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Hot Off the Presses
July 05, 2005 - 7:26 p.m.

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O.K., so two entries in one day. I know. Too much of a mediocre thing.

But this is just too silly not to mention. From the The Toronto Star.


Marina Bai has sued the U.S. space agency, claiming the Deep Impact probe that punched a crater into the comet Tempel 1 late Sunday "ruins the natural balance of forces in the universe," the newspaper Izvestia reported today. A Moscow court has postponed hearings on the case until late July, the paper said.

Bai is seeking damages totalling 8.7 billion rubles ($300 million U.S.) � the approximate equivalent of the mission's cost � for her "moral sufferings," Izvestia said, quoting her lawyer Alexander Molokhov. She earlier told the paper that the experiment would "deform her horoscope."

Aren't you glad Russia is capitalist now? Finally, they can stop it with all that grim "survival in the face of wintry hardship" nonsense and get down to being silly like the rest of us.

In other news...the World Health Organization is urging a fight against avian flu. This isn't funny except for the fact that, whenever the World Health Organization is mentioned in the paper, it's identified by its acronym. So the headline reads, "WHO urges 'all-out war' on bird flu."

I don't know who...you tell me. I thought he was on first base.

This last bit is from a story that's not funny at all...nine horses were killed in a stampede in downtown Calgary. Apparently the city is hosting a provincial centennial rodeo and they herded a mess of horses into the downtown, trying to pretend that Calgary is stuck in the 1800's. (It sounds silly, but that's essentially what the Conservative government of Alberta does on a regular basis.) Sadly, the horses were spooked by a train and stampeded across a bridge where the bottleneck became deadly.

As I said, this is not funny. Not one bit. What is funny is this line from the newspaper account...

...the animal death toll is near the 1986 record, when 11 horses were killed in a spectacular chuckwagon accident.

Only Alberta, and possibly Texas, would ever, ever have a "spectacular chuckwagon accident."

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