Reptile family values

New research on timber rattlesnakes—among the deadliest snakes in North America—shows that they're actually social and family-oriented: they care for their young, recognize their kin even after being separated at birth, and often live together in family groups. I'm not even going to bother with a "What's the difference between rattlesnakes and Republicans?" joke; fill in the punch line yourself.

Scorecard

I am heartened that a San Francisco judge has again refused to halt the city's same-sex weddings. (I'm trying to come up with a headline using the phrase "SF judge says STFU," but I can't figure out the rest of it.)



I am pleasantly surprised that a county in New Mexico was, briefly, issuing same-sex marriage licenses on Friday. (They stopped late in the day; more information on Monday, presumably.)



And I am downright shocked that the King of Cambodia has called for his country to legalize same-sex marriage. Well, damn. You go, king. It's rather internationally embarrassing that a country that's not many years away from killing fields and genocidal dictatorship might wind up giving a civil rights lesson to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

Like a diamond in the sky?

Actually, it is a diamond in the sky: a white dwarf star that's been compressed into a 10 billion trillion trillion carat diamond. No word on whether it's one of those sparkly transparent diamonds, or just a black industrial-grade diamond; still, that's an awful lot of diamond. DeBeers would be really pissed off if someone figured out how to mine it. (I imagine that would be difficult, since getting anywhere near a white dwarf would probably result in getting sucked into its enormous gravitational field and vaporized in its intense heat. And it's not like the earth is running out of diamonds any time soon, anyway. They're a lot less rare than DeBeers would have you think.)

Words, words, words

Someone should invent a crayon-stain remover and call it "Cray-Off." (Somebody probably already has.)



If someone invented a mayonnaise-based sexual lubricant—and I really hope they don't, but if they did—they could call it "Mayonn-Ease."



If a group of eschatological Christians started playing Caribbean music, they could call it "Apocalypso."



(My brain just comes up with this stuff sometimes.)

Election update (no, not our election)

Well, this isn't bad: the "missing" Russian presidential candidate has surfaced in Ukraine, alive and apparently well, surprised by all the fuss his unscheduled absence had caused:

The ITAR-Tass news agency quoted the head of his campaign staff, Kseniya Ponomareva, as saying that Rybkin "called me, saying that he had had pleasantly spent four days in Kiev and did not understand what all this hysteria was about."

Why exactly he took off to Kiev for four days without telling his wife or anyone on his staff is his own business, of course; perhaps, rather than sleeping with the fishes, he was only drinking like one...



So: He's alive. Good.



The three other politicians I mentioned in yesterday's post are still dead. Not good.



("One of these politicians you've been accused of liquidating is not like the others, three of these politicians are kind of the same...")

The end of an era?

Is the age of flagrantly-misleading domain names coming to an end? It's reported that pornographer Daniel Parisi is selling the leading misleading Web address "whitehouse.com", the slogan of which isn't, but ought to be, "Confusing children, scandalizing parents, and surprising the heck out of people who don't understand TLDs since 1997." (The actual White House Web site is, of course, "whitehouse.gov." The presidency isn't officially a commercial enterprise...not quite yet, anyway...)



(Actually, that's probably why "whitehouse.com" is still around; if you bought, say, "windows95.com" and routed it to a porn site, you'd be slapped with a lawsuit before Internet Solutions charged your credit card; but the federal government can't sue for trademark infringement.) (Can it?)

Spam subject line of the day

Once again, not a very inventive spam name, but I love the subject line: "Anita Alford," "Re: helm inviolable." Doesn't that sound like the beginning of an epic-fantasy quest? "Thou shalt cross the Misty Mountains and the Burning Barrens and bring back the Sword Invincible and the Helm Inviolable, and therewith slay the Dragon of Dark Delving, and when thou returnest with his heart on an adamantine spike, we shall all go out for mead and fresh unicorn sandwiches."