AP story via a Sacramento, CA TV station

It's the story of a 27-year old orangutan female named Karta, who got out of her enclosure at the Adalaide (Australia) Zoo, sat around for a half hour, then decided that the grass was not in fact greener on the other side, and retreated back into her enclosure.

Ah, this is more like it. Simians!

The secret to chimp strength, via Science Daily:

In an article published in the April issue of Current Anthropology, Walker argues that humans may lack the strength of chimps because our nervous systems exert more control over our muscles. Our fine motor control prevents great feats of strength, but allows us to perform delicate and uniquely human tasks.

Hey, I just got one!

From - Sat Jan 31 08:49:52 2009
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From: Chevron Texaco chevrontexaco@chevron.ng
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Yours faithfully,
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Thank you, Mrs. Mary Jones, from somewhere in the Czech Republic, for making me smile--AGAIN.

The ciderthat I actually started on December 15th 2008 has been brewing for about 20 days, so it was time to siphon it off from the primary fermentation pail into a carboy for settling. The initial hygrometer reading for the cider was 1.055, and the reading today was 1.012, which works out to just under 5% alcohol in the cider, if I'm doing the math correctly.

My hard cider's new home--for the next month or so

Science Daily has a story of Bonnie the whistling orangutan:

Bonnie, a 30-year-old female orangutan living at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., began whistling – a sound that is in a human’s, but not an orangutan’s, repertoire – after hearing an animal caretaker make the sound.

They go on to be all sciencey and stuff about how it might give a clue to the evolution of speech, but for me, it's all about the picture:

Credit: Photo courtesy of Smithsonian National Zoological Park.

Arr.

Shiver me timbers.

Belay that, ya squab!

Yo.

Ho.

Ho.

That oughta do it.

Via the ever-dependable Fark.com, some Vermont TV station reports:

An 8-foot-tall mechanical gorilla is back home at an eastern Maine flea market-style store two weeks after being "kidnapped" and later dumped in a corn field in Vermont.

Yeah, it's an AP story, but I'm walking on the wild side tonight . . .

If you're in Kansas City, you have two main outlets for conservative/rightie talk radio:  710 KCMO, and 980 KMBZ.  Those are the two stations I listen to most of the time.  When I get bored with them, there's the two sports talk stations, 810 WHB and  610 KCSP (of which the sports talk hosts on 810 tend to be better, but 610 has the Royals and the Jayhawks play-by-play that I prefer).  Music, I go to 105.1 "Jack FM" most of the time I'm not hitting my iPod.

With that out of the way, here's my usual day's radio talk show listening schedule, when I'm within earshot of a radio:

5 am-9 am:  KCMO Morning Show with Chris Stigall vs. the Kansas City Morning News on KMBZ:  Overall, I find Stigall's show much more entertaining than the more hard-news program on KMBZ.  Stigall is a big-league talk host talent, I think.  He's guest-hosted the national Rusty Humphries show on occasion, and is pretty smooth all the way around.  Stigall seems to have the knack of disagreeing without being too disagreeable--a rare gift nowadays--although he seems to take very few positions that I strenuously disagree with.

9 am-11 am:  Glenn Beck on KMBZ dukes it out with Laura Ingraham on KCMO:  There's no clear winner in this slot as far as I'm concerned.  I can listen to them both.  Beck is at his best when his show is slightly out of control, and at his worst when he's getting ultra-mega-serious.  Ingraham has an unfortunate tendency to shout down guests she disagrees with (see above "disagreeing without being disagreeable", but when she avoids that she's very listenable, too.

11 am-2 pm:  Rush Limbaugh on KMBZ, vs. Dave Ramsey on KCMO:  Rush is THE master of the medium, but when you're not in the mood for incessant liberal-bashing, Ramsey's show is a welcome alternative.  Rush gets around the whole issue of arguing with guests by simply not having any who disagree with him.  The show is, after all, about what HE thinks.  He's best when he's talking about people lifting themselves up and personal responsibility and the like--a message not at all dissimilar to Ramsey's.

2 pm-4 pm:  Bill O'Reilly on KMBZ vs. Sean Hannity on KCMO:  battle of the Fox News heavylightweights!  Well, after either Rush or Ramsey, these guys come off sounding pretty light-weight.  You've got Rush-Lite personified by Hannity, versus the squishy, populist, O'Reilly.  Hannity loves shout-fests for some reason I can not completely understand.  O'Reilly just likes to hear himself talk.  I usually wind up on sports talk after Rush goes off the air, but of the two, I find O'Reilly is generally more listenable than Hannity on a regular basis, even though his aggressive populism scares me every once in a while.  No winner in this time slot.

4 pm-7 pm:  Local hosts Shanin and Parks on KMBZ, vs. Hannity (until 5 pm) and Michael Savage on KCMO:  I find "The Savage Nation" utterly unlistenable.  Sometimes I tune into Shanin & Parks, but they're rarely interesting enough for me to stay for an entire show.  This time slot again winds up being sports talk radio, or more often Stargate Atlantis and SG-1 re-runs on the SciFi Channel followed by local TV news, while making and consuming supper.

Evenings:  Darla Jaye, local on KMBZ vs. Savage (until 8) and Rusty Humphries (8-11 pm) KCMO.  I don't listen often, except occasionally catching the end of Rusty's show while getting ready for bed.  Recently I tuned in for a while to Jaye's show, and it was . . . awful.

Overnight:  Coast to Coast AM on KCMO vs. Mark Levin (10 pm-midnight) and the Rush replay (midnight-4 a.m.) on KMBZ.  Levin is, I suppose an acquired taste that I have so far failed to acquire.  Coast to Coast can be amusing, unless they get too apocalyptic and/or paranoid.  Which, come to think of it, is more and more often since Art Bell retired again.   Sleep wins out over radio, I'm afraid.

So, the winners:
Chris Stigall, KCMO
Beck & Ingraham (tie)
Limbaugh, KMBZ
none-of-the-above
Shanin & Parks, KMBZ
Rusty Humphries, KCMO
Coast to Coast AM, KCMO

Science News has the details:

A team of Jackson Laboratory scientists have figured out a simple, cost-effective process to freeze mouse sperm and get it to achieve high fertilization rates with mouse eggs. The breakthrough will greatly reduce the cost of developing and distributing new mouse models of human disease.

OK, yeah, it's important for medicine and science and stuff.  But it's more fun from here just to meditate upon the phrase "frozen mouse sperm."  Then giggle uncontrollably.

Some day I'll grow up.