Sunday smörgåsbord

Lots and lots of stuff has accumulated, so we're serving heaping portions today. There just has to be something in this list that you haven't already seen.

Cricket ball kills a pigeon.

Giant (220kg) pig was eating a cow.

NYT food writer explains how wine should be chilled. "...with summer nearly upon us and the consumption of white wine rising, I think it’s worth making the point clearly and explicitly: To enhance the pleasure of drinking a good white wine, please do not serve it too cold."

Woman performs C-section on roadkill rabbit to save its unborn fetus.

60% of U.S. bankruptcies are caused by medical bills. Of particular note: "More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance..."

NPR discusses the earliest known sound recording (from 1860). You can listen to it at the link.

In a column at the Guardian, an atheist contrasts "believing in God" with "believing in belief."

Neil Armstrong's famous comment upon stepping onto the moon has apparently been mistranscribed. "The researchers show for the first time that he intended to say "a man" and that the "a" may have been lost because he was under pressure."

A man's hand was pulled off in a tug-of-war.

The Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal is not new, but some people have not heard of it. "...an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side and rear poses..."

Four girls traveling between parties decide not to pay the $13 fee to their Edmonton cabbie because he wouldn't let them smoke in the cab. He said he would call the police. The girls then told bystanders and the police that the cabbie had attempted to rape them. He has a videotape of the entire episode.

Man atop train gets electrocuted. Corpse starts burning. Warning - graphic video.

Man files documents with the IRS requesting payment of $14 trillion. IRS doesn't believe him. Another man secured a 2-foot-long sword to his car's steering wheel and crashed his car into a wall trying to commit suicide. However the car's airbag bent the sword, the car went into a swimming pool, and he's doing fine. Both stories via Fark, which has more of these types of stories than you can shake a stick at.

Betelgeuse is getting smaller. Not the Michael Keaton one - the celestial one. It has shrunk by about 15% (!) in about 15 years. It could go supernova.

The global production of oil is declining. "Whatever the timing of the arrival of peak oil's actual peak, there is growing agreement that we have, at last, made it into peak-oil territory, if not yet to the moment of irreversible decline." The global recession is preventing prices from rising... for now...

Three items from Neatorama: Tapeworms are spreading because of the consumption of sushi. The world may run out of bluefin tuna. A fungus is spreading that could wipe out 80% of the world's wheat.

Powerful women like Sonia Sotomayor like to watch Law and Order.

Got Ophidophobia? Then don't read about Brazil's Snake Island. "The island is home to the world's most poisonous snake [the fer-de-lance], and there are five to every square meter. You have to hop, skip and jump over their snapping heads to avoid being bitten... What we usually say is that if you're looking, along the trail, you'll see a snake about every 10 minutes."

Can you name the best-selling car in the United States? 10 million sold in the last 30 years.

Good discussion thread at The Oil Drum on how to build a root cellar.

Why the price of Maine lobsters has plunged.

Death by cows. "..."I have had letters flooding in - from people telling me about personal experiences, family experiences, who have been in hospital for three weeks after an incident, who have had family members killed, and a couple of letters from people whose dogs were crushed..."

Stoned wallabies created crop circles.

The 4-year graduation rate for high school kids in New York City is... 56%.

An important warning at Consumerist for those who shop at Radio Shack. "RadioShack stores sell returned merchandise all the time. Sometimes it's cordless phones that have sold and come back to the store 4 times, or it's an antenna that's missing a remote (not that the staff will tell you), or it's a cell phone that a manager wants sold."

"Global warming" notwithstanding, the Sahara Desert appears to be getting smaller, not larger.

People who are grossly obese can be burned by an MRI machine.

The state with the lowest rate of overweight children in the nation is... Minnesota. That's the good news. The bad news is that MN wins despite having 23% of its children obese or overweight. Mississippi was #1 with 44%. "The number is based on a child's body-mass index, a calculation using height and weight, and included those who are moderately overweight to obese."

Installing red-light cameras to catch drivers who run stoplights may paradoxically INCREASE the number of accidents at intersections. "This 43 percent increase can be attributed primarily to rear-end collisions that happened as drivers, faced with short yellow lights, slammed on the brakes to avoid receiving a ticket in the mail."

In order to reduce fuel, airlines have reduced the size of spoons.

Police in Tennessee raid a house at 3 a.m., then... "The officers charged the Chiltons with resisting arrest and aggravated assault for the incident. Police did not drop the charges even after learning they responded to the wrong house."

In Las Vegas, a two-year-old girl was in a critical condition after being shot by her four-year-old brother at their home... In South Carolina, a four-year-old boy was shot in the stomach by his three-year-old brother after the little boy found a gun...

A woman in Switzerland called firefighters to report her television was on fire. "They found instead that the TV was tuned into a German station that in the early morning hours aired the constant image of a fireplace..."

Photo credit.