Frank Flees

The regular readers among you may recall around the end of January a post about Eclipse a lab mix who took herself to the dog park and back on the bus. Today's post is about a dachshund named Frank who slipped away from home,sneaked onto a bus unknown to the driver and made his way to the beach 18 miles from his home. Meanwhile his owner noticed he was missing and formed a search party of friends and neighbors and posted on social media hoping to locate Frank. A rider on the bus finally noticed Frank and asked the driver if he knew where the dog had come from. They discussed what they should do and the man said he would take him home with him then contact a vet to have him scanned for a chip the next day. Later that evening he noticed a post on Facebook pleading for information. He contacted the woman and Frank was reunited with his family later that night. Another happy ending,but when did dogs learn about riding buses? What am I missing?

Duped Again

An image of a baby platypus went viral last week because of the cuteness factor however it wasn't real or rather the image was real but not the puggle (what a baby platypus is called). The image showed a small animal being held in the palm of a person's hand but it was actually a sculpture made by a Serbian artist who has also made a lifelike baby walrus. Sorry if I broke any hearts by revealing this work of art.

Good As New

In case there's anyone still in doubt about the life of plastics the following story may be of help. A Swedish woman was visiting an art exhibit when she spotted a cassette tape she had lost on vacation over 20 years ago. The Stockholm exhibition was called Sea of Artifacts and was about plastic pollution. The tape still had the songs the woman had recorded in the 1990s for a trip to Spain with her family and all but the first couple were still playable showing how long plastics can exist in the oceans. The tape will be returned to the woman after the exhibition.

Dennis? Is that you?

Regardless of what science deniers claim the world just keeps having more devastating storms,but enough about that. One such storm has been wreaking havoc in the UK and Wales (or Whales if you happen to believe trump) in particular. So the weather reports were hurriedly put together to show the area the storm was currently beating on without much thought of anything but the storm. Needless to say people who tuned into the BBC to keep abreast of Storm Dennis found not only flooding but also a threat from a giant amber penis! Nothing like a little humor to lighten up an otherwise gloomy report.

Plan B?

Though it is interesting to know about alien life and where it might exist it begs the question what good will the information be? SETI is teaming up with Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico to scan the entire sky for both chemical signals of life,which can be detected from the smallest life forms  and signatures of technological usage. They're using 28 giant radio telescopes then feeding the data into a supercomputer. I can't help but wonder what the plan is if they do find anything since at this point there isn't any way to get people any further than Mars safely,and even at that there would be no return trip,so why not spend that effort to patch up the damages to this planet? or perhaps the idea is to lure the aliens in then steal their technology? I'm obviously becoming jaded by our planets current affairs.

Mating Rituals

With a nod to Valentine's day I found a few interesting mating rituals. Hyenas make it difficult to determine their sex since the females are not only bigger and meaner than the males they also have a pseudo penis,but wait,that isn't the weirdest part. When it's time to mate the male has to get his penis into the female's fake penis then when it is time for birth the female has to deliver through the fake penis!
When honeybees aerially mate the drone looses not only his genitals in the process but also his life. The genitals explode forcing the sperm deep inside of the queen and his phallus prevents any other drone from mating with her.
Clown fish are all born male and live in groups with one breeding male and female. When the female dies the largest male then changes his sex to female.
Here I thought humans had some weird rituals!

Unprofessional

There really isn't a valid reason to trash a rig the way this vehicle obviously was plus the way the interior is cared for is usually a pretty good indication about the general care of the car but the shop the family took it to for cleaning was out of line for posting pictures of it online and I would hesitate to use a service that doesn't respect both the customer and their privacy. Not to mention if the company found themselves with a mess that was going to take them 7 hours to clean I am willing to bet they made the task financially beneficial.