Eeyeuw! Thank god I am not a farmer, driving one of those manure plows. On the other hand, that manure spreader is pretty awesome. More of a "manure blaster" really. I envision "borrowing" one fully loaded with the most liquid poop and driving it down Main Street to wreak smelly, smelly vengeance.
Find out what's been run over in the past 90 days. There's even a roadkill photo gallery. The site is maintained by UC Davis researchers who use it to track the movement of species throughout the state.
MATCHING FIGURES — Shapely actress Monique Van Vooren is all set to match strikes and spares with Victoria, the bowling kangaroo, at the opening of a huge new bowling alley in New York. The bowling palace is the newest and largest of its kind in the East.
How would you like one of these guys to land on your head? People walking through a particular field in the Netherlands get the chance to find out what its like. The friendly owl likes to spend a minute or so on his human perches before flying off.
Schonach, Germany, is the heart and homeland of the cuckoo-clock industry. Two houses in fact have been transformed into giant cuckoo clocks to commemorate this.
In 1940, Rev. Hansen started touring around the U.S. with his family, putting on a show in which he used trained birds to demonstrate lessons from the Bible. Newsweek (Dec. 10, 1951) offered this description of the act:
A typical show opens with a six-canary choir accompanying Mrs. Hansen (on the vibra-harp) in "The Star-Spangled Banner," while an oriole pulls a string that hoists a flag on a tiny pole and a parakeet shinnies to the pole top to pose as an American eagle.
Other birds ride on a tiny electric train, eat at tables, and climb ladders while the Hansens appropriately quote the Bible. For example, when Tiger the canary sits on Catnip the cat while daughter Sylvia watches (see picture), Mr. Hansen quotes Isaiah 11:6, "... the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the faitling together; and a little child shall lead them."
Mr. Hansen feels that the whole act is "a demonstration of faith. Pete is not afraid of the flaming hoop because he knows I am holding it. Muggs has to stretch out his neck to swallow a sword that's as long as he is, but he has faith in us."
Amazingly, Hansen was able to continue putting on his Bible Birds show for 60 years, until he died in 2002. See Roadside America for some more info.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.