Well, finally, someone has found the proper response to Furby’s entertaining banter. A microwave.

I’m warning you right now, this has got to be one of the most eerie things I’ve ever seen. I don’t know where that animal lives, but I intend to find out and NEVER EVER GO THERE. Ever. Don’t click on the play button if you are squeamish, the mouse doesn’t put up much of a fight.

And for the record, yes, I really am this bored.

An even crazier picture from the tornados that ripped thru Missouri earlier in the month. This was captured over in Sedalia. I wish I could find a higher res version of this, although from the looks of it it might have been captured by a video camera.

Courtesy of The Loom, this has got to be one of the creepiest things I have ever read. Apparently there is some wasp out there that turns roaches into living zombie egg hosts.

“The wasp slips her stinger through the roach’s exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently uses sensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach’s brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.

From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach’s antennae and leads it–in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex–like a dog on a leash.

The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp’s burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes.

The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon–which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative.”

Ya .. once again I’m reminded how blessed I am to be human. At least we just shoot each other.

I used to read Calvin and Hobbes when I was a kid; it always left you with the feeling that there was something slightly more under the surface. But of course, you were a kid, so you had no idea what it was. Instead you enthralled yourself with the adventures of Spaceman Spiff, laughed at Calvin’s gallery of twisted snowman displays, and wondered what horrible slop his mother was going to serve up for him that night. That was as deep as you needed to go.

Looking back now, there was certainly a lot more to that comic than what drew children to it. I never would have thought I would be seeing a 1400+ page hardcover edition of Calvin and Hobbes, but sure enough, here it is. Pretty cool, actually.