Shocka!

Here's a real shocker: Americans think the media is biased. Moreover, almost 2/3 of Americans think that bias is hard over to the left. What a surprise.

The vast majority of American voters believe media bias is alive and well – 83% of likely voters said the media is biased in one direction or another, while just 11% believe the media doesn’t take political sides, a recent IPDI/Zogby Interactive poll shows.

The Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet is based at George Washington University in Washington D.C.

Nearly two-thirds of those online respondents who detected bias in the media (64%) said the media leans left, while slightly more than a quarter of respondents (28%) said they see a conservative bias on their TV sets and in their column inches. The survey, which focuses on perceptions of the “old” and “new” media, will be released today at the PoliticsOnline Conference 2007 at GWU. It is also featured in the March issue of Zogby’s Real America newsletter, now available on zogby.com.

In other words, the smokescreen isn't working. People see the bias. Well, let me rephrase that, the smokescreen is alive and well and living in the minority who see a bias to the right. But that has more to do with the internal biases of those folks than with reality.

Ferocious Felines Flay Family

House cats gone wild in North Platte, Nebraska! The Animal Uprising™ has unleashed it's feline storm troopers on the hapless citizens in that historic location*. Yes, the feline berserkers have taken up home invasion. With intent.

NORTH PLATTE, Neb. - Two stray cats attacked three people after they got into a house in North Platte. "I thought I had seen it all, but I have never seen anything like this," Chief of Police Martin Gutschenritter said Tuesday. A call for help Monday took animal control officer John Pettit to the home of Melissa Breva, Gutschenritter said. Breva told Pettit she had captured two cats in a bedroom.

"She said the cats had gotten into the house when the front door was open," Gutschenritter said, then attacked two women who were visiting Breva.

One, Wendy Holliday, suffered scratches, the chief said, and she was bitten on both ankles, both knees and on her left calf.

"She told the officer it happened when the two cats entered the residence and attacked her for no reason," Gutschenritter said.

The other woman, Rebecca Cheever, was bitten on the right calf.

After talking to the women, Pettit went to his truck for snares — his "cat catchers."

Then he heard screaming from inside the house.

"When he ran back, he saw a young male with blood over his face," Gutschenritter said.

The two ferocious feline commandos were taken into custody and shot as illegal combatants, in strict accordance with the Geneva Conventions. Folks in North Platte know how to deal with the Animal Uprising™ and apparently are quite willing to do so.

* If you are not aware of the history of North Platte, Nebraska, you should be. The residents there ran a canteen to greet the troop trains moving American soldiers across the country. They met every, single train and greeted and fed the men all through the Second World War. They did it voluntarily, they did it for no charge whatsoever and the did it without asking for any thanks or assistence from the government. The Union Pacific Railroad has a lot of pictures of the canteen's years of operation. There's one that shows an older local woman, Lyda Swenson, presenting a cake to a black soldier. They saw American soldiers - and they cared for them. Without charge. Throughout the entire war.

Motherly Love In Mother Russia

The housing shortage in Russia has eased a little since the fall of the Soviet Union, but not completely gone away. Which caused a wee bit of tension between a mother and her 17 year-old son. It seems the two shared a one room apartment. With their respective significant others. Then the son's girlfriend got pregnant. Which is when mom decided something needed to be tone.

So she hired a hit man to whack her kid.

The 42-year-old crane operator paid the man a 2,100 rouble ($80) deposit to kill her son, Izvestia said. But the would-be hitman told the police who set up a sting operation and arrested her when she handed over the 900 rouble 'completion' payment.

The woman and her son shared the tiny apartment in the Moscow region with their respective partners and there were frequent rows, which became worse when the son's girlfriend became pregnant.

"The woman decided that by snuffing out her son she could solve her housing problems," the paper said.

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard want to point this heartwarming tale out as a reminder to our children that gluing the elderly to the roof is a really bad idea. As is failing to leave home. We're just saying is all.

On A Personal Note

I've known this for a few days, but did not want to say anything until it was official: My son's unit is coming home earlier than expected. They should be here at the end of this month instead of in August. My son has already shipped all but the bare necessities home. My daughter in law is leaving footprints on the ceiling. My other kids are dancing around.

Off To The Solid State Races

It looks like it won't be very long at all until we start seeing computers with flash disk drives. The competition is suddenly red hot to see who can get to market with the biggest fastest Solid State Drive with more entering the sweepstakes every day.

Following similar announcements by Intel, Samsung, and SanDisk, flash- and module maker Super Talent has announced plans to manufacture 1.8-inch, 2.5-inch, and 3.5-inch drives next month.

The drives are "100 percent compatible" with conventional hard drives, according to Super Talent, and even include a standard Serial ATA interface. The drives will range in capacity up to 32 Gbytes for the 1.8-inch models, to 64 Gbytes for the 2.5-inch models, and up to 128-Gbytes for the 3.5-inch drives — double SanDisk's capacity points, and four times as large as Intel's notebook drives.

Pricing, however, remains a mystery. According to Joe James, marketing director for the company, Super Talent will announce the price of the new drives in April. "Why put out pricing now? The market may move 30 percent in a month," James said.

Interesting times for geeks. Quad-core processors and flash hard drives drives. These things are going to boogy. Everything I own is hopelessly outdated.

Humps Across Australia

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have noted, with sadness, the capitulation of Australia to the forces of the Animal Uprising. Between putting the humans in cages at the Adelaide Zoo, Setting up dating services for penguins and feeding the excess human population to the jellyfish we really thought they had reached bottom. But now, an underground has sprung into action! And they plan there own uprising.

They're going after the camels.

"An estimated one million feral camels whose numbers double every eight years compete with native animals and livestock, threaten native plants, wreck fences, bores and tanks and invade Aboriginal sites," said the centre's Glen Edwards.

"Camels have been an emerging problem over the last decade or so, but the latest drought has focused camels' attention on certain parts of the landscape and brought them more into contact with people and their activities," he said.

Camels "mad with thirst" had recently rampaged through the Western Desert community of Warakurna, damaging toilets, taps and air conditioners in a frenzied search for water.

Feral camel experts from around Australia are due to meet in the western city of Perth on Thursday as part of a project to develop a national plan to control the humped beasts.

"We're talking about hundreds of thousands of camels that need to be removed from the system," Edwards told AFP.

While some could be exported live to markets in the Middle East, Russia and parts of Europe for human consumption, or turned into pet meat, culling would be unavoidable, he said.

"Provided culling is done by people who are professional and well-trained, it is deemed to be probably the most humane way of managing camels — a quick death," Edwards said.

"In some respects it is better to do that than to muster the animals up, put them on a truck and cart them 1,000 kilometres to an export port."

Now if they could figure out a way to turn camels into Vegemite, they could make a fortune. Not that we'd cooperate in massive Vegemite smuggling on a grand scale or anything.

That Time Of Year

Yeah, I know. I haven't posted much. There is a perfectly good explanation. Tis the season. Tax season, that is. I just got back from my crack of dawn appointment with my accountant. I absolutely hate getting the taxes done each year, but my accountant is fabulous. She does a great job every year and makes it as relatively painless as she can.

That doesn't make it any more fun, however. But it is over for another year. So I am catching up on reading.

A Dark New Chapter

As if the Animal Uprising™ wasn't bad enough already. It has taken another, even darker turn today. Now mythical animals have joined the inhuman plot to take over the world. Yes, folks, unicorns have taken up carjacking.

BILLINGS, Mont. - A man told police not to blame him for crashing his truck into a light post — it was that unicorn behind the wheel. Prosecutor Ingrid Rosenquist said Phillip C. Holliday Jr. initially denied driving the truck involved in the March 7 crash in Billings. He told officers at the scene that a unicorn was driving, she said…….

…..A pickup truck drove through a red light and nearly struck another truck in the intersection, according to court documents. The driver then made an erratic U-turn through a gas station, crossed the street and crashed into a light pole. Nobody was injured.

So this poor guy stops at the local tavern, has a drink or three, then gets jumped by a unicorn as he tries to leave in his car. Sounds perfectly logical according to our informants. They tell us that pink elephants will be skyjacking flights soon, too. We wonder - a lot - about our informants.