Washington, DC apparently feels it cannot let New York City go unchallenged in the great rat race. Oh, sure, New York got big headlines when rats were videotaped running wild in a takeout joint. But Washington is going for the gold, so to speak. They plan a new reality television show, Dancing With the Rats.
District officials closed the restaurants as a result of an "Inside Edition" segment, which is set to air at 4:30 p.m. Tuesday on Channel 9. The show shows "rodents running wild" in Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan restaurants.
The program will show "vermin dancing in the alleys and leaping out of trashcans behind restaurants," a news release for the show says.
The District has 4,024 establishments that serve food and require yearly inspections. D.C. Health Department Director Gregg A. Pane says the city has taken a comprehensive approach that includes education, inspection, baiting and enforcement.
We have it on good authority that Chuck Schumer saw the camera crew filming this segment and had to be restrained from running in front of it to deliver a sound bite. Well, that's what we heard, anyway.
We here at Blue Crab Boulevard spend large amounts of time documenting the depravities of the Animal Uprising™. We do this thankless task out of our sense of duty to humanity. Or lack of sufficient medication, depending on how you look at it. We have not sunk to the level of watching cheese age, however. Instead, we peruse obscure news sources for alarming news of the latest dastardly deeds of the animal overlords. Which is why we find this article we found so alarming. Deer now appear to be worried about their appearance and want haircuts.
Sunday morning in downtown Williston, the City Barber Shop was closed. However, a wild deer must have known the cool weather was over and that the warm, almost-hot spring weather was here.
The full-grown deer evidently wanted a hair cut to shed its winter coat. But the Barber Shop was closed, so it crashed through one of the five-by-eight-foot plate glass windows, at about 8:30 am.
The deer was believed to have been chased downtown by some loose dogs roaming the area. The deer exited the barber shop through the same broken window and headed back to where it came from, still wearing her winter coat of hair.
Williston police said that shop owner Randy Griffis was skeptical at first, and thought someone must have thrown a rock through the window, until he saw some of the deer's hair on the floor of his shop. Police said the city's public works director, James Arrington, witnessed the entire incident.
Now, why does this worry us, you ask? Simple. If deer are now thinking about how they look, that means they are anticipating extensive leisure time in the near future. We suspect that some really major plan is in the works and that the Animal Uprising™ is about to produce a major victory.
Ok, that or the deer had a big date. Depends on how you look at it.
The French failed to break the world record for train speeds, but they gave it a really good try. Their specially equipped train managed to reach a top speed of 357.2 miles per hour. A Japanese record still stands at 361 mph. They had to really deck out the train to do it, though, using a special 25,000 horsepower engine and larger wheels than are ordinarily seen on the trains.
Roaring like a jet plane, with sparks flying overhead and kicking up a long trail of dust, the black-and-chrome V150 with three double-decker cars surpassed the record of 320.2 mph set in 1990 by another French train.
It fell short, however, of beating the ultimate record set by Japan's magnetically levitated train, which hit 361 mph in 2003.
The French TGV, or "train a grande vitesse," as the country's bullet train is called, had two engines on either side of the three double-decker cars for the record run, some 125 miles east of the capital on a new track linking Paris with Strasbourg.
Aboard the V150, the sensation was comparable to that of an airplane at takeoff.
The demonstration was meant to showcase technology that France is trying to sell to the multibillion-dollar overseas markets such as China. Hours before the run, Transport Minister Dominique Perben received a California delegation, including state assembly speaker Fabian Nunez. The state is studying prospects for a high-speed line from Sacramento to San Diego, via San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Which makes one wonder: if an earthquake were to hit in California as one of these went whizzing by, would it take off? Inquiring minds want to know. Regardless, the French can now retreat at near record speeds!
Apparently, Google is now giving in to the Animal Uprising™ and is hiring snakes.
The one-meter (three-foot) snake, named Kaiser, went missing over the weekend, in what many thought at first to be an April Fool's Day prank.
After more than a day sliding around the company's palatial offices, which are big enough to house four soccer pitches, Kaiser finally turned up late Monday night, a company spokeswoman said, without revealing further details.
"We are pleased to report that Kaiser was located in the office last night," Google's communications director, Ellen West, said in a statement.
Don't be surprised if your next Google search redirects you to a reptile porn site or something. Snakes have dirty minds.
Oliver Burkeman, writing in the Guardian, takes a look at the boring banality of the web. Or at least the boring banality of some things on the web. It's actually pretty amusing, in a boring sort of way.
It is generally agreed that we are more bored today than ever before. Some surveys put the percentage of people who yearn for more novelty in their lives at around 70% and rising. As the scholar Lars Svendsen explains in his book, A Philosophy of Boredom, until at least the 17th century being bored was an elite privilege, bragged about by princes and the nobility. The paradox is that boredom seems to have become democratised in exact proportion to the explosion of reasons not to be bored: books, affordable international travel, and the mass media, for a start. And here is an even stranger paradox: in the age of the internet, when the average person has access to vastly more genuinely fascinating information than at any point in history, what are the sites that consistently achieve cult status, from the birth of the web up to the present day? The boring ones. A ripening cheese. A coffee pot in a Cambridge University computer lab (the first webcam, and now a dusty artefact of online history). A camera trained on a street in a Scottish village where nothing ever happens. And I do mean nothing: so little, in fact, that it would be more interesting to watch paint dry - which, incidentally, you can also do via the web, at watching-paint-dry.com.
Some incredibly boring websites, it's true, hold the promise of sporadic but genuine excitement - a webcam trained on the US-Mexican border might conceivably show an immigrant crossing it illegally; the webcam trained on Mount St Helens might show it erupting. Even the Virtual Holmfirth webcam, positioned to broadcast a live view of events taking place on the pavement between Sid's Cafe and the parish church, might catch a West Yorkshire youth engaged in antisocial behaviour. (If that ever happened, by the way, we would probably identify the epidemic of boredom as the cause of the antisocial behaviour.)
Watching paint dry as a web event. Do go over and look at the roster of websites he has collected. There are several I have heard of, quite a few others that I had not. But they are astonishing when all put together like that. This is how people spend their time? Really? Why don't they start a blog or something?
Now you're going to have to keep looking up to make sure a guy wearing a rocket belt isn't about to crash into you. That's right, rocket belts are now available commercially from a guy in Mexico who appears to have far too much time on his hands. Because he's also making rocket powered bicycles.
Anyone who buys the new version will receive a machine to make its rocket fuel, hands-on training and 10 training flights. The firm also offers maintenance and 24-hour support.
Its inventor, Juan Manuel Lozano, who owns Mexican-based Tecnologia Aeroespacial Mexican (TAM), describes the Rocket Belt as "the most spectacular flying machine ever developed".
The 52-year-old said the main difference between his belt and the James Bond version is the use of modern materials such as carbon fibre, Kevlar and titanium.
"The Rocket Belt came about as a result of my passion for speed and my love of motorcycles, racing cars, planes, boats, rockets," he said.
Mr Lozano believes the belt could also be an investment for entrepreneurs who could fly it in TV commercials or at event openings.
TAM has also combined a 1,100 horse-power rocket with a mountain bike to create the world's fastest bicycle. The Rocket Bike reached 160mph in just five seconds.
Mr Lozano said: "I had to buy the best and strongest mountain bike. I then built a custom tank and designed a special rocket engine for the bicycle. The results were pretty spectacular."
He is now working on a rocket-powered motorcycle.
We're holding out for the rocket powered rocking chair. If you're interested in one of the rocket belts, the website is right here.
The Animal Uprising™ appears to have been successful in its drive to create a four wheel drive duck. Stumpy, who we first wrote about in February, is thriving and running around like the wind on his multitudinous appendages. The bad news is that he is being kept with a female duck for companionship. Just wait, there will be hundreds of these creatures soon.
Mrs Janaway said that Stumpy would not have had a chance of survival in the wild but she was looking after him as best as she can at the farm.
She said that he had now grown into a full-size duck and will grow only about another inch.
She said: "He's doing really well. He is still very tame and loves all the attention he's been getting."
Mrs Janaway said that Stumpy would have to live in a pen for the rest of his life but had been paired up with a female duck for companionship.
She said: "He won't be allowed to roam the farm because his back legs stick out and could get caught in brambles and I might never find him.
"So we're making a very big pen for him to make sure he is kept safe and he has been paired up with Alice - he seems a very happy duck."
Of course he's happy. He's got four legs and a bride, too.
Animals | Gaius Tuesday, 3 April , 2007 | 
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