I'll let the juxtaposition be the only commentary on these two stories. First, one from Alabama:
Five veterinary clinics in eastern Alabama received 32 surprises in the last week: healthy cats in containers and carriers, along with notes from an anonymous donor saying she is dying from cancer.
I notice so many of the blogs are conducting polls nowadays, and I see that my blogging service has just enabled me do do them, too. You apparently can't be taken seriously in today's highly interactive culture unless you regularly take the pulse of your readers. How's your pulse? Take this poll, please!
[polldaddy poll=1003358]
Here's one I agree with Obama on rather than McCain:
Even as the U.S. confronts two long wars, neither Sen. John McCain nor Sen. Barack Obama believes the country should take the politically perilous step of reviving the military draft.
Issues such as gay marriage should be decided by legislatures, but it's obvious that we're not headed that way. Connecticut has become the third state to say that same-sex partners are entitled to all the benefits of traditional marriage, including the title, and all three were court decrees. Furthermore:
This Editor & Publisher article makes it sound like The Associated Press is going through a small rough patch. I think it's bigger than that -- technology is passing by the whole model AP uses:
This is a day to mark on the calendar of despair:
A watched clock never moves — unless it's the National Debt Clock.
In fact, the digital counter has been moving so much that it recently ran out of digits to display the ballooning figure: $10,150,603,734,720, or roughly $10.2 trillion, as of Saturday afternoon.
If you didn't think Hugo Chavez was a menace to the world before, this will surely change your mind:
The Venezuelan government has ordered all McDonald's restaurants in the country closed for 48 hours for what it calls irregularities in the fast-food chain's financial books.
The order stands for Thursday through Saturday, affecting all 115 McDonald's restaurants nationwide, the state-run Bolivarian News Agency reported.
Plants have feelings, too!
ZURICH -- For years, Swiss scientists have blithely created genetically modified rice, corn and apples. But did they ever stop to consider just how humiliating such experiments may be to plants?
That's a question they must now ask. Last spring, this small Alpine nation began mandating that geneticists conduct their research without trampling on a plant's dignity.
Thank God, the world's economy is crumbling and millions and millions of people will therefore have more miserable lives. At least the planet can heal, and we all know that's all that's important:
A slowdown in the world economy may give the planet a breather from the excessively high carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions responsible for climate change, a Nobel Prize winning scientist said on Tuesday.
It's been quite a while since we had a "research dollars hard at work" entry, so here's a dandy:
When dining at Chinese buffets, overweight individuals serve themselves and eat differently than people of normal weight, according to researchers at Cornell University.
Brian Wanink said that obese people sit closer to the food, generally face it and even chew less. He is the lead author of the study and wrote the book "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think."
