3:00 snapshot #432, and some random links

[urbpan]

Fruit for the fruit bat.

It's been a while since I've done "Weird Pest Control Products," so I was happy to discover the Rodenator. (Link leads to video automatically playing.) The Rodenator supplies the ingredient that's been missing from pest control: Explosives! It fills a rodent burrow with a propane and oxygen mix (STOP right there! If you can fill a rodent burrow with a gas, you can use C02, an inexpensive and non-explosive as well as veterinarian approved euthanasia method. But why feel like Kevorkian when you can be Rambo?) Where was I? Oh yeah, then you blow it up. The video is pretty entertaining, if you don't mind the fact that it's a gopher snuff film.

Own one of those cars that suddenly accelerates beyond your control? Or maybe your travel mug fell under your brake pedal? Here's what to do. (spoiler! it involves the N on your gear shifter.)

Mysterious fossils of the trunk of some vegetative organism that grew to 20 feet tall were described as fungi a few years back. Now, in the most frustratingly badly written piece of science journalism I've reposted in months, there's a theory that they were giant liverworts. A liverwort is a category of non-flowering plant, like mosses and ferns. Or as the article says: "Though technically classified a plant, liverwort doesn't have leaves and is generally lumped together with lichen, slime-molds, algae and fungus[sic]." What? That meaningless lumping together covers at least 2 kingdoms, 3 redundancies, and no common biology among all the organisms listed, excluding only animals and bacteria really. The only place those things are lumped together is on my ancient copy of the Non-flowering Plants golden guide, which I bring to my mushroom class as an example of wrong information that's still floating around.

Comments

[brush-rat.livejournal.com]

"Excuse me Sandy, but if we kill the golfers, they'll lock us up."

For what it's worth, the lady testifying most recently about the Toyota accelerator problem says she dropped in neutral to no effect and eventually put in in reverse to no effect. I have a little trouble believing that, but I'm only hearing the sound bytes.

[urb-banal.livejournal.com]

Who's killing golfers? Geez, golfers are a personal pet peev of mine, eating up the landscape with their silly green and sand pits and such. They mate voraciously I hear and there is a strain of Tiger golfer which is especially viralent. oh gophers, you meant gophers, well they can't lock you up for that!

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Oh "Gophers!" Yeah, we can do that. We don't even have to have a reason!

I want to kill gophers.

[(Anonymous)]

OMG, this is the coolest thing I have ever seen! Please, everybody go to www.rodenator.com and see this gopher bazooka for yourself. I grew up on a farm and know how much of a problem gophers can be. If I had gophers I would totally buy a Rodenator and have the time of my life.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_bazilisk_/]

Bad science journalism makes my head hurt. And I've only had a basic high school and a basic college course in actual biology. Sigh.