Day: September 4, 2013

Parents. According to conventional wisdom, they know best. But, as you move out — be it for school, work or marriage — ask yourself this: do you know where they are and what they’re doing right now?

Maybe they’re knitting. Or gardening. Or doing it to DVDs full of people with pubic hair. Or — as it’s turning out to be the case — marijuana.

And if you think it’s not your parents, think again. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services), illicit drug use among 50- to 64-year-olds has doubled since 2002.

So, what are you going to do to make sure your parents don’t turn on, tune in and drop out … again? Continue reading Take it from Snee: Talk to your parents about drugs

All of us have thanked Michael Bay repeatedly for introducing us to Megan Fox, oh, and the rest of the Transformers. However every Transformers’ nerd’s worst nightmare may be coming to the silver screen when Mark Wahlberg meets … the Dinobots.

Show of hands: who has an injured index finger? Oh, what’s that? You couldn’t raise your hand because of said injured index finger? Your hand has turned into a claw? You can’t sleep because social networks?

Don’t worry, there’s help.

The Bradford Regional Medical Center in Pennsylvania is looking out for you. No longer content to allow internet addiction to take over a person’s life, the Behavioral Health Services part of the hospital will be opening a 10 day program for the unfortunate next week. The first step will be the termination of the client’s internet service. The next step involves counseling, which we can only assume is stern and repeated yelling that cat pictures do not need to be made or seen.

Researchers at the Centre de Neurosciences Paris-Sud believe they know why the Gardiner’s Seychelles frog always looks so shocked whenever they talk to it: the frog may use its mouth to listen.

The tiny frog that’s no larger than a fingernail lacks an inner ear that most animals — including people — use to hear. So, based on X-rays, they think that the frog uses its mouth as a replacement since it is the only part of its anatomy that resonates at the proper frequency.

They would study the frog further to confirm this theory, but that would mean continuing to talk to frogs. And there’s nothing creepier than talking to someone with their mouth hanging open.

We may have taken a week off, but that doesn’t mean the War on Animals did. In fact, our foes seemed to have stepped up their efforts because they thought we weren’t watching. They were wrong.

We’ll begin in Japan, where motorists in two cities in the Nagano prefecture got tangled up because many of the traffic lights went dark. The reason was excessive amounts of bird poop. Not on the traffic lights themselves, but on an electric substation that controlled the power flowing to them. The local power company said that there was so much bird crap at the substation that it dripped into the equipment and caused a short. The birds are still at large.

Now onto Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, which is where we keep many of our nuclear missiles, armed and at the ready to send some unlucky enemy back into some sort of weird, irradiated Stone Age. But a species of ground squirrel is leading an assault on our biggest weapons. The Richardson’s ground squirrel has been burrowing under the fences of the base all summer long, and it’s been setting off motion sensors, forcing military personnel to drive out and see if there is a security threat. It distracts our boys from doing their jobs, and keeps them from being at the ready.

Luckily, the Air Force has caught a few of these animal-terrorists, and is hard at work designing a squirrel-proof fence to defeat their attempted intrusions.