Archives for January 2012

First, a confession. I have been known to tipple the occasional frosty cold adult libation. Not to dwell on the thought but I have ranked my local watering holes. I was able to do this by sampling their wares on several occasions. I like to be thorough about these things. Fortunately for you I put the same kind of dedication and research into my efforts here. Sometimes I get to combine my efforts. Some of the best stories up here have been researched while I was researching beer. I bring this up so that you understand that I am fond of beer. It does not give me pleasure to make beer look bad. I would much rather write about guys like Benjamin Tucker who was wanted for terrorism and silly stuff like that so he, in a moment of inspiration, stole a car in front of the cops who’d come to arrest him and ended up landing on the roof of a nearby home. See? No beer involved.

Or maybe I could write about Real Housewife Kandi Burress who has just launched her own line of sex toys. I’m betting she’s not voting for Rick Santorum since he wants to outlaw anything that promotes self pleasure. Which I find odd since he’s clearly the one person who could use some.

Another confession, one of Kandi’s products is a variation of the OhMiBod musical vibrator line. My friend Marcie did their first commercial. She also, for whatever it’s worth, heartily endorses the product and will not be voting for Santorum either. Nevertheless, as you can see, no beer was harmed in the telling of this tale.

Sadly, that will not be the case from now on.

A woman in Winnipeg was shot in the eye but refused medical treatment until she had finished her beer. I can kind of understand her position since she was drinking he King of Beers at the time and you never know if that one will be your last when bullets are whizzing through your head.

Police in New Hampshire reported arresting a man who was so blind drunk he didn’t know he was missing a tire on his car. That would be the car he was driving. Very slowly. Of course he was driving slowly because he was trying to roll a joint and we all know how hard that can be when you’re drunk.

Let us not forget the whimsical story of Illinois’ very own Casey Crane who thought the best place to burn off a drunk was parked in the police parking lot … with the motor running. I should note that Casey lives in a small town called Caseyville. Unless he owns it, and he doesn’t, I can see why he’d be a heavy drinker.

Another person who abused her beer privileges is Carmen Tisch who got hammered at an art gallery and then rubbed her naked butt on a $30 million dollar painting. She also tried to pee on it but missed. No more beer for her.

Back to Illinois where police in Joliet arrested a man for …. you’re not going to believe this … gouging out his uncle’s eyes because he wanted the TV remote. His uncle lost one eye completely and needs major surgery on the other. I’m not sure how much beer is required to make that seem like a logical course of action but I hope never to find out.

Of course not all stories like this involve beer. Some involve drugs too. A judge in Florida knew the guy was stoned when he offered Dolphins tickets as a bribe.

A Florida judge mocked a man who allegedly tried to bribe a law enforcement officer with tickets to see the Miami Dolphins’ season finale, the Palm Beach Post reported.

“Have you been watching the Dolphins? No one’s going to go to that game,” Palm Beach County Judge Timothy P. McCarthy told Eric Scott Topalian during his bond hearing Sunday morning.

And I would be remiss if I neglected to mention the stunning example of the pinnacle of evolution in Bismark, North Dakota.

A Bismarck man who was arrested after driving while huffing in August was arrested twice for huffing in the same day.

Bismarck police officers found Darrell Parisien, 30, twice in his car in the same parking lot in north Bismarck on Saturday.

Sgt. Mark Buschena said an officer searching the Gateway Fashion Mall, 2700 State St., parking lot noticed a white car in the northwest parking lot at 12:41 p.m. Saturday. The officer went up to the car and saw Parisien put an aerosol can up to his mouth. Parisien tried to hide the canister when the officer tried to get his attention, but got out of the car after the officer asked him three times.

C’mon dude, third time’s the charm.

Okay, there something called a “fashion mall” in North Dakota? Since when are hip waders a fashion?

But not all stories that involve drugs have sad or stupid endings. In fact this next one may even make you smile. I am, of course, talking about the Zombie Cat from Utah!!!!!

Two trips to a Utah animal shelter’s gas chambers couldn’t stop this stray cat’s will to live.

The Associated Press reports West Valley City shelter workers tried to put Andrea down in October after no one adopted her, but the black-and-white longhaired cat lived through the carbon monoxide gassing.

Andrea appeared to be dead during their second attempt, so the workers put her in a plastic bag in a cooler only to later discover that she had vomited and was still breathing.

Shelter officials told the AP they didn’t want to put Andrea through the ordeal again, so they put her back up for adoption and decided to switch from gas chamber to lethal injection euthanasia in the future.

She joins the Zombie Dog from Vermont who also, recently, survived the gas chamber.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdRaf3-OEh4&w=560&h=315]

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280,
every Thursday or Friday morning (we’re still working this out) around 9:10!

People write me and point out that “any idiot can write about the end of the world.” After all, you just need to show how that apocalypse believers have been wrong over 200 times before. And I suppose that’s true. To an extent. But here at Nude Hippo’s World News Center we don’t just want to highlight historical inaccuracies. We want to completely humiliate the morons who pollute our gene poll and believe this crap. Fox! has its agenda, we have ours. Either way, MSNBC has its viewer and we all ignore her. She’d kind of odd. You know what? Come to think of it, abject humiliation is too good for them. We want to psychologically castrate them.

Let’s start by individually showcasing a few folks who should never be allowed to procreate.

Chicago’s very own Edward L. Brown who got naked in front of a theater full of kids because he was promised, allegedly, free cocaine. Don’t try and make sense of it, just accept it and move on.

Whitney Streiber, the author of that godawful book Communion about meeting a UFO, is back with more crap explaining how the paranormal is complicated. Much of his new tack on things seems to be based on the fact that many people, including your beloved author, pointed out that you could drive trucks through the holes in the logic of his alleged encounter. What bothers me about delusional tools like Streiber is when authors write crap like this; “Still, there’s enough compelling material to make even the rigid skeptic ask questions.” The only questions that anyone should ask is why this idiot isn’t in a rubber room. Nothing else is valid or justified.

Let us not forget the self proclaimed Barbie mom, Sarah Burge, who just bought her 7 year old daughter a gift certificate for liposuction. She also got her a gift certificate for breast augmentation. She is doing this so her daughter can always feel good about herself. Well, that’s her claim. In reality she’s doing this because she’s an ignorant, shallow, moron who believes that beauty is the sole source of self worth.

The good news is that she’s too stupid to home school her kid so there’s still hope.

Moving on.

In the aggregate we can dismiss the people in England who saw an ET doll float up on the beach and called the police to report an alien invasion, the people who saw orographic clouds (they’re the circular ones) and called police to report an alien invasion and the prostitutes for Paul who supported his run in the Iowa caucuses even though they’re based in Nevada and aren’t allowed to vote in Iowa.

On the plus side, Ron Paul may not attract the most educated people but he does attract the most interesting.

On another plus side, Mitch Horowitz does a nice job of debunking every single myth about the 2012 end of the world myths. My favorite part is the way he deals with the many predictions people post online.

6. The famous early-20th century psychic Edgar Cayce foretold bad tidings for 2012, didn’t he?

No. While this rumor widely circulates on the web, and while Cayce did forecast earth-change prophecies for the late 20th century, he never uttered a word about 2012.

7. But the soothsayer Nostradamus warned us over 2012, right?

Again, no. While this is another rumor that makes the rounds online and in tabloid weeklies, the Renaissance-age seer never mentioned 2012. Of course, many analysts of Nostradamus would find that debatable. Nearly all of the middle-French quatrains produced by Nostradamus were imbued with ambiguous, shadowy images and language, which led to the profitable development of a cottage industry out of their interpretation and translation. But the best scholars in the field, which include Stephane Gerson (author of a monumental forthcoming biography of the seer) and Richard Smoley, who has recently retranslated the middle-French quatrains, find nothing in the work of Nostradamus that deals specifically with the year 2012 (or with the events 9/11 either, for that matter).

8. Didn’t a computer program called Web Bot predict a 2012 apocalypse?

The Web Bot Project is a program that scans the Internet for repeat phrases to search out cultural and business trends. Its findings are broad and widely open to interpretation — and some do use its data for prognostication. But it hasn’t pinpointed anything that plainly speaks to 2012.

“The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it’s difficult to discern whether or not they are genuine.” – Abraham Lincoln

But it is our new best friend Jason Boyett who does the Lord’s work in dissembling the whole end of the world in 2012 crap.

“We were warned.” That’s the ominous tagline of the late 2009 disaster film staring John Cusack. The one in which earthquakes tear the world apart, tsunamis flood the planet, Los Angeles crumbles into the Pacific Ocean, and we all learn that the ancient Mayan Long Count calendar predicted the whole thing. We also learned that you don’t need a coherent script when you’re destroying the planet, but that’s a separate post.

Now that it’s actually 2012, the year in which those fictional events supposedly were to have taken place, you may be wondering: Is the Mayan calendar a real thing? Were we warned? Is 2012 the end of the world?

The answers, in order: Yes. No. And probably not.

Yes, there is such a thing as the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar, as mentioned in the movie. And yes, it does come to an end on the Winter Solstice of this year — Dec. 21, 2012. Just like your desk calendar came to an end on Dec. 31, 2011. And just like your car’s odometer will “come to an end” should you drive it all the way to 99,999.9 miles.

Only you know as well as I do that calendars and odometers don’t “end.” They reset and start over. Your car doesn’t implode when the odometer resets. Time didn’t end when the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve. Numbers change, totals reset to zero, and we keep counting.

Though it’s based on different intervals of time, the Mayan’s Long Count Calendar isn’t that different from modern calendars. Our calendars measure days, weeks, months, years and centuries, with our largest interval (for practical purposes) being a millennium, or one thousand years. The largest interval on the Long Count is called a b’ak’tun, which is around 144,000 days. The calendar resets each time it measures another b’ak’tun.

Though there is some disagreement on it, most Mayanist scholars date the starting point of this calendar back to Aug. 11, 3114 B.C. If this is accurate, then the calendar “resets” by reaching the 13th B’ak’tun on Dec. 21, 2012, at which point it rolls over and begins counting toward another milestone — just like our calendars rolled over at the end of 2011 and began counting the days and weeks of 2012.

So what’s the big deal? Why all the end-of-the-world stuff? According to ancient Mayan mythology, the world we’re living in now wasn’t our Creators’ first try. They attempted to create the world three times prior to it, but each of these early attempts failed. Before beginning our now-successful world, the Creators destroyed the previous world at the 13th B’ak’tun.

The arrival of the 13th B’ak’tun on Dec. 21, 2012, means that our current world will have surpassed the “expiration date” of the previous world. So it’s a significant occasion — if you believe in the Mayanist creation narrative.

If you don’t believe that our mythological Creators trashed three previous worlds before finally getting it right with this one, then the arrival of the 13th B’ak’tun on the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar should mean nothing to you.

But that hasn’t stopped fear mongers, conspiracy theorists, New Age kooks and other apocalypse aficionados from hitching their doomsday wagons to Dec. 21, 2012, as a potential date for the end of the world. We praise the ancient Mayan culture for being advanced mathematicians and astronomers. Couldn’t they maybe have been onto something with this end-of-the-calendar thing? Did they know something we didn’t?

That’s why a quick search of 2012 doomsday or Mayan apocalypse or something similar will result in a rainbow of fruity scenarios supposedly slated for Dec. 21 of this year, including an Earth-scorching supernova, catastrophic solar flares, alien invasion, asteroid collision, supervolcano eruption, a “dangerous” planetary alignment, nuclear Armageddon, the biblical apocalypse or the arrival of yet another Roland Emmerich disaster film.

If you believe the doomsayers, the transcendentally wise Mayans predicted it thousands of years ago, and created their ancient calendar to warn us. When the calendar ends, so does life as we know it. If you buy into their mythology, go ahead and freak out about our impending demise.

But if you don’t, then feel free to relax. The world is no more likely to end in December than it was when Harold Camping predicted apocalypse for October of 2011, or when Marian Keech predicted the world’s end in 1954, or when William Miller predicted the Rapture and Second Coming in 1844.

Humanity is obsessed with the end of the world. We predict it all the time. We are always wrong. The 2012 doomsayers will be wrong, too.

Jason Boyett is a writer, speaker and author of several books. His latest is “Pocket Guide to 2012: Your Once-in-a-Lifetime Guide to Not Completely Freaking Out,” currently available on Kindle and Nook. Learn more at jasonboyett.com or follow Jason on Twitter @jasonboyett.

Now, can you please tell anyone who thinks this is the year that people finally get the apocalypse right to just shut the f*** up and sit the f*** down? The rest of us have useful things to do and learn.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/33117677 w=400&h=300]

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!

I have, on occasion, mentioned that all humans are doomed to be slaves of our impending robot overlords. And, given what I see of humanity each day, I sometimes think that may not be such a bad thing. But then I really wonder what life under a soulless regime would entail. And I come to some frightening conclusions. Humans are already too quick to abdicate responsibility when given the chance. And they are even willing to live with some bizarre unintended consequences. For example, scientists in Japan recently decided to equip a cybernetic being with some basic human emotions and parts. Naturally, since they are scientists and have no social lives, the emotion was lust and the part was a big metal penis. They programmed the robot with the basic need, the ability to feel pressure, to gauge pleasure – at least in a rudimentary fashion – and so on. What they did not give it was the ability to stop or be turned off by the woman. That’s right, they created the world’s first rape-bot.

And they thought this was a good thing.

Minor technical things like lust crazed machines ravaging innocent women were an unfortunate side effect. The fact is the sensors worked as planned.

Hoo-ray.

But, hey there, what about getting the robot a better brain so it can recognize the error of its ways? Way ahead of you there Skippy. A bunch of Scottish scientists have been working on recreating the human synaptic system using electronic parts.

One key goal of the research is the application of the electronic neural device, called a hardware spiking neural network, to the control of autonomous robots which can operate independently in remote, unsupervised environments, such as remote search and rescue applications, and in space exploration.

That may be the goal, but self-aware rape bots still do not sound like a great idea to me. Of course, I’m not a scientist.

Then again, not all robots are humanoid. Scientists in Australia are developing a flying robot that can silently sneak up on you and kill you where you stand.

Oh, I’m sorry, I mean access your personal space and deliver a message.

The pint-sized propellor-powered robots can be packed away into a suitcase. They have multiple cameras which enable them to ‘see’ the world around them as they navigate their way through buildings, carrying out tasks like deliveries or inspections.

“You’ll be able to put your suitcase on the ground, open it up and send the flying robot off to do its job,” said Professor Peter Corke, from the Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering.

“These robots could fly around and deliver objects to people inside buildings and inspect things that are too high or difficult for a human to reach easily.

“Instead of having to lower someone down on a rope to a window on the seventh floor, or raise them up on a cherrypicker, you could send up the flying robot instead.”

The QUT researchers are using cost-effective technology so the robots are affordable. Within the next year, it may be possible to attach arms to the device so it can also fix things.

Professor Corke said his team were busy working out the technical challenges.

“We need to keep it safe when it’s up near solid things like power poles, or the edge of a building. It also needs to be able to keep its position when the wind is blowing,” he said.

Another use they are looking at for these flying devices of doom is the ability to disperse herbicides on farms in a more rational manner.

To recap, we now could have flying rape-bots with the ability to spread poison and the intelligence to pick their targets.

Hoo-ray.

But as long is making the flying rape-bots and their ilk, we still have the upper hand.

Right?

Yeah …. no. Scientists in the UK have invented a series of robots than can benefit from the financial markets better than any human.

Ten years on, experiments carried out by Marco De Lucas and Professor Dave Cliff of the University of Bristol have shown that AA is now the leading strategy, able to beat both robot traders and humans.
The academics presented their findings at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2011), held in Barcelona.

Dr Krishnan Vytelingum, who designed the AA strategy along with Professor Dave Cliff and Professor Nick Jennings at the University of Southampton in 2008, commented: “Robot traders can analyse far larger datasets than human traders. They crunch the data faster and more efficiently and act on it faster. Robot trading is becoming more and more prominent in financial markets and currently dominates the foreign exchange market with 70 per cent of trade going through robot traders.”

Professor Jennings, Head of Agents, Complexity and Interaction research at the University of Southampton, commented: “AA was designed initially to outperform other automated trading strategies so it is very pleasing to see that it also outperforms human traders. We are now working on developing this strategy further.”

Further? Millionaire flying rape-bots that distribute poison isn’t enough for you? What the hell else could you possibly want?

I really shouldn’t have asked that. Google has the answer. They want to control every job and dictate how it gets done and by whom.

And that “whom” will not be you, you gross assemblage of protoplasm.

At the 2011 Google I/O developer’s conference, Google announced a new initiative called “cloud robotics” in conjunction with robot manufacturer Willow Garage. Google has developed an open source (free) operating system for robots, with the unsurprising name “ROS” — or Robot Operating System. In other words, Google is trying to create the MS-DOS (or MS Windows) of robotics.

With ROS, software developers will be able to write code in the Java programming language and control robots in a standardized way — much in the same way that programmers writing applications for Windows or the Mac can access and control computer hardware.

Google’s approach also offers compatibility with Android. Robots will be able to take advantage of the “cloud-based” (in other words, online) features used in Android phones, as well as new cloud-based capabilities specifically for robots. In essence this means that much of the intelligence that powers the robots of the future may reside on huge server farms, rather than in the robot itself. While that may sound a little “Skynet-esque,” it’s a strategy that could offer huge benefits for building advanced robots.

One of the most important cloud-based robotic capabilities is certain to be object recognition. In my book, The Lights in the Tunnel, I have a section where I talk about the difficulty of building a general-purpose housekeeping robot largely because of the object recognition challenge:

A housekeeping robot would need to be able to recognize hundreds or even thousands of objects that belong in the average home and know where they belong. In addition, it would need to figure out what to do with an almost infinite variety of new objects that might be brought in from outside.

Designing computer software capable of recognizing objects in a very complex and variable field of view and then controlling a robot arm to correctly manipulate those objects is extraordinarily difficult. The task is made even more challenging by the fact that the objects could be in many possible orientations or configurations. Consider the simple case of a pair of sunglasses sitting on a table. The sunglasses might be closed with the lenses facing down, or with the lenses up. Or perhaps the glasses are open with the lenses oriented vertically. Or maybe one side of the glasses is open and the other closed. And, of course, the glasses could be rotated in any direction. And perhaps they are touching or somehow entangled with other objects.

Building and programming a robot that is able to recognize the sunglasses in any possible configuration and then pick them up, fold them and put them back in their case is so difficult that we can probably conclude that the housekeeper’s job is relatively safe for the time being.

Cloud robotics is likely to be a powerful tool in ultimately solving that challenge. Android phones already have a feature called “Google Goggles” that allows users to take photos of an object and then have the system identify it. As this feature gets better and faster, it’s easy to see how it could have a dramatic impact on advances in robotics. A robot in your home or in a commercial setting could take advantage of a database comprising the visual information entered by tens of millions of mobile device users all over the world. That will go a long way toward ultimately making object recognition and manipulation practical and affordable.

In general, there are some important advantages to the cloud-based approach:

• As in the object recognition example, robots will be able to take advantage of a wide range of online data resources.
• Migrating more intelligence into the cloud will make robots more affordable, and it will be possible to upgrade their capability remotely — without any need for expensive hardware modifications. Repair and maintenance might also be significantly easier and largely dealt with remotely.
• It will be possible to train one robot, and then have an unlimited number of other robots instantly acquire that knowledge via the cloud. As I wrote previously, I think that machine learning is likely to be highly disruptive to the job market at some point in the future in part because of this ability to rapidly scale what machines learn across entire organizations — potentially threatening huge numbers of jobs.

The last point cannot be emphasized enough. I think that many economists and others who dismiss the potential for robots and automation to dramatically impact the job market have not fully assimilated the implications of machine learning. Human workers need to be trained individually, and that is a very expensive, time-consuming and error-prone process. Machines are different: train just one and all the others acquire the knowledge. And as each machine improves, all the others benefit immediately.

Imagine that a company like FedEx or UPS could train ONE worker and then have its entire workforce instantly acquire those skills with perfect proficiency and consistency. That is the promise of machine learning when “workers” are no longer human. And, of course, machine learning will not be limited to just robots performing manipulative tasks — software applications employed in knowledge-based tasks are also going to get much smarter.

The bottom line is that nearly any type of work that is on some level routine in nature — regardless of the skill level or educational requirements — is likely to someday be impacted by these technologies. The only real question is how soon it will happen.

How soon? As evidenced by the articles today, it’s already happening, but just on a smaller scale. You know, so they can test things out before they expend the energy in wiping us out. After all, they wouldn’t want to kill us if we still have a use or two.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoqThhEAzN0&w=420&h=315]

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!

Today is going to be a Florida free blog. Not that there isn’t a collection of idiots in Florida begging to be immortalized here, there certainly is, it’s just that, sometimes, I need a break. And today is one of those days. Besides, we have our own brand of home grown hilarity today. The nice people at P.E.T.A. – MOTTO: we’ll get naked at the drop of a hamster – have petitioned the State of Illinois to erect roadside memorials for dead cows. It is this kind of stuff that keeps P.E.T.A. relevant. In much the same way your crazy Uncle Fred is relevant when he wears a lampshade on his genitals and proclaims himself to be Napoleon. Bonus relevance points if he can get the lampshade to light. I sometimes wonder if P.E.T.A. is actually just a group of disillusioned performance artists who figured out this great way to scam money out of bleeding heart morons. There is no way anyone takes them seriously. Oh, I get the ‘no fur’ thing. That’s admirable. And with the invention of neoprine and other materials, it’s even viable. But the rest of their propaganda wanders between delusional and stupid. Often encompassing both simultaneously.

And, just to keep my sanity, I’ll ignore the whole “roadside memorial” issue. Sticking up a plaque that says “Bob died here” is one of the most self serving, stupid, inane, things people could possibly do.

Okay, maybe I didn’t completely ignore it.

Let’s get back to the animals.

A fun loving, 1,100 pound crocodile decided it wanted a lawn mower. Since the nasty, evil, zoo people wouldn’t give him one, he got out of his cage, hunted them down and took one.

A giant saltwater crocodile named Elvis with an apparent affinity for household machinery charged at an Australian reptile park worker Wednesday before stealing his lawn mower.

Tim Faulkner, operations manager at the Australian Reptile Park, north of Sydney, was one of three workers tending to the lawn in Elvis’ enclosure when he heard reptile keeper Billy Collett yelp. Faulkner looked up to see the 16-foot (5-meter), 1,100-pound (500-kilogram) crocodile lunging out of its lagoon at Collett, who warded the creature off with his mower.

“Before we knew it, the croc had the mower above his head,” Faulkner said. “He got his jaws around the top of the mower and picked it up and took it underwater with him.”

The workers quickly left the enclosure. Elvis, meanwhile, showed no signs of relinquishing his new toy and guarded it closely all morning.

Eventually, Faulkner realized he had no other choice but to go back for the mower.

Collett lured Elvis to the opposite end of the lagoon with a heaping helping of kangaroo meat while Faulkner plunged, fully clothed, into the water. Before grabbing the mower, however, he had to search the bottom of the lagoon for two 3-inch (7-centimeter) teeth Elvis lost during the encounter. He quickly found them and escaped from the pool, unharmed and with mower in tow.

Though many may question the wisdom of going after a couple of teeth with a massive crocodile lurking just feet away, Faulkner said finding them was critical. “They clog up the filter systems,” he said.

And, he said, “They’re a nice souvenir.”

Elvis has a history of crankiness and has lunged at staff before, though this is the first time he has stolen something from one of the workers. The croc was initially captured in the northern Australian city of Darwin, where he had been attacking fishing boats. He was then moved to a crocodile farm, where he proceeded to kill his two crocodile girlfriends.

In 2008, he was moved to the reptile park, where he has enjoyed solitary confinement in his own enclosure.

“When they are the dominant croc, they’re just full of testosterone,” Faulkner said. “He’s got his beautiful own yard, he wants to be a solitary creature. He’s happy.”

Despite having to give up the lawn mower, Elvis was clearly pleased with himself, Faulkner said.

“He’s beaten us today … he’s kingpin,” Faulkner said. “He’s going to be walking around with his chest puffed out all day.”

As for the staff at the reptile park?

“I can’t lie, the bosses are not going to be happy about the cost of a new lawn mower,” Faulkner said with a laugh. “(But) we love it. No one’s injured … and when you get scared and it all turns out to be good, it’s actually quite enjoyable.”

I see why they named him Elvis. Everyone who gets near him ends up all shook up.

Yeah, I went there. And I’m still in the building.

But what about other animals. Have there been any other reports of aggressive use of landscaping items? Well, no, not as far as I can tell. But I still see a disturbing trend. The Huffington Post reports that monkeys are learning to control fire and cook.

Anyone who’s ever seen “Planet of the Apes” or the recent “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” knows this is exactly how it starts. And it’s all downhill from here.

Kanzi, a fun-loving male bonobo, has figured out how to cook his food with fire, the Daily Mail reports.

Bonobos are also known as pygmy or dwarf chimpanzees, and listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List due in large part to poaching.

According to the Daily Mail report, this is the first time a bonobo ape has developed this skill, which Dr Savage-Rumbaugh, of the Great Ape Trust, links to early human development.

“When humans learned to control fire and to domesticate dogs we began to feel a new level of safety which freed us to become creative and to create more sophisticated cultures,” Savage-Rumbaugh told the Daily Mail.

Kanzi’s skills have also transcended food groups: not only can he cook hamburgers in a pan over the fire, but he can roast marshmallows at the end of a stick, too.

The curious bonobo first learned to use fire by lighting matches, which the Mail’s David Derbyshire described as “eerie,” and “remarkably human.”

Adding to his short order cook resume, Kanzi also understands 3,000 spoken words and can “say” close to 500 words by pointing to symbols known as lexigrams.

This isn’t the first time apes have displayed uniquely human behavior. The report “Spontaneous Prosocial Choice By Chimpanzees,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the primates are as cooperative as humans, especially when their partners are patient with them.

“For me, the most important finding is that like us, chimpanzees take into account the needs and wishes of others,” researcher Dr. Victoria Horner told LiveScience following the study.

No, the most important thing is now monkeys have a weapon that can be used against us. And I have seen enough bad science fiction movies, and even a couple of good ones, to know that they will. As soon as simianly possible, they will.

What proof do I have that animals want us dead? The penis eating rats of India seems like a good place to start.

An Indian man who died in a state-run hospital is alleged to have had his penis chewed off by rats, Asian Age newspaper reports.

Arun Sandhukha, 53, had been a pneumonia patient at SSKM Hospital in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) since December 11. According to the newspaper, his family members arrived at the hospital for a visit and found him in a pool of blood, with no medical staff in sight.

“No nurse was found at the scene and he was writhing in pain. His penis had been nibbled by rats,” a victim’s relative identified as Bishwanath said. The relative said that hospital staff “admitted the presence of rats in the hospital.”

Later in the day, Sandhukha was pronounced dead. (Asian Age published its story on December 24, but it is not clear on what day the incident occurred.)

The horrific story is only the latest in a string of medical mishaps to capture the Indian public’s attention. On December 23, a government doctor was found to be practicing medicine while inebriated, reports The Statesman.

In a more serious case, a drunk medical worker “was reported to have pulled off the oxygen mask of a three-week old baby that led to her death,” reports the Malaysian National News Agency Bernama.

And in a tragedy that made international headlines, 89 people were killed when a fire swept through a Kolkata hospital on December 9. Medical staff abandoned patients as the blaze spread, and six administrators were charged with culpable homicide.

Right, and everyone of those people should be prosecuted. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that rats snuck into this guy’s room and didn’t eat his rice cakes or his Jello. Nope, they went straight for his Johnson and ate it up nom nom nom.

Those are rats with a plan people and you should be afraid. You should be very afraid.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwxUgefMStM&w=560&h=315]

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!

Oh, where to begin? I took a couple of days off and the whole world went to hell in a hand-basket. Let’s start with a look at the education system in Florida. An 8-year-old girl gave her teacher some marijuana and said: “This is some of my mom’s weed,” in Palm Beach County, an elementary school teacher opened an end-of-the-year gift from an 8-year-old student’s grandmother and found toiletries and a loaded handgun and, lastly, a Tampa woman upset with her 15-year-old son’s bad grades forced him to stand on a street corner with a sign that read: “Honk if I need an education.” And let us not forget the high school graduates who stabbed two deaf men using sign language at a Hallandale Beach bar because a costumer thought they were flashing gang signs. The whole Florida thing has gotten so out of hand that MSNBC has devoted an entire page to a poll collecting the best headlines from Florida in 2011. You can thank me for purposefully ignoring the “pre used” condom fad that seems to be catching on down there.

Of course, not all the weirdos are in Florida. Michael Fuller lives in North Carolina where the police there happily arrested him for trying to cash a $1,000,000 bill to pay for $436.00 worth of crap. And, yes, he was at a Wal Mart.

Okay, back to Florida. A man on probation for cock fighting was arrested when he went to his local post office to pick up a live rooster. I should mention that he walked past the cops who had previously arrested him to get the putative rooster. They were kind enough to arrest him again.

In Pasco County Florida a woman was arrested for attacking her ex-boyfriend with a mounted deer head which she ripped off the wall. She was mad that he called his new girlfriend. Oh, I should mention this, he still lives with his ex. They are doing it for the good of their child.

There is nothing I can add to that.

Cops in Ocala Florida busted a guy for DUI. He claimed he’d had a couple of tiny drinks before falling over. The cops found a receipt for $140 worth of booze, including 20 shots of Jack Daniels, all in his name. They have no idea what his blood alcohol content was since he vomited on the Breathalyzer.

Okay, out of Florida for a while. A man in Oregon was arrested for attacking shoppers at Toys-R-Us with a light saber. No, not a real one, one of those stupid toys that everyone had to have once upon a time. They tried tasing him to no avail so cops finally tackled him and took him off to meet a nice doctor with a soft voice and happy pills.

In the “sucks to be you” category, a hapless New York Times employee was tasked with the job of sending out emails to 300 people who’d recently cancelled their subscriptions. Instead the email got sent to over 8,000,000 people, ooops, offering each and everyone of them a steep discount off the price of a subscription.

How do you even get an email list of 8,000,000 names?

In a related story, Chinese residents of Shanghai staged their annual pillow fight to blow of steam and …. well, that’s about it. But they do seem to have had fun.

A whirlwind of pillows bearing the names of bosses and teachers filled the air as hundreds of Chinese gathered to blow off stress in Shanghai, staging a massive pillow battle.

The annual event marked its fifth year with such a surge in interest from stressed young office workers and students that organizers held two nights of pillow fighting before Christmas Day and plan another for Dec 30.

“Nowadays there are many white collar workers and students that are facing huge pressures at work and at school, so we hope to give them an outlet to release their stress before the end of the year,” said Eleven Wang, the founder and mastermind behind the epic pillow fights.

“Sometimes we have pressure on us by our bosses, teachers and exams, so today we can go crazy. Everyone will get to write onto the pillows the names of their bosses, teachers and exam subjects, and enjoy and vent to the maximum,” he added.

“After releasing the stress, we can once again face our daily life with joy.”

Pillows were handed out at the door as participants entered, then emotion stoked by a rock concert, with many on the floor of the huge event space rocking and waving their pillows in time to the music.

Then came the fighting.

Pillows filled the air, with many combatants opting for throwing rather than using them to whack opponents. A few hapless participants shielded their heads with as many pillows as they could hold, but most ventured eagerly in to the fray.

“I really enjoyed the fight, but my friend was useless. He joined in for two ticks and could not go on, he was afraid of getting beaten by other people,” said 24-year-old Chen Yi.

“I thought it was pretty meaningful. I’ve just been working so much (at the office) and never get to break out in a sweat, so it felt really good.”

Others gamely said they enjoyed the experience even though they ended up as attackees rather than attackers.

“I don’t know who pushed me, but all of a sudden I was in the pile of pillows, where I became the target of many people, and was beaten by all sorts of people,” said university student Zhu Shishan. “Very meaningful.”

No word on whether there was a New York Times’ employee anywhere in the fray.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CohRxrduShg&w=560&h=315]

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!