A moose died after being hung fifty feet above the ground on a power line.

The workers believe the moose may have come across the sagging and swaying wires and decided to challenge the power line to a fight, as bull moose are known to do during the rut, or mating season.

“My guess is he was in full rut and probably seen that line moving out there,” and decided to fight, said Marvin Pickens, line construction manager for City Electric in Anchorage.

Now here’s someone with too much time (and too many cats) on his hands.

[via (who else?) Paul Hsieh]

As an about-to-become Florida resident, I found this interesting:

I fully expect some sect of the Amish to come up with some way of justifying using space technology to homestead asteroids.

This is my weirdest email of the week (and perhaps the month), in response to my previous two Foxnews columns (or at least so I surmise, to the best of my admittedly limited interpretive ability). The author didn’t specify what pharmaceutical assistance empowered him or her to write it.

Ollah: praise Olleh…for Olluh is great.

Hitler’s disposition….1. he handed Neville Chamberlain a letter thanking the British soldier who spared his life on the battle fields of WW1. 2. Churchill’s churlish disposition: an actor impersonated him over broadcast radio for his most famous pep talk to the Brits (which raises the spectre of speech writers) while he was otherwise engaged. Sore throat? Golf? “We shall…” LOL. Nasa and Epcot might be interested in space, but I’m interested in taeme travel.

I liked your article. I like debunking of myths. My favourite is the book of photos of virtuoso pianists: all those stubby fingers. LOL.

There is some water on the far side of the moon but it’s really hard to find anything on the internet about the origin of water. My own theory is planet Earth is a neutron star which creates water.

Nasa and Epcot behave as the only PR game in town. It’s a bold strategy…but it requires a quick win. Master players don’t play for the quick win. Rubes do. I find the same with 3D. Co’s like Imax and Deep Video are playing for the quick win against hundreds of others.

Byebye, see you, tata.

FisherKingKQJ

It’s in italics because that’s the way it came in to my email client.

Make of it what you will. I report, you decide…

An Austrian man wants to sky dive across the English Channel. Well, if one can run for governor of California, why the heck not?

“I want to be known as the God of the Skies,” he told the Telegraph.

Either that, or as one wag at Free Republic suggested, the “Crater of Calais.”

There are some places where seeing dinosaur descendants would be an everyday occurrence–your back yard, Sesame Street (which has one of the Big variety), the aviary at the San Diego Zoo–but my living room is not one of them. Thus it was notable this evening that I suffered an invasion by not zero, not one, but two animals of the feathered variety in Casa Transterrestrial.

The disconsertion was amplified by the fact that it occurred during dinner, which was occurring in the living room, during a Simpsons rerun, Patricia being up in Reno and thus unable to protect me from the beaky predators as I innocently munched my chicken nachos (were they, Hitchcock-like, lying in wait for me, as I ate their distant cousin?).

I was first alerted to the avian intruders by Jessica. Jessica is the younger cat, who has misleadingly gangly legs, and black fur with a white undercoat, and who seems much too uncoordinated to deal with flying prey.

The elder cat, Stella, is a premiere ratter, having dispatched all the rodents who temporarily took up abode in the garage after discovering my stash of malt and corn sugar, set aside as brewery inputs after I discovered that beer was unacceptably carbohydratic for my newly-discovered relatively paleolithic protein-rich diet. But I’ve never seen her catch a bird, and I suspect that, at age thirteen, her hunting days may be behind her.

Anyway, Jessica was making that peculiar moaning sound, familiar to cat owners, of a cat in pure, unadulterated hunting mode. She was looking up toward the cathedral, wood-beam ceiling at a fluttering apparition in the beams. I saw the motion myself, and went to turn on the track lights to view it better.

It was a hummingbird, frantically beating itself against the ceiling between the beams, attempting to find a way to freedom. Its wings were beating at approximately thirty-four thousand flutters per second. It was clear that it was going to run out of energy in a matter of short minutes at its current rate.

Don’t ask me how it got in–I don’t know now, and I never will.

The ceiling is high on that end of the room. The front door was just below, however, so I opened it. It was late, but the sun wasn’t down, so I hoped that the light coming in would draw it to the Great Outdoors.

Fortunately, after a few minutes, it did indeed come down toward the door. But it didn’t go out. It beat itself against the narrow wall between the open front door and the entrance to the kitchen, in which it perhaps had fantasies of endless supplies of sugar water with which to power its frantic wings.

I gently brushed it toward the open door with my hand and, panicked, it found the opening, exited, and quickly increased altitude. Unlike the living room, it was ceiling unlimited.

Relieved, I sat down to finish my chicken nacho consumption.

Then Jessica started crying and pawing at the fireplace. Now what?

I heard another fluttering of wings in the hearth.

Great. Another bird had flown down the chimney, and was beating itself up in the flue, or in the logs on the grate. The cat was going nuts trying to get to it, and I couldn’t see any way to persuade it to go back up the chimney, or to head outside.

As I sat there, trying to figure out what to do, Jessica finally managed to frighten it into flying out of the fireplace, and toward the glass patio doors in the living room. It was hiding and fluttering in the vertical blinds.

I opened up the door all the way, and got the cat away from it.

Like the hummingbird, I gently brushed it toward the door opening. It found the exit, and fluttered up and away.

Jessica looked up at me, disappointed. She whined a little, and then went outside.

I finished dinner.

I found this little story over at Natalie Solent’s site, about a man who wrecked his digital camera by dunking it in a lake, and now claims to like the results.

Web designer (and high-tech camera designer) Bill Simon comments:

This is classic. In sales it is called turning a bug into a feature.

Okay. Now he has a “magic” camera.

Big deal. All he can take are “magic” pictures. But with a program like Paint Shop Pro, I can make any of my normal pictures as magical as I wish and I still get normal pictures.

This guy doesn’t want to face the fact that he wrecked an $800 camera. But with this hype the camera will become worth whatever the new age world can afford…Say, $250,000. So I guess he gets the last laugh.