Stupid soda can tricks

A canner exceedingly canny
One evening remarked to his granny,
“I canner can can
anything that he can,
but a canner can’t can
a can, can he?”
(English doggerel)

Cans apparently continue to fascinate some people, and not just for what’s inside them.

Skeptical? Take a look at this trick, then.

The other 30% is a bitch

I am pleased to share the news with you that the world’s oceans are 70% shark free.

That’s according to the findings of an international team of scientists that postulates the absence of sharks from abyssal zones of the world’s oceans may mean some species are in danger of extinction. The abyssal zones are the ones that are in perpetual darkness at depths below 6,560 feet, and have phenomenal pressures that can be up to 10,000 pounds per square inch!

The findings were published in the “Proceedings of The Royal Society, Biological Series.” Among conclusions: sharks may be having more difficult times than ever finding food.

Monty Priede, director of Oceanlab at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, told United Press International:

“Sharks are already threatened worldwide by the intensity of fishing activity, but our finding suggests they may be more vulnerable to over-exploitation than was previously thought.”

I’m sure that’s of some comfort to all those people we hear about who are victims of shark attacks.

The organ grinder

  New York magazine has one of its patented — well, copyrighted, anyway — inside-stories, this one on the man seen here who masterminded a ghoulish cadaver snatching ring that included the remains of such luminaries as Alistair Cooke.  

How detailed and fascinatingly creepy is the story? Consider this excerpt:

“They were just going to come and collect him and return the ashes in due course,” (Cooke’s daughter Susan) Kittredge recalls. But instead, there was a man waiting for Alistair Cooke, with a knife.

“He cared nothing for Cooke’s mind or manners. He had actually come for the body — that pale, wizened, cancer-ridden cadaver of a 95-year-old Englishman, stretched out now beneath the light in the embalming room.”

Brrr. Scary, boys and girls.

The ‘little old ladies’ of Makers Mark

Stereotypes are a funny thing. Sometimes they stem from reality. Other times they stem from … a detachment from reality?

Sonja Kassebaum, who writes the clever North Shore Distiller’s Journal for the distillery in Lake Bluff, IL, has some tips in the current issue on finding good offbeat buys at liquor stores. However, one item in particular sounded a sour note for me.

Here’s the item: 

Over-Dipped Wax:

“A bartender friend told us that every once in a great while the little old ladies who dip the Makers Mark bottles get to over-dip one of them, and sometimes they make it out of the warehouse. We saw one recently here in Chicago — unfortunately it wasn’t for sale.” 

Here’s what the “little old ladies” who work the Makers Mark assembly line really look like, courtesy of some photos I shot while touring the Kentucky distillery last fall: 

   

2-faced headlines

Gathered, with a little help from my friends, from various newspapers, magazines, Web sites and blogs:

• Sperm donor reforms ‘long time coming’

• Suspect says pants caused fire

• Lawmakers leave state with surplus of $26 million

• Girls find life with half a brain is difficult choice

• Victims of fatal Chinese fire hold march

• Search called off when man is found

• Judge not convinced murder victim is alive

• French add Alzheimer’s to benefits of red wine

• Yuma woman gives birth at port of entry

• Girl, 10, improves after fatal crash

• Officer shoots woman with butcher knife

• Search for woman in fertilized egg suit goes nationwide