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Wayne Manor burns down. No, really.

Also,
Reverend Graham Taylor, who penned the novel "Shadowmancer" which, similar to Harry Potter, centres on witchcraft and battling evil, got his marching orders after teachers accused him of homophobia. "As for Harry Potter, well, he's not the only gay in the village," the former Anglican priest told children at Penair School in Truro.

He also described the villains in Rowling's blockbuster series as "wimps" and called TV "crap" compared to books. Teachers brought Taylor's talk to the 12-year-olds on Tuesday to a premature end, saying the youngsters had become "excitable", and asked him to leave.

Taylor, whose book topped the book charts for 15 weeks with the film rights also sold for 2.25 million pounds, was unrepentant and accused staff of censorship. "It was a joke; a joke from 'Little Britain' that the children would know," Taylor was quoted by newspapers as saying. "I didn't set out to offend. I'm a priest and I'm very careful about not offending people."

Also,
US FTC pursuing charges against spyware vendor, seeking to send him to "pound-me-in-the-male-server" prison, open his ports to critical meat exploits.

Also,
Vengeful dead goose injures Swedish hunter.

Also,
Eat At Doug's: "Where you can eat Manatee, as God intended."

Also,
US Marine working in the White House found to have been a spy, stealing documents and sending them to the Phillipines.

A fake Marine in the White House? Who isn't who he says he is and isn't working for the people he says he is?

INCONCEIVABLE!

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Because Pat Robertson was just getting too much free press to *not* get on the bandwagon, Bill O'Reilly has decided to call for the assassination of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

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Southwest Airlines considers wearing Bush-mocking clothing to be "lewd, obscene, or patently offensive" - throws woman off plane.

EDIT: Apparently, the "Meet the Fockers" T-shirt the news are reporting actually said "Meet the Fuckers", which makes the issue much less clear-cut.

Count the zebras in this picture.

Link goes to many more zeeba pictures.

On How Zebra Stripes Work:

Zebras usually travel in large groups, in which they stay very close to one another. Even with their camouflage pattern, it's highly unlikely a large gathering of zebras would be able to escape a lion's notice, but their stripes help them use this large size to their advantage. When all the zebras keep together as a big group, the pattern of each zebra's stripes blends in with the stripes of the zebras around it. This is confusing to the lion, who sees a large, moving, striped mass instead of many individual zebras. The lion has trouble picking out any one zebra, and so it doesn't have a very good plan of attack. It's hard for the lion to even recognize which way each zebra is moving: Imagine the difference in pursuing one animal and charging into an amorphous blob of animals moving every which way. The lion's inability to distinguish zebras also makes it more difficult for it to target and track weaker zebras in the herd.

So do zebra stripes confuse zebras as much as they confuse lions? Oddly enough, while making zebras indistinguishable to other animals, zebra stripes actually help zebras recognize one another. Stripe patterns are like zebra fingerprints: Every zebra has a slightly different arrangement. Zoologists believe this is how zebras distinguish who's who in a zebra herd. This certainly has significant benefits. A zebra mare and her foal can keep track of each other in the large herd, for example, and a zebra can very quickly distinguish its own herd from another. This also helps human researchers, because it enables them to track particular zebras in the wild.

The zebra has developed two unique things: a pattern that confuses pattern recognition in lions, and a specific pattern recognition ability so they aren't as confused as the lion.

A zebra would look at that picture and say right away, oh sure, there are 11 zebras. A lion would look at it and say, I have no idea, it's a big pack, how annoying, the gazelle next door is easier.

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Okay, the Dactyl Fractal is cool.

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