Harper's Weekly excerpt

An excerpt from my favorite weekly news update, Harper's Weekly:

James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for his role in the discovery of DNA, said that while he wishes everyone were equal, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true." Lynn Cheney announced that her husband and Barack Obama are eighth cousins. "Every family," said the Obama campaign, "has a black sheep." A New York man was arrested after wearing a stolen Rolex watch to his parole meeting, an Ohio woman stood accused of digging up her ex-boyfriend's grave and stealing his ashes, and a Virginia woman was fined for attacking a Comcast store with a hammer after the company cut off her phone and Internet connections. "I smashed a keyboard, knocked over a monitor and I went to hit the telephone," she said. "I figured, 'Hey, my telephone is screwed up, so is yours.'" A New Jersey woman sent 80,000 cans of Silly String, which can locate trip wires, to U.S. troops in Iraq; a military spokesperson thanked her but admitted that soldiers don't use as much Silly String today as they did at the beginning of the war. Forty-nine percent of New Jersey residents admitted they'd rather live somewhere else. Taku the killer whale died unexpectedly at the San Antonio SeaWorld, 5 of the world's 350 remaining Asiatic Lions were found dead next to an electric fence in India, and the curator of the Rotterdam Natural History Museum asked the public to donate pubic crabs, claiming that their population was dwindling as a result of Brazilian waxes. "When the bamboo forests that the Giant Panda lives in were cut down, the bear became threatened with extinction. Pubic lice," he explained, "can't live without pubic hair."

Link | Subscribe to Harper's Weekly email list

• [Jennifer Emick]

  Actually, the lions weren’t found next to the fence- they came to that guy looking for them when they vanished, and he admitted he’d buried them after his fence killed them.

• [KurtMac]

  Oh, Lordy, that last thing about the crabs is insane. It does get me thinking about (other than Brazilian waxes) how we somewhat, for lack of a better term, ‘discriminate’ against which species are worthy of saving from extinction. Sure, save the cute pandas and gorillas, but what about the polio virus? Or bed-bugs? Who’s sticking up for these guys?

• [bigfatgreg]

  the dude on the right must have done something to piss watson off.

  http://www.alleninstitute.org/content/james_watson.htm

• [Mingross]

  Why is it that we need pubic lice anyway?

• [Flying Squid]

  I love Harpers, but someone needs to tell their e-mail people how to use paragraphs.

• [MarlboroTestMonkey7]

  @mingross: lice can be used to add movement to a stop motion Star Trek’s Dribble.

• [Mark Frauenfelder]

  Harper’s Weekly is always presented in the form of three long paragraphs. It makes a certain kind of sense when it’s done this way. I like it.

• [V]

  Just imagining the National Pubic Lice Preserve.

  eegh.