eight-legged freaks
Last night we found a tarantula in the living room. I dispatched it out the front door with a mighty fling of the mop. Empowering!
Those who are still in Iowa probably know this already, but someone is burning down the bridges of Madison County. There's something incredibly Iowan about the state's response:
State investigators enlisted the aid of Sax, a black Labrador retriever from Mount Pleasant, the state's only arson-investigation dog. It wasn't immediately known whether the dog helped spot the fuel used to set the fire, but Sgt. Robert Hansen, spokesman for the fire marshal's office, said Sax had an exemplary record of sniffing accelerants.
Damn it, I remember trying to build a computer from Tinkertoys in the fourth grade or so. It was going to be a binary adding machine involving marbles but it didn't work at all; and it wasn't nearly as impressive-looking as this model, which plays tic-tac-toe.
German authorities have denied a Turkish couple's request to name their newborn son Osama bin Laden, a court spokeswoman said Thursday. German laws make it illegal for parents to give their children names that might dishonor them or harm their dignity. "That could be the case with this name," Birgit Neepmann, a spokeswoman for the district court in Cologne, said of the parents' wish to name the boy for the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Another girl who seems about 10, with a serious face and haunted eyes, says, "I looked at the twin towers, and I saw, like, people falling out and stuff." A school psychologist says that children in the area reported seeing an unusual number of birds in the sky that day, or "birds on fire." What they saw, he says, was bodies falling.
