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I know that "Thousands die in Bangladesh flooding" is the old joke

Um, what's the joke?

I wonder if the white thing comes into play too... I don't think the bali coverage was as exhaustive.

I was in Australia for the first Bali bombing (and god, how awful is it that I have to refer to it that way), and I remember the news was mostly all about the Australians who'd been killed or injured--very little on how it had affected the Indonesians.

I actually haven't seen much on the second Bali bombing either, but I've been kind of hermitty and news-avoidant of late.

My sinuses are protesting the weather changes. Other than a couple of head colds this year, they've been behaving, so I'm extra whiney about it.

Weekends I tend to be pretty news free (only a vague idea of what it happening in the world. As in, still turning) so this morning's paper was one of OMG. Dude. Holycrap.

Nap. Need nap.

Update from home.

Right now he and Emaryn are in her room. He has bullied her into playing "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" for him over and over so he can do the hand motions. She said to me, "Mom, he lowered his eyebrows at me and stared at me, so I had to do it." Yep, she's right.

Yeah, Leif is pretty unmoveable once those eyebrows lower.

I'm sitting at home waiting for the contractors to come and fix my wall. I arranged for them to show at 8, and then they called back and asked if 7:30 would be okay. Now it's 7:50, no contractors.

Hmm. I'm reading the reporting on the earthquake in Pakistan, but I'm not seeing links to donate -- I assume Red Cross is there?

Leif and the Eyebrows of Domination +1.

Not really a joke, more a wry commentary that the front page of a newspaper will have "Three Dead in LA Shooting" and the bottom corner of the third page is where "Thousands Die in Bangladesh Flooding" goes.

I assume Red Cross is there?

Red Crescent probably.

CNN's website has a link to big list of relief agencies (with links).

[link]

More on the Ig Nobles: [link]

I've heard this one a lot:

The Ig Nobel Prize in medicine went to Gregg Miller, inventor of Neuticles, artificial testicle replacements for neutered dogs and other animals, which come in different sizes and levels of firmness.

In his videotaped acceptance speech, Miller noted the time it took to develop his invention. "It took two years to get the balls rolling," he said.

But I haven't heard the others, including this one:

Another gross-out idea won this year's Ig Nobel Prize in fluid dynamics: Two European researchers calculated the pressure that builds up inside a penguin about to go potty, and reported their findings in a paper entitled "Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh -- Calculations on Avian Defaecation" (.pdf)

I love the spelling of "defaecation." Does that make me a weirdo?

Not really a joke, more a wry commentary that the front page of a newspaper will have "Three Dead in LA Shooting" and the bottom corner of the third page is where "Thousands Die in Bangladesh Flooding" goes.

Ah, okay. I was missing the context.

It's so horrifying. I'm tempted to go look up numbers from the tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina, and the mudslides, and compare numbers of people who died, because I don't have any sense of where 20,000 falls on the scale of truly major disasters. But it wouldn't tell me anything useful. 20,000 people dead is unimaginably awful, and a comparison to 50,000 or 100,000, or whatever, isn't going to make it any less so.