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.

You also have to calculate how much infrastructure was destroyed in each -- in the case of the tsunami, whole seaside towns were swept away, f'r'instance.

Heather, the one thing I most care about with renaming is that noone else chooses 'Connie' because I'm already too confused as it is.

I have been to yoga, so go team me. Unfortunately, the instructor had us practicing the run up to headstands, and I really don't have the upper arm strength to get very far with those. (Conversely, once you get up into the headstand, it's easy on the arms, since your body weight is balanced through your head and neck. It's the lifting up part that does me in.)

And in other news, Crack-addict squirrels terrorize Brixton

Yup, crack dealers and addicts have apparently taken to burying their stashes in people's gardens in the streets around the centre of Brixton after a police clampdown drove them from the thriving commercial heart of the popular London district. Locals have spotted squirrels digging in the same gardens, prompting speculation that they are already addicted to rocks and will in due course take up semi-automatic weapons and launch a violent challenge for the whole trade in illicit narcotics, as is the local custom.

One fearful resident, who asked not to be named, told Life Style Extra: "I was chatting with my neighbour who told me that crack users and dealers sometimes use my front garden to hide bits of their stash. An hour earlier I'd seen a squirrel wandering round the garden, digging in the flowerbeds. It looked like it knew what it was looking for. It was ill-looking and its eyes looked bloodshot but it kept on desperately digging. It was almost as if it was trying to find hidden crack rocks."

The RSPCA said it had no reports of the "Brixton Crack Squirrel", but did not completely dismiss the idea. A spokeswoman said: "We have not had any dealers reporting the theft of their stash by squirrels but the animal is attracted by smell and if it detects something it likes it will dig it up. If a squirrel did open a bag of crack and start consuming it there is no doubt it would die pretty quickly. I suspect that nobody has reported it because they are a wild animal and when they are found dead no-one cares."

I heard a story about the mudslides in Guatemala this morning.

I agree with ita that Bailey was brilliant on GA this week.

Wikipedia death tolls by natural disaster (wars and other disasters also on page).

Heather, we are low on Davids these days.

Davidina?

Davida Loca.