redacted

No, no, no, no, nooooooooo...

Alan Goldscher has sold the film rights to his forthcoming zombie-Beatles novel, Paul is Undead: The British Zombie invasion, due out in June by Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster.

The book, which got a ton of press when it was announced last year after people realized Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was awesome, is an oral history of the undead Fab Four, who are trying to, ahem, "escape eternal death at the hands of England's greatest zombie hunter, Mick Jagger."

Double Feature Films, the company run by the producers of Pulp Fiction and Erin Brockovich, bought the rights.

Mommy, make it STOP.

(Although really, it's Mick who should be the zombie, not the hunter.)

pbskids.com, lego.com, playhousedisney.com, and cartoonnetwork.com are on Owen's list of bookmarks.

Are there any email sites out there that would be kid-safe?

If you google kid safe email, there are a bunch of results that have various sorts of spam controls and parental controls and things like that. It looks like some of them let the parents set up an "approved" list of addresses, and the kid can only send or receive email to and from those addresses.

Hot human-on-neanderthal action: A scientific update

So, remember a few weeks ago when new genetics research challenged the accepted idea that humans and neanderthals had never knocked boots? Back then, I mentioned that we were waiting to hear from Svante Pääbo, a hominid genetics expert who was due to publish his findings from sequencing the neanderthal genome. The Pääbo data would be the key to clearing up this ancient soap-operatic mystery.

This week, Pääbo weighed in and the answer looks pretty clear: If your ancestors are from anyplace other than Africa, you've got a little neanderthal in you. And so did your great-great-etc. grandma.

In fact, researchers can actually narrow down the location where at least some of this hanky panky happened.

all non-Africans - be they from France, China or Papua New Guinea - share the same amount of Neanderthal DNA, suggesting that interbreeding occurred before those populations split. The timing makes the Middle East the likeliest place where humans leaving Africa and resident Neanderthals did the deed.

I set Owen up a gmail account and I plugged in his contacts--so he only uses it for family.

fertile crescent indeed.

This kid email site looks like it's pretty well-regarded: [link] It's free, and the parents can set up the list of approved addresses, plus there's an option that will send copies of all emails to the parents, if they want to set that up.

fertile crescent indeed.

Heh.

msbelle made a naughty joke!