If your airplane goes kaput in flight...

... how lucky is it that every passenger on board is a skydiver, with a parachute?

Here's more, from Joe Hornaday of the Greensburg Daily News (Greensburg, Indiana).

The engine was spewing thick smoke and oil so the pilot couldn't see where he was going, the instrument panel went out, the flaps failed, the plane deadsticked, and the pilot still found the runway? The plane went off the runway and flipped, but the pilot got out of the wreckage himself? Yinga. I'm impressed. (Also happy that nobody was seriously hurt. Yikes.)

The 'future' versus 'dancing'

Most years, I hear a 'horror story' or two from one graduation service or another. The winner so far this year is the one passed along to us from the father of a college graduate at a school where one of the commencement speakers, who was also one of the graduates, got up to speak, said he thought it was boring to listen to talk about 'your futures' and said he was going to solve that. Whereupon he danced a bit. And then spent a full hour (so we're told) talking about the importance of dance (according to him). This despite boos and threats of walk-outs.

I think using an oversized shepherd's crook to haul him off stage, like they used to do in vaudeville, might have been in order...

Woman gives mouth to mouth resuscitation to tiger cub

A visitor to a German zoo is credited with saving a tiger cub by giving it heart massage and mouth to mouth resuscitation. No, really. The grateful zoo decided to name the cub after good samaritan Janine Bauer's son Johann.

Bauer, a medical student, noticed the cub choking, and then collapsing. She ran to a zookeeper and offered to help. The keeper locked up the mother tiger, and Bauer set to work doing first aid on the 4-month-old cub. Unluckily for Bauer, the cub wouldn't revive without mouth-to-jaw resuscitation. Luckily for the cub, she didn't flinch.

I'm glad the stolen painting has been found...

... and the story has some nice twists, but... it's thought the painting might bring one million dollars at auction? That painting? (Tres Personajes by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo)

I think I've said this before, but the folks who float around in the upper-range collector circles are beyond my comprehension. I can't see spending that much for a painting (with, possibly, a few exceptions, but only for the very best, most beautiful, most inspiring masterpieces of all time), but why, for pity's sake, would you spend big bucks for something that's ugly?

I know, I know, when you're talking about modern art, it's (supposedly) not the painting that counts, it's being in the know about what is hot just now, and what is yesterday. The art is just a token of your worldly sophistication and a way to flaunt how dripping you are with wealth, not to mention a prize to be captured away from other collectors. Still...

FYI: blog news

For what it's worth (and, at some level, I hope it isn't worth much), for several days now the number two entry page to this blog -- number one after the main page -- has been the post on the urban legend about the tiger raising piglets. (An urban legend that is, for a wonder, kinda sorta partially true, btw.)

From looking at the search phrases used to get here, it appears you could mindlessly raise your stats and improve your profile simply by publishing a post that mentions both tiger and piglets.

I don't know if posts about Tigger the tiger and Piglet would work, but... as of this evening, if you google tiger and piglets and nothing else, there are about 86,900 results, of which my post is, astonishingly, currently sitting at number 9. As in the top ten.

Go figure.

I hope you don't think I'm advocating that you put up an empty-ish entry just to raise your hit count. I'm not. I'm just amazed that, with everything else that's going on, that the internet would have this many people writing about, and searching for information on, a mother tiger caring for baby pigs dressed up in tiger-print clothes. Not that it's a bad story. And heaven knows I did my own googling when a friend sent us the email with the erroneous information in it. It's just that somehow this all strikes me as somewhat strange.

It's also not necessarily a niche I was hoping to conquer... ;)

Anyway, if you're here for the first time because you're hoping to run down the facts behind the legend, welcome. I appreciate people who research anonymous fad emails before passing them along. I wish more people would, actually. For info on this one, click over to my previous post (linked above), or go directly the articles at Snopes and/or About.com (identical links also provided in my previous post).

Urban legend watch: tiger raising piglets

We recently got an email from a friend about a tiger in an unnamed zoo in an unspecified location in California being consoled after the loss of her cubs by being given piglets to raise, the piglets being "wrapped in tiger skin" to fool the supposedly depressed mother tiger into thinking they were her own offspring.

That sort of story screams hoax. Not that ranchers haven't been known to get a cow that has lost her own calf to accept an orphan calf by putting the skin of the dead calf on the orphan. Same with horses. Not that I think I would or could do it, mind you, (major blech) but I know it was recommended in how-to-raise-livestock books that I read when I was young and my brothers had Herefords (more here) and I had a horse. I'd rather bottle feed, thanks. Any day. Absolutely. And, no, I don't know if skin-suiting is still recommended, or how well it generally works or doesn't work. I just know we were told we might have to do that someday, so we'd better be prepared. (Perhaps it was just a way of trying to weed out sissies, or folks not really prepared to deal with animals that insist on being animals instead of fairy tale creatures?)

Oh, wait, let me google... Here you go, Maternal Behaviour of Beef Cows, by Joseph M. Stookey, seems to have about as much or more than I really want to know about mothering, mis-mothering, and fostering with beef cows. It appears to be a good overview, anyway. And it notes that grafting a skin onto the calf you want the cow to adopt can result in a successful bond - but often isn't necessary. Oh, good. Glad to hear it. Skinning baby anythings just strikes me as something to be avoided if possible, you know?

But, back to the story at hand, these "tiger skins" didn't look like tiger skins, and why in the world just say 'a zoo in California'? It just didn't scan.

So, here's what Snopes has to say about it, and here's what About.com has to say about it. The write-ups are similar, and agree that the pictures come from a zoo/circus in Thailand, which does this sort of thing as part of its exhibits. The zoo is also proud of its ladies who wrestle crocodiles, btw, for all you who admire that sort of craziness. (Not my thing. By a long shot. But since I spent part of my youth planning on putting on shows with killer whales at Sea World or something like that when I grew up, I'm not sure I have a whole lot of room for fussing. Do I? I like to think that swimming with intelligent and sociable killer whales is somehow saner than wrestling massive-jaws-with-man-eating-incredibly-brainless-reptiles-attached, but... honestly, I'm not sure if that's a difference in degree or in kind. Although, to be sure, I do think it's possible to be ladylike while putting killer whales through their paces. Wrestling crocs, I don't think so.)