F%&# you, penguin

I love the Internet. I know I've mentioned that before. But this is different. Those other love songs to the online world were about all the incredibly useful information that the Internet (and its overlord, Google) put at our fingertips, information that used to take a trip to the library and hours spent thumbing through card catalogs and the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. (Are any of you old enough to remember those glorious green indexes to every article ever printed in a magazine? I spent hours in junior high looking up articles about Bucky Dent. That's him over there on the right. Be still my beating heart.)

But this link I'm about to share with you has nothing to do with learning something useful or necessary. It is sheer, unadulterated, irreverent goofiness and the kind of thing that the Internet was born for, as far as I'm concerned. Behold, I present to you ...

Fuck You, Penguin
A blog where I tell cute animals what's what.

Is this a great Internet, or what? Read more!

Sometimes the comedy writes itself

Another newspaper story made me laugh out loud tonight, and — what a refreshing change — it wasn't because of a typo or mistake. From the West Branch Times:

Joe White, Alliant’s manager of customer services for an area that includes West Branch, said he would have to know more about that town’s electric service before he could compare. He did say that West Branch has a lot of squirrels, referencing an outage in March where more than 1,100 customers were powerless for about two hours at lunchtime on a sunny day.

Yes, I live in a town where the squirrels outnumber the people, apparently. And not just any squirrels. These are your juvenile delinquent squirrels, your punk squirrels. I'm sure if I ever got a good look at one, it would be wearing a little black leather jacket, or maybe a guinea tee to show off its tattoos of naked ... otters? I don't know what turns squirrels on. Well, not four-legged ones, anyway.

Actually, this story kind of confirms a brainstorm I had when I was in college. In one of my geography classes, where we had to choose a research project to utilize our newly acquired mad mapmaking skillz, I toyed with the idea of trying to find out if Cedar County has the highest number of skunks per square mile of any county in Iowa. Because I'm telling you, the number of squished skunks on this county's roadways is unreal. You have to smell it to believe it. Clearly, this news story proves that it's not just skunks -- apparently the entire small-rodent population is out of control around here. Read more!