Saturday, December 10, 2005

Hide Your Nuts

Hey. It's Saturday again. I am drinking the Saturday swill. So good morning then; I have been over to the cafe of the beautiful people, where they are still trying to remember my name. Anyway -- after finding the coffee and remembering my name -- I was reading an article in Pravda. Let’s just imagine for a minute that we were expecting it to be a world class newspaper. I started with this article about killer squirrels and continued to look at the links. It occurred to me that the stories linked under words weren't really about the words, as one might expect (my comments are in parenthesis):


The witnesses said the squirrels fiercely eviscerated the dog (One could have seen a top model "eviscerate" a dog, too). When the people rushed to rescue the dog it was too late. The fight between the dog and the squirrels lasted for not longer than a minute. When the triumphant squirrels saw the humans approaching, they scattered carrying pieces of the prey in their mouths.

The incident made locals incredibly cautious and people now prefer to pass the park by and do not let children play there (Be really careful should you decide to put them to sleep instead). People fear that savage squirrels may attack someone again. One of the locals says that if another accident occured there it would make sense to fix traps in the forest to catch squirrels.

Mikhail Tiunov from the Far East Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences says he has never heard about squirrel attacking other animals before. "This sounds nonsensical that squirrels attacked a stray dog and tore it to pieces. If this actually happened, the life of squirrels in the forest seems to be really hard this year. It is typical of squirrels to feed on nuts, seeds and mushrooms. And it is unlikely that squirrels have become so aggressive as a result of some mutation," Newsru quoted the expert as saying (From Pravda.ru).

I have to say at this point -- that the picture I get of carniverous squirrrels feeding on nuts is more than a bit disheartening, but then when I looked at the deadly peanutbutter kiss story linked to that -- it became clear that either someone is a bit nutty, or there is no correlation whatsoever between the words "feed on nuts" and the story linked to it.

After I had followed the links for a while I found myself reading this story about what I would call a disaster:


A top environmental protection official urged residents of Russia's Far East city of Khabarovsk on Tuesday not to panic over a toxic soup headed their way on the Amur River, drinking a glass of water as television cameras rolled to demonstrate uthorities had the situation under control. But a spokesman for the World Wide Fund for Nature said the river faced "ecological catastrophe" as an 80-kilometer (50-mile) long slick of chemicals floated toward the Russian border from China, where a Nov. 13 explosion at a chemical plant spewed it into the Songhua River.

Again -- it is astonishing -- what the links hook to -- And I really thought that this blogperson might want to know that the Pravda story has linked to his article. Let's keep in mind that I don't really agree with any of this -- but just want to point out the sanity of the links in the Pravda Article.

I think I am going to start making links like this -- which I will hereinafter call "Pravda Style" linking. This could be very interesting -- when defined as having anything even vaguely related to the story. It could be much more entertaining than the other options.

Have a great Saturday -- enjoy your coffee and steer clear of the nuts.

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