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Archaeologists on a Greek island have discovered a large Roman-era tomb containing gold jewelry, pottery and bronze offerings, officials said Wednesday. The building, near the village of Fiscardo on Kefalonia, contained five burials including a large vaulted grave and a stone coffin, prompting a quick and angry rebuke by the Iranian Government.

Even though the dig was no where near the fabled lands that made up ancient Sparta, uncovered artifacts dated hundreds of years after the battle of Thermopylae, and offered no insight or speculation on the Persian Empire, Iran is furious.

“Once again our great and proud ancestry has been shamed,” shouted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “by horrible and racist depictions of the Persian Empire by these alleged scientists who promote nothing but hatred in their uncovering of small stone coffins unrelated to our people in every way.”

Ahmadinejad was equally outraged that archaeologists also located traces of what may have been a small theater with intact stone seating in a nearby plot that also reflected no relation whatsoever to the Persian Empire or the Ancient Iranian peoples.

“This is Blasphemy!”, Ahmadinejad exclaimed in a recent press conference, dressed in lavish Persian robes and distinct facial piercings. “This is Madness!”

A marine mammal rehabilitation facility opened a dolphin “chat line” of sorts Saturday, hoping to teach a deaf dolphin’s unborn calf to communicate.

Castaway, as the stranded Atlantic bottlenose dolphin is named, has been recovering at the Marine Mammal Conservancy since Jan. 30. A battery of tests has confirmed she is deaf.

Dolphins need to hear echoes of sounds they produce to find food, socialize and defend themselves against predators.

“We asked ourselves ‘How do we get the calf to speak when we have a deaf mother?’” said a representative from the conservancy.

They decided to electronically connect Castaway’s habitat with a lagoon at Dolphins Plus, a research and interactive educational facility a few miles down the Keys Overseas Highway. Underwater speakers and microphones were installed at both locations and connected via phone lines.

Though initially built strictly for the newborn Dolphin’s use, scientists hope to open several lines to the public as well, offering live phone chats and steamy online audio streaming with a host of hot, smooth dolphins world-wide.

“I’ve studied dolphins my whole life. They are a naturally sensual creature, and our research could certainly benefit from additional revenue streams,” the representative exclaimed while slipping into a wetsuit. “I have a very good feeling about the future of this project… because I really like Dolphins. Really…. Really like them.”

Here’s a good one. School district officials in Union City N.J. are trying to identify who watched $250 worth of pay-per-view porn using a school cable television box.

Someone after business hours used one of the five cable boxes in the Board of Education building to order the films, priced between $4.95 and $9.95.

So… you put televisions with cable in or near an environment with access by teenage students, and you wonder why you got billed for 50 hours of Spice Channel? Wow. Let’s see if we can put the pieces together here.

It certainly doesn’t take a 5th grade math teacher to figure out that half the reason that adolescent boys are so good at video games and electronics, is because they’ve honed their skills by devising workarounds to every parental lock and v-chip porn blocker known to man. Half the reason Edison discovered the electric light bulb was so he could secretly view his collection of exotic womanly etchings in a dark room where no one could find him.

I guess it’s possible it wasn’t the students, though. Apparently the school officials have since gotten rid of three of the cable boxes, stating that the only reason the building had cable was in case of emergency.

Wait… what? That must’ve been a para-phrase. The direct quote was probably more along the lines of…. “Um… we got premium cable for… uh… emergencies. Yeah. That will do. Emergencies.”

From the towering Great Dane to the feisty little Chihuahua, all dogs are brothers under the skin. Now, researchers have uncovered a reason why the animals wearing that skin vary so much in size.

Dogs have the largest variation in body size of any land animal, so researchers led by Elaine A. Ostrander of the National Human Genome Research Institute decided to look into the reasons why.

They found a section of genes that controls small size in dogs and reported their results in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

This is it. This is officially what our best and brightest are now spending their research efforts on. We have hunger ravaging our planet. Disease sweeping through populations. Unidentified objects falling from the sky and troubling our elected officials. And this is what we’re studying now.

Why Great Danes are bigger than poodles.

I can appreciate that there is a genetic puzzle to unravel in just about every aspect of life. And of course I can understand the need to learn about human DNA testing through the discoveries brought about in the study of animals. But still. We’re studying what makes big doggies bigger than little doggies. It’s like Dr. Ostrander was late for work on “Select Your Genetic Area of Research” day at the NHGR Institute. “Dammit! All the good one’s are taken! Fine. So it’s between ‘Why cats flick their tails when they’re trying to hide’… and ‘Why some dogs are really really big.’ I freaking hate cats… so…”

The good news, is that through the Institute’s research, we may finally be able to get help for the more pathetic dog breeds. Yippy dogs throughout the world can hold out hope that one day… there may be a cure. Furless, shivering Chihuahua’s, through the tireless efforts of the Genome Project and their wealthy benefactor, the mysterious “Paris H.”, can now hold their tiny golf-ball-sized heads high. Knowing that someday. Someday soon! They may be slightly bigger and have hair follicles.

The march of science staggers on.

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