CrankyRants.com

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.

Check out Las Vegas jobs at NVJobSearch.

Nothing beats watching two giant space Krackens go toe-to-toe in a battle for the galaxy. And now we get to watch it happen live as Google fixes it’s single eye, rimmed in fire, on the Blue Towers of Microsoft with their newest subscription-based Office suite.

Google has been offering a free version of its online software suite called Google Apps for the past six months. More than 100,000 small businesses and hundreds of universities nationwide are using the free service, Google said.

The fee-based version, Google Apps Premier Edition, includes five times more e-mail storage — 10 gigabytes per e-mail box — as well as a guarantee that all services will be available 99.9 percent of the time with around-the-clock technical support.

Google also is adding mobile access to e-mail accounts through the BlackBerry devices that tether workers to their offices.

So what happens when two of the largest software companies known to mankind fail at winning the entire market and can’t buy the other out like they’re used to doing? Temporarily cheap or free software may be in the works! That always seems to be the next logical step.

The co-inventor of the TV remote, Robert Adler, died Thursday of heart failure at a Boise nursing home at the age 93.

In his six-decade career with Zenith, Adler was a prolific inventor, earning more than 180 U.S. patents. He was best known for his 1956 Zenith Space Command remote control, which helped make TV a truly sedentary pastime.

In a May 2004 interview with The Associated Press, Adler recalled being among two dozen engineers at Zenith given the mission to find a new way for television viewers to change channels without getting out of their chairs or tripping over a cable.

But he downplayed his role when asked if he felt his invention helped raise a new generation of couch potatoes.

“People ask me all the time — ‘Don’t you feel guilty for it?’ And I say that’s ridiculous,” he said. “It seems reasonable and rational to control the TV from where you normally sit and watch television.”

Some respctful jokes for the funeral may include the following:

“Guess his batteries… just sort of ran out, poor guy.”

“His picture looks good. Can you get up and change it for me?”

“Have you seen Robert anywhere?” - “Check under the coffin lid over there.”

Lasers beamed from space have detected what researchers have long suspected: big sloshing lakes of water underneath Antarctic ice.

These lakes, some stretching across hundreds of square miles (km), fill and drain so dramatically that the movement can be seen by a satellite looking at the icy surface of the southern continent, glaciologists reported in Thursday’s editions of the journal Science.

So… I’m no scientist or anything. But I’ve seen enough James Bond movies to know that if there’s anything giant space laser are best at… it’s melting stuff. Anyone in the research team ever think to ask “Hey guys? Are we sure all of that under-ice water wasn’t just ice before we started pointing our giant laser blaster at it?”

Seems to me that would have been the first question asked… followed closely by “How’s progress coming on the research into the melting ice-caps from our Giant Direct-light Space Toaster?”

You’ll find jobs in London at Canary Wharf Jobs.com.

If professor Ray McAllister could perfect his time-machine technology… he’d send a note back to his 1972 self that simply read: “Tire reef. Dont!”

Back in the heady days of disco, cocaine, and environmental research, professor McCallister and a team of fellow oceanic engineers decided something needed to be done to help promote new coral activity and underwater wildlife growth. The solution? Strap tens of thousands of old tires together and sink them off the coast of Florida.

The tires were unloaded there in 1972 to create an artificial reef that could attract a rich variety of marine life, and to free up space in clogged landfills. But decades later, the idea has proved a huge ecological blunder.

Little sea life has formed on the tires. Some of the tires that were bundled together with nylon and steel have broken loose and are scouring the ocean floor across a swath the size of 31 football fields. Tires are washing up on beaches. Thousands have wedged up against a nearby natural reef, blocking coral growth and devastating marine life.

“The really good idea was to provide habitat for marine critters so we could double or triple marine life in the area. It just didn’t work that way,” said Ray McAllister, a professor of ocean engineering at Florida Atlantic University who was instrumental in organizing the project. “I look back now and see it was a bad idea.”

Give the guy credit for admitting he was wrong, I suppose. But clearly every member of that team needs to strap on a speedo and snorkel and commence to floating that 30 year old science experiment back to the surface. At least we now know a little more about tires. Can’t burn’em. Can’t drown’em. Those things are strong.

How do you get a spider in the mood? Pour some wine, drop the needle on a scratchy Barry White album, and un-dim the ultraviolet lights. Ohhh yeah, baby. Just like the human species crica 1978… nothing sets the scene like the back of a van with shag carpet, avacado-green bean-bag chairs, and Jimi Hendrix posters glowing in beautiful black-lights.

Same for spiders, though instead of glowing guitars and unicorns… it’s their face that glows in ultraviolet light. And the ladies? Oh yeah… they swoon. Big time.

Apparently both male and female jumping spiders, Cosmophasis umbratica, have markings on their faces and legs that glow in ultraviolet light, researchers led by Daiqin Li at the National University of Singapore reported, before carefully coming down from their chairs and lab tables… trying their best to stifle a quiet, “eww… spiders.”

Many animals possess UV vision and use it for foraging, navigation and sexual selection, Li explained. Jumping spiders are known to have good eyesight, he said, adding that many of these spiders are colorful, with the males generally more colorful than females.

So if you happen to know of someone who is a little put-off by the creepy-crawly critters, now you know what to get them for your next gift exchange. Natural, wholesome ultraviolet lights for their basement. “Helps kill mold!,” you might explain.
 

Search internships at CollegeRecruiter.com.

For quite some time now, women have chosen to engage in an activity that continues to severely confuse me.  High-end, fashionable, designer handbags exist in this world for the sole purposes of aiding a woman in feeling classy, powerful and almost euphoric.  The perfect handbag can take a look to an entirely different level, resulting in observers believing that you are on a fashion plateau that is all your own and that is simply unattainable.  This is the very reason that I cannot process why, with the existence of such exquisite handy work available, women choose to purchase bags that are such horrific and obvious imposters in the efforts of appearing fashionable. Financial concerns can get in the way at times, but if you’re going to show off your new feathers, better make sure they’re not painted on.

These days, one can find imposter designer handbags just about anywhere.  All over the world, women proudly adorn their shoulders with them as if other women are too unintelligent see the difference between high-end and complete hideousness.  The ways in which a woman can attain such a bag are endless; from their local malls, to the internet, to individuals selling them on the street and even from such a thing called a “purse party.” Like Tupperware. But with purses. These are gatherings of women who get very excited about purses, and hop about in hopes of coming home with about three or four imposter bags.  I’ve actually seen a Prada imposter on the internet that was so terrible that the pathetic excuse for a designer bag actually bore the label Prado! Seriously. Advertised right next to a new Sorny DVD player and Freddie DeBauer wallet.

The thing that I really cannot get past, and refuse to, is that each of the imposter bags range in price from approximately $80.00 and upwards of $150.00.  With women snatching up these babies by the masses, they are spending more than enough to actually purchase one magnificent, first-rate specimen of a handbag that they could carry with much more pride.  I’d think it would make more sense to own one legitimate and beautiful designer bag than five imposters. But then, I’ve been known to wear black socks with shorts in the summer, so I’m probably not the best fashion plate to follow.