Is Obama the Antichrist? asks a November 15, 2008 headline in Newsweek magazine. The answer, of course, is almost certainly no. Mikhail Gorbachev is the Antichrist—something we know thanks to Robert Faid, author of the book “Gorbachev! Has the Real Antichrist Come?“, in which Mr. Faid calculates the exact odds (710,609,175,188,282,000 to 1) that Gorbachev […]
Corpse case arises anew
The three men who inspired John Troyer’s study “Abuse of a Corpse: A Brief History and Re-Theorisation of Necrophilia Laws in the USA” (discussed here earlier this year) are again in the news. The Associated Press reports on November 20, 2008: 3 men plead not guilty to digging up grave to have sex with dead […]
Dishing up dormice delight
The edible dormouse is the star of Giuseppe Carpaneto and Mauro Cristaldi‘s 1995 study Dormice and Man: A Review of Past and Present Relations, published in the journal Hystrix. The two Rome-based scholars, Carpaneto at Terza University, Cristaldi at the University of Rome, savour one of the tasty rodent’s two major historical roles. Though some […]
Saturday: 15 minutes of duckiness in Vienna
This Saturday in Vienna, Austria, Kees (“The Duck Guy”) Moeliker will will elaborate on ‘Science communication with a laugh: Improbable Research and the Ig Nobel Prizes’. In no more than fifteen minutes, he will tell how and why he won the 2003 Ig Nobel biology prize, highlight the (new) 2008 Ig Nobel prize winners and […]