Coffee and Provocation

• 114 Rabid Raccoons in Central Park:
  The New York Daily News reports that 114 rabid raccoons have been pulled from New York City's Central Park this year.
  
  
• Will Obama Care Pay for My Starbucks?
  Scientists have discovered that coffee can help protect the brain against Alzheimer’s disease. But you have to drink five cups a day (which is no problem here, I assure you!)
  
  
• Terrier Eats Five Cats:
  Not really a headline until you realize it was done at one sitting.
  
  
• The Aetheist App for Your I-Phone:
  The “BibleThumper” iPhone app boasts that it “allows the atheist to keep the most funny and irrational Bible verses right in their pocket” so that you can be “always ready to confront fundamentalist Christians or have a little fun among friends.”
  
  
• Chienblog Nails It:
  You have to read it.
  
  
• The Devil Generally Wears A Suit:
  A friend sent me this C.S. Lewis line from The Screwtape Letters: "The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice."
  
  
• We are Too Connected:
  It seems pigs in Holland were not having piglets. No one knew why, but they eventually tested the feed and found it contained birth control pills. The feed, it seems, was made from wastewater that came from a birth control pill factory in Ireland. Some 50,000 pigs had to be destroyed, and the Dutch Feed Industry trade group said the disaster was ‘one of the worst in memory’ and cost the industry about $145 million.
  
  
• The Secrets of Homeopathy:
  There's a nice new video for all you folks who always wanted to know how homeopathy works. A warning, however: it may ruin StarTrek for you.
  
  
• Real World Dog Training:
  Christie Keith writes about what people really want when it comes to dog training: "Most people do not consider small bits of cheese mixed with lint an acceptable and normal part of the lining of their coat pockets. They do not enjoy the positive vs. traditional training debate, and actually, don’t even know there is a debate. They don’t participate in organized dog sports and aren’t interested in improving their dogs’ times on the agility course by one-tenth of a second. No, they’re like me, and what they want is a dog who doesn’t jump on people, eat the sofa, pull on the leash, pee in the living room, bark incessantly and develop an acute case of deafness when he hears the word 'come.'"
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