The piscine messiah

Sink your teeth into this tasty story!

A virgin shark from Virginia has given birth to a pup. No sign as yet of three wise sharks on their way to present the mother with gifts, however I’m predicting that it won’t be long before the baby is healing the sick and turning water into wine. The interesting part will be if he tries to feed the masses with just five loaves of bread and two humans.

The whole concept of asexual reproduction in an animal as complicated as a shark is quite fascinating. We should be very worried; imagine if scientists managed to discover the trigger for parthenogensis and apply it to human females. The entire male species could become obsolete!

Oh wait, but then there would be noone to open all those tricky jam jars. We’re safe for now, boys.

Hyperbole? Never!

ABC’s The World Today ran a story about the asteroid that burned up over Sudan yesterday. It featured the inimitable Professor Paul Francis complaining about the Howard government cutting the funding to his astronomy hobby:

Well we’ve probably got lucky. We probably got lucky in the sense that we didn’t search and nothing hit us since.

But if in two years a city gets destroyed by a southern asteroid, then the government’s decision will look pretty stupid. But we may have got lucky.

Now, as much as I would love for my taxpaying dollars to be spent propping up this old fossil in his ivory tower in Canberra, I have a disturbing statistic to reveal.

Number of cities destroyed by asteroid (beginning of civilisation -> present): ZERO

You’ll forgive me if I try my luck a little longer, Professor Humdinger.