The Major League Baseball All-Star Game happens tonight, and if you’re the type who needs an animal with mystical powers to tell you what will happen, this octopus at Sea Life in Arizona says it’s going to be the American League. It’s good to know that when one psychic octopus dies, another can rise up and take his place. Last year I won $500 on the World Cup by strangling the sh:t out of a carp.

The game was predicted by placing equal amounts of food in boxes labeled “American League” and “National League”, then allowing the octopus to choose which food (and by proxy, which team of adult humans) it preferred. The best part of the video is the Octomom bystander comments, which boil down to “it was so awesome seeing the octopus do things”. I wonder if this is how Arizona chose their immigration laws, by dunking a white guy and a brown guy into an aquarium and seeing which one gets molested first by a squid.

Regardless, this method is at least as fool-proof as the ESPN writer method, which is just reading what most people think and saying the opposite to try and piss them off.

[h/t Eye on Baseball]

Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn has raised an eyebrow this week over the concern that the National Science Foundation has been wasting a great deal of money on various projects that he believes aren’t worth a diddly and the squat it rode in on. Among those projects, scientists have been running shrimp on tiny treadmills to “measure the impact of sickness on crustaceans”.

That’s right – we’re training shrimp to be the best at exercising.

The Oklahoma Republican issued a new report Thursday that concludes the National Science Foundation has misspent $3 billion on “waste, fraud, duplication and mismanagement.” It offers a list of research projects that could have been left as questions for the universe.

Among them, $2 million to analyze 38 million photos on Flickr and cross-reference them against the site’s social networking service. Turns out, researchers concluded, that friends generally post photos on the Internet depicting the same place at the same time. (Fox News)

$2 million to analyze Flickr? Let me save them some effort – it’s 30 million photos of dudes in skinny jeans drinking PBR. But let’s go back to the part that really matters – shrimp on tiny treadmills. If there is video of these alleged shrimp running on their alleged tiny treadmills, then I would say the money is well spent. Until then…

*cowboy octopus riding a seahorse crashes through wall, sprays ink message*

Oh there’s a video, friends.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday we discussed the lack of animal aggression laws in Colombia and how that would affect Panamanian soccer player Luis Moreno after he kicked a live owl during a game against Junior Barranquilla on Sunday. Basically, Moreno wasn’t in any trouble despite pissing off most of the animal-loving world. Well the story took a turn for the different yesterday, as the owl, which is also Junior’s mascot, died after going into shock. Now people are calling for serious action against Moreno and he stands by his story that he was just trying to see if the bird could fly.

Just kidding, he knew exactly what he was doing. Moreno admitted yesterday that he let the tension of the game and the atmosphere dictate his actions and he wasn’t thinking clearly when he free kicked a live injured bird. But he apologized and believes that life goes on, just not for the bird.

“My family is very worried about what happened because an entire country is against me. I believe what happened is regrettable and I apologised to the entire country,” he said.

Ramon Jesurum, president of Dimayor, said on Monday that “the player should be severely punished for this painful, horrible act of intolerance,” before adding that the case would go before their disciplinary committee. (Via The Telegraph)

Dimayor is the Colombian league in which Moreno plays, and Jesurum seems pretty pissed about the whole thing. He should demand swift action for the stupid act and show the world that he means business. Otherwise, PETA may make a trip to Colombia and show up outside the league’s venues and loudly protest. In fact, I encourage PETA’s leaders to get to Colombia as quickly as possible, and make sure the natives know that they are American and do not approve of what they’re doing. *fingers crossed*

Video of a really half-assed, selfish apology after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

A soccer match between the Brazilian teams Boa and UEC received a little interruption during a game last week, as a police dog ran onto the field and stole the ball. The crowd seemed to love it, but since South American soccer fans are crazy I think they may actually be chanting for someone to kill the dog because it interrupted the game. Either way, the video after the jump suggests one of two things:

1) Someone in Brazil filled a soccer ball with cocaine, and it was somehow mixed in with the game balls, and so the police dog recognized the scent and made an important discovery that crippled a massive conspiracy that featured the soccer league running drugs and laundering money through its teams as they traveled from country to country, or…

2) Brazilian police dogs are poorly trained.

I’m leaning toward No. 1. Just feels right.

Read the rest of this entry »