That’s a Duck with a lot of pluck!

I’ve been surfing the Internet this morning looking for a little news of the weird and this caught my attention. On a little farm near London, the owner was sexing a newly hatched group of ducklings when she turned one over and much to her surprise she counted four legs. According to Associated Press reports, had the duckling been born out in the wild, the mutation would have made it difficult for the duckling to survive. However, owner Nicky Janaway said “Stumpy” seems to be doing fine. In fact, the extra appendages seem to act like ‘stabilizers’ as the little ball of fluff runs around the farmyard. But just wait till he hits the water, those extra legs will prove valuable when racing against his siblings!

In other news, a Wyoming woman said folks should stop complaining about the goat in her minivan. With the seats removed down, there’s plenty of room for the animal. Despite protests from some residents, animal control officer Ray Buhr for the city of Sheridan said Weidt isn't violating any laws or treating the animal cruelly.
"The van is kept clean," Buhr said. "We've checked several times. There's really nothing in ordinances or state statutes that says she can't do that. The goat is entirely happy in there."
Shirley Weidt said it's "nobody's business" if she keeps her goat in a van. The goat is in the van so it won't escape, she said.
But according to an Associated Press story, Weidt’s neighbor, Beverly Saxton, said keeping the goat in the minivan is cruel.
I wonder if the van is operational or its stationary. Can you imagine being Weidt’s children, and having to share the van with a goat on the way to and from school. That would be totally embarrassing not to mention smelly! No kidding!

Drunken man parks horse in bank foyer

This news of the weird story made me smile today. According to the Associated Press, an early morning customer discovered a man sleeping in the heated foyer of a bank in the east German village of Wiesenburg early this week. Standing next to the snoozing man was his horse, Sammy, who the man had apparently taken in with him the night before.

The 40-year-old machinist told Bild newspaper he had had "a few beers" with a friend in Wiesenburg, southwest of Berlin, and decided to hit the hay in the bank on his way home. Confronted with the lack of a hitching-post, he brought the 6-year-old horse in with him. The startled customer contacted police around 4 a.m. who entered the lobby and asked the man (and horse) to leave.

No charges were filed, but there might be some cleanup needed: Apparently Sammy made his own after-hours deposit on the carpet.

Duck Pond on the Virginia Tech campus in Springtime

In pictures the grass was Kelly green and spring flowers were in bloom. Historic buildings were bathed in the spring sunshine. What seemed horribly incongruent in all this were the images of police carrying out bloodied students from Norris Hall at Virginia Tech University Monday morning. Thirty-two are dead after a lone gunman entered a dorm and several classrooms, shooting over 50 people.

All we can glean from eyewitness accounts, make that terrified eyewitnesses, is that a young Asian man in his 20s entered the classrooms and without a word began firing off shot after shot, killing the sons and daughters, husbands and wives of families all over the United States. And for what? Payback? A relationship that went sour? Mental illness? Will we ever know?

All I know is that violence seems to be an epidemic in this world. Everyone has a reason to lash out and harm others. Power. Money. Hate. Anger. And the list goes on. The solution? As simplistic as it seems, the Golden Rule seems to offer the most sense. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. This rings true for the sane among us, but for folks like David Koresh, Adolph Hitler, Kim Jong Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iranian president) or Joseph Stalin, their twisted reality is painted with a different brush stroke.

My son, who is a senior at UW Madison is understandably depressed about the news from Blacksburg, Virginia. Virginia Tech has over 100 buildings on its 2,600-acre campus where 25,000 students are educated each year. Nestled along the shores of Lake Mendota, UW Madison is sprawled out over 933 acres and has over 220 buildings that are filled each day by the 41,466 students enrolled in its programs. That’s a lot of students on the 159-year-old campus at any given time. And for a madman with a gun, that’s a lot of vulnerable people.

So I can understand why he’s not up about his upcoming birthday this week. Take a look at these dates: April 19, 1995; April 20, 1999; and April 19, 1993. These are the dates of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine High School massacre and the end of the Davidian Branch cult stand-off in Waco, Texas, that claimed the lives of 4 police officers and 90 men, women and children inside the compound. I assured him that his birth was a red-letter day that week in the history of the world. I hope he believes me like he used to when he was little. When I told him that most people were inherently good, not evil. Now I’m not so sure.

Freak Chickens Lay Eggs Loaded with Drugs

But hey, it's not a bad thing. Read on.....Genetically modified hens can produce drugs in the whites of their eggs, scientists reported today. The technology "signifies an important advance in the use of farm animals for pharmaceutical production," the scientists said in a statement.

Traditional methods for producing therapeutic proteins such as antibodies used to treat cancer and arthritis are expensive. Farm animals could produce them faster and cheaper, the thinking goes, according to the Health SciTech web site.

Researchers led by Helen Sang of the Roslin BioCentre in Edinburgh, Scotland created transgenic hens by inserting the genes for desired pharmaceutical proteins into the hen’s gene for ovalbumin, a protein that makes up 54 percent of egg whites.

All the egg whites from these hens contained miR24, an antibody with potential for treating malignant melanoma. The whites also packed human interferon b-1a, an antiviral drug.

"With the demand for therapeutic protein drugs increasing, the efficient generation of transgenic hens that produce functional protein drugs at high levels in egg whites marks an important step in the development of this technology," according to a statement released by the Proceedings of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, which published the research in its online edition.

Too bad scientists can't figure out how to protect the chickens (as well as us humans) from Avian Flu.

Welcome Spring???

I am so mad at Mother Nature that I could scream. Just when my tender tulips and crocuses were peaking up out of the ground, the mercury in the thermometer heads south! Yes, I know, I live in WIsconsin and this is the type of thing I should be used to by now. But it's hard to reconcile yourself to the fact when the purple blossoms of your crocus are frozen like a grape popsicle and the leaves of your prized tulips are lying limp on their sides.

NEvertheless, my ever optimistic husband the farmer tells me to have faith, that the sun will shine and the plants will pop back up. (This is the guy who mutters at the weather man for too much of this or too little of that for his crops). We'll see what Mother Natures dishes out tomorrow.