Lost parrot tells vet his name and address

I forgot about this story from earlier this year – it cracks me up.

 

When Yosuke the parrot flew out of his cage and got lost, he did exactly what he had been taught — recite his name and address to a stranger willing to help.

Police rescued the African grey parrot two weeks ago from a neighbor’s roof in the city of Nagareyama, near Tokyo. After spending a night at the station, he was transferred to a nearby veterinary hospital while police searched for clues, local policeman Shinjiro Uemura said.

He kept mum with the cops, but began chatting after a few days with the vet.

 

“I’m Mr. Yosuke Nakamura,” the bird told the veterinarian, according to Uemura. The parrot also provided his full home address, down to the street number, and even entertained the hospital staff by singing songs.

“We checked the address, and what do you know, a Nakamura family really lived there. So we told them we’ve found Yosuke,” Uemura said.

The Nakamura family told police they had been teaching the bird its name and address for about two years.

But Yosuke apparently wasn’t keen on opening up to police officials.

“I tried to be friendly and talked to him, but he completely ignored me,” Uemura said.

 

 

[Thanks, MSNBC, for the flashback]

last.fm

Just in case anyone is feeling especially stalkerish, you can see what I’ve been listening to here.

Mixtapes… er… CD’s.

I’ve been cleaning up my music collection, and I came across some mixes that mean a lot to me, for one reason or another. They always remind me the time in my life when it was made, and typically makes me happy. I don’t really have any mixes that remind me of bad times, like Vietman or something. ‘Cause that would be a terrible mix. 

Here’s one from the end of 2004:

• Seeing in Believing – Acceptance
• There Cannot Be a Close Second – Copeland
• Living Rooms – Down to Earth Approach
• Fluxy –  The Early November
• The Best Happiness Money Can Buy – I Can Make a Mess Like Nobody’s Business
• Wrong Way Out – Junction 18
• We Had A Deal – Onelinedrawing
• Who I Am Hates Who I’ve Been – Relient K
• City Lights – Over It
• Round Here – Punchline
• Darker – Ticker Tape Parade
• Watch the Sky – Something Corporate
• As the Story Goes, Lorraine – Not Long After
• Visions of What Once Was – Finding Westerly
• Deja Vroom – Rory
• Sadie – Alkaline Trio
• Katherine, Please – Tokyo Rose
• All Hail the Heartbreaker – The Spill Canvas

And of course I have mixes of Grey’s Anatomy music that grows each week, a “Tub Mix” from 2006… good times, good times.

[P.S.: Santa is now in Shanghai, China] 

Tracking Santa’s sleigh

Want to see where Santa is? NORAD is keeping track to keep you and your kids in touch with Santa’s current location and where’s going next. You can even watch him on his route in 3D with Google Earth.

As I write this, he’s in Daru, Papua New Guinea…

Retention wall in Tennessee breaks, sludge flows free

As I found out via Facebook last night from a friend in Central Tennessee, the wall that was holding back 500 million gallons of waste from the Kingston Fossil Plant broke, spilling that waste into the surrounding area.

To give you a better idea of exactly how much waste that is, and how much ground that covers (courtesy of CNN): 

Cleaning up the mess, which could fill nearly 800 Olympic-size swimming pools, could take months or years, Taylor said.

And if you still don’t have a good mental picture of what kind of damage this is doing:

The retention wall breached early Monday, sending the sludge downhill and damaging 15 homes. All the residents were evacuated, and three homes were deemed uninhabitable, a TVA spokesman told CNN…

Video footage showed sludge as high as 6 feet, burying porches and garage doors. The slide also downed nearby power lines, though the TVA said power had been restored to the area…

Appalachian environmentalists compared the mess with another spill eight years ago in eastern Kentucky, where the bottom of a coal sludge impoundment owned by Massey Energy broke into an abandoned underground mine, oozing more than 300 million gallons of coal waste into tributaries.

The water supply for more than 25,000 residents was contaminated, and aquatic life in the area perished. It took months to clean up the spill.

“If the estimates are correct, this spill is one and a half times bigger,” said Dave Cooper, an environmental advocate with the Mountaintop Removal Road Show, a traveling program that explains the effect of an extreme form of mining.

My sincerest regret goes to the residents in central Tennessee. I really hope they figure this out, because finishing out 2008 with another not-so-natural disaster sure isn’t the way I would want it to end.

[Thanks to CNN, for being my lifeline to the real world]