First bees, and now bats. Dear faunæ: We’re trying to stop killing you. Please stop dying. Sincerely, Us.

This primary season has raised many important questions, but a post in the Times blog today raises the most important one yet — how have I been to Texas multiple times without seeing Whiplash, the Cowboy Monkey, a monkey who, dressed in a cowboy costume, rides a border collie?

Some charts from the New York Times presenting data from the Democratic primary battle. I’m not sure what conclusions, if any, can be drawn from the first chart, which shows that out of the states which Bush won in 2004 that have held their primary contests already, Obama’s gained 96 delegates net over Clinton, while in Kerry states, Clinton netted 15 — too many other variables correlate with “red” vs. “blue” statehood.

The other two are informative¹, though; they show that superdelegates not deciding this race is about as likely as Huckabee’s “miracle”, and that this race would be just as close if the primaries were winner-takes-all, either by state or by congressional district.

As reported by Chad, Ridley Scott is making a movie based on Monopoly. Chad pooh-poohs the idea, but I see a few interesting directions this could take:

• “What do you expect me to do, Race Car, mortgage Baltic Avenue?” “No, Mr. Thimble, I expect you to die.”
• “Pop quiz hot-shot: You’ve just rolled your second doubles. If you roll doubles again, the bus explodes. If you don’t roll doubles, I kill every man, woman, and child in Marvin Gardens. What do you do? What do you do?!”
• “Ye can take our hotels, but ye’ll never take our FREEDOM!!”

LanguageLog describes the havoc wreaked by journalists’ inattentive use of spell-checkers. For instance, the following from a Reuters article:

With its highly evolved social structure of tens of thousands of worker bees commanded by Queen Elizabeth, the honey bee genome could also improve the search for genes linked to social behavior.

I’ve been enjoying reading the coverage of the primaries. It’s fun to read about the mechanics of things like delegate apportionment that aren’t usually as important as they are this year. I have a long post about it on Liz’s new politics forum for those of you who are into that sort of thing.

Prince Charles appears at energy summit via hologram.

Richard Knarr, the co-founder of Wham-O, died today. Wham-O was responsible for the Hula Hoop and the Superball, and for popularizing the Frisbee.

Their first marketing idea was a slingshot; they had been using one to hurl meat to their pet falcons to train them.

The Washington Post has a nifty gallery of mushroom photos by Taylor Lockwood.

A hilariously terrible first date (via Universal Hub.)