YouTube: Video Games A Capella. How many can you name?

Wow -- a woman who will tell me anything I want to hear? I think I'm in love! I may never leave the house again. Actually, I particularly like "No -- don't close my window -- I want to live!"

What did one gay sheep say to the other?
"I wish I could quit ewe."
Baaaaadda-bing!

So Darth Cheney thinks Wolf Blitzer's question about Cheney's daughter is "out of line"? How about asking "When are your kids leaving for Iraq to join your boss's surge"?

Crowds Pray To Frozen Virgin Mary In Store Freezer as she ministers to the Corn Dogs. God forbid there should be a power failure!

New Scientist magazine: Hybrid flu virus in near-miss escape:

Last April, a researcher at the University of Texas, Austin, put tubes into a centrifuge to separate out their contents, which included a human flu virus modified to carry a gene from H5N1 bird flu. The centrifuge became unbalanced and stopped, and when the researcher opened it he found the lid of a safety cup holding one of the tubes had fallen off. [...] If aerosol had escaped, the consequences could have been serious, since the virus would have been able to infect humans, with unknown effects.

I spoke with Bob Krug about this incident in his lab; he emphasized that the experiment used only 1 gene from H5N1 and that they substituted a hemagglutinin gene from "an old virus from 1972" to which many people have immunity, in order not to increase the hybrid virus's transmissibilty to humans and to decrease its pathogenicity. I asked about whether this experiment could be viewed as weaponizing H5N1 or providing information that could be used to do so; he replied that this is the least dangerous work that is currently being done to examine the H5N1 genes that are distinct from human flu genes and that code for internal proteins (not surface proteins) that could be targets of future animal studies. He also emphasized the lab's BSL3 safety procedures and responsibility in reporting the incident. He is concerned that the publicity generated by this accident, especially by the Sunshine Project, will discourage other labs from reporting such incidents.

Darren "Not a Second Life hater" Barefoot thinks you should Get a First Life.

War in Heaven: Political group's in-game presence sparks virtual war in Second Life. And, as always, on slashdot. And lest you think that exploding pigs are all fun and games, consider this cautionary tale:

Romanian Farmer Hurt by Exploding Pig

"[A] Romanian farmer was hospitalized for three days when a pig he had slaughtered for his holiday dinner exploded. A doctor who treated the farmer's wounds said the man had inflated the pig with gas to make it easier to clean the skin.

Transylvanian farmers usually inflate the pig using the exhaust of a vacuum cleaner or a pump to tauten the skin and burn straw to remove the hair and clean it. The farmer's vacuum cleaner was broken so he used bottled gas and the pig exploded when he singed it with a naked flame."

The type of gas used to inflate the pig is not identified in the story. From the circumstances given, it was probably propane, a highly explosive gas.

Attention, men: brush your teeth or die!