In Other News: Cables, Cosmonauts, Coffee and the Call of Nature

Not too, too far from Liberty Township MI, one wild turkey hunter got more than he bargained for early the other Sunday morning: a crossbow bolt in his left arm, according to Yahoo News.

Whether it was a case of two hunters each thinking the other was a real turkey responding to their call, only the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office knows for sure at the moment, and they’re planning on seeking charges against the crossbow shooter.

If, on the other hand, said shooter had been as quick off the mark, but a few thousand miles more to the east, then perhaps the Large Hadron Collider — that seventeen-mile long underground machine beneath France and Switzerland could still be online, but unfortunately, ABC News tells us, it went offline late one recent Thursday night.

Back in 2009, it had been shut down by a bit of baguette dropped into it by a passing bird. This caused the world’s largest atom-smasher to overheat, and seriously toasted the piece of bread in question — just as it did the “small mammal” that shut it down that Thursday by chewing through a power cable.

So if the un-named crossbow marksman had been at the site and taken a pot-shot at the extremely-charred and now-unidentifiable animal before it started chewing through that cable, scientists beneath France and Switzerland could even now be happily smashing atoms using the biggest and most complicated machine in the world.

Just what that small, smoking heap of ex-wildlife might have been, nobody quite knows. There have been lots of guesses, both educated and uneducated, but if our little sizzling friend had been a mole, his molehill would have been of great interest to certain parties over in the United Arab Emirates, where they’re planning, the Washington Post informs us, on building a mountain.

Had they been lucky enough to have a molehill in their desert landscape the process might be easier, if that old “mountain/molehill” proverb is to be believed. The theory is that their proposed artificial mountain will force air to rise, thereby creating clouds to bring much-needed rain to the ground below.

It’s definitely an interesting idea, and if it works, will bring some equally-interesting culture changes to the area when all that additional water suddenly becomes available.

In which case, Starbucks branches from the Ajman Drive-Thru to the Wahat Hili and every other branch in the UAE might just have to watch out, because here in the USA, in a state where there’s more than enough ice for every man, woman, child and animal living there, the Alaska Dispatch News advises us that an Illinois woman is suing Starbucks because she thinks there’s too much ice in their iced drinks.

Her lawsuit claims baristas pour a smaller amount of coffee into the beverage container, then top it up with ice, leaving consumers with less coffee than they’re actually paying for. A Starbucks spokeswoman stated — icily, no doubt — that “Our customers understand and expect that ice is an essential component of any ‘iced’ beverage”.

And if those customers at the Dubai Airport branch of Starbucks end up sneakily feeding their dogs some of that surplus mountain water either in liquid form or, indeed, their now notorious ice before taking off westwards towards the USA, they’d better hope they’re landing at JFK.

There, says Fox News, animals now have their own fire-hydrant-equipped special bathroom to enjoy some much-needed pre-and post-flight relief in the run-up to August, when federal regulations will require any airport servicing more than ten thousand passengers annually to install a pet relief area.

There’s no mention of trans-gender complications, but after so many hours cooped up so many miles above the ground with a stomach so full of Starbucks ice water sloshing around it’s doubtful grateful pet-relief area users are going to care very much either way.

And much higher than the average airliner, with no accessible Starbucks branches (but an Italian espresso machine to cater for cosmonauts’ caffeine cravings) the International Space Station fortunately has its own astronaut-relief area. Otherwise space flights would no doubt be considerably shorter.

UK Astronaut Tim Peake, according to Market Business News, has been getting more than a little twitchy at the quite realistic prospect of relations with Russia breaking down in the near future. Since he’d hitched a ride up to the ISS on a Russian launch vehicle, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to make the return trip if all he was going to get from his cosmonaut co-passengers was a shake of the space-suited head and a muffled Russian-relation-breakdown “Nyet” before the airlock slams shut in his face.

So all in all, it’s just as well the ISS has bathroom facilities, no matter how complicated using them might be. However, it can be a long ride from there back down to ground level, so when (or if) Peake steps out of the Soyuz onto Russian soil it’s probably best if he resists the temptation to unzip his spacesuit straight away.

That’s because rabies can make infected animals “display unprovoked aggressive behavior” … and once a person has been bitten by an animal displaying that kind of aggressive behavior, it can be an unpleasantly fatal condition.

And the Moscow Times is warning readers that due to an outbreak of rabies discovered in the Dmitrovsky District and Solnechnogorsky districts of the Moscow region, there could be unprovoked aggressive behaviour from the local …

… hedgehogs.

Exactly how far rabies has been spread across Russia by the indigenous hedgehog population has yet to be verified, and precisely how high a hedgehog in serious aggression mode can jump has yet to be documented, but it’s still a good enough reason for any returning cosmonaut to refrain from pulling down their spacesuit pants until the official debriefing.

What the Russians are doing to eradicate the threat of spiky biters the Moscow Times isn’t saying, but it’s unlikely they’re taking the same kind of route as they’re doing Down Under, where they’re having to deal with a river that’s much too full of carp.

Australia’s ABC News is running the story of a herpes virus to be unleashed in the Murray River, which is predicted to result in millions of tonnes of dead carp floating downstream, potentially causing more of a problem than when they were alive.

It’s not like they’re inedible: a senior fisheries manager says “So there is up to 58 million individual carp that are eaten for breakfast in Israel every day, with this virus, and there’s never been a single documented human health issue.”

So that’s a relief, then.

If those millions of tonnes of carp do find their way into the food chain, let’s hope whoever sells them are a little more on the ball when it comes to labeling: the UK’s Metro leaves readers scratching their heads in bewilderment with the news that supermarket chain Lidl are recalling many, many cans of Nixe Herring Fillets …

… because the labels on the cans don’t carry the warning they should, by law, be carrying.

And that warning would be?

“This product may contain fish.”