Follow-ups

Knitting with hair My Mom noticed a comment on the post showing people in their dog-hair sweaters that left us laughing hysterically: someone had remarked (anonymously), "Finally! A sweater I can chase cars in!"
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Ngorongoro crater I heard from my Dad, my sister Melissa, and my follower Kent regarding Ngorongoro. Dad commented that it is also one of his favorite words to say (and mentioned at the same time that the number of words in the English language has just reached 1 million). Melissa loves the photos by Nick Brandt. And Kent reminded me that his daughter and family live in Tanzania. He visited in October of last year and spent a day in Ngorongoro, seeing all but one of the "big five." He reports that there is a nice road from the airport to the rim, but the one-way dirt track down into the crater is "nightmarish." His photos and post about the safari are here.
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Apparitions of Mary and Jesus In response to this post, Kent tells me that he has always thought of these religious images as just amusing and compares them to seeing a particular person's image in the clouds or thinking you see someone in a crowd after you've just thought about them. He understands from the 10 Commandments that God wants us to avoid making images of him and refers to numerous instances in the Bible where bad things result from idolatry. He points to the dog's butt to example of how silly humans can be when we try to make God in an image we devise, rather than understanding that God made us in his image, and that image is far more profound than the fact that we have a nose or fingers. Thanks for your enlightening perspective, Kent!
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Mortsafes I'm reading a book called Scottish Bodysnatchers that begins with this epitaph on a stone in the Howff Graveyard in Dundee:

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Here lies Nothing.

The impious resurrectionist
At night dared to invade

This quiet spot, and upon it

Successful inroads made

And when to Relatives the fact

Distinctly did appear

The stone was placed to tell the world

There's nothing resting here.

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Hamilton mausoleum Follower Carrie noted that she and her husband live only 15 minutes from Hamilton, and that he grew up and went to school there. They made a visit to the mausoleum, where she took this photo, and reports that she was only able to peer through the keyhole because the doors are only open to the public one day a year.
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Chihuahuas in the weird news Police in Cincinnati tasered and killed a 5-year-old's pet that had escaped from the yard when the family was not home, leaving blood, bullet holes, and a note on the front porch.

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Emmett Kelly Two remarkable coincidences in the news, one good and one bad. A female graduate who had just received her nursing degree from the Southwest Tennessee Community College exited the ceremony and saved the life of the Dean of Health Sciences. And an Italian woman who missed the flight and therefore was spared dying in the ocean crash of the Air France plane has died in a car crash in Austria.
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Bears in the news There have been a spate of grizzly attacks in the news: a 60-year-old Montana man joggging in Glacier National Park; a man and his 78-year-old father who were looking for moose antlers north of Grand Cache in Alberta, Canada; and a 34-year-old Idaho man hiking in Galatin National Forest near West Yellowstone, Montana.

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Ocean garbage dump An expedition called Project Kaisei - supported by the Scripps Oceanographic Institute and Brita - has set out this month to map the extent and depth of the garbage floating in the Pacific and retrieve 40 tons of plastic for trial recycling. If successful, they will attempt to recycle the entire the entire 100 million tons.

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Giants Another Chinese aquarium has tapped a long-armed man - in this case retired basketball player Zhang Youliang - to save a dolphin by reaching into its stomach to remove plastic it had swallowed.

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Poisonous plants Britain held its World Stinging Nettle Eating Championship on Friday. Contestants are supplied with 2'-long stalks from which they strip and eat the leaves - that are covered with microscopic needles that release boric acid and burn the skin. The winners are the male and female with the most accumulated length of stalks after an hour's competition.

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Kangaroo home invasion Following on the kangaroo home invasion in March, a koala entered a vacation home on an island off northeastern Australia, surprising the human inhabitants upon their return, but not threatening them or tearing up the house.
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Rats! A paper just published in Molecular Ecology after studying Baltimore rats shows that rats have "site fidelity," in other words, they spend their lives within the same few blocks in which they were born.

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Jayne Mansfield My sister sent me this amusing video by an actor named Mike Doyle who has found his niche playing the victim in television crime dramas including "Law and Order."

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More mammoths A researcher has determined a bone etching of a walking mammoth to be authentic. Found in Florida, it dates to the last ice age - some 13,000 years ago - and may be the oldest art in America.
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Octopus with attitude My stepmother Sarah e-mailed me this photo she took of an octopus at the Seattle Aquarium. Unless I am getting my stories confused, it was particularly active at the time this was taken.
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Fatal tiger maulings The family of Carlos Sousa, Jr. - killed by a tiger on Christmas Day 2007 - settled with the San Francisco Zoo for an undisclosed amount in February 2009. His two friends Amritpal and Kulbir Dhaliwhal, who were mauled in the same attack, just reached a settlement of a reported $900,000.