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From a once-and-again AP article on Yahoo! News:

LONDON - Aaron Balick expected to find a tiny mouse rustling behind the TV in his apartment. Instead, he found a venomous giant centipede that somehow hitched a ride from South America to Britain.

“Thinking it was a mouse, I went to investigate the sound. The sound was coming from under some papers which I lifted, expecting to see the mouse scamper away,” the 32-year-old psychotherapist said Wednesday. “Instead, when I lifted the papers, I saw this prehistoric looking animal skitter away behind a stack of books.”

He trapped the 9-inch-long creature between a stack of books and put it in a plastic container.

The next day he took it to Britain’s Natural History Museum, which identified the insect as a Scolopendra gigantea the world’s biggest species of centipede.

Stuart Hine, an entomologist at the museum, said it was likely the centipede hitched a ride aboard a freighter, likely with a shipment of fruit.

“Dealing with over 4,000 public and commercial inquiries every year, we have come to expect the unexpected. However, when Aaron produced this beast from his bag I was staggered,” Hine said. “Not even I expected to be presented with this.”

The Scolopendra gigantea has front claws that are adapted to deliver venom when it stings, which can lead to a blistering rash, nausea and fever. The sting is rarely life-threatening, but painful.

(via Yahoo! News, AP: “Briton Finds Venomous Centipede in House.” [August 31, 2005])

Not that you necessarily knew it was gone—or in existence, for that matter—but rest assured you won’t believe you could live without the totally & brazenly obscure audio treasures and whatnot that UBUWEB provides.

(via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog blog)

“Hi, my name is Dr. Johnny Valdez, and I think global warming is bunk!”

“Oh, and did I mention the six-figure donation my organization got from a prominent, ahem, petroleum utilization corporation?”

Not too far from the truth, aside from the total lack of details. Here are some actual details, courtesy of Environmental Defense.

Identify them all!

Will you find a more comprehensive resource to the aforementioned singing insects of North America? Probably not. Take a look, convince yourself.

Quick: which industry devours more money, Hollywood or Self-Storage?

The answer may surprise you.

(Or not; it really depends how easily you are surprised.)

Now there’s yet another study to add to the growing scientific dissatisfaction with echinacea and its alleged cold-fighting properties.

The sad thing is that, probably, no amount of scientific proof is going to dethrone echinacea in the minds of the millions who’ve already convinced themselves it does work.

(Of course, there’s always the chance that the study is flawed…)