Streetlight terrorizes alien planet

Mosquito journalist embedded in windshield

Dust settles for undisclosed amount

Album of the Day - Dick Cheney, "So"

2008 Tour schwag available at the JankyStore.

Clinton calls in Mariano Rivera

UPDATE: Mars Rover stripped in bad section of crater

VICTORIA CRATER, MARS - Four years into its journey to explore the surface of Mars, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover has been stripped of all six wheels. An earlier story about recent upgrades may have brought unwanted attention to the expensive vehicle.

Despite having an onboard camera, the Rover did not capture an image of the culprits. The scene of the crime was Colfax Escarpment, known to astronomers as the "sketchy part" of Victoria Crater.

"We believe they worked as a team, because they got those wheels off fast," said lead Rover brake specialist Doug Prinimay. "But we have no clue as to who 'they' might be."

The Rover team had some disagreement over whether to install an alarm system or a set of chrome rims, which won funding.

The team plans to continue exploring the area immediately surrounding the Rover.

Mars Rover fitted with new rims

VICTORIA CRATER, MARS - The Mars Exploration Rover received shiny new rims recently, as revealed by NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The extra "bling" is expected to enhance the Rover's status on the harsh, uninhabitable planet.

Project costs were not available at press time, although a NASA spokesperson emphasized a continuing commitment to "off-the-shelf" parts to save money. The rim size, however, is reportedly custom.

UPDATE - Mars Rover stripped in bad section of crater

Jimmy crack corn, public apathetic

Date reaches record high

GREENWICH - The calendar date reached an all-time historic high today, May 8, 2008. Observers of time report that humanity has never seen or recorded later dates.

"This is much, much later than dates we had in the 5th century, the Renaissance, or even the 90's," said calendar maker Chip Wheeler. "And it's only going up, I'm afraid."

The previous record high date was set on May 7, 2008, but pundits say the rest of this week will easily surpass it.

Wheeler warns that we can expect higher and higher dates throughout the year, and that they won't be coming down.

"You'll see a monthly flux in the days of the month, but overall the trend is one of inflation. It's not like in the days of Egyptians."

New bin Laden mix tape inexplicably omits Sugarhill Gang

LANGLEY, VA - A new, as yet unauthenticated mix tape from Osama bin Laden purports to be a definitive collection of "old skool hip-hop", yet fails to mention one of its most influential groups, The Sugarhill Gang.

CIA analysts are hesitant to verify that the tape is genuine, but they were quick to point out this glaring gap in authenticity.

"I'll hand it to him, this is a decent compilation," said a senior analyst using the code name 'Breakbeat'. "Grandmaster Flash, Kool Moe Dee, Fab 5 Freddy... he's even got some Slick Rick and Run-D.M.C. on here. But how could you not include Sugarhill's 'Eighth Wonder' or 'Rapper's Delight'? That just boggles the imagination."

A number of old school rappers declined comment, saying through a spokesperson only that they denounce any association with terrorism.

Breakbeat believes every bit of information coming in helps with the search for bin Laden. "He keeps slipping up like that, we're going to catch him."

Homeschooled teenage boy caught with stack of evolution magazines

HOVINDA - A mother caught her 15-year-old boy Tuesday with dozens of publications that describe in explicit detail the theoretical framework of evolution.

The unnamed boy had been hiding the books and magazines under his bed, intermingling them with sports magazines.

The mother, who asked not to be identified, expressed shock and disappointment at her discovery. "I'm his teacher. I should have seen this coming," she said. "At the dinner table, he started using roundabout terms that caught my attention. How could I let this happen?"

"He asked me one night if traits inherited by successive generations could make offspring better suited to their environment, and therefore more likely to survive and reproduce. I'm ashamed and disgusted."

The boy is grounded for a month, but in the context of his home schooling the specifics are not yet clear. The family is planning a trip this summer to the Grand Canyon to brush up on the antediluvian period.

May 6, 1937: Led Zeppelin album photo shoot held in New Jersey

Office ficus tree longs for the wild

Hurricane travels single file at equator

Face on Mars turns out to be somebody else

PASADENA - Astronomers at Jet Propulsion Laboratories have confirmed that the fabled "face on Mars" was indeed a trick of light and not at all the face observers first perceived in low-resolution images from 1976.

"At the time, everybody thought it was Ali MacGraw or some very advanced humanoid extraterrestrial," said Lance Lominlon, lead analyst for JPL's new Folklore division. "Now, with much higher quality images we can definitively say that it's someone more like Bill Pullman or a Roman emperor."

Lominlon believes that the phenomenon of the face was wishful thinking because of the limited lighting conditions and angles from which we could observe the Martian landscape. "It's a classic case of mistaken identity. You can see where the shadows would have fallen to make you think it looked one way, but that doesn't hold up. What's there now and looks like a face has nothing to do with our original perception, and we can therefore put the whole thing to rest."

For decades since the first image appeared, amateur astronomers have speculated about what might actually be on the surface of Mars. Some believed that the "face" was a structure built by a highly developed civilization, designed as a calling card to signal their presence. The new evidence suggests that the features present on the outcropping are purely coincidental.

Kenickie Fried Chicken

Self-portrait of Mobile Phone

Google Ocean to allow undersea viewing

MARIANA - Google will soon offer a 3D equivalent of Google Earth for the world's oceans, enabling users to see below the surface like never before.

"You'll be able to look at deep underwater canyons the same way viperfish presumably do," said Len Kenman, marine biologist at the Barstow Oceanographic Institute.

Happy Birthday Carl Friedrich Gauss!

U.S. Dollar fires manager

WASHINGTON D.C. - The bill once known as the "King of Currency" has fired its longtime manager in hopes of reviving a troubled career.

The U.S. Dollar announced Monday that it was severing relations with the management guru known as "The Fed" after disappointing performances in four consecutive decades.

"We just don't see things eye to eye," said a haggard Dollar after an economic forum. "I need new backing to compete with this new Euro kid on the block."

Dollar's value has been trending down the last few years in the international currency market, not least because fewer countries use it as a reserve currency. Competition from other currencies like the euro and the Chinese yuan has driven the dollar to look harder for gigs, and waning interest led to lower confidence in overseas economies. The combination of these stresses led to the rift between Dollar and Fed.

Pound Sterling, a close friend of Dollar's for many years, does not think the once mighty standard will fare well in this new landscape. "The charts don't lie. Dollar's not going to like being 'just another currency' in the global market. It's going to take some adjustment, stay uncrumpled, that sort of thing."

Dollar put its best face forward at a press conference following the forum. "I may be folding money, but I never fold."

Rescheduled curling tournament now canceled

LAKE SUNNYVALE, OR - A pro-am curling competition originally slated for January has now been canceled altogether, according to the event organizer Ben Slidee.

"We ran up against an experimental ice hole fishing tournament the same weekend," said Slidee. "But we couldn't find a way to line up the lanes so they wouldn't send the stones on a likely path down the holes."

Slidee and the other planners settled on the last weekend in April, which was the earliest time slot unencumbered by other events at Lake Sunnyvale.

"Turns out I know about as much about seasons as I do curling," said tournament founder Slidee, who has competed all three years and has yet to make the finals. "Next year, if the timing's right, and if one of those other four teams backs out, we've got a shot at getting in the bracket."

Curling, a sport more popular in colder climates and known by many as "chess on ice", depends very much on a solid sheet of ice for reliable play.

Spellcheck virus deletes most of Internet

SAN FRANCISCO - A fast-moving virus that targets misspelled words has deleted a majority of all the written content published on the World Wide Web, according to IT expert Kirk Tiesley.

"It hit blogs and forums the hardest," said Tiesley, who has studied the virus and is working towards a patch. "It has an advanced algorithm that sifts through pages, ignoring names and colloquialisms. If more than two words in common usage are spelled incorrectly, it deletes the whole entry."

The virus, identified as W32.spellcheck.doom, works by comparing web pages to lists of commonly misspelled words (including "misspelled"). After it deletes all connected text, it seeks out the author's work elsewhere and replicates to the host sites.

"Spellcheck.doom is actually rather lenient in terms of computer viruses," said Tiesley. "It spots you two strikes, so you could get by with a typo like 'recieve' and a mulligan like 'calender'. But it's absolutely savaging social networking sites and any forum that allows anonymous comments."

Tiesley's network security company, Securitrode, expects to offer a patch later this week. Until then, he advises writers to utilize the spell checker software available in most word processors.

UPDATE: Massive particle collider smashes subatomic particles, finds creamy nougat center

GENEVA - A stunning yet accidental result from an experiment on the Large Hadron Collider has revealed the nature of one subatomic particle as a creamy nougat center.

"A research assistant was surfing the Internet at his station, and he clicked on a link that offered 'hot proton-on-proton action'," said Giles Naughton, lead hadronologist. "We were still setting up the experiment, and he unknowingly switched on the collider. Nobody was hurt, but he's been docked a week's pay, and we do have this rather pleasant surprise."

Nougat is a confection made of sugar or honey and usually some kind of nut, in this case pistachio. Its presence at the heart of a proton, however, was completely unexpected. Pending further research, the particle has been nicknamed the Nougaton.

"While it answers one question, it only raises others," said Naughton. "We know now that the proton is comprised of creamy nougat, and that in turn that nougat is comprised of sugar and pistachios, but are those the same form of sugar and pistachios with which we are familiar? Is there some sort of smaller particle that forms nougat molecules?"

Massive particle collider to be tested with peanut butter, chocolate

GENEVA - The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland is in the final stages of construction, cooling down to an operational temperature of about 2 degrees Kelvin. Before physicists begin their research on the elusive Higgs boson particle, they will make a test run using peanut butter and chocolate.

"We know what outcome to expect from this experiment, so it will confirm that the equipment is working," said Alice Reese, the lead scientist on the test. "If it does not come out according to our predictions, we know we'll have some adjusting to do."

The team considered several combinations of substances to collide before settling on peanut butter and chocolate. "Oil and vinegar, cats and dogs, rock music and flutes - none of them produced a predictable outcome in our offline models," said Reese.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be the largest and highest-energy particle accelerator when it begins full operations in June 2008. Critics warn that the collider could produce disastrous doomsday scenarios in which micro black holes or strangelets destroy the universe and everything in it, including Earth.

Reese is skeptical of those claims. "Let's wait and see how the peanut butter thing goes first."