Works for me.
Posted on 04/14/2005 2:17:25 PM PDT by Teflonic
ITHACA, N.Y., April 14 (UPI) -- A pair of scientists has named three species of slime-mold beetle after three of the United States' leading Republicans.
President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have each had a species of slime-mold beetle named after them.
The scientists, Quentin Wheeler of London's Natural History Museum and Kelly B. Miller, a post-doctoral fellow at Utah's Brigham Young University, said Thursday they named the beetles after the Republicans out of admiration for their moral courage.
"We admire these leaders as fellow citizens who have the courage of their convictions and are willing to do the very difficult and unpopular work of living up to principles of freedom and democracy rather than accepting the expedient or popular," Wheeler said.
Riiiiight.
Yeah I'm not sure if their intentions were good or not. Quentin Wheeler is a Cornell professor...
It's Ithica, NY.
Baghdad Bob's only true competition. :-)
Smarmy bastards.
This is a joke, right?
"We admire these leaders as fellow citizens who have the courage of their convictions and are willing to do the very difficult and unpopular work of living up to principles of freedom and democracy rather than accepting the expedient or popular," Wheeler said.
Clintoon should have some venereal diseases named after him.
I'd like to name that armadillo road kill over on 714 I saw today after Nancy Pelosi, for her relentless pursuit of high ideals & eyebrows.
They belong to the Axis of Beetles.
If all was good in the world, all political retoric would end on a positive note. Ceasar & Brutus had a good thing going too! :-)
Hepatitis Clinton?
Two former Cornell University entomologists who recently had the job of naming 65 new species of slime-mold beetles named three species that are new to science in the genus Agathidium for members of the U.S. administration. They are A. bushi Miller and Wheeler, A. cheneyi Miller and Wheeler and A. rumsfeldi Miller and Wheeler. The entomologists also named some of the new species after their wives and a former wife, Pocahontas, Hernan Cortez, the Aztecs, the fictional "Star Wars" villain Darth Vader ("who shares with A. vaderi a broad, shiny, helmetlike head"), Frances Fawcett (their scientific illustrator) and the Greek words for "ugly" and "having prominent teeth" and the Latin word for "strange." Many of the other names they used for the recently described beetles were derived from various geographic locations, such as California, Georgia and a few states in Mexico, and for various distinguishing features they discovered on the beetles.The decision to name three slime-mold beetles after Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, however, didn't have anything to do with physical features, says Quentin Wheeler, a professor of entomology and of plant biology at Cornell for 24 years until last October, but to pay homage to the U.S. leaders. "We admire these leaders as fellow citizens who have the courage of their convictions and are willing to do the very difficult and unpopular work of living up to principles of freedom and democracy rather than accepting the expedient or popular," says Wheeler, who named the beetles and wrote the recently published monograph describing the new slime-mold beetle species while a professor at Cornell.
...
Wheeler and Miller collected and borrowed thousands of specimens of slime-mold beetles -- named for the fungilike molds on which they feed -- in order to study their evolution and classification. In so doing, they found that more than five dozen in North and Central America had never before been described.
It reminds of when Gary Larson happily gave an entomologist permission to name a species of louse after him.
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