Free Republic

BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. - A Florida man unknowingly picked up a slithery hitchhiker on his way home from work. David Harrison says he was driving home when he found the snake on his windshield – but this isn't the first time something like this has happened. About a week ago he says he found a chicken on the hood of his truck. While Harrison says he's seen his fair share of wild animals, he says the snake takes the cake!

"I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say "Hang the sense of it" and just keep yourself occupied. - Slartibartfast, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy"

After exhaustive work to recover from a dramatic August launch failure, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut was poised for blastoff late Sunday on a delayed flight to the International Space Station, the program's first manned launching since the U.S. shuttle was retired.

I have been reading "Atlas Shrugged" again for about the 6th or 7th time, mostly because I like the book and I always learn new things. This passage leaped out at me and struck me with Ms. Rand's precience: "Then you will note the rise of the men of the double standard - the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money - the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you...

Fruity hitchhikers leave you heaving 14 August 2006 Beware the mild-mannered melon. Researchers at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have found that since 1973 the cantaloupe melon has been responsible for at least 28 outbreaks of food poisoning in the US and Canada that have left more than 1600 people ill and at least two dead. Of these outbreaks, 68 per cent occurred during the last decade, with Salmonella being the predominant culprit (Epidemiology and Infection, DOI: 10.1017/SO950268805005480). The actual number of cases could be far higher, since one-offs often go unreported, say the researchers. "Fruit...