Seriously people?

Yes, I have heard news of the supposed 'Giant Mutant Rats' that are 'invading' Iran. Ugh, it hurts to even type that sentence. It is such nonsense.


This picture shows me someone holding a large, dead, male rat. The perspective in this shot is giving the illusion that it's larger than it actually is. It is not near 5 kilograms, or 11 pounds as MSN reports. If it were that heavy, this person could not hold it at arm's length after having stabbed it with a knife.

I can believe that they have lots of rats and that is an issue. I do not believe that they are mutated as Ismail Kahram states. This is like every time a picture goes around claiming that it's some new species, or they finally have photographic proof of a chupacabra and it's just a coyote or wild dog with a serious case of mange. I have to facepalm and sigh, that people are still making this stuff up. What really bothers me is less that people are making it up, or believing it. What bothers me is the news happily and completely uncritically puts this crap out there.

I don't want to do much in the way of 'debunking' or even shitting on people too much with this blog, but I had to mention this. It was bothering me too much. Hopefully soon I'll post something on baking, or movies, or even history.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Let's Get Baking

So, like many home chefs, I have a number of cookbooks at home. I do use them occasionally, but there are some that I haven't tried a single recipe from. I'm hoping to whittle down my entire library soon, and that will include my cookbooks, but I don't want to get rid of a cookbook I haven't tried even once. Another thing I want to do is bake and cook more, I particularly want to bake more. (I mean, I do end up cooking pretty much every night, even if it's not always something new and exciting.) Thus, this project was born. I'll try and document it as I bake my way through some of my books. I'm starting with One Bowl Baking by Yvonne Ruperti, which is a neat book I received from my sister. I'm setting an easy goal for myself of one new recipe a week. I'm hoping to do more than that, otherwise this will take forever, but I'm trying to be honest about my ability to set aside the time and gather the will power. The book contains about 112 recipes...
Read more

The Wooing of the Irish

Introduction In the tradition of Irish literature, there are many genres. One example is the genre of dindshenchas , the stories of why places are given certain names, and there is also the genre of tochmarc . A tochmarc is a story of the wooing of a woman. While each story has it's own unique details, there are many shared themes and tropes within the genre of tochmarc . Finding these common threads can give us some ideas of their idealised romance. For this, three stories will be used: Tochmarc Étaínne , from the Tales of the Tuatha De Danann, Tochmarc Emer , from the Ulster Cycle, and Tochmarc Becfola , from the Tales of the Traditional Kings. In the first section they will be briefly summarized while in the second section we will tie them together and briefly discuss the themes of tochmarc and the common elements within these stories. The Stories Tochmarc Étaínne The story of Tochmarc Étaínne 1 has been divided down into three subsections by the editors of Ber...
Read more

Sunday Dinner: Calzones

Image
Forgive the truly awful pictures and the fact that there are almost no pictures. This is what I get for doing this so late. The original plan for today was to make chili con carne and the first recipe for my one bowl baking project, cornbread. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to get enough cornmeal for the muffins, so I turned to something else I had wanted to make for a long time: calzones! I only realized all this fairly late, so dinner was going to be late, though we've definitely eaten later. First step was pulling out a dough recipe. I went with Cook's Illustrated for their calzone recipe. I ignored the filling but I did follow their instructions for the dough. So the dough started rising around 7pm, and would need at least an hour and a half before I could start even thinking about eating. After that, it was time to divide up the dough into balls, let it rest a further 15 minutes and prepare the ingredients I was going to be shoving in them. Both would get some ri...
Read more