1. Tyson recalls (not fondly, one assumes) 75,000 lbs of nuggets –
Tyson Foods last week said it is recalling 75,320 pounds of frozen chicken nuggets because they could contain small pieces of plastic in the filling, a situation that has already caused injuries to consumers unlucky enough to bite into the tainted nuggets.
I post this only because “Tainted Nuggets” would be a pretty good name for a rock band.
2. This is not what this story is about. It appears under Google’s Science news feed.
Researchers net ‘zombie bass’ with electricity
Not this:
But rather:
Momentarily incapacitated by a weak electrical charge that’s fed into the water from a boat equipped with a humming generator, fish large and small floated motionless to the surface during an electrofishing trip last week. They were scooped up with a net and placed into an aerated holding tank.
Eyes wide and mouths agape, stunned fish were measured, weighed and checked for illnesses and parasites. Within a few minutes the animals snapped out of a zombie-like state, and workers put them back in the water to swim away.
Oh. Never mind.
3. Smithsonian Air and Space Museum Getting Major Makeover
About time. Ever since they lost track of all that valuable air and space, something needed to be done.
Next, someone needs to look into the 16 1/2 prime acres missing from the Field Museum.
(On a geek-out note: a few years back, took the family to D.C. on our way to a family wedding – of all the very cool things in the Air & Space museum, the Me 262 had me twitching: first production jet. Like how the Monitor ironclad got all the wooden warship orders cancelled, once that Me 262 went jetting past the wonderful state of the art prop driven P-51 Mustangs, the era of prop-driven fighters was effectively over. Anyway – they have one of the very few surviving Me 262s there – they look like lethal catfish.)
4. Mars finally comes to opposition this week
After years of laboring under false consciousness, Mars, the God of War, finally grasped the fundamental and all-explaining TRVTH of Marxism, and crossed over to the more Progressive camp in Parliament, joining the not all that loyal opposition….
Oh, wait – that’s not it at all! It’s the word ‘finally’ that threw me – like, we were waiting impatiently for Mars to get around to opposition? Heck, Ptolemy could have told you when the opposition was going to take place with more than passing accuracy.
5. Neil deGrasse Tyson: Pluto Is Not A Planet So ‘Get Over It’. Big whoop. I’m not even going to link to this. What gets me is how some fairly arcane classification system gets developed over time, and people in charge of it think somehow it makes any difference at all to the rest of the world. It reminds me of the New Atheist gotcha about the Bible classifying bats as birds, therefore no God – nobody asks who gets to make up the classification categories, when they get made up, and whether it makes any difference to anybody who is not a specialist. Or Melville having Ishmael make a long argument in the middle of Moby Dick about whales being fish or not.
So: if you are not teaching astronomy, go ahead and call Pluto a planet if you feel like it. It just doesn’t matter what the professional astronomers want to call it. NdGT (yes, he is now a set of initials, with a precious small ‘d’ and everything) will just have to get over it.
Yard Sale of the Mind 
NdGT looks suspiciously like ‘nugget’… hmm…
Whoa. Synchronicity.