April 25, 2006

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Who’s the daddy? That’s the question being asked by zoologists stumped by the birth of four rare Komodo dragons at London Zoo – with no obvious male contender on the scene.

The mother, Sungai, was brought from Paris to London to meet a new British lover to bolster the endangered species. But she gave birth before she was even introduced to him, and the last time she is known to have had sex was two years previously.

It could be that this fearsome species is one that is either able to sore up sperm for long periods of time to use it later. Or it could be that the lizards are able to clone themselves - reproducing without having sex, by a process called parthenogenesis.

Although the Komodo dragon may not be a looker (in the conventional sense) and has some pretty unappealing features – devouring large mammals like goats and deer, and even eating young Komodo dragons with its bacteria-teeming teeth – cloning yourself is pretty drastic.

Consultant paid $372K by schools

The district has paid Baker an average of $124,021 a year for the last three years, his records show. He’s made an average of $75,708 a year for the last three years from the bond and $44,917 from the district’s operating fund. In total, Baker, who started out working for the district as a volunteer, has been paid $372,063 for his work since January 2004.

It’s money well spent, district administrators said. “He’s helped us do a lot of things we didn’t understand,” said Superintendent George Fornero.

Baker is a former IBM executive and a former partner in the local firm Blue Hill Development, which built University Commons for University of Michigan alumni, faculty and staff age 55 and older.

Ann Arbor News Discovers 20th-Century Business Practices

I hate when the News discovers something exotic like the “consultant” and gives it banner headlines.

Heads Up: ‘Princess Diaries’ Author Has a New Calling—Not Suitable For Children!

Meg Cabot’s work sits alongside that of Ann Brashares, Kate DiCamillo and Cecily von Ziegesar as required extracurricular reading for just about every self-respecting adolescent girl. That’s because Cabot’s astonishingly successful Princess Diaries series, chronicling the trials and tribulations of an ordinary girl who has royal status thrust upon her, so effectively merges fairy-tale fantasy with contemporary verisimilitude.

The series—comprising seven books, with an eighth on the way—has also been adapted for the screen, in two movies that launched Anne Hathaway’s film career and heralded the return to cinema of Hollywood queen Julie Andrews. Cabot wrote the screenplay for Disney’s Ice Princess, too, her tween-friendly brand having proven such a good fit for The House of Mouse.

But for her next project, Cabot is going down quite a markedly less PG path.

The author’s upcoming Queen of Babble, due May 23 from William Morrow, revolves around post-graduation uncertainty, secrets and sex through the eyes of a young woman who usually has her foot in her mouth.

I can’t even quote from the rest of the article. For shame, Meg Cabot! You are already established as a YA guru, you owe it to your audience to keep it clean.

Publishers Lunch Deluxe

Meanwhile, Lunch has obtained (that’s journalistic code for pretending you did a lot of hard work after someone dropped some documents on you) multiple documents asserted by the source to have been prepared by the principals representing author McCafferty. One section carefully cites over 40 passages from McCafferty’s two books accompanied by what are asserted as “duplicate passages in Viswanathan’s novel.” Another section cites 29 numbered comparisons (often a subset of those cited above) of “alleged infringing passage(s).” Presumably this is where today’s NYT piece gets its contention that “there are at least 29 passages that are strikingly similar,” but they don’t source their accusation. Many of the passages cited have similar (and in a few cases identical) page numbers as well, indicating that the “unconscious… similarities” often occurred at similar points in the respective books.

An additional section asserts an extensive overview of “identical scenes, plot points, and characters” shared between the books in question. It alleges: “After an initial, nearly original, 30-page set-up in Viswanathan’s novel, many of the primary plot points, characters, and settings in Viswanathan’s novel directly copy McCafferty’s work. Every major character in Viswanathan’s novel… is clearly modeled after a character from Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. Both novels are written in the first person, each narrated by a witty, high school honor student who lives in New Jersey, whose primary desire is to get into a specific Ivy League college (Columbia/Harvard).” [and more and more...]

Good reporting by Michael Cader who absolutely puts to shame the flimsy coverage of this story in other outlets.

Chron.com | Airlines ponder standing-room ’seats’

The airlines have come up with a new answer to an old question: How many passengers can be squeezed into economy class?

A lot more, it turns out, especially if an idea still in the early stage should catch on: standing-room-only “seats.”

Airbus has been quietly pitching the standing-room-only option to Asian carriers, though none has agreed to it yet.

Let’s put more eggs in the basket!

Lone Lawmaker Blocks Flight 93 Monument in Pa.

For emotional wallop, there are few rivals to the windswept, grassy field outside of Shanksville, Pa., where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, 2001.

But for three years, that field has made do with a makeshift monument while one member of Congress, Rep. Charles H. Taylor (R-N.C.), has blocked a $10 million request to buy the land for a permanent memorial to the 40 passengers and crew members who overpowered hijackers bent on crashing their jet into the Capitol or the White House.

For shame.