Nim Chimpsky...

Were you aware of the new film "Project Nim"? It's the story of Nim Chimpsky, the chimpanzee who in the mid-1970s became the focus of a landmark experiment which aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. It doesn't go well...

(monkey painting by Allison Schulnik)

5,000 Blackbirds fall from sky on New Years...

Apparently an hour before midnight on New Year's Eve, as many as 5,000 Red-Winged Blackbirds fell dead from the sky in Beebe, Arkansas and no one knows why. Some say it was fireworks that confused the birds and caused them to bump into things (but 5,000 times over? Really?) Others are waiting for toxicology reports.

The NYTimes reports: "State scientists believe one thing to be almost certain: that the bird deaths were not related to the roughly 85,000 fish that died a few days before near Ozark, in the western part of the state, the biggest fish kill in Arkansas that anyone can remember."

Phew. Glad there 's no connection. Still, I'm going to go out on a limb and blame humans in both cases until proven otherwise.

Meanwhile, roughly 500 dead birds were found on Monday outside New Roads, La.