Storks, Not Orcs!

So, it seems that the little hobbitses of Flores Island had to deal with very large storks as well as Komodo Dragons. The science blogger Laelaps has a post about the storks of Flores, and riffs on Island effect, and the sensationalist accounts in the popular press (with our need for monsters to tantalize our imaginations).

Oddly enough, classical Greek sources describe wars between Pygmies and cranes... who knew what Homer could have known when he composed the Iliad?





Speaking of hobbitses, and islands inhabited by huge, flightless birds, the slayer of things that suck issued a challenge at Snark Central to write a poem about a certain "fat hobbit-hugging bastard":


There is a guy whose medium's film,
From a strange Antipodean land.
Whining that his profit margins kill'm.
And the labour costs are out of hand.
The Queen, being rich, done made him a knight,
But the working folk think he's a dastard.
Yet beard-boy still says the money is tight,
The fat, hobbit-hugging bastard.