Life Imitates Art

First and foremost, I'd like to point out that I will be sending a note to the Blogger staff. One of the things that I've always loved about Blogger is that it will allow you to update posts without having to delete and repost them, thus preserving the order in which they were posted. They've apparently changed their setup so that if you update a post, it bumps it up to the top. I'm not sure if it would bump an old post from weeks or months ago to the top, as it appears that it only bumps it to the top of that particular day of posts, but I'm going to call bullshit on it. I edited the Arabic in the Fly Report last night, and woke up this morning to find that the Fly Report had been bumped up above the actual post from yesterday. I experimented with the actual post, and it bumped up to the top, too. I call shenanigans, so I'm sending them a note.

Anyway, here are a few interesting stories that I've seen over the last few weeks, and in a couple of cases, articles that lambasted them months or years before they were written. Read on!

Italy's struggle to disband the army that never was - Apparently, the Italians had an entire division that only existed on paper (and at a huge, unoccupied base) that was meant to fool the Warsaw Pact folks, but now that the Cold War is over, they can't destroy all of the unit's old classified records because nobody exists with the proper credentials to declassify them.

Number of alien worlds quantified - The late, great Michael Crichton gave a great speech that I've cited a number of times called Aliens Cause Global Warming in which Crichton took a major bite out of the hide of anyone who claims that they can quantify the number of worlds with intelligent life on them.

Sanctions put on Mauritania junta - I always post articles about Mauritania, and this one's no different, but it's funny because a similar situation was envisioned - and parodied - in The Onion a few years back: Rebels Immediately Regret Seizing Power In Zambia. Hysterical.

That's it for today, folks. Check in tomorrow for what will almost certainly be a fantastic Arbeit Macht Freitag post. Have a great day!