The "theme" of this set of questions is that all the answers end in "--a" as in Dracula, tarantula, fistula...

Keep going...

I'll bet the person who created this flooring has never tried to clean up cat hairballs on the floor.

The comments above re the red/white Santa costume are correct. I've modified the post to eliminate the reference to Coca-Cola.

Perhaps. But a life lived with an excess of caution misses a lot of experiences and pleasures. It might be better while sitting in the rocking chair in the nursing home to be able to mutter "I remember the night the Christmas tree burned up..."

Very interesting video. There is at least one report of similar tool use by an octopus back in 2007 -

http://radthoughts.com/2007/02/01/octopus-tool-use/

@L-bot - Those events are still compatible with the original hypothesis. Those particular dogs after surviving the jump (perhaps after leaping over a railing of the bridge toward one end or the other), run back to join their masters, detect the scent again and, not having been injured the first time, jump again perhaps from a more central part of the bridge.

MSN has a small gallery of nail art from the Tokyo Nail Expo -

http://travel.msn.co.nz/glance/978794/crazy-nail-art-fans-gather-for-tokyo-expo

Just to clarify, the stretch limo showed up in a search for Copenhagen + limousine. There's no implication that attendees at the conference are using stretch limos. They probably use much smaller ones.

Looks like the North Star state has become... Minnesotastan.

Russia has confirmed that it was the launch of one of their missiles that triggered the unusual lights in the sky.

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/distrikt/troms_og_finnmark/1.6904061&sl=no&tl=en

If this discussion thread is going to go on for a while, it might be useful to define the term "feral" now. There are subtle differences between feral cats and stray domestic cats. As indicated in the article, feral cats are offspring of domestic breeds, but are ones that have not been socialized to interact with humans - typically born outside a human home or abandoned shortly after birth.

A stray cat that has been abandoned as an adult will retain human interaction skills for a while and can often be readily adopted; over time it may however revert to feral instincts. A true, life-long feral cat presents unique difficulties in terms of management.

Skip - if you are a former dumpster diver, you would probably really appreciate Dirk Jamison's "Tao of the Dumpster." You can Google the text, but it's more fun to listen to the audio version at Ira Glass' This American Life. Search for Tao Dumpster or go to Episode 62. You can start at the beginning or skip to Act II at the 31:10 mark, where the dumpster diving story is located.

Skip - it is the former, although a Google search will reveal many instances of "Minnesotastan" being used to compare politics in the state to that of an Asian republic.

I won't ask about Skipweasel...

"And it's never said that Rockwell "traced" the images. He scaled them up..."

The person who commented on Rockwell's "tracing techniques" was Clemens Kalischer, an artist-photographer who reportedly "assisted Rockwell through the years."

I don't think there's any doubt that Coca-Cola used Santa for promotions or that that Santa wore red and white in those ads. Perhaps the myth is that the Coke Santa was the original