Chaser, a border collie who lives in Spartanburg, S.C., has the largest vocabulary of any known dog. She knows 1,022 nouns, a record that displays unexpected depths of the canine mind and may help explain how children acquire language.

Chaser belongs to John W. Pilley, a psychologist who taught for 30 years at Wofford College, a liberal arts institution in Spartanburg. In 2004, after he had retired, he read a report in Science about Rico, a border collie whose German owners had taught him to recognize 200 items, mostly toys and balls. Dr. Pilley decided to repeat the experiment using a technique he had developed for teaching dogs, and he describes his findings in the current issue of the journal Behavioural Processes.

He bought Chaser as a puppy in 2004 from a local breeder and started to train her for four to five hours a day. He would show her an object, say its name up to 40 times, then hide it and ask her to find it, while repeating the name all the time. She was taught one or two new names a day, with monthly revisions and reinforcement for any names she had forgotten.

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All I can do when I look at this is burst into tears–the dog stayed there for two days.

ABC News has reported: Premier Anna Bligh says Queensland is facing a reconstruction effort of post-war proportions as the state battles possibly the worst natural disaster in the country’s history.

The Brisbane River inundated more than 20,000 homes and businesses across the capital when it peaked this morning at 4.46 metres. More than 100,000 homes are without power across the city and to the west in Ipswich where floodwaters are receding rapidly after yesterday’s peak. The search for missing people continues in earnest across the Lockyer Valley, where this morning the body of a man was found in a field near Grantham, bringing to 13 the number confirmed dead.

Read it all and continue to pray for those in Australian struggling valiantly to shine Christ’s love in this challenging time.

Like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the Australian floods come as a salutary reminder that, for all the technological advances of our time and for all the sophistication of modern urban life, there are many ways in which our civilisation is vulnerable and some elements we are still powerless to control.

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Ice and sleet and freezing rain-fun, fun, fun.

What an amazing looking animal!

What a nice picture.

In these darkening days between Hanukkah and Christmas, here is a story to keep your spirits high ”” a story of cooperation between Jews and Christians, between people named Seinfeld and Samberg and people named Morgan and Lohan. A story of celebrities putting ethnic differences aside to raise money for charity.

By making fun of ”” or is that gently teasing? ”” Jews….

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One Sunday morning an elderly woman walked into a local country church. The friendly usher greeted her at the door, “Good morning, ma’am. Where would you like to sit?”

“The front row, please,” she replied.

The usher said, “You don’t want to do that. We have a visiting preacher today who is really boring.”

The woman[,] bristling at the comment, asked, “Do you know who I am?”

The usher said, “No, ma’am, who are you?”

She replied “I am the preacher’s mother!”

The usher asked, “Do you know who I am?”

She said, “No.”

He said, “Good.”

–William J. Carl III, The Lord’s Prayer Today (Westminister: John Knox Press, 2006), p.85

This is hysterical and well worth the time–listen to it all (just over 12 minutes).

Scientists said Thursday that they had trained a bacterium to eat and grow on a diet of arsenic, in place of phosphorus ”” one of six elements considered essential for life ”” opening up the possibility that organisms could exist elsewhere in the universe or even here on Earth using biochemical powers we have not yet dared to dream about.

The bacterium, scraped from the bottom of Mono Lake in California and grown for months in a lab mixture containing arsenic, gradually swapped out atoms of phosphorus in its little body for atoms of arsenic.

Scientists said the results, if confirmed, would expand the notion of what life could be and where it could be. “There is basic mystery, when you look at life,” said Dimitar Sasselov, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and director of an institute on the origins of life there, who was not involved in the work. “Nature only uses a restrictive set of molecules and chemical reactions out of many thousands available. This is our first glimmer that maybe there are other options.”

Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA astrobiology fellow at the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., who led the experiment, said, “This is a microbe that has solved the problem of how to live in a different way.”

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Michael Laughlin’s Mill Race Farm served as the fixture for the Edisto River Hounds 16th annual Blessing of the Hounds, Opening Meet and Stirrup Cup on Saturday afternoon.

Father Garrett Clanton of All Saints Anglican Church officiated the Blessing of the Hounds.

“It’s a good day for a fox hunt, and we’ve welcomed friends and their families,” said D.J. Newell, Edisto River Hounds, joint Master of Hounds. “Among the things that we’re renowned for are safety and education. We enjoy for people of all ages, who are involved in all riding disciplines, to come out and go ride with us. We place an emphasis on teaching people to hunt in a safe environment.”

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Watch Jennifer Arnold of the Canine Assistants Program give a wonderful description of the amazing connection between a person and a dog in this ministry.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Watch it all–are those puppies cute or what?

Jay Leno on undecided voters: “Do we vote for the people who got us into this mess, or the people who can’t get us out of this mess?”

Simply an amazing sight–watch it all.

Check it out-heh.

Wonderful stuff–watch it all.

Wonderful stuff-watch it all.

All creatures great and small are gathering at St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral in Nicosia today as animal loving crowds take their pets along to a special blessing.

Part of a worldwide celebration to mark the recent World Animal Day on October 4, the Saint Francis Blessing of the Animals received a very good response when a similar event was held at the Cathedral a few years back.
World Animal Day was established in 1931 at a convention of ecologists in Florence as a way of highlighting the plight of endangered species. Since then it has grown to encompass all kinds of animal life and is widely celebrated in countries around the world. October 4 was specifically chosen as World Animal Day as it coincides with the Feast Day of St Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals.

“St Francis is usually depicted surrounded by and holding various animals,” says the St Paul’s Cathedral Dean, Father John Tyrrell. “Religious blessings are now very popular in many countries, especially England and North America. People who live on farms out in the country even take their horses down to the nearby chapel.”

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The four-hour [Union Theological Seminary] session, “Humor in Ministry,” was a kind of seminar in how to do stand-up for God.

The workshop’s leader, the Rev. Susan Sparks, pastor of the Madison Avenue Baptist Church on East 31st Street, moonlights as a nightclub comedian. Her adjunct for the day was another stand-up comic with whom she sometimes works, Rabbi Bob A. Alper, who bills himself as “the only practicing rabbi in the world doing stand-up comedy intentionally.”

Ms. Sparks and Rabbi Alper, invited as part of the seminary’s “field-based” program to teach some of the intangibles of ministry not covered in the divinity curriculum, surveyed the arc of potentially humorous situations ”” including weddings, funerals and long, hot summer days when even the sermonizer can lose the thread of a sermon.

They discussed the often-overlooked humor in some passages of the Bible, including Jesus’ use of irony and exaggeration, and the ribaldry in the Book of Esther.

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Do take the time to listen to it all–KSH.

Mr. [JOHN] DABIRI: I started studying jellyfish during a summer project when I was still in college. I came out to CalTech to work with Morey Gharib, who was my later Ph.D. advisor. And at the time I was primarily focused on studying rockets and jets as an engineering major at Princeton, and when I came to CalTech he said well let’s take a trip to the aquarium to see if you can find something interesting there. And it was there that I sort of fell in love with jellyfish.

{MICHEL] MARTIN: Why jellyfish? I mean a lot of us have our relationship with jellyfish but love is generally not one of them. I mean they’re lovely to look at, but.

Mr. DABIRI: Right, something, certainly not to study and for me I think it was because on the one hand they looked very simple but there’s a lot of interesting complexity there, especially when you start to study how they swim and the field of fluid dynamics, which tries to understand the physics of the water motion that they create.

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Enjoy it all.

AIRPORT-INDUCED IDENTITY DYSPHORIA Describes the extent to which modern travel strips the traveler of just enough sense of identity so as to create a need to purchase stickers and gift knick-knacks that bolster their sense of slightly eroded personhood: flags of the world, family crests, school and university merchandise…..

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This includes an example of some of what has occurred to church structures–watch it all.