Saturday Reads, Politics Overload Edition

Good Morning!!

I’m a little burned out on politics at the moment, so I’m going to focus other kinds of news. I’ve got some nature stories and a few other odds and ends.

The photo above shows a rare baby white bison that was born in Connecticut last month.

[W]hen Bison No. 7 on Peter Fay’s farm gave birth to a white, 30-pound bull calf a month ago, it made the Fay farm below Mohawk Mountain, for the moment at least, the unlikely epicenter of the bison universe.

For Mr. Fay, what happened was an astoundingly unexpected oddity — white bison are so rare that each birth is viewed as akin to a historic event.

For Marian White Mouse of Wanblee, S.D., and other American Indians, it is a supremely auspicious message from the spirits. She will fly with her family to Connecticut for naming ceremonies at the end of the month that are expected to draw large crowds.

….

Mr. Fay said his Indian friends had told him that a white bison was considered the most sacred thing imaginable — its birth viewed as something like the Second Coming….Mrs. White Mouse, a member of the Oglala Lakota people, said a white bison was believed to be a manifestation of the White Buffalo Calf Maiden, or Ptesan Wi. She is revered as a prophet, who in a time of famine taught the Lakotas seven sacred rituals and gave them their most important symbol of worship, the sacred pipe.

“They are very rare, and when a white bison is born there is a reason for each one to be here,” Mrs. White Mouse said.

Only one in ten million bison are albinos. You can watch some videos of the baby bison here.

Two snow leopard moms and their cubs were located recently in Mongolia and were filmed for the first time ever.

Snow leopard dens are difficult to find because of the animals’ secretive, elusive nature and the difficult, mountainous terrain in which they live. Finding the dens is an important step in learning more about the reproductive behavior and the young of this endangered species.

“We have spent years trying to determine when and where snow leopards give birth, the size of their litters, and the chances a cub has of surviving into adulthood,” said Tom McCarthy, executive director of the snow leopard program at Panthera, a wild cat conservation organization….

The dens were discovered in Mongolia’s Tost Mountains, where locals refer to the creatures as “Asia’s Mountain Ghost.”

A team of scientists from Panthera and the Snow Leopard Trust entered the dens when the mothers were away hunting. They found that the first had two cubs and the second, one. All three cubs were weighed, measured and photographed and handled with extreme care, according to a Panthera release. Two were fixed with tiny microchip ID tags (about the size of a grain of rice) that were placed under their skin for future identification.

Here’s the video:

A little three-month-old kitten stowed away in a shipping container and traveled from Shanghai to Los Angeles, somehow surviving the trip without food or water.

The orange-and-white short-haired kitten traveled 6,500 miles before arriving Wednesday.

It was unclear how many days the kitten was in the container. The trip can take as long as 21 days, according to freighter-travel.com.

The stowaway was retrieved from the container at a Compton-area business where it was delivered.

Los Angeles County animal control officers are cautiously watching his health.

Poor little thing. I hope he survives and finds a home.

Next, a silly story involving a tree (including video): Devout see Virgin Mary in N.J. tree trunk, erect shrine around it

Some people walk past the tree in suburban New Jersey and see … well, a tree. Others walk past it and see what they say is a miracle — an image of the Virgin Mary in the trunk, which has become the centerpiece of a shrine rising on the hot pavement.

“It’s amazing,” Dile Marku, part of the throng surrounding the tree, told WABC, the local ABC affiliate, on Friday, after news of the wondrous piece of wood spread through the city of West New York. “I cannot explain because that’s God’s work, but I know how I feel and what I’ve seen people feeling here for three days. It’s amazing. It is amazing.”

The mayor of West New York, a city of about 49,000 people across the Hudson River from Midtown Manhattan, said he had received calls from around the world from people wanting to come and see the “miracle” for themselves. Mayor Felix Roque said the attention had led to a shrine so large that he wants to make it permanent, in hopes of drawing visitors to an avenue whose fast-food shops, nail salons and cellphone stores don’t scream “vacation spot.” ….

Locals say the image appeared this week after a man was killed in a car crash in the area. Eva Copantitla, who lives in West New York, was the first to notice the image and alerted the mayor, the Jersey Journal reported.

A California photojournalist was surprised when he found there was a hive containing 50,000 bees in his home. Instead of having them exterminated, he decided to find a bee expert to relocate them. There’s video at the link.

Larry Chen, 27, initially didn’t notice the bees. According to the hired beekeeper, the hive was an estimated six to eights months old.

However, one month ago, Chen began noticing bees buzzing in and out of his window, and he decided to investigate. According to Chen, the bees only came out during a 30-minute window in the day.
“I’m not really terrified of the bees… I just remained calm, and I figured they wouldn’t bother me too much… I got stung once, but I was more curious about how big the hive actually was. I figured it was just a small clump of 1,000 or so,” Chen said.

After his initial investigation, he spent a month on the road, traveling for work. When he returned, Chen found time to call a professional to assess the situation. He explained that he recently saw a documentary about the endangerment of bees, so he wanted to save—not exterminate—them.

He found a man on Craigslist, who goes by the name Mike Bee, who would safely remove the bees. He is a member of the rescue organization Backwards Beekeepers, a group that works with HoneyLove.org in order to educate the public about bees.

Read the rest to learn how the bees were relocated.

Attention gun and pop culture collectors: the guns used by Bonnie and Clyde during their infamous 1930s crime spree will be auctioned off in New Hampshire in September.

She kept a Colt .38-caliber revolver close, while he preferred a .45-caliber pistol from the same maker.

But neither weapon was enough to save American outlaws and lovers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow during a 1934 ambush by law enforcement officers.

After the duo was dead, authorities recovered the revolver Bonnie had secured to an inner thigh with white medical tape.

They also seized the handgun Clyde had tucked into his waistband.

Nearly 80 years later, those guns and other items connected to the infamous gangsters will be going up for auction in New Hampshire on Sept. 30. An auction official estimated Thursday that each Bonnie and Clyde weapon could bring between $100,000 and $200,000.

Also to be auctioned off are

a gold pocket watch Clyde was wearing when he died, and a cosmetics case Bonnie was using to carry lipstick, Coty face powder and a powder puff. The brown leatherette box was inside the Ford automobile the gangsters were riding in when a posse of lawmen riddled it with bullets on a Louisiana road.

Also in the auction is a letter that Clyde wrote to his brother L.C. Barrow on the back of a photo showing a house on a platform surrounded by water. He signed it “bud,” his code name when he was on the run.

On Tuesday at Comic-Con, Hyundai introduced the “zombie survival machine.”

Korean automaker Hyundai unveiled its latest model – the unlikely Elantra Coupe Zombie Survival Machine – at an unlikely venue Tuesday night, Comic-Con International 2012 in San Diego.

Built to withstand the rigors of the coming zombie apocalypse, it features such essential undead-eliminating armaments as a front-end spiked zombie plow, armored window coverings, a roof hatch that enables passengers to fend off attacking walkers, a trunk laden with electric and pneumatic weaponry, front and rear-mounted floodlights and spiked all-terrain/rally type tires.

The heavily customized version of the automaker’s new compact coupe was designed by creator/writer of The Walking Dead TV show and graphic novel series Robert Kirkman, and was fabricated by Design Craft Fabrication in Westminster, Calif.

Video at the link.

Finally, don’t forget that Sunday July 15 is National Ice Cream Day. MSNBC offers some suggestions of where to celebrate.

Those are my non-politics news selections. Feel free to discuss politics or anything else in the comments. What are you reading and blogging about today?