A Thursday Cornucopia

All the random stuff that's too short for a blog post and/or I forgot to tweet about:

• A few years back, I had a weird discussion with a friend about the offbeat idea (discovered at Dave Barry's Blog) of a car engine that runs on urine (a resource that's pretty hard to deplete, right?). Now some university researchers in Ohio have gotten pretty close to that concept.


• An elephant at a safari park in England has learned to play the harmonica (video here).


• A Florida man who was arrested for downloading kiddie porn has an unusual alibi: He blames it on his cat. (If that were true, the cat was obviously looking for "kitty porn" and clicked the wrong link.)


• An award-winning English sheep breeder decided to get married in a wedding dress made of wool from her own flock.


• PETA is at it again: Now the group is referring to fish as "sea kittens" on its website, evidently in an effort to make them sound cute and cuddly and repel people from eating them.


• A St. Louis-area Burger King is apologizing after a woman was booted from the store because her kid came in there barefoot. The only problem was that the kid in question was six months old.


• And finally, hot on the heels of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Opera House will stage an opera whose libretto is being composed on Twitter. (Maybe they can call it Cosi fan tweetie.)

It's still a busy week; I'll try to have more up tomorrow.