Yahoo answers questions. Sometimes.

The folks at Yahoo! have a feature they call Yahoo Answers! Go there, post a question and wait for folks to give you an answer. They leave the questions up for a few days, so you might get a lot of answers. Then again, you might get none.

One of today's questions: "What are the necessary steps to safely sedate and approach a hedgehog in order to weigh and chip him?"

Sure got my attention. There's a TV commercial running now that features a hedgehog. (inspired by the gecko maybe?) Cute little critter. Some folks have them as pets. My insatiable curiosity (no, not the Mars rover) and inquiring mind were both entering Hyperdrive (a sci-fi scientific term). Why would someone want to sedate the little thing (nice to know he wanted to do it safely. especially with PETA spies scouring the innernetz) and just what the hell does he mean by chipping him (or her. he didn't say). The only kind of chipped animal meat I know of has to do with a ghastly dish prepared by military cooks. (it's also referred to as something else on toast, but this site is rated PG13 so I refrain)

A hedgehog. Female, I think.

First answer out of the box: "I assume you're trolling, shooting hedgehogs with a tranquillizer gun is just stupid." For the non-regular innernetz folks, the term "trolling" has nothing to do with fishing and is not complimentary. It means deliberately and cleverly (sometimes) posting something on the innernetz that is dumb, irritating to most readers and/or just tics off folks. (the troll's intent)

To which the inquirer replied:  "I am working on hedgehog research, not fish. I thought that I was abundantly clear about that Sir. Trolling for hedgehogs, really now. That is just silly, those sharp teeth will gnaw through any net, unless you can afford a titanium one. I don't have that much funding for my research." Take that, troll!

But wait... The retort gained nothing in the way of knowledge. For him or me. I still don't know what/how/why he wants to chip the object of his research. The answers he did get, though, were funny.