Hundreds of icebergs heading towards Australia!

From JenK and Treehugger.com:

Ships passing through the southern Pacific Ocean have been issued a warming: beware of hundreds of massive icebergs. Seems that they've broken off of an Antarctic ice floe and are now drifting towards New Zealand.

Scientists have counted over 100 icebergs drifting north to New Zealand. It's a rare event--according to the BBC, the last time such a huge flotilla was amassed was in 2006. Before that, the last record incident of this magnitude was in 1931. Quick, who wants to guess what might be responsible?

There's no major cause for concern, since the waters in which the icebergs are flowing in aren't a major shipping lane, and few boats tread there. And though they're en route to New Zealand, it's doubtful that they'll make it all the way. But they would be a sight to see--some of them have been determined to be over 30 ft high and 650 ft long. Even so, as the BBC reports, "scientists have said they believe these segments will break up long before reaching the New Zealand coastline."

Texas accidentally bans straight marriage.

From Newser:

The geniuses who wrote Texas’ gay marriage ban may have accidentally banned all marriage in the state, according to one Houston lawyer. Subsection B of the ban, a constitutional amendment ratified in 2005, states, “This state…may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.” The intent was to prevent even civil unions for gay couples—but it doesn’t actually specify the “gay” part.

The wording essentially “eliminates marriage in Texas,” Barbara Ann Radnofsky, the Democratic candidate for state attorney general tells the McClatchy Papers. “You do not have to have a fancy law degree to read this and understand what it plainly says.” Conservatives scoffed at Radnofsky’s tactics. “It’s a silly argument,” said the head of an organization that helped draft the amendment. A lawsuit based on it would have “about one chance in a trillion” of succeeding.

Japanese man weds video game character.

Just stay away from Rikku, buddy. She's mine. From Boing Boing:

On Sunday, a man named Sal9000 married the love of his life. Her name is Nene Anegasaki, and she lives inside of a Nintendo DS video game called Love Plus. The wedding took place during a Make: Japan meet-up held at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. In attendance were a live audience, an MC, the bride's virtual video game girlfriend — who made a speech — and a real human priest.

Hospital sign has secret meaning.

From Queens Crap:

It shined briefly as a strange beacon of commiseration: the hospital sign that declared in large neon lights something that looks a lot like, “I’m hurt.”

Now the Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, where the sign marks the entrance to the emergency room, has decided to cut power to the sign until it is repaired, probably next week, a hospital spokesman said.

“It’s too much attention that wasn’t intended and is not needed,” said Dario Centorcelli, the spokesman. “It will be fixed.’

The strange message was the result of the neon bulbs in two letters in the hospital name burning out — the “E” and “S” — prompting passers-by to find hidden meaning in the surviving text “lmhur t.”