The Spiderbite Song ... is Wrong?

I happened upon a question at The Straight Dope (a terrific resource, by the way -- everyone should read it religiously) about spider bites. Knowing nothing whatsoever about spider bites or their results, and inhabiting a home with at least 6 varieties of spiders (none of which I can name; I simply describe them by what they look like to me: "little yellowish spider on the wall of the basement stairs," "small round black spider that sits in the center of it's web in the laundry room," etc.), I was interested. Was I, perhaps, in danger of being harmed by a spider bite?

Apparently not. According to Rick Vetter at the University of California - Riverside Department of Entomology, the vast majority of "spider bites" resulting in necrotic wounds are misdiagnoses, and are more frequently caused by bacterial infections and the like.

So, although one of my favorite songs from the Flaming Lips' album The Soft Bulletin is The Spiderbite Song, what almost caused the breakup of the band probably wasn't a spider bite at all.

A great idea that will never be adopted

The tyranny of the QWERTY keyboard is a relic of the mechanical shortcomings of the 19th century, when it was invented to slow down typists so that typewriter keys wouldn't collide and jam. Now, following in a long tradition of attempting to improve keyboard layouts -- the result of which has been almost zero adoption -- an electrical engineer named John Parkinson is introducing a new keyboard that puts the first half of the alphabet on the left side of the keyboard and the second half on the right side, separated by directional and punctuation keys (picture here). It will be demonstrated at the February 2006 Consumer Electronics show. Retail price is expected to be $70.

Of course, the first barrier to entry here for me is prying $70 out of my cheap little fingers. Then there is the time-cost of getting comfortable with a new keyboard layout. Two major barriers that likely will spell doom for yet another potential efficiency improvement in my life ...