Weird Uncle Joe Biden showed up to campaign for Barack Obama in Florida today, and man, was he on top of his weird uncle game. "I'm being a good Biden today," he said.
How good? Well first, it being Florida and really sunny, Uncle Joe wore his signature aviators to speak at rallies—a perfect look for a Biden-licious day.
He also talked about running for office...four years from now. At an unscheduled stop in Sarasota at old-timey restaurant Station 400, Uncle Joe was feeling good, hugging "aging groupies," as Los Angeles Times' Michael A. Memoli observed. One woman, after snagging a photo with the VP, said she couldn't wait to share the photo with her Republican brother. But why wait? In warm Uncle Joe fashion, he said he'd call the brother up right now. So he did, and the brother got talking about health care, and Joe really wanted to get into it but those darn aids pulled him back. “Look, I’m not trying to talk you into voting for me, I just wanted to say hi to you,” Biden told the brother. “And after it's all over, when your insurance rates go down, then you’ll vote for me in 2016.”
He said "whole load," hehe. Uncle Joe has been super frustrated by Republican statements recently and just wants to let it all out. So of course, to illustrate this, he uses a metaphor that the kid's table would snicker at: "As they say in my business," he told a rally, "I'm going to give you the whole load today."
He made another inappropriate remark about Indians. Despite previous reprimands, Uncle Joe just can't stop being awkward with Indian people. There was that time he used an Indian accent when pretending to be a call center worker, and there was that other time he said you have to have an Indian accent to go to a 7-11 or Dunkin Donuts. That's not okay, Uncle Joe! But then on Wednesday, he came face-to-face with a real live Indian American, and he botched it again. From Buzzfeed's Zeke Miller:
Biden turned to the group of guys, then, according to the pool report, Biden asked one of them, “Are you Indian?”
“American!” the man responded.
He forgot where he is again. Uncle Joe never seems to remember where he is, like that one uncle who never remembers where you live now. He's always traveling, you know? And today in Florida, he did it again. When referencing the Cleveland Plain Dealer, he calls it "one of the major newspapers in this state." Cleveland, if you recall, is in Ohio.
Oh, don't worry, fumbling Uncle Joe: It'll all be over soon.
Mapping the bird kingdom to plot avian evolution. There are almost 10,000 different species of bird in existence today. So scientists led by Yale University's Walter Jetz had their work cut out for them when they set out to create a comprehensive family tree of every living type of bird. But they did it, finding that evolutionary diversification has sped up over the last 50 million years. That's an unexpected finding, says co-author Arne Mooers of Simon Fraser University in Canada. "The current zeitgeist in biodiversity science is that the world can fill up quickly," she says. "These species fill up all the available niches, and then there is nowhere to go. Extinction catches up, and things begin to slow down or stall. For birds the pattern is the opposite: Speciation is actually speeding up, not slowing down." [
