"Monotremes are really weird. Everything about them seems to have been thought up past some kind of deadline. Take the method by which they reproduce: after mating, the female lays an egg (echidna) or two (platypus). Then she carries them around until they hatch. Monotremes are mammalian, even if what they have is a kind of free demo version of mammalianism without the really useful features like live birth, so they lactate. But they have no nipples. The milk just leaks right out of glands in their skin, and the baby monotreme laps it up with sweeps of its tiny bill."
NEWS : "The 40-year-old Mr. Everett was raised in McLean, Va., with his sister Elizabeth, mother Nancy and father Hugh Everett III, a quantum physicist who in 1957 proposed a formal theory of parallel universes known as 'The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.' 'Everett's work has boggled minds inside and outside physics for more than four decades,' reported Scientific American in last month's issue.
Mr. Everett said his brilliant father wasn't communicative at home. When I asked him what the conversation was like around the breakfast table, he replied, 'There wasn't any.'
'Physicists and geniuses don't always make great family men. I lived with him for 18 years and I learned more about him from the Internet.'
Mr. Everett's family was a heartrending source of inspiration for his most notable work, the 1998 album 'Electro-Shock Blues' (DreamWorks), written after his sister committed suicide and h...
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