TORONTO (Reuters) - A Canadian province will shut its 24-hour suicide hotline and replace it with one that operates only during business hours.

Prince Edward Island, a small province on Canada's East Coast, says it is too expensive to operate the hotline around the clock. Starting June 1, it will be open only between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., Monday through Friday.

The plan drew protest from mental health groups across the country on Wednesday.

"How many times, when you get upset or worried or concerned about things, is it in the middle of the day? It's usually at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning when you wake up," said Joan Wright, executive director of the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention based in Edmonton, Alberta.

If you were a fan of Law and Order, then you'll remember all the great one-liners from the late Jerry Orbach. Well, someone has collected many of them on this page and that page. Rest in peace, Lennie.

Lab technician (trying to establish the age of a skeleton): "Once we get the chemical analysis, we can narrow it down."

Lennie: "Great. When you get an answer, give me a call at the retirement home."

Ian Urbina recently wrote a New York Times article about how Americans exact revenge on telemarketers, bad drivers, and loud cell phone users. Below is an excerpt, about how Mr. Wesley Williams began sending junk mail back to companies, and how he added extra weight to the packages, so the companies would have to pay more postage.

Anyways, the writer, Urbina, is looking for more of life's annoyances and small revenges. Scroll down to the bottom of Cockeyed.com's article to find out how to submit your story or suggestion.

Wesley A. Williams spent more than a year exacting his revenge against junk mailers. When signing up for a no-junk-mail list failed to stem the flow, he resorted to writing at the top of each unwanted item: ''Not at this address. Return to sender.'' But the mail kept coming because the envelopes had ''or current resident'' on them, obligating mail carriers to deliver it, he said.

Next, he began stuffing the mail back into the ''business reply'' envelope and sending it back so that the mailer would have to pay the postage. ''That wasn't exacting a heavy enough cost from them for bothering me,'' said Mr. Williams, 35, a middle school science teacher who lives in Melrose, N.Y., near Albany.

After checking with a postal clerk about the legality of stepping up his
efforts, he began cutting up magazines, heavy bond paper, and small strips of sheet metal and stuffing them into the business reply envelopes that came with the junk packages.

''You wouldn't believe how heavy I got some of these envelopes to weigh,'' said Mr. Williams, who added that he saw an immediate drop in the amount of arriving junk mail. A spokesman for the United States Postal Service, Gerald McKiernan, said that Mr. Williams's actions sounded legal, as long as the envelope was properly sealed.

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Annoyances, Take Two

And if you're looking to annoy people, you can go to GetAnnoyed.com. I don't know if these work on monkeys, but some suggestions include:

I posted a gif file last week of Will Ferrell playing the cowbell, and man, I've gotten more emails, conversation, and suggested links out of that one tiny post than all the other posts combined.

For those of you who don't know the Will Ferrell/Christopher Walken Saturday Night Live spoof of VH1's Behind the Music, then 1. What rock have you been living under? and 2. You can see it here. And here. And here. It's well worth your time. There is even a transcript of the skit online, though it doesn't do the performance justice without Walken's delivery and Ferrell's physical comedy.

But that's just the start...

Lead singer Donlad Roeser breaks into a laugh. "That's a total fiction," he says. "They made up that character." And he adds: "We all thought it was phenomenal. We're huge Christopher Walken fans. I've probably seen it 20 times and I'm still not tired of it."

It's the cymbal's evil third cousin. It's the dark ring that pounds in the back of your brain and lets you know, it's time to rock. The cowbell is an instrument that can't be overused. It should never be underused. Many great rock and roll songs are perfect because the cowbell is used just right.

Here you'll find some of the top cowbell songs ever. These are the songs that took this dark, clanging demon and pounded the essence of rock into your veins and left imprints of the dark master in your subconscious. Click on the track and you'll hear why the cowbell, when used properly, is the perfect instrument."

Eggers Interview

A great Salon.com interview with Dave Eggers about his books, his publishing projects, and 826 Valencia.

The Exploratorium, a science museum in the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, ran a cool exhibit a few years back. They had people write in and describe their first memories. These varied, from watching african violets in the rain, to eating rat poison, to recognizing a mother, to getting trampled by a herd of sheep. Anyways, the exhibit is no longer accepting memories, but all the past memories are posted on the site. There are hundreds of them. Check it out. And the rest of the Exploratorium's site.

(And yes, that's a picture of a child eating a dog's bowl of food. Love the expression on the dog's face.)

Christine Texiera is a frequent reader of the Daily Pick. Since her Layercake Project is down for the time being, perhaps she and others of you fluent in Photoshop would like to surf over to Exquisite Crops, (Yes, that's crops, not corpse, though sometimes it seems to be corpse), a project developed by Charles Platt. Basically four contributors will add to the same canvas. And together you'll create some really weird/cool/new/collaborative art. Similar (and thus the name) to the 1920's surrealist method of creating literature through blind collaboration.

For a detailed explanation from Charles Platt, go to Boing, Boing. For the actual site, go to anexquisitecorpse.net

Happy photoshopping.

Anyways, this may give you an idea of the kind of work we get done in my class. We had a good laugh about all this, and the rest of us thought these four or five students were out of their minds.

Well, turns out: It's all true. And then some. The monkey's brain has adapted to the point where it acts as if the robot arm is actually an appendage and not just an external device. Check it out at the Duke University Medical Center.

And I'd like to point out (obviously) that most groundbreaking advances in science, literature, and art originate in North Carolina.

Thanks to Paul Czarapata, of Collectively, On a Whole for more cowbell.

This is Pat Fletcher, and those aren't sunglasses. Pat is blind, and she's an amateur scientist. Those are "hearing" glasses she's wearing.

"For the past few years, she's been experimenting with a revolutionary new technology that allows her to see through sound. Using a simple computer program that she downloaded from the Internet, called "The vOICe", which translates visual images into soundscapes, Pat's brain is able to translate those sounds back into images."

Thanks to this link from CBC Radio One.

The Stephen Cohen Gallery in L.A. has a great online gallery of past photography exhibits. Click on any of the artists on the left side of the archive page.

I really like this article. It explores, among other things, the importance of adding new members to successful teams, in order to keep them successful.

"Northwestern University researchers discovered that the composition of a great team is the same whether you are working on Broadway or in economics.

The researchers studied data on Broadway musicals since 1877 as well as thousands of journal publications in four fields of science and found that successful teams had a diverse membership -- not of race and gender but of old blood and new. New team members clearly added creative spark and critical links to the experience of the entire industry. Unsuccessful teams were isolated from each other whereas the members of successful teams were interconnected, much like the Kevin Bacon game, across a giant cluster of artists or scientists."

This site begins "Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe..." and it continues on to list the top ten ways to destroy the earth. Options include "Blown up by matter/anti-matter reaction," "Destroyed by vaccum energy detonation," and the ever-popular "Sucked in to a giant black hole." Thanks for the post, Sam's archive.

And thanks to Clive Thompson's terrific blog, Collision Detection, of which you'll see more of on here soon.

I can't find this person's name, but he/she has collected over a hundred photographs of Elvis impersonators. Rock on.

Progressive Boink has listed his 25 most favorite Sesame Street episodes. With pics and recaps.

Hey, it's my sister's birthday. Happy Birthday, Kerri!!

I bet Kerri will get a laugh out of this dude named Longmire, who has taken old Halequin-like Romance Novel Covers, and re-titled them with phrases like "The Legend of the Totally Lost Mountie" and "I Married a Sissy-Boy."

Forwarded from Stephen Elliott. This really is hilarious.