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Does anyone else find this as funny as I do? It was on the page with a story about the tsunami on Indystar.com.

Okay, I know everyone laughed in Napoleon Dynamite when he said his favorite animal was a liger, a cross between a lion and a tiger. Well, laugh no more. Ligers are apparently very real. Wikipedia (an online, user-created encyclopedia) has an entry about them, and here is what it says:

Liger

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The liger is a cross between a male lion and a female tiger. It looks like a giant lion, with diffused tiger stripes. Like tigers (and unlike lions), ligers like swimming.

Ligers exist due to human influence. In natural conditions tigers and lions do not inhabit the same territory so do not have the opportunity to form such a species cross. (Lions and tigers coexist in the wild today only in the Gir forest of India although their respective ranges used to intersect in Persia, China and perhaps also Beringia.) Lions and tigers also do not usually want to mate with each other.

Ligers grow much larger than tigers or lions. This is because female lions and male tigers transmit a growth-inhibiting gene to their descendants. Being the offspring of a male lion and female tiger, the liger does not have the growth-inhibiting gene and grows much more. They will grow constantly through their lifespan until their bodies cannot sustain their size anymore.

The liger featured in the photograph is called Hobbs and lives at Sierra Safari Zoo. He is the offspring of an African lion and a Bengal tigress. The staff say, “He roars like a lion and swims like a tiger. He’s definitely all cat. He likes to play, and for all his incredible bulk he moves just as silently as any other cat.” He is estimated to weigh about 450 kilograms, about twice the average for male Siberian tigers, the largest non-extinct naturally occurring member of family Felidae.

Most ligers are sterile; however, a few births have been recorded.

A cross between a male tiger and female lion is called a tigon.

Please note that it doesn’t make any mention about them being “bred for their skills in magic.” I found this picture of a 13 yr. old, 900 lb. liger in a Russian circus. I can see why they’d “pretty much” be Napoleon’s favorite animal.

I got the quote below from this site, which has snippets of chat logs that people have submitted. There’s some funny crap on there. Anywho, here’s just one of the Top 100.

A woman has a close male friend. This means that he is probably interested in her, which is why he hangs around so much. She sees him strictly as a friend. This always starts out with, you’re a great guy, but I don’t like you in that way. This is roughly the equivalent for the guy of going to a job interview and the company saying, You have a great resume, you have all the qualifications we are looking for, but we’re not going to hire you. We will, however, use your resume as the basis for comparison for all other applicants. But, we’re going to hire somebody who is far less qualified and is probably an alcoholic. And if he doesn’t work out, we’ll hire somebody else, but still not you. In fact, we will never hire you. But we will call you from time to time to complain about the person that we hired.