“It’s one of our average-to-smaller mazes,” said Brett Herbst, who counts that maze among the 2,000 he has designed in the past 16 years. A typical visitor should expect to complete it in about 20 minutes, he said.

Still, a local family had to be retrieved by the police on Monday when they were unable to find the exit to Mr. Connor’s maze before the sun set. The parents, toting an infant and a small child, panicked and called 911, setting off a chain of events that soon turned them into a target for late-night jabs from television hosts like Jay Leno and Chelsea Handler. (The punch line, Mr. Connor said, was that the family was about 25 feet from the exit when they called for help.)…

“It’s not like 100-acre field out there,” he said. “Just cut through the corn.”

– Douglas Quenqua, N.Y. Times.

I don’t know what Leno or Handler went with, but I’d go with this:

You called 911 to rescue you from a corn maze.

You called 911 to rescue you from a corn maze.

You called 911 to rescue you from a corn maze.

It’s like that movie Open Water, except instead of getting stranded in shark-infested waters miles from shore, you called 911 to rescue you from a corn maze.

Incidentally, this is an aerial view of the 2009 version of Mr. Connors’ maze:

Do you like TedQuarters? Make it official on Facebook.

I’ve taken the RSS feed off the TedQuarters Facebook page. Some people thought it annoying and I’m not convinced it was sending a lot of traffic to this site. Instead I’ll link a couple posts a day there and include some other to-be-determined Easter eggs that exist only on Facebook.

Chinese scientists have reportedly cloned six piglets from a pig that survived the devastating 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province. The piglets’ DNA is identical to that of their father, Zhu Jiangqiang, or “Strong-Willed Pig,” who is something of a national celebrity in China….

Zhu was hailed as a hero after the magnitude 8 earthquake in May 2008, which claimed tens of thousands of human lives and left millions more homeless. The 330-pound hardy hog was trapped beneath rubble for 36 days, but survived by drinking rainwater and chewing charcoal, the AFP reported.

– Rebecca Boyle, PopSci.com.

You know what happens next right? One of these pigs survives another disaster, then someone clones that pig. Then one of those clones survives yet another disaster, and someone clones that pig, and so on until someone produces a pig clone so hearty and cunning that it learns how to clone itself and suddenly it’s the pigs serving us on a platter with apples in our mouths.

A 37-year-old Ronkonkoma woman was so afraid of terrorist activity on a flight her son and mother were taking on Sept. 10 that she called in a bomb threat. Yikes.

More than 50 new alien planets — including one so-called super-Earth that could potentially support life — have been discovered by an exoplanet-hunting telescope from the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

The newfound haul of alien planets includes 16 super-Earths, which are potentially rocky worlds that are more massive than our planet. One in particular – called HD 85512 b – has captured astronomers’ attention because it orbits at the edge of its star’s habitable zone, suggesting conditions could be ripe to support life.

– Denise Chow, Space.com.

Well that’s exciting. And hey, it’s only 35 light years away! That means if we ever figure out a way to travel at the speed of light, which we won’t, we can put a bunch of babies on a space ship and they can go check it out and report back when they’re old. Provided the space ship that travels at the speed of light also can sustain human life for 70 years, of course.

I was driving north on the Sprain Brook Parkway on Saturday, looking at the pavement and the mild automobile congestion and the roadkill and the trees looming over the highway, when I decided there must be other life somewhere in our universe.

How arrogant are we to ever think otherwise? There are about 400 billion other stars in our galaxy, and maybe 400 billion other galaxies with that many stars. One recent estimate suggests there are 300 sextillion stars in the universe. That’s 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

And you want to tell me this here, that Ford Explorer speeding over the remains of what was probably a raccoon, is the best the universe can offer? I don’t buy it.