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It's Wednesday, September 3, 2014. From slate, it's the GIST of my Pasca. And now introduce

you to a news topic that takes you on a thrilling rollercoaster ride with every word I utter.

The Geckos, the Space Geckos, the Russian Space Geckos, the Russian Space Geckos involved in a study

of sexual habits? Or dead. Okay, kinda fell off a little bit at the end. But yeah, these

Russian Space Geckos who were invited to have sex and outer space, basically demanded that

they have sex and outer space, they froze to death. That's the top theory or perhaps they

questioned Putin's foreign policy. That's also a competing theory. But they are dead. There

were five of them possibly frozen. Although, of course, if you want to smear any one in Russia,

what you do is you say that they died from freezing. I mean, you go off the list of brave cosmonauts

and onto the list of the shamefully weak in the eyes of any Russian if you freeze. So that

would play into maybe Putin wanted to smear them and have them killed. Anyway, I've got really not

a lot to go on there. What I do know is that the landing apparatus of the photon M satellite returned

to Earth as planned today. It fell into a region of Russia, but the entire crew of Geckos was dead.

I for one suspect fell play. So you had five Geckos, right? So there was one odd Gecko out in this

...