This just in from the Deep South: File under daring rescue #867. An Australian chef suffered serious injuries while riding on a quad. (Clearly his occupation was unrelated except in the news to his accident?) So the erstwhile pilots of the 109th Airlift Wing of the New York Air National Guard swooped in to rescue. Among the many, many concerns: airstrip fashioned on seasonal (ie, melts each year) ice, and a runway so slick they kept wheel on rather than skis. Australia's Davis station is in a relatively remote part of Antarctica, 2600 miles south of Perth at about 68 degrees of latitude. Both of the "true" Antarctic penguins -- they breed on the Antarctic continent -- live around Davis Station. And both posed another tricky problem, according to Captain David LaFrance: They don't tend to move fast enough when planes are landing, which is bad news for both the penguins -- and the humans in the plane. So this rescue, done during a lull in gale force winds, (and without which the man in question would have died), required penguin herders to keep the ice clear. And sometimes people ask me why I think of Antarctica every day. Sigh. If you want to hear me obsess about Antarctica and are not in close proximity to any of scheduled readings (see events), you can catch me on Sedge Thomson's show West Coast Live! on December 13 at 10 a.m. -- they load the shows on the Internet. So we'll post a link here when it comes available.