"Scientists discover world's oldest clam, killing it in the process."

The clam was 507 years old, and the scientists were screwing around with it in their effort to research climate change — because old clams are (as the Christian Science Monitor puts it) "palimpsests of climate change."

[T]he lines on its shell to estimate its age, much as alternating bands of light and dark in a fish’s ear-bones are used to tell how old the animal is."

The clam "born in 1499." (Are clams born?)

This is the same year that the English hanged a Flemish man, Perkin Warbeck, for (doing a bad job of) pretending to be the lost son of King Edward IV and the heir to the British throne. It’s also the same year that Switzerland became its own state, the French King Louis XII got married, and Diane de Poitiers, future mistress to another French king, Henry II, was born.

It's not like the clam could reminisce about such things. What could the clam say? What's one century or the next to a clam? It's one eternal moment down there. Is it not? Do you revere a clam because it is 500 years old? Does it have a greater clam to continued life than all the little clams in the last bowl of chowder you gulped?

Oh, but those are not little clams in your chowder. Those are cut up large clams, often ocean quahogs like that Oldest Clam in the World, and probably often over a century old.

ADDED: I see I wrote "Does it have a greater clam to continued life." For years, I've had an uncanny tendency to write "clam" for "claim." Taking notes in law school, I used to sometimes need to stifle a laugh. But I don't think I ever wrote "clam" for "claim" while writing about clams. The claims of clams.

What does that clam claim?

Mary Burke's job-creation claim rated "Half True."

By the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's fact-checker.

The numerical part of the claim is on target -- Burke’s tenure was pre-recession and despite gains Wisconsin has not yet rebounded to 2007 levels. But Burke overstates the credit that she and Doyle deserve for the 2007 figure, and skips past the recession that helps explain the statistical truth.

Burke, the Democratic challenger to Scott Walker in the 2014 Wisconsin gubernatorial race, was Commerce Secretary under Doyle, the Democratic Governor who was in office until January 2011. Since Burke left in the end of 2007, she's able to make statement about her time in office that distract us from from the fact that there were 3 more years of Doyle, and the bad numbers in those years can't be pinned on Walker.

ADDED:  Typo in the headline corrected. I apologize for creating the false hope that there could be something called a "job-creation clam."