Pictures from Across the Way
This seal, which forms an acrostic of V I T R I O L, would have been useful back when I blogged under that other old alias of mine.
A Bird for YDG
I don’t know why but when I heard what these birds were called I immediately thought of Jackie Sue…
Go on… click the picture. I dare you to try to read the article without snickering at least once.
A More Majestic Infirmity is Needed
Swine flu. What an unfortunate name. Why, it’s downright misanthropic in application! If I ever contract swine flu, I don’t think I’d be able to live it down. It’s not just the name–if that were the case, then I’d still be smarting from that bout of chicken pox I had a few years ago. It’s the fact that it really is a porcine disease that usually doesn’t affect humans, but now all of a sudden, has decided to give Homo sapiens a test run.
All this talk about the swine flu has made me wonder–where are all the majestic-sounding illnesses? Why are we stuck with swine flu and chicken pox and bird flu and monkey pox? What we need is a dashing infection, an animal-based ailment that people would actually be proud to catch! Here are some suggestions.
-. Liongitis
-. Bear palsy
-. Cobra pox
-. Wolverickets
-. Scorpion fever
-. Albatrossoriasis
-. Dingo dengue
-. Hellbender hemorrhoids
Perhaps one day, one of these bugs or conditions will plague our species. Then, at the very least, we will die with some awesome-sounding problem.
The Miscellany
Things out of context.
Simian Sophistication
Who says monkies ain’t got no class?!
The original title of this post was “Obviously Not Relatives of Travis, The Face-Ripping, Hand-Amputating Chimpanzee”.
Hiatus
Be back soon
For now, have some pandas vomiting rainbows
This Bizarre Cranial Wiring Must Extend Even Into My Subconscious
So I’d dreamed all night about sitting in on various lectures about economic theory. I had split my time between a lecture that was offered by Milton Friedman and one that was offered by Mister T. This was surprisingly plausible in my mind, because I could tell T was simply reading straight from the textbook and using the canned PowerPoint presentation that came with the teaching materials.
After having spent all night dreaming about this, I found myself sitting in a small meeting room with three or four of my Indian colleagues. I was intensely curious about elephant poop paper, the physics of which I still wasn’t too sure about. Did the elephant’s digestion transform the cellulose into a substance not unlike the wood pulp used at paper mills? What color was this unusual paper? Was it grainy? Did it have visible variations in color?
Of course, all these thoughts crossed my mind but were not uttered to my coworkers. After one of them acknowledged that he used the paper, the question that immediately came to mind (and which I asked him) was: if you are printing on elephant poop paper and it gets stuck in the printer, do you have to use a plunger?
The room erupted into laughter, and I woke up.
The Old Popularity Index
