By far the hardest thing about being out of the country for so long is that I don’t have my critters romping around anymore. This can be a good thing, because it means I don’t get headbutted awake every morning to toss stupid toys around. It’s also a horrible thing, because it means I don’t get headbutted awake every morning to toss stupid toys around.

I’ve posted before about missing my pets, but tonight the longing is especially grave. I found a sweet GIF that shows why animals are so great. And also why they should be trained: to hone their skills in annihilation.

This experience for me was particularly moving because it combined the nostalgia of a looping-GIF with the timeless classicism of a little kid getting rocked.

The comments on the Digg page for it are actually funny enough to warrant reposting here.

• Stay down kid. Just stay down.
• Flawless victory.
• Dogs doing things to kids is sort of old, we see this shit on t.v. We need something more eventful and new like Kids and Badgers.
• Well that’s what you get for fucking around in the water kid.
• What the hell is the damn kid doing running around in a swamp in the first place?

That’s about everything that could ever be said about this gleefully looping slice of life. Oh, how I envy the historians of the future.

In case you didn’t laugh hard enough, please watch the same thing in reverse.

All is right with the world.

Maybe the entire internet has already been informed of this particular LOL-macro and I’m yet again behind the times. But I thought it was post-worthy (what isn’t these days?).

It works on so many levels. Check out a brief post on LOLinanimateobjects and of course LOLTHULHU.

I say this a lot, but in general I consider myself a rather chill individual. That said, I relish flipping out, particularly the kind that entails maintaining composure while cutting people down verbally. It’s a kind of social interaction many people don’t know how to handle, as it seems calm, yet feels very aggressive.

Today, while poking through my feeds, I found this little gem.

Some people really do have the threshold on their appallingness meter set to the wrong value, don’t they? If we are going to use up the word “appalling” on a minute variation in orthographic conventions, what kind of adjective will be left to describe the taste of fermented soy beans in methylated spirits, or the sound of a cat being electrocuted during a child’s violin lesson?

The context was the “appalling” practice of capitalizing the first letter after a colon. It’s comforting to know that some people still respect the art of sound appallingness meter calibration.

I’ll refrain from stating whose calibration I find sound.

Fortunately, for every noble, dashingly stupid soul that bites the dust, there’s at least one more to take its place. Behold Dr. Brady Barr, wearing his croc-suit.

The Telegraph has an interesting, if utterly predictable, article up about this peculiar gentlemen.

“If the suit is too small, larger male crocs may see me as an aggressor and attack me. But if too big, I may scare off smaller crocs. So I want to look like an average sized croc - about four metres long.”

Barr then crawled on all fours towards the den, while enduring scorchingly high temperatures of up 60°C, the threat of being rumbled by the crocs and also the danger of attack by a family of neighbouring hippos.

On his lonely, exposed route to the river, Barr’s weird appearance attracted the curiosity of a herd of hippos.

“This may be just too dangerous,” he says as a hippo and her calf take an interest in him - but they turn away.

“That could have been a very hairy situation,” he says. “And that was before I’d even seen a croc.”

Oh, look at that! The man is batshit insane. If you ask me, designing a “croc-suit” should be grounds for having your PhD taken away.

To Dr. Barr I send my most steadfast salutation: “I wish you no hippos, and crocodiles of the number and dimensions you specify.”

Perhaps this treatise will be more familiar to you than it was to me. I tend to stick to the regular watering holes of my RSS feeds when I surf, and so I often miss the goings-on in the internet wilderness. No doubt this meme is already well propogated.

Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To this end, I hold M&M duels.

Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them cracks and splinters. That is the “loser,” and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round.

I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theater of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world.

Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.

When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest of the herd. Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to M&M Mars, A Division of Mars, Inc., Hackettstown, NJ 17840-1503 U.S.A., along with a 3×5 card reading, “Please use this M&M for breeding purposes.”

This week they wrote back to thank me, and sent me a coupon for a free 1/2 pound bag of plain M&Ms. I consider this “grant money.” I have set aside the weekend for a grand tournament. From a field of hundreds, we will discover the True Champion.

There can be only one.

I’m really glad someone took the time to compose that epic. I genuinely think the world is a better place for it.

I was raised in a house with scads of animals of all kinds. We had dogs, cats, birds, reptiles, even owned horses. So I like animals. Maybe that’s why I love the Planet Earth series, but it could just as well be the sexy, ultra-long-range HD cameras they use. But I have to say, this video really gets to the heart of what I find great about the series.

So eloquently rendered.

Found an interesting series of pictures today in a Digg submission. Each is a shot of an individual getting arrested, whether of a booking, accosting, or a true mugshot. I applaud these gentlemen.

Source article

No source, unfortunately I just have the direct image link.

Source article (that’s paint, not puke)

I hope you enjoyed these as much as I obviously did.

I’m fixing a friend’s laptop that was down for the count last week. I’d fixed it before, and now it’s “dead” again after only maybe a month. It appears the hard drive is failing, but I ran fsck and the filesystem is now at least breathing again, if coughing, too.

I’m also doing maintenance on my own machine, so it’s really convenient to have a second one on my desk. (Nothing like two screens to make me miss home.) This way I can still surf and chat while I mess around with low-level settings on my box. It’s great.

As I’m working today, I get an IM from Will. He and I have our IM clients configured to automatically exchange digital fingerprints and encrypt our conversations. He of course didn’t know I wasn’t on my normal machine, so he IMs me and I get hit with about three paragraphs of ciphered text. I laugh and tell him (unencrypted) to hang on while I install the encryption package on this machine.

Here’s the terminal output from that effort:

conor@roslaptop:~$ sudo apt-get install pidgin-otr
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libotr2
Suggested packages:
libotr2-bin
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libotr2 pidgin-otr
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 93.5kB of archives.
After unpacking 324kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!
libotr2 pidgin-otr
Install these packages without verification [y/N]?

I’m sorry, but I find it absolutely hilarious that a digital verification package meant for encryption and online security fails an authentication check itself.

I know it’s just a temporary glitch in the repository, or even something weird I’m doing with my network here, but I thought it was a blast. I love how the recommended choice for proceeding was no (capital N).

I’ve met more Australian people in my time in Germany than makes sense. I mean, I didn’t know there were this many of them. But I guess if I lived on a dumpy prison island and spoke in a bizarrely obnoxious dialect that made everyone around me suspect I’d recently been quite near a loud explosion, I’d try to travel a lot, too.

I’ve never met an Australian who even made an attempt to speak German, let alone the Queen’s English. They drink the low-grade tourist beer, get trashed, say “Let’s gut pusst, moit!” a lot, and are all around intolerable. I wonder what they’re running from back home.

Oh, I know. It must be the coffee made from feces. Nothing less could make Hofbräu seem appealing, I’ll tell you that much.

Kopi Luwak, made in neighboring Indonesia from coffee beans excreted by native civet cats, is reputedly the world’s rarest and most expensive coffee, painstakingly extracted by hand from the animals’ forest droppings.

When roasted, the resulting beans sell for around $1,000 a kilogram ($450 a pound) and brew into a earthy, syrupy, coffee acknowledged by connoisseurs as one of the world’s finest.

I just hate Aussies so much.

I’ve been told that I value logic very highly, and also that I’m a huge jerkface pathological debater and I argue vehemently regardless of what my stance on any given topic really is. I’m an ENTP, so this is to be expected. But seriously, man, I own people at arguing.

Thus I experience a sense of awe each and every time I bear witness to an instance of ownage wrought by someone who isn’t me. A swift and clean reverence rushes through me, whipping and winding out of my cynical, sardonic heart, and I’m left to contemplate the eternal mystery: what is it like to feel stupid? Some of us may never know.

Today, though, I’d like to bestow upon you all the means to call down the wrath of the gods of mock and scorn upon the heads of your foes. Behold.

There isn’t too much to say to that. You just kind of sit there feeling stupid, going, “But that doesn’t—damn, a windmill. In a beard.” You’ll say it to yourself over and over. You might try to convince yourself it’s CGI. But does that really matter? Because you can’t CGI yourself into countering that cunning logical tactic.

Ten thousand thanks to J for e-mailing this, saying, “This made me think of you immediately.” Obviously Jordan understands Bavarian culture to the T.

Picture taken from FOHG pic repository.

I was innocently surfing tonight when I was all too suddenly broadsided by a careening semitrailer of technological illiteracy.

03:13:48 Unknown_Player(1): if i stick songs on itunes from a cd, do those songs take up a lot more space than an mp3
03:14:07 I: that’s what an mp3 is
03:14:14 I: a song that was on a cd and was then moved to a computer
03:14:36 Unknown_Player(1): i thought you had to convert them or something
03:14:59 I: that’s also what an mp3 is, it’s a converted file of audio, usually extracted from an audio cd
03:15:16 Unknown_Player(1): oh, ok
03:15:24 Unknown_Player(1): my bad.
03:15:45 I: the reason people encode (convert) their audio is because a CD can store around 700MB of data, but if you rip it to mp3, it can be only 100MB or so
03:16:09 I: but it depends on the quality at which you rip… higher quality, bigger filesize, but it still won’t be as big as a full cd
03:18:29 Unknown_Player(1): oh. i duno i just imported a bunch of songs from cds
03:18:54 I: well good yeah that should work too
03:19:30 Unknown_Player(1): yay

Jordan commiserated, saying “I wish I knew what some people think goes on behind the scenes of technology.” This reminds me of a video my mother recently sent me, saying that I would probably find it very representative of the relationship I have with her. (She was wrong.)

Here’s to magic, eh?

My post about that freaking sweet Portal song by Victims Of Science got me thinking that the world needs way more videogame tribute music. So I fired up my sweet professional audio synthesizing software (read: GarageBand) and coughed up a turd.

When I linked Jordan to my newest brainchild, he said:

“I don’t want to listen to your Mario paint bullshit.”

I hope that made you laugh as hard as it did me. And now the bullshit.

Pretty sweet, eh? I totally plan to go somewhere with this in mid- to late-January, when I should be studying for finals.

Deadlines are the mother of creativity of stuff that doesn’t help you meet deadlines.

This city of Munich is beautiful. The upkeep is remarkable, the overall effort the city exerts to make sure it stays beautiful is really worth a tip of the hat. Sometimes, when I miss a tram, and have to wait up to two minutes for the next one, some street cleaning crews will stroll by, powerwashing the sidewalk, even though they just did it on Tuesday.

No matter how many times I walk down a certain street in the city, I can always expect to see new planters and sculptures and fountains being set up—maybe winter is the time for additions to be unveiled in spring.

Today I saw an article in The Onion about Opposite World, namely America.

Nation’s Crumbling Infrastructure Probably Some Sort Of Metaphor

The tragic Minneapolis bridge collapse that left 13 dead this August brought national attention to the country’s crumbling infrastructure, forcing many to question whether the nation’s rapidly deteriorating roads, contaminated drinking water and groundwater, and run-down schools could perhaps be a metaphor for something.

[…]

“I think our overstretched and increasingly obsolete infrastructure might symbolize something important,” Perry added. “But what?”

Hooboy. That is pretty well said.

I’ll be heading to Berlin this weekend, enjoying the meticulous smoothness of the autobahn on the way. At least once there, Berlin’s drab former Soviet Bloc countenance will remind me of home in a gently depressing way, conjuring up mute thoughts of empires lying in ruin.

OK, it’s been awhile since I’ve plastered lolcats all over the place, so give me some leniency here. This picture freaking rocks.

Oh man, that just made my day. That dog is absolutely getting rocked. “Pwn3d,” one might even be driven to say.

But that expression of sheer horror is yet bested.

The poor kid is probably at least mildly mentally retarded, judging by the clawed hand and Lovecraftian mien that speaks of having sipped from the goblet of madness beyond the outermost realms of space and thought.

Enjoy your day. It can’t possibly be worse than this kid’s.

UPDATE: Please check out this entry. I had completely forgotten about the grandeur of lolcatting RSS feeds. This is awesome.

Great article in the Wall Street Journal today. Misleadingly entitled It Dawned on Adults After WWII: ‘You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out!’ (the only mention of the relevance of the War in the realization that kids are retarded and prefer their toys in their eyeballs is the increased incomes of the post-war economy, rather than, you know, people coming home with eyes shot out), the article talks about toy safety, comparing today’s Chinese abominations with the homemade mistakes of the 20th century. There are some utterly win quotes.

In 1955, New York’s director of safety advised the state’s fire chiefs to seize fake Davy Crockett coonskin caps from stores. Made of shredded paper, the caps burst into flame “in seconds after the most casual exposure to a live cigarette or to any spark.”

Why were parents putting out their cigarettes on kids’ heads? Maybe it was a reaction to such a stupid hat.

By 1974, more than 1,500 toys had been banned by the newly established Consumer Product Safety Commission. Among them was a Smokey the Bear tent that was highly flammable….

That just sounds like a joke. Looks like somebody had a score to settle.

“[W]e run into proud parents who think their children are so clever that they can handle toys much too old for them.”

The toy industry disputed the statistics on rising toy injuries. “If a girl slips on a doll on the floor or a boy is hit by a baseball bat, it goes down as a toy-related accident,” said Aaron Locker, general counsel of the Toy Manufacturers of America, in 1974. “We estimate that only about 15% of the accidents can be attributed to a product feature.”

Right. So if your kid is eating his baseball bat, please abort the child and promptly sterilize yourself. The sugary sweetness of the lacquer on the wood of the bat was not intended as a feature, so don’t blame Louisville Slugger.

I honestly don’t see how anyone would assign blame when their kid is eating a baseball bat. I mean, who would admit that shit?

Robert Barnett, president of the company that made Jarts, a controversial lawn game using giant darts, said, “I’d rather be hit by a lawn dart than by a horseshoe.”

New reality TV show: Calling the Bluff: Holding PR Reps Accountable for Their Bullshit Claims!

I’d watch.

UPDATE: I believe the article link is only valid for a week. That’s a shame, but it’s how the WSJ does things. Eventually this Old Media model will go extinct and on that day I’ll be sure to repost the link, when it’s open for posterity.

How the hell are my kids supposed to learn about the dangers of lawn darts and setting cigarettes on their children’s paper hates if the article isn’t available to them?! History says I as a parent am not going to teach them.

Unless you count having them learn the hard way. I’d be great at that.

Was talking with my buddy Jim tonight. He’d IM’d me to table a debate that cropped up while he was editing a friend’s thesis on an engineering project. The friend (of the friend’s group) had written something about “Using inspiration based on designs found in nature,” and Jim strongly objected to this phrasing, suggesting it should be revised as “Using inspiration stemming from phenomena found in nature.”

Now, no comments about the language skills of engineers. OK? Let’s play fair. Onward.

Jim obviously was trying to avoid having the paper be interpreted as drawing upon or otherwise endorsing “intelligent design.” I told him I thought the edit was ridiculous and he should have left the initial phrasing as it was. This launched a debate about definitions, he opting always for “pattern” and I for “design.”

For example, were I to be going on a stroll (IRL, not along the shoulder of the information superhighway) and pass a rock formation, with all sorts of strange swirls on the surface and between layers of the rocks, I’d probably say to a companion, “Man, check out those crazy designs on that rock over there.” Jim, of course, would say “check out those crazy patterns on the rock.”

Now, in my opinion, a pattern necessitates repetition across multiple instances, meaning that I’d have to see several rock formations before I’d be in a position to identify a pattern. But I understand Jim’s conviction that “design” requires forethought, and therefore nothing natural can be “designed,” given his lack of belief in an omnipotent creating (or designing) entity. Fair enough.

Basically our disagreement boiled down to how much credit we each were willing to bestow about the intelligent design camp. Jim thinks it’s worth fighting against, and actively pre-empting whenever possible. I, on the other hand, prefer the method of acting like it doesn’t exist, because it’s just so damn silly. I look at it like this: I wouldn’t be caught holding a debate on the logical merits of intelligent design, just like I would try very hard not to let anyone see me swatting at faeries as I walk to class every day. Sure, faeries are rad and everything, but, like, they don’t actually exist, and I’m not going to pretend in public that they do.

Jim called me out on grossly misinterpreting the demographics of the great nation of America, and maybe he’s right about that. At least he and I could agree that although the form of something, like a pine tree, with its branches, needles, trunk, and pinecones, might look designed or patterned, there certainly was no entity which said “it must be so” and then it was so. Atheism is in, after all.

While we’re at it, let’s examine some corollaries to this statement.

Well that one certainly holds true in most social circles. But let’s calibrate our testing mechanism, because we need to be sure of the accuracy of the results.

Boom, case closed. Can’t argue with that.

I’ve never really been picked on for reading science fiction, but I’ve definitely gotten some weird looks. Fortunately, people don’t find it too weird, because at least it’s consistent with all the other freaky loser things I do, like listen to metal and run Linux. I live SF, man.

But today I found another person, Shelley the Republican, who finally understands what SF is about.

If you are not familiar with the genre, do not worry: Very little has changed since it was invented 50 years ago by Isaac Asimov and L. Ron Hubbard. These two men created the first “Scifi” (pronounced see-fee) books as a crazy of bet: They dared each other to concoct the most preposterous nonsense in order to see if American kids would buy it

[…]

These outlandish tales are often full of vivid, perverse sexual imagery, violence or excessive cussing. The stories are frequently amoral, with protagonists rewarded for their sinful behavior. Furthermore when God is mentioned, it is usually to take his Holy name in vain. The end-result is a shameful and grotesque fantasy nightmare. It’s more horrific than anything that could come form Hollywood’s sick imagination.

If only this were the full extent of the sci-fi problem: There are now hundreds of web-sites offering readers a quick fix of fantasy. As with drug pushers the first hit is always free, which is why you can find authors offering hundreds of short-stories and even entire novels available as a free download. This is clearly an incentive to coerce your kids into buying-into their degrading fantasies.

Man, talk about hitting the nail on the head. And I love the burn about how SF authors can never get published, so they just Creative Commons their work. Ouch.

Picture from the article. I don’t know whether it’s fair to label this dude an SF fan, given that he’s dressed as a videogame character, but I suppose some leniency should be allowed, since the author is a self-professed Republican. They aren’t exactly champions of cultural know-how.

I was really pleased to read about an article about a guy who took a hunting rifle and destroyed a traffic light camera. The cops were puzzled after they caught him, because apparently he’d never gotten a ticket from it, as one might have expected.

Clark, now facing a $50 fine if convicted and loss of his rifle, refused to say anything about the incident to police, leaving the motive unclear.

Seems like a deep guy. But not as deep as I am.

This story reminded me of an episode in my past where I was a bro. There was a project freshman year where we had to invent something and then write a poem about it. Naturally, I wrote about a traffic light camera that was disguised as an owl, but was really a ninja.

You can tell this was written years ago, because ninjas were still cool. I also had roommates obsessed with ninjas and robots, as I think will be obvious by the text.

Robot Ninja Justice Death

Twinkling stars adorn the firmament above
The placating coo of a lonely mourning dove
Reminds me of the hour: just minutes till dawn
And miles to go, before I sleep; I yawn
Hazy memories of the night behind
Swim round my head and through my mind
For serious, I cheated on my wife! Oh well
I hate her more than morning wood before the bell
A light turns red, so I slow my ride
But no one around, not on either side
And not in front or back, so I run the light,
Thinking no one will see, but out of sight
Atop the bar that spans the street
An owl sees, and in him burns a vengeful heat
I roll out from the crossroads, think all is well
But soon I’ll bear the baddest wrath of hell
Delivered by a ninja I mistook for an owl
That can unfold, transform, and make a howl
Which curdles blood, raises hair, and terrifies
He lands in kneeling ninja pose, and in his eyes
Burn the demons Justice and Honor with an eerie glow
His sword he draws and strikes a blow
Across the windshield, turning glass to dust
A might smiting of a million knives, swift and just
My eyes, they vomit blood—I scream:
“How can even a ninja be so mean?!”
And he intones, “I’m also a robot
With a bloodlust and sword. Now whatchu got?!”
And as my sorry, bloody life ends in woe
I murmur, “Why?” And he, to my lifeless, spurting corpse, declares: “I KNOW!”

Man, those were good times. Iambic pentameter makes everything better.

I love headlines you don’t have to think about. Or maybe that you don’t want to. The point is, if an article headline is good enough, I shouldn’t have to read the article. So a big tip of the hat to the New York Times for this little gem.

Chicken Fat Leaks Over 20 Miles

Sorry, I had to size it appropriately. From the article:

A truck leaked poultry fat along 20 miles of Route 13 on Tuesday, causing at least four crashes and making a stinky mess.

[…]

Sergeant Bunting described the grease as a “glassy film” and said crews sanded the road. He added that the gunk stuck to tires and spread to secondary roads, causing a “really funky” odor.

Well damn.

Also, The Onion is famous for headlines of this formula. My latest favorite is Fat Kid Successfully Avoids Ridicule By Swimming With Shirt On. The headline says it all.

The internet’s a pretty big place, right? Nonetheless, I let to think I get around. But somehow I’ve missed this gem for a year and a half. I’m glad I’ve finally found it.

I know the first 30 seconds of the vid are boring, but they’re characterization. Hang in there.

Certainly has me thinking about the Amon Amarth concert my bros’ll be seeing in Philly soon. Oh, and I found a remix of it which I post for my bro Will, because he loves pirates almost as much as he loves Vikings (and is wise enough not to bother with ninjas, who are lame).

And in case it’s not obvious, this is in Germany. It’s Berlin’s Fuckparade, I believe from 2006.

I found this comic intensely funny. Many times when preparing bills for the next day’s patients, I would see a certain item on the doctor’s write-up sheet that made me gape in slow horror, then stare damagedly at the wall for about an hour. It really hurt my productivity. Couldn’t they call the procedure something else?

Brutal.

I was doing some e-mail juggling this evening, futzing around with my Gmail settings. Google recently joined the rest of us in the 21st century and decided to offer IMAP in addition to POP3 for Gmail accounts, so I’ve been migrating my stuff over, trying to maintain the level of order and cleanliness my POP3 account in Thunderbird had. This all means that occasionally these days I must visit Gmail’s web interface.

Today I was confronted with the following error message above my inbox.

Peculiar, but at least it shows the dudes are Google are on the ball, and are using spiffy Firefox extensions like Firebug. So I click “Fix this” to find out what they think I should do, and I’m taking to a brief guide which is inexplicably forked according to operating system—not by browser, mind you.

How bizarre is that? The instructions for “Mac Users” are the exact same steps for “Windows or Linux Users,” only the Mac crowd isn’t given the choice of leaving Firebug running. Why separate the instructions by operating system? In this context it wouldn’t even make sense to separate by browser, given that Firebug is an extension for Firefox and Firefox alone. (OK, Iceweasel and Bon Echo too, but let’s not get into that right now.)

I guess the Gmail team believes that Mac users are so used to simplicity that they can’t follow more than two steps worth of instructions.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

I know what you’re thinking: nothing’s better than drunken elephants. That’s what I thought, too. But now I have a better answer to this question for the ages: elephants trippin’ balls.

What happens if you give an elephant LSD? Researchers solved this mystery on Friday 3 August 1962, when Warren Thomas, director of Lincoln Park Zoo in Oklahoma City, fired a cartridge-syringe containing 297 milligrams of LSD into the rump of Tusko the elephant. With Thomas were two colleagues from the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, Louis Jolyon West and Chester M. Pierce.

The dose was about 3000 times what a human would typically take. Thomas, West and Pierce figured that if they were going to give an elephant LSD they’d better not give it too little.

Found a glorious article on NewScientist about the top ten craziest science experiments. There’s somebody here for everybody. Even people who are into turkey on faux-turkey action, like yours truly.

While researching the sexual behaviour of turkeys, Martin Schein and Edgar Hale of Pennsylvania State University discovered that male members of that species truly are not fussy. When placed in a room with a lifelike model of a female turkey, the birds mated with it as eagerly as they would the real thing.

Intrigued by this observation, Schein and Hale embarked on a series of experiments to determine the minimum stimulus it takes to excite a male turkey. This involved removing parts from the turkey model one by one until the male bird eventually lost interest.

Tail, feet and wings - Schein and Hale removed them all, but still the clueless bird waddled up to the model, let out an amorous gobble, and tried to do his thing. Finally, only a head on a stick remained. The male turkey was still keen. In fact, it preferred a head on a stick to a headless body.

Fascinating! Read the full article for their speculation on why that is.

Thanks, J.

I’ve already admitted that I don’t have any content for today, but that’s not going to stop me from posting. I’m proving a point. Griefing n00bz.

Last night my mother was being my mother and finding pictures of animals on the internet, I presume because the ones in her life were being boring. Maybe she ran out of catnip or something.

I figured I’d share what she inflicted upon me, as the photos are pretty badass. I wish I could take pics like this.

Pretty intense, no? The guy has a 471-photo set of the dog, who evidently is named Titan.

According to my mother, the dog looks rather like an seamonster in the third pic there. I tend to agree.

Three cheers for contentless blogging.

Jordan gets me. He linked me to this as soon as he saw it, and said it reminded him of me.

He says this one is also “me.”