Zugenia's Procrastination Salon

How can one not succumb to that tagline?  Yes, I am about to make D watch Dark Days in Monkey City, a show that he predicts will "anthromorphize animals that have no interest in being ... morphized."

We shall see.

So this past weekend, I'm at the annual ASECS conference—this year in Portland, OR, which is a lovely city with great food and bookstores, which makes up for the fact that it snowed and hailed on my lovely spring wardrobe—and people I don't know keep greeting me as if they know me, and they occasionally refer to conversations we've never had as if we've had them, and it's all quite baffling, until on the second day I find myself riding the elevator with a woman who looks just like me, except distinctly taller, thinner, and better dressed. I have no idea what name my svelte doppelgänger goes by, or what she works on, but I hope she's brilliant and charming and thus giving me a good name.

Back in the NWA¹, I'm back to work, piled in papers, enduring the annual spring onslaught of killer wasps in my office, leaking news of my engagement to D (have you heard? I'm engaged), dreaming of the elusive free hour when I can finally watch last week's episode of Lost. I have made time, however, to read up on Cracked.com's 6 Endangered Species That Aren't Endangered Enough, which boldly suggests that pandas—yes, pandas!—have outstayed their welcome on planet Earth.

"Not the cuddly, wuddly panda!" you exclaim, possibly chewing on a gender-neutral flax-soy bar. Well guess what? The panda is nature's loser, an animal so far gone that it won't even have sex without the aid of several Chinese zookeepers. When a species' sole responsibility is to "get busy" and it still doesn't bother, then we, as people who have to go to goddamn work every day, lose sympathy.

Speaking as men, we can tell you--when an animal has lost interest in its own penis, it wants to die.

Not having a penis to call my own, I have to take the Cracked boys' word for it. But, I admit, they make a compelling case.



The Poor Panda: Would Rather Sleep Than Exist

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¹That's NorthWest Arkansas, not the other thing.

This is the kind of thing that I, as a devotee of both The Cute and The Predator, absolutely love: Cracked.com's 6 Cutest Animals That Can Still Destroy You. For a taste, here's their take on the platypus:

How cute!
God, we don't even know where to begin.

This is an animal so deliriously ridiculous, biologists refused to believe it could possibly be anything but an elaborate hoax when it was first discovered. To put this in perspective, these exact same biologists believed that rotting meat spontaneously generated maggots and saw nothing wrong with pouring liquid heroin down babies' throats. Platypi are that ridiculous.

But seriously, look at it. It's got a thick, furry body with a flat, beaver-like tail and otter-like feet and we're cool with that because he's so damn fuzzy. Then there's the matter of the big, leathery duck bill and it's suddenly more than a little weird, because that's ... that's not really supposed to happen to mammals.

And then there's the further matter of the very high degree of electroreceptivity in that there bill--it helps the platypus find food buried in the silt. Kinda like a hammerhead shark's head, only instead of being terrifying-looking eye protrusions with an awesome name, it's a goofy-looking duck bill. On a mammal. And OK so that's ... pretty weird, but so what? Their babies are called puggles for fuck's sake! Puggles!

Also they lay eggs for some reason.



OH SHIT! RUN!
And, they are poisonous.

Wait, what?

Male platypi have a pair of spurs on their hind legs that they use for defense and dominance duels. They deliver a brutal dose of venom that will put a human being into the emergency room and leave him writhing in muscle-impaired agony for months.

The platypus is mother nature's way of saying, "I made this thing out of spare parts I found on the workshop floor, and it can still fucking cripple you."

Love love love. Thanks to xterminal for the link.

There's something making a chattering, screaming sound from the trees outside my apartment. I'm pretty sure it's a rabid monkey.

We had summer weather in Northwest Arkansas this weekend and I saw approximately a billion kinds of birds I'd never seen before in the trees around town.

But I'm not posting right now; I'm watching The West Wing.

Maybe it's the DayQuil talking,¹ but I'm so very tickled by this story about a pair of wild eagles attacking a paraglider in Australia. Reuters reports:

Britain's top female paraglider has cheated death after being attacked by a pair of "screeching" wild eagles while competition flying in Australia.

Nicky Moss, 38, watched terrified as two huge birds began tearing into her parachute canopy, one becoming tangled in her lines and clawing at her head 2,500 meters (8,200ft) in the air.

...

"It swooped in and hit me on the back of the head, then got tangled in the glider which collapsed it. So I had a very, very large bird wrapped up screeching beside me as I screamed back," Moss said.

The wedge-tailed eagle of Australia: "the shark of the air."

I love the image of traded screeches and screams nearly a thousand feet in the air; it's so Man Bites Panda After Panda Bites Man. And if it is true, as the article suggests, that the eagles attacked after mistaking the paraglider "as a bird intruder," one cannot but admire the avian approach to homeland security. Wedge-tailed eagles may have a wing-span of two meters, but think of what kind of bird a paraglider would look like. I think veteran Australian paraglider pilot Godfrey Wenness says it best as he points out that "eagle attacks were rare, but Moss had been flying in an area where the birds were not accustomed to human pilots":

"Eagles are the sharks of the air. But if you're a regular they just treat you pretty indifferently," he said.

That's right, bitches. The sharks of the air. None of this "they're more afraid of you than you are of them" nonsense; glide through their neighborhood like you own the place and these birds will fuck you up.

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¹I have a lot of DayQuil pumping through my system right now, as a low-grade flu-like thing from the weekend has decayed into a high-grade head cold. Despite the drugs, my throat hurts, my head hurts, my face hurts, even my snot hurts, and there is a lot of the latter. It's Monday morning and I am thoroughly disgusting.

[x-posted to LEVIATHAN and thelunarsociety]

The BBC reports that palaeontologists have discovered evidence of prehistoric killer kangaroos in northern Australia:

The flesh-eating marsupial would have lived between 10 and 20 million years ago, scientists say.

The research team has also unearthed evidence of a large carnivorous bird dubbed the "demon duck of doom".

The dig site in Queensland has yielded remains of at least 20 previously unknown creatures.

This news reminds me of the time I was touring Australia with my sister K, and we went to an alligator ranch that had free-roaming kangaroos and emus that you could chase around with loaves of bread, which we did, gleefully, for hours before the rancher (a hard fellow who fed his alligators mutilated chickens and had a collective six remaining fingers) informed the group that a kangaroo's defense mechanism is to grab you by the shoulders with its little hands, give a charming little leap, and gut you with its powerful, clawed feet. Disembowelling seems to be the defense of choice among Australian wildlife; cassowaries also specialize in it, apparently.

In other news, it turns out that one can rent a gorgeous, palatial apartment in Cincinnati for free. Seriously. In fact, they will pay you to live in an apartment the size of Manhattan. I had no idea.

Off to Louisville today to see the great Willie Nelson and, if I play my cards right, the Jim Beam distillery.

Courtesy of yarinaosu: Yahoo! News reports that a really fucking big rabbit has been roaming the English countryside, leaving a trail of veggie carnage in his wake.

Leeks, Japanese onions, parsnips and spring carrots have all been ripped up and devoured by the mystery were-rabbit -- prompting the 12 allotment holders in Felton, north of Newcastle, to hire two marksmen with air rifles and orders to shoot to kill.

"It is a massive thing. It is a monster. The first time I saw it, I said: 'What the hell is that?'" the Northumberland Gazette newspaper quoted local resident Jeff Smith, 63, as saying.

That's probably what I'd say too. While Bunny-zilla remains at large, here is Yahoo!'s visual aid to help us understand just how big a really fucking big rabbit might be:



And now back to your regularly scheduled life.

Item 1: The NYTimes reports that scientists found fossils of a fish with a "transitional footlike structure" and went WILD:

In an interview, Dr. Shubin, an evolutionary biologist, let himself go. "It's a really amazing, remarkable intermediate fossil," he said. "It's like, holy cow."

It's like, totally holy cow. Dude.

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Item 2: According to IMDb Celebrity News, "Cruise Denies Adult Pacifier for Holmes":

Tom Cruise has hit out at reports he has bought an adult pacifier to keep fiancee Katie Holmes quiet during childbirth. The heavily pregnant actress plans to adhere to strict Scientology rules and give birth without screaming, crying or making loud noises, and Star magazine insisted Cruise would help by providing a specially designed device to bite. A source tell the magazine, "He commissioned an adult-sized 'binky' for her to clench between her teeth, hoping that it'll squelch her screams. In keeping with a Scientology silent birth, Tom is prepared to do whatever it takes to muffle Katie's moans and groans during the delivery." Cruise's publicist Arnold Robinson has dismissed the reports as nonsense. On Tuesday fellow Scientologist John Travolta lent his support to the controversial birth plans.

I have only two comments: 1. If anyone ever attaches the modifier "heavily pregnant" to me, even if it happens to be true, I will kick that person until he cries; and 2. For some reason I can't quite figure out, I find the phrase "Katie's moans and groans" strikingly lewd. Also the word "squelch." It's grossing me out.

OK, I have one more comment: Tom Cruise is totally nuts. Dude.

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Item 3, perhaps the most shocking of all: The New Yorker's Shouts & Murmurs is funny for once! Thank you, George Saunders, for this tidbit of cultural commentary:

I used to love music, back when it had melody and chords and lyrics. But now it has no melody and no chords, just thwack-thwacking, and they even seem to be cutting back on the thwack-thwacking, so now it’s sometimes just thwa, and, as far as lyrics, do you consider these lyrics?

Hump my hump,
My stumpy lumpy hump!
Hump my dump, you lumpy slumpy dump!
I’ll dump your hump, and then just hump your dump,
You lumpy frumply clump.

I’m sorry. To me? Those are not lyrics.

I believe I snorted my coffee at "my stumpy lumpy hump." There, I just did it again.

( I just noticed that Michael at Bookslut quoted this same piece. Does that make me cool?)

Ever take a few days off from the internet news media and then realize upon your return that the world really is as weird as you imagine it is?

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Item 1: Sony has pulled the plug on Aibo the Robot Dog, to the dismay of robot-dog owners throughout the land.

"Aibo is so symbolic of Sony quality I'm starting to lose faith in Sony's audiovisual products," said Hashimoto, a longtime fan of the company whose every home appliance practically is a Sony.

"The robot is like a real dog. It responds when I call it," he says. "It's so cute. It sulks. And it looks sad when things don't go right."

Paul Wallingford, the owner of a Los Angeles-based Internet business, owns four Aibos. Lately, he's been keeping them turned off often so they're less likely to have problems.

"I think you do develop an attachment to them," he said by telephone.

An "attachment," eh? Is that what you call this?

Owners have created fan clubs around the world, and some even dress up their canine robots like babies.

Now, the death of a robot affects me every bit as much as it does anyone with a heart who grew up in the age of Short Circuit (Number 5 is alive!). But what with the dressing-up-robot-dogs-like-babies stuff, I think perhaps Sony is performing an important public service in this case.

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Item 2: According to science, bat brains are inversely proportional in size to bat testicles.

The study offers evidence that males—at least in some species—make an evolutionary trade-off between intelligence and sexual prowess, said David Hoskens, a biologist at the Center for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter in England and a leading authority on bats' mating behavior.

"Bats invest an enormous amount in testis, and the investment has to come from somewhere. There are no free lunches," said Hoskens, who did not participate in the study.

I feel it would be too simple to make some quip about the allegorical richness of this finding at the expense of male beefcakes, so I'll satisfy myself with pointing out that there is no scientific evidence linking the size of female bat brains to the size of their hooters. The female of the species has apparently better honed the economy of intellectual and sexual energies.

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Item 3: Drug dealers used cute little puppies as heroin mules!

Oh no they didn't, you say. But yes, they did:

Colombian smugglers turned puppies into drug mules by surgically implanting them with packets of liquid heroin, authorities said.

Investigators believe the ring used the dogs, as well as people who swallowed the drugs, to conceal millions of dollars of heroin on commercial flights into New York for distribution on the East Coast.

The authorities are understandably outraged ... about the puppies:

It was unclear how many dogs might have been used in the smuggling scheme, [John P.] Gilbride [head of the DEA's New York office] said.

"I think it's outrageous and heinous that they'd use small, innocent puppies in this way," he said.

That guy Orlando Tobon who has devoted the last 15 years or so to raising money for decent burials for human drug mules should take note. Everyone knows puppies are more lovable than poor people.

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Item 4: And finally, once again, citizens of the most powerful nation in the world wait with bated breath for a giant rodent to predict the future.


This morning at Gobbler's Knob (actual name, I swear) Punxsutawney Phil (pictured here—the one without the hat) communicated with that remarkable eloquence unique to the groundhog species that we're in for a long winter. Inevitably, Phil was aggressively appropriated to a number of political causes as various factions "latched on to the Phil frenzy for a publicity boost—for just about anything, from global warming to the lottery":

The National Environmental Trust said it's [sic] groundhog-suit-wearing human "will ignore his shadow and will instead rely on global warming evidence to forecast an early spring."

The American Physiological Society was offering experts to discuss "What Punxsutawney Phil can teach us about surviving massive blood loss, preventing muscle atrophy, and more."

The Pennsylvania Lottery even has Gus, "the second most famous groundhog in Pennsylvania," who implores lottery players to "keep on scratchin'."

None of those things are really what Groundhog Day is about, said Mike Johnston, a member of the Groundhog Club's Inner Circle. Punxsutawney Phil is nonpolitical and can't speak anyway, Johnston said.

Thank god we have the Groundhog Club to call us back to earth. As I always say—where there be grown men in top hats who form a fan club for a giant rodent, there be the voice of reason in America today.

Because last night I found myself watching (horror of horrors) Ghost Whisperer starring the queen of insipidity herself, Jennifer Love Hewitt. (Who, incidentally, is slated to star in a film called She Had Brains, a Body, and the Ability to Make Men Love Her, which is ironic in every way imaginable. The IMDb plot summary reads: "Jennifer Love Hewitt plays a young Odessa, Texas housewife and former homecoming queen who became one of the city's most popular hookers until she, her bordello sisters and 68 prominent Odessa residents were arrested in a scandal that shook Texas." I shall have to see this movie.) Back to CBS: I was so captivated by the sheer fact that I was home alone on a Friday night watching such dross that I couldn't move, and proceeded to watch Close to Home, Numb3rs, and half the local 11 o'clock news before peeling my eyeballs off the television, to the immense relief of my poor, tortured brain.

Now, if I had cable, I could have watched National Geographic's Dog Whisperer instead, which looks fascinating, and would have saved me the plunge into the greatest shame spiral any non-alcoholic Friday night has ever witnessed.

I had planned to get up early and work today, but I stayed up late into the night reading The Moor's Last Sigh (fan-fucking-tastic), which cut into said plan. Now the least I can do as I caffeinate my way into the second half of this dreary Saturday is at least try to focus on something a bit more upbeat than my depressed sleeping patterns, my missing boyfriend, my mind-fucking job search, and the CBS Friday night lineup. Thus I give you the giant squid.



While in New York recently, I visited the American Museum of Natural History, which has been one of my most favorite places in the whole wide world since I was a little, little girl. They have, of course, added a big shiny new section with a planetarium and lots of physics-centered exhibitions since then, because Natural History (as my very educated little sister sillygirl84 explained with stunning erudition) in an archaic category that now contains all those embarrassing elements of 19th-century thought that could not migrate into the modern scientific categories of Biology and Organic Chemistry and such. So now the old section of the museum, with its uncanny dioramas of stuffed natural specimens, among which are scattered, without categorical distinction, models of things that for technical reason couldn't be stuffed and mounted, like giant squids and Native Americans, is (despite the integration of video displays representing the "real" natural world) less an educational exhibition than a hallowed monument of an earlier moment of American scientific and historical culture that we prefer now to hold at a polite distance from the higher technologies of Enlightened Knowledge.

But in the corner of the Deep Sea room, there's a menacing diorama of a giant squid attacking the head of a sperm whale. Walking through that dimly lit room from the upper level, down the stairs, under the suspended arch of blue whale, and across the quiet expanse of floor is so much like plunging into the briny deep that when you come face to face with this horrific spectacle, less Discovery Channel than Melville epic, it's really freaking scary. By some trick of the light (I think), there appears to be no glass between you and the enormous, squid-entwined head of the whale, which produces a visceral thrill very different from the cinematic excitement of watching big animals on TV.

It's so cool.

It's alive! ALIVE!!!

So here's to the giant squid, which (as you may recall) was photographed alive for the first time just a few months ago. In honor of this glorious creature, I'd like to direct you to my new favorite procrastination outlet, Poor Mojo's Almanac(k), which features a very informative Giant Squid FAQ, which are answered by none other than the great squid himself. In fact, through this site you too can approach the giant squid with any of your pressing questions, such as how to quit smoking, how a sperm whale manages to eat a giant squid, and the giant squid's position in the perennial debate on boxers or briefs. Also, you can get instructions on how to knit a squid hat for baby. I invite any- and everyone to knit me squid hats for the new year.

Go visit Poor Mojo and have a merry, squiddy ol' time.

Did you all catch last week's BBC story on the squirrels that attacked the dog?

The latest victim of the racist media?

From the article:

Squirrels have bitten to death a stray dog which was barking at them in a Russian park, local media report.

Passers-by were too late to stop the attack by the black squirrels in a village in the far east, which reportedly lasted about a minute.

They are said to have scampered off at the sight of humans, some carrying pieces of flesh.

Notice that the perpetrators of this sickening crime are specifically identified as black squirrels. Now, remember those pictures that went whizzing through the blogosphere in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, where the white kids were identified as having "found" bread in a deserted market, while the black kid had "looted" his? Do you think if these were gray squirrels, or maybe those scary-ass red ones the size of bobcats that roam Michiana, they would have been described in these same terms—as depraved, barbaric rodents with no regard for canine life, driven by their monstrous appetite for "pieces of flesh"? Might not lighter-furred squirrels have been said to have gallantly defended themselves from the canine menace, or resourcefully "found" themselves a supply of dog-meat to get them through the harsh Russian winter? After all, according to the article, "A pine cone shortage may have led the squirrels to seek other food sources," and the dog was reportedly "big." But, no; our poor, maligned black squirrels are ruthless killers, who "literally gutted the dog," according to a local journalist.

The article also mentions that that "in a previous incident this autumn chipmunks terrorised cats in a part of the territory." Oh, I get it. Because they're brown, they must be terrorists, right?

We have black squirrels (or "urban" squirrels, as I prefer to call them in this sensitive age) around the Haverford campus, too. Sure, they're rowdy, but it's just part of their culture, and you gotta respect that.

o_jenny, and everyone else: Go see March of the Penguins. It's an incredible piece of documentary. The voiceover script (read by Morgan Freeman in the U.S. release) is a bit distracting—too much personification, as my mom accurately put it, as if we need to imagine penguins feel human emotions, and consider themselves "families," in order to fully appreciate their labors of "love." Which we really don't, not with film footage like this. Emperor penguins, we learn, walk—walk—70 miles to their breeding ground every year, and then the males and females take turns walking back and forth across the same 70 mile distance to feed themselves in the distant sea while the others remain huddled against antarctic winter storms trying to keep the chicks alive. The shots of miles of penguins parading across a desolate white landscape are worth the price of admission alone. In the spring, the ground thaws and the ocean gradually creeps its way up to the breeding ground, to carry the surviving chicks out to sea. It's astounding to be made to see Antarctica as a life-sustaining system—it really pushed the edges of my imagination.

It does make one think about the delicacy of these ecosystems, and how destructive it could be for the ice shelf to shift, to put more miles between the breeding ground and the ocean, with these birds already living on the brink of starvation for so much of the year.

I would also recommend Winged Migration, another French documentary of bird migrations, with amazing footage and no annoying narrative enhancement. (I think there's some voiceover, but for the most part this one lets the images speak for themselves.) As with March of the Penguins, I marvelled at how the filmmakers managed to put this stuff on film. In this case, they filmed migrating birds on all 7 continents over the course of 3 years before cutting the film.

From "This Side of the Blue" by Joanna Newsom:
And the signifieds butt heads with the signifiers,
and we all fall down slack-jawed to marvel at words
when across the sky sheet the impossible birds,
in a steady, illiterate movement homewards.

Click here and check out the characters' names. Not a spoiler. I promise.

And that's all I'm going to say about Harry Potter, because there are plenty of other smart-ass kids out there who have also finished the book and can taunt the rest of you with their knowing what you don't know, whether you care or not.

Last night my dad and his team over at Brooklyn Children's Museum hosted one of their recurring family nights, this one for families of single-sex couples. There was a book signing by the authors of And Tango Makes Three, a picture book about the two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who raised a chick together. I'd never heard about these penguins, but my parents filled me in. Several years ago, one of the zookeepers noticed that two male penguins were acting like a couple. (Okay, get your filthy minds out of the gutter. That's not what I meant.) They spent all their time together, and played together, and did little mating dances with each other, and then they built a nest together. But they didn't have an egg for their nest, which all the other penguins did, and this they found frustrating, and, no doubt, perplexing. So they found a little stone and put it in the nest, and took turns sitting on it. For days and days and days. And it broke the zookeeper's heart to watch them nursing this little stone that was never going to hatch, while all around them all the other penguin couples were hatching fuzzy little gray chicks. Then, one day, he found a stray egg (penguins only hatch one at a time), so he put it in their nest, and they took turns incubating it while the other went off for food, and then their own little fuzzy gray chick hatched, and the Zoo named her Tango. And the three of them were a little penguin family unit, just like all the others. Except Tango had two daddies.

The book is really extraordinarily cute. I suppose anything with baby penguins in it is bound to be. I mean, look:



I think we'll go see the new penguin movie before I head back to Providence today.

Last night Z and I watched John Sayles's The Secret of Roan Inish. I had seen it in the theater when it came out in 1994, and I remembered liking it quite a bit, but I couldn't recall any details beyond seals and Irish accents. It is a perfectly lovely fairy-tale of a movie, with a precocious blond-headed little girl running barefoot over islands surrounded by gray ocean. And there are seals. As dear as the shark documentary is to my heart, I must confess that I have a soft spot for cute animals with sentient faces, and it was refreshing to watch seals in a movie where they are not simply shark food.

I have not been to the beach once this summer. Why live in Rhode Island if you're going to let the summer slip away without going to the beach?

A comment by diatryma in response to yesterday's discussion of siphonophora sent me googling the Portuguese man-o-war first thing this morning, and look what I found:



I love the little silhouetted people in warning signs. They usually look more festive than they're meant to. Like here, doesn't it look like he's dancing with the siphonophora? Kinda makes you want to get in the water.

(I nicked the image from this site—very informative on the Portuguese man-o-war, with lots of pretty pictures.)

I've been lurking about LJ for the past few days, unable to muster the energy to post anything. I think this is because I finally got down to work revising this blasted chapter, and dissertating really gets in the way of my dissertation procrastination.

I have done a very poor job of keeping track of all the books I've been buying. I don't think I can do a June tally. In July, already, I have purchased and otherwise accumulated the following:

( Recent Book Binge )

There are probably more; these are the ones crowding my desk. This is what happens when bookcloseouts.com and BN.com have clearance sales at the same time. Most of these books were under $5, many under $2. What was I supposed to do? Not buy them? *laughs scoffingly*

What else, what else. The White House is maintaining its petulant silence on Karl Rove's involvement in the CIA leak. You can read about it in the NYTimes, but it's not very exciting, just mildly infuriating:

Under often hostile questioning, [press secretary] Mr. McClellan declined to comment on Democratic demands that Mr. Rove's security clearance be revoked, or whether Mr. Rove might be becoming a political liability for the Bush administration. "I don't think it's helpful for me, from this podium, to get into discussing what is an ongoing investigation," Mr. McClellan said.

Well. There are at least two ways of interpreting this statement. He could be saying that it's not helpful in general, like to the American people's understanding of what's going on behind the curtain of the White House, for him, Press Secretary Scott McClellan, to discuss publicly what is going on. And this is simply not true. It would be very helpful indeed to our understanding of the situation for him to explain it. On the other hand, he could be saying that it's not helpful for him, Press Secretary Scott McClellan, to discuss the "ongoing investigation." And this is probably more true, though it does raise the question of what exactly he is trying to accomplish, personally, and why we should care whether anything is helpful to him in this endeavor or not.

Did I mention that I dressed as "the CIA leek" for Halloween a couple years ago? The design was sillygirl84's. Basically, I was light on bottom, green on top, with a tall hat of leek-like slats made of dark green posterboard that said CIA on the front. And sunglasses. Most people thought it was a very bad costume for a chef-in-training. I did win a Jagermeister baseball cap at the Graduate Center Bar for sporting the "Most Intellectually Rigorous Yet Materially Effortless Costume" of the evening.

There's a better story in the NYTimes on siphonophores, a cousin of the jellyfish.

The deep ocean is home to swarms of gelatinous creatures, many boasting dazzling displays of bioluminescence, usually blue or green - wavelengths that can travel long distances in water. Scientists have long theorized that the light is purely defensive in nature. For instance, startling brilliance is often seen among siphonophores, gelatinous colonial animals whose different members work in unison. Some species found in areas teeming with life eat voraciously and grow up to 130 feet long, longer than blue whales. Such large siphonophores work passively like living drift nets, moving slowly along and reeling in krill and tiny fish.

Each animal has a cluster of swimming bells serving as a "head" and long elastic tentacles for fishing and drawing prey to waiting stomachs. From slender bodies, the animals can drag thousands of tentacles, stingers ready, and dozens of stomachs, each with fingerlike arms ready to grab captured prey.

Such creatures, with no eyes, light up brightly when touched, and scientists believe that the strong illuminations may be intended to blind or frighten off predators.

I'm so in the market for a siphonophore horror flick. It would be pretty and gruesome. The news here is that scientists have discovered a siphonophore that uses a glowing red lure to attract fish into its stinging nest of tentacly death (not the scientists' words), which is interesting because scientists have always thought that fish couldn't see red. How 'bout that?

Okay, this is all the stimulation my poor, sore brain can handle for today. Off to zone out in front of Beavis and Butt-head for a while.

Last night, I could have sworn I went to bed in the city of Providence, but in the night it turned into Wild Kingdom. While I was reading myself to sleep, some unidentifiable beast began moaning and squealing just outside the window. It was not a cat, and I couldn't tell if it was closer to a bird or a rodent. Whatever it was, it was not happy, and it wouldn't shut up. Then, in the middle of the night, I was startled out of a very deep sleep (and detailed dream) by what I really, honestly thought was a pack of wild dogs in the room. I said, "Is that a pack of wild dogs in the room?" Z said, "No, it's just one wild dog." It was apparently attacking the squealing thing just outside the same window. Eventually, the attack abated, and we listened to the squealing thing, now even less happy than before, make its miserable little way around the corner of the house and proceed to cry and thump (a leg? a head?) against something, perhaps the wall of the house next door. I somehow managed to block out this disturbing display of dejection and return to sleep, only to be awoken again, some time later, by Z knocking over a glass of water and swearing violently and stomping around and exhibiting various other beastly behaviors. At this point, it was arguably "morning," so he got up and I sat up and read. After finishing my book, I figured it was safe to go back to sleep, but I was wrong. After an hour or so, I awoke to the terrible cacophony of a murder of crows just on the other side of the wall bickering nastily over something, probably the still-warm carcass of the squealing creature.

Frankly, it was enough to make me nostalgic for the rodent in the wall.

The book I was reading was When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka. A beautifully rendered exercise in minimalism, Otsuka's debut novella focuses on the internment of a Japanese American family from Berkeley during World War II. The writing focuses on simple objects, framing them in a silence full of longing and sorrow. It considers what it means to become anonymous in a world where everything has become at once strange and disenchanted. Her prose is sparse, every word a gem. I am almost certainly going to teach this book in my spring Asian American lit course.

Scientists have announced the discovery of a new species of rodent: the Laotian Rock Rat. Laotians have been eating these creatures time out of mind, but Western science has just "discovered" them. According to the NYTimes report, "The adults have bodies about a foot long, with a six-inch tail that is not as bushy as a squirrel's. They knew immediately that this was, as Dr. Timmins [one of the discoverers] said, 'an oddball rodent.'" "Oddball" being, of course, the preferred scientific term for all things that are "definitely not rats or squirrels, and are only vaguely like a guinea pig or a chinchilla."

So here's today's question: If you were a college freshman, would you be inclined to sign up for a course called "To Create More Worlds, or The Literary Art of Becoming Other"? This is the Introduction to English Literature freshman seminar I'm designing. (Incidentally, "To Create More Worlds" is the second half of the line from Paradise Lost from which Philip Pullman culled the name of the His Dark Materials trilogy.) The course looks at the interwoven projects of defining the "human" as an essentially mutable category and defining "the world" as a thing that must be constantly remade. It's about reproduction and transformation, and the paradox articulated by Percy Shelley, that "Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; / Nought may endure but Mutability." readings include Ovid's Metamorphoses, Othello, Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe, Frankenstein, a bunch of Romantic poetry, Mrs. Dalloway, Einstein's Dreams, and, of course, The Matrix.

Too think-y?

The new FannyPack CD arrived yesterday courtesy of psychoprince, who, by the way, is one of the handful of esteemed teachers who really taught me how to think. He fed me Kafka when I was a freshman, and I've never been the same since.

Oh, and because I know you've all been following the story, you'll be pleased (or disappointed) to know that Demi Moore Denies Belittling Kutcher's Bedroom Performance, according to the IMDb news page.

I'm not feeling particularly writerly this morning, but I thought I'd check in and provide some other forms of internet entertainment.

For those of you who missed the NYTimes story on the star-nosed mole: scientists have reported that this weird little creature, which "for the most part ... looks like an ordinary mole, except for its nose, which sprouts 22 fleshy rays that squirm like miniature fingers," is the fastest-eating mammal on the planet. Even faster, they say, than Sonya Thomas of Alexandria, VA, who can eat 65 hard-boiled eggs in 6 minutes 40 seconds (i.e. 6 seconds per egg). Yes, even faster than that. The secret is apparently in the "fleshy prongs," which are as sensitive as a human hand and shovel food into the mole's mouth at the rate of "10 mouthful-size chunks of earthworm, one at a time, in 2.3 seconds, or 0.23 second a chunk."

( Here is a photo of the star-nosed mole )

Unfortunately, the article did not supply a photo of Sonya Thomas.

For those of you more in the market for the information-and-advice-column genre, let me refer you to Crooked Timber's Ask a Nineteenth-Century Whaling Expert thread. Unfortunately, the thread is now closed, but many important questions were asked and useful answers provided, regarding such topics as black whales, baby-eating whales, the "leftist myth of finite whale supplies," and the question of going "all the way."

Finally, the reason I cannot write more is that I'm halfway through Murakami's Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which is so good that I must go finish it right now. Following that, I shall fill a duffel bag with every piece of text Murakami ever published (in English translation) and a change of underwear, and run away to some secret woodland hut or underground lair and spend the rest of my days revelling in solitude in their bizarre and beautiful dreamworld genius. Murakami's writings', that is, not the underwear's.

Science news of the day: Monkeys pay for porn?

It is a slow, chilly Saturday morning. I did very little of note yesterday—just a bunch of tramping around in dirty snow, checking in at the department without actually doing any work, brunch at Louis', sushi lunch at Tokyo, lots and lots of C.S.I. and a couple episodes of Gilmore Girls. Louis', by the way, also known as Loui's or Louis's for reasons that shall be explained presently, is one of the few local establishments I will genuinely miss once I finally leave Providence. It is a little greasy spoon run by the Gianfrancesco family, conveniently located about halfway along the walk from my apartment to the Brown campus. I know I'm simply stating the obvious to anyone who has lived on Providence's east side, but Louis' is just so yum. Without it, the hipster contingent of the Brown undergraduate community would wither and die. It is not exactly cozy, and certainly not quaint. Often, the atmosphere is downright surly. In place of friendliness, it offers true love in the form of food. About the name: the sign outside reads, somewhat perplexingly, "Loui's Family Restaurant." I believe this was merely a typo, or whatever one calls a typo in the context of untyped signage. But it is what the sign says. So the apostrophe wanders, looking for a home.

What to do today? I want to finish The Pickup, which I find a rather slow read, though thoughtful and not uninteresting. But kind of cold. I should also write, I should always also write, and I have a random assortment of texts that I've been meaning to read, ranging from Restoration comedies to toilette poetry to domestic fiction. I'm lagging in both my work and my procrastination. Also, I'm running out of food and my car is still buried under a formidable layer of snow. I'm rapidly nearing the get-yer-ass-to-the-store-or-resign-yerself-to-pizza-you-lazy-lump state. I should find this depressing, I know, but I've got Frou Frou on and it's making me smile. Hey, it's Saturday, and pizza rules.