The Oyster’s Garter

I thought lolstats and lolthulhu were the pinnicle of lolosity. I was wrong, so very wrong. Behold my contribution to the lol-oshunz-conservashun meme. This is Killick, who is half of the official Oyster’s Garter feline support team. She’s a natural oshunz spokeskitty, being named after Capt. Aubrey’s grumpy steward in the Patrick O’Brian novels. (The original meaning of “killick” is a big rock used instead of a metal anchor. Killick the cat also strives to embody this spherical, heavy ideal.)

If this lolkillick doesn’t make any sense, read this.

Please enjoy the skinned heads of teddy bears, rendered in felt. [Maybe NSFW since there's artsy felted naked people way down on the page.] There’s also felt teddy bear fetal development, felt sheep skulls, and a felt headless hu-chicken.

Via Boing Boing

This Nature News profile of whale anatomist Joy Reidenberg has it all: how to get your dead dolphin into Manhattan (through the Lincoln Tunnel, of course), how to move a table-sized pharynx (a forklift) and bit of an elegy for the dying art of anatomy (hard to publish, no support). Reidenberg’s scientific work is on cetacean voice evolution and mammalian pharynx anatomy, but the amazing part of this profile is her utter joy in dissecting rotting bus-sized cetaceans. Please enjoy selected quotes:

“I had to fold the front seat over on the passenger’s side and shove the bottlenose dolphin’s face out of the front passenger window to fit the thing in the car,” says Joy Reidenberg, almost losing her breath in laughter at the memory. “And so coming in through the Lincoln Tunnel, they’re saying ‘What do you have as a passenger?’”

—–

“To bring back a larynx the size of this table,” she says, thumping on a conference room table, “takes six people, a tug-of-war, and maybe a backhoe and a crane.”

—–

“The two words that have usually sent me into near heart attack have been the words ‘mass stranding’. To her, this is one of the greatest excitements in the world,” he [the department chair] says. “I, on the other hand, have the wonders of explaining to the institutions, the boards, the loading dock, the security people the wonderful material that comes in — trying to stand there with a straight face and say, ‘Odour? What odour?’

And anyone else who loves roadkill gets a double-A+ awesomeness rating in my book:

Once, at about age eight, she decided one of her few dolls needed a fur coat. Rather than asking her mother for one, she went out and found a dead chipmunk. She flayed it and was drying the hide when, to her horror, a raccoon took her prize.

Go read the full profile before Nature takes it out of the free zone.

I am in the midst of writing My First NSF Proposal (Wudda lil’ scientist! Though actually it’s a mock proposal for a class). So in lieu of actual content, here is series of links themed “Marine Mammals: They will &%$@ You Up!”

• British couple gets too close to a anxious humpback momma in Hawaii, almost made into krill
• Orca has either bad aim or a wicked sense of humor - what IS it with kayakers?
• Though it’s aquatic, not marine, please fear the Compubeaver. It’s a computer! And a beaver! Now you can crunch number and trees with one handy device. It gives a whole new meaning to “dual processor.” The Compubeaver’s home page is not to be missed, where you can also meet his buddy, the text-o-possum.

Apparently coyotes have been sighted in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The city animal commission’s response is entitled “Coyotes in the City - a time for Precaution not Panic.” Which I immediately read as DON’T PANIC! written in large friendly letters. Good advice, at least until the coyotes start reading horrific poetry to the wild turkeys.

(Via most excellent Martini-Corona)

I’ve been called for jury duty - on the first day of classes, no less - and I have it from a reliable source that the jury room has not internet. Gasp! So for today, I leave you with this highly educational mountainn lion sign.

(If you want to see the real sign, it’s here. Will these techniques make my kitties stop attacking my feet?)

Voice of the Hive is an amazing collection of stories about bees. Half are from the bee’s perspective, and half from the beekeeper’s (who does not want you to buy his honey).The author did not anthropomorphize the bees, which makes the stories that much cooler. Take that, stupid Bee Movie!

Check out “Meet the Bees” to get started. I especially enjoyed “Lions at the Gate“and “Death of a Thousand Pinpricks.” Maybe the next Bee Movie should be a horror flick.

Via Metafilter

The Whale Hunt is a “storytelling experiment,” narrating a native Alaskan hunt for a bowhead whale.  The artist, Jonathan Harris, took a photo at least every five minutes (even when he was sleeping by using a timer), and has organized these thousands of photos into a “photographic heartbest.” The more photos he took per minute, the faster his heart is beating.

The art? Perhaps misconceived - I found most of his photos rather boring. Taking a photo every 5 minutes and then posting them all means that there’s a whole lot of photos of empty rooms and lines of snowmobiles.

But the content? Amazing. There’s a pruned down highlights section, but I don’t think it gets to the heart of what was cool about these photos - the actual process of butchering a 36 foot whale. Harris has photographed seas of blood, yards of intestine, and enough meat and blubber to feed a village. And that is right, because that is exactly what this whale is going to do. The photos really communicate the whale-as-valuable-resource.  By the time the hunting group was done, the only bit of whale left was the jawbone and the bloodstained ice.

Via Metafilter

There’s so many whales on this blog,
That adding a few more won’t clog.
There’s dolphins with Krauts*
The Navy’s sonar ruled out
And a minke up the Amazon did slog.

*I couldn’t rhyme “German!” I hereby invoke my German ancestry to justify using Kraut instead.

There’s a scene in “Finding Nemo” at the shark support group where all the shark repeat, “Fish are friends, not food.” Of course, before long the sharks are chasing our plump delicious fishy heroes with lethal intent. This is the first thing that came to mind when I heard that the Japanese are planning to go whaling for humpbacks for the first time since 1963. My first reaction was, “Not the friendly humpbacks!” and my second was, “Wow, I HAVE been indoctrinated into anthropomophizing whales. Now, is a sustainable harvest possible? And why is international whaling law so broken, anyway?”

My first reaction is pretty standard for an American. We tend to think of whales as spectacular, intelligent, and precious. But Norwegians like nothing better than to pop a minke steak on the bbq, and the Japanese have a cultural connection to eating whale meat (even though few actual Japanese seem to want to.) So assuming that everyone’s interested in having whales around for the future, what is the most useful attitude?
(more…)