The Oyster’s Garter

Did my previous post on anatomically correct heart-shaped jewelry leave you unsatisfied? Fear not, dear reader. Here’s another lovely heart-shaped necklace, in still-beating red or formalin white. If you prefer brains or teeth or ribs, there’s a little something for you too.

Or if you are more into tech than bio-goo, you could make floppy disk earrings.

Via Boing Boing

Pepjin Koster, the brilliant inventor of lol oshunz, has collected all the entries. I’m rather partial to the fish-scorning penguins. Wudda!

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.

The town of Skowhegan, Maine has an old jail to sell. They’re building a new jail, and they figure maybe some developer will be able to make use of the old one. But it wasn’t a developer who answered the call, no no - it was PETA! Yes, that’s right, the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals want lease the jail so they can build a Lobster Empathy Center.

From the letter they sent to the Skowhegan commissioner in charge of this stuff:

The center will also feature interactive exhibits that will give visitors the opportunity to experience the horrors inflicted on lobsters caught by humans. The first room that visitors enter will be a large replica of a lobster trap. Visitors can have their fingers wrapped in large rubber bands, which will be left on for the rest of their visit. At that point, they can be moved to a small, filth-strewn glass tank where they will be crammed together and confined for up to an hour. (Lobsters, by contrast, are often confined to supermarket tanks for weeks before being killed.)

The interactive experience won’t be completely realistic–visitors won’t be boiled alive, of course.

Wait, what? They won’t put the visitors into boiling water? Seems kind of half-assed to me. I sent this story to Miriam, and she had a number of suggestions for how PETA could make the experience more detailed:

Will they feed their visitors tasty rock crab for total reality? (Rock crab is a common bait, but is also good to eat for people, just a lot of work.) Will there be an escape hatch for children? Will they notch the ears of pregnant women? Can people “molt” by taking off their clothes and putting on bigger ones, then gaining a lot of weight so they fit?

Myself, I noticed that Skowhegan is near the geographic center of Maine, a good 50 miles (and 90 minutes driving) from the coast. The people who do most of the lobster catching don’t live there, and the people who do most of the eating live far, far away (like Bristol Rhode Island, say, or San Diego) and are unlikely to experience the pains of lobster catching via the Lobster Empathy Center.

Of course, I recognize that the center will probably never come into being. PETA likes to scare up a lot of publicity by making these ridiculous proposals, and far be it from The Oyster’s Garter not to give to them. But it’s also important to be aware that in fact, lobsters seem to be one of the most environmentally sound fisheries in the world. Lobstermen notch the females and throw them back in, so they can keep reproducing, and the traps are designed to let small ones escape. Heck, University of New Hampshire researchers have found that lobsters like the traps so much, trapped big ones keep out the small ones.

Lobsters are most decidedly food, not friends. If a person-sized lobster ever found me scuttling along the ocean bottom, it would eat me in a second.

[Major shout out to the Lunch Bunch List, who pretty much supplied all these links]

Please, please tell me that this dress comes with nematocysts.

Via Chaos Theory

I’m back in the augmented bosom of southern California, at least for a grand total of one day before heading to New England for family events. In lieu of actual blogging:

• Please enjoy enormous blue Australian earthworms from Zooillogix. Mess with them and they’ll put YOU on a fishhook.
• For those of you interested in trash in the North Pacific Gyre, the Algalita Foundation is sailing a boat made out of trash to Hawaii. It’s like the Life of Pi with more trash and less maneating tiger.
• Make your boobs bionic with a solar-powered bra. The energy can be used to a) keep those delicate lady parts warm; or b) charge your cellphone or ipod. The only catch is that the solar panel needs to be exposed to sunlight for a few hours a day - so unless sunbathing is a required part of your job, it’s not so useful. (But I have all these required surface intervals between dives! Could the bra charge my underwater drill or suction sampler? Sweet!)

And I’m going to a Dresden Dolls concert tonight! Brechtian punk cabaret and crossdressing and their new album! In honor of my return, this is their “Shores of California” video.

Perhaps I’ve had too much sun, but I feel that I can only properly thank Rick for his latest That’s a Moray Monday in limerick form.

In the field, the Net’s hard to find,
My blog reading falls far behind.
But today I did see
Rick’s sweet tribute to ME!
And my encounter with the moray kind.

Oh woe! For Rick’s time I did waste!
By typing away in great haste,
I wrote the wrong common name
I quiver in shame
Next time I will cut and paste.

But the goldentail moray’s so fine,
I’m flattered that Rick thinks it’s mine,
For Gymnothorax miliaris
Is definitely the eel I saw - is
My rep for invert love on the line?

Screw inverts, into backbones I foray,
Because it’s the Goldstein-tail moray!
In gold, black, or spots
This eel’s toothy and HOT
Who could ask for anything more, ay?

When penguins get old and bald, the feather comb over just doesn’t provide enough insulation. What’s an elderly penguin gentleman to do? Wear a fetching custom wetsuit, of course. The article does not discuss whether a penguin’s natural tux promotes the wetsuit to formalwear.

Thanks, Aunt Sharon!

Alexander Lervik designed this lamp off an MRI scan of his own brain, then printed it on a 3-D printer (previously). Now Lervik has an endless source of terrible jokes based on the brightness or dimness of his brain-lamp. And it doubles as a zombie confusion device!

Oh, but the teasing Lervik must endure when the bulb burns out…

Via Boing Boing

The cell phone software maker Qualcomm happens to be based in San Diego, so I actually received a press release for Handsolo yesterday, though I failed to open it (I get a lot of press releases). It contained a link to this video, the hands down winner (a pun you’ll soon get) for funniest April Fool joke this year.