(This video will take up a mere twenty seconds of your life.)

That was my ringtone when I lived in Japan. But it never attracted alpacas.

(Via Mari Diary.)

One of my guilty pleasures is Swim at Your Own Risk, the shark attack blog. (It also has killer jellyfish, munchy barracuda and other toothy things from the water.) I’ve followed this blog for a while. I even occasionally venture into the Victims Gallery, though, I don’t usually last there for long. It’s quite squelchy, if you’ve followed the link. Sharks manage to make everything they chew up look like abattoir refuse.

Imagine my pleasure when, last year, a small child asked me to write a program about sharks. I had to wait all year to vet my shark program and now it’s a go. So I will technically get paid to research a topic I would anyhow. It’s too bad work is so busy and I have to bring the fun research home with me.

So far I read The Devil’s Teeth by Susan Casey. Yes, it’s neat stuff - there are these islands in San Francisco’s city limits called the Farallones and they’re quite sharky. The islands also happen to be eerily picturesque. Their history is replete with weird characters, fuelled by a chickenless San Francisco’s appetite for the murre’s eggs. Plus there is all this other stuff about radioactive waste dumping and a sea urchin diver with a lot of luck. Then there’s the obsession part of the subtitle - “A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks” - this obsession belonged to someone I didn’t suspect.

But that’s for another blog post.

I gleaned about five pages of notes on sharks. Here are some highlights:

The following stuff has been found inside dissected sharks:

• a cuckoo clock
• a fur cape
• license plates
• lobster traps
• a buffalo head
• an entire reindeer
• a man dressed in a suit of armour

I looked up to see if I could find out who was the nut who thought he’d take on a great white in his suit of armour. If I could find out his story and his name, perhaps I could imagine his life and give it some meaning beyond his famous death.

Unfortunately, there’s not much on him. I found a reference in a book that an eighteenth century shark’s stomach contained a suit of armour. But no mention of the man in the armour, except in the Wordsworth Book of Urban Legend. Hardly a trustworthy source, that one. (Read on in the previous link, however, for whaler James Bartley’s February 1891skin-lightening-by-whale-gastric-juices affair.)

The Shark Friends website has a further inventory of shark stomach contents:

• nails
• coats
• wine bottles
• jewelry
• musical instruments
• torpedoes

But great whites aren’t just about their appetites:

• Sharks are resistant to infections and circulatory disease. They are almost entirely immune to cancer.
• Baby great white sharks can detect .005 millivolt electrical impulses from a heartbeat from hundreds of metres away.
• Great whites are actually black. This camouflages them when their prey looks down into the water. It’s their bellies that give them their name.
• Great whites suntan.
• Most great white shark attacks take place at high tide.
• Great whites are warm-blooded. This helps them hunt better in cold waters where their prey may get sluggish.
• As of 2003 when the book was published, at least 37 great white sharks have died in captivity.

Great white sharks, by the way, are more correctly called white sharks.

Munich’s Museum of Man and Nature scored Bruno the Bear’s taxidermied remains, displayed by taxidermist Dieter Schoen at “being disturbed by people while stealing honey from bee hives to show his potential danger” (as quoted from this BBC article). In 2006, I blogged about how poor Bruno, or JJ1, is the result of a poor candidate for motherhood. Bruno was shot dead on June 26, 2006.

This bear is not Bruno.

I knew that Bruno dabbled in sheep and rabbit menus. I had no idea there were other animals involved. Specifically, I didn’t realize there were Incan rodents with a penchant for timothy hay involved in the Bruno saga. Here’s Bruno’s more complete list of exploits:

He upset farmers, breaking into bee hives and eating 30 sheep, four rabbits and a guinea pig.

Chuy is disgusted.

A planned hi-tech driverless underground railway line set to bring desperately needed transport links to the historic heart of Rome has run into a minefield of Roman remains.

(From the May 14 online edition of the Guardian.)

There’s a scene in Fellini’s Roma where a subway crew finds Roman ruins and calls in the film crew. The delighted visitors crawl through holes to see a fresco with colours as fresh as if they had just been daubed on the walls. Yet, within seconds, the fresco disintegrates into dust and floats off the wall.

Matt didn’t care much for this movie, but after riding the Roman Metro, he changed his mind and wants to watch it again.

What we didn’t know while we were there, is that we stood above the proposed Largo Torre Argentina stop.

This area, near tourist hot spots like Piazza Navona and the Pantheon, is to be one of the stops on Rome’s third subway route, Line C. City planners estimated that 30 metres deep should just about miss the pesky ruins. But they’ve found amphorae that could be part of an villa’s garden and, just as annoying, some imperial era building. The nerve of those ancient Romans!

Instead of pondering all this, we admired the cats:

The ruins are also home to the Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary.

Soon after the ruins were discovered in 1929, the cats moved. Roman cat lovers, derisively called gattare, began feeding leftover pasta to the homeless cats. Though the current batch of felines are (mostly) fixed, irresponsible pet owners still dump cats in the area, resulting in a population of around 250 cats. We counted about 18 from the fences high above the remains of the four temples.

Like everyone else with an internet connection, I spend a lot of time on Cute Overload.

Then there are those days when a kitten just won’t hack it.

Were you one of those nerdy kids who knew every animal in the Funk and Wagnalls Animal Encyclopedia? Did your parents order you those as-seen-on-tv Safari Cards in the Eighties? Can you tell a tarsier from a douroucouli? Did you ever describe the takir as your favourite animal at show-and-tell? If you answered Fuck, Yeah! then Just a Little Guy, the blog of cute cussing animal babies, is the blog for you.

Written and compiled by a 28-year-old dude from Brooklyn, Just a Little Guy is the nerd’s Cute Overload, or the Cute Overload with Vice overtones, though, um, Just a Little Guy came first. It’s just past its first birthday. Which means that Cute Overload is derivative; Cute Overload is the Just a Little Guy of the trailer park. Or something. Anyhow, the guy took his GRE and the Cute Overload girl didn’t.

In the call to war against the cute animal upstart, JALG writes, “Domesticated animals. They’re BRED to be cute. It’s like genetically modified athletes.” Whereas Cute Overload sticks to puppies and kittens, with the occasional foray into kookaburra territory, Just a Little Guy throws open a cornucopia of cuteness most of us didn’t know exists. Hence the discovery of the momonga, the hamster of the Japanese woodlands. Other, deserving cute animals finally get their fifteen minutes and we all benefit.

Let’s cut the editorial and get to the good stuff. At this, the first ever Just a Little Guy retrospective, the cutest, meanest Just a Little Guy blogposts are in the spotlight:

• Penguin pooping: I bet you anything March of the Penguins and Happy Feet have nothing like this. Like one commenter put it, I’ll never use toothpaste again. Furthermore, we learn that “the velocity of a penguin’s shit is high enough to chip a human’s front tooth.”
• The pacarana, an animal even I have never heard of, shows that other good things come from Colombia besides cocaine and paramilitary torture. The best is the third image down, scanned from the National Geographic. It’s the pacarana, in his guinea pigginess, leaping straight up. And then it crashes a car. My kind of rodent!
• A wombat, nothing more, nothing less.
• Wombat + red panda. But the words win: “This mother giraffe actually suctions her baby’s head and then catapults him into enemy territory where the lanky limby little guy goes whirling dirvish on his enemy. His little head on his long ‘ol neck acts like a mace. Suckers get played when they mess with the giraffe.”
• A wombat of Ivan proportions. Great smile, buddy!
• On Aussies groping wombats, there’s fourth from the top: “Man, this wombat looks fucking laaaaaaazy, and believe me I know lazy. Some wombats are like: hold me. This one is like: cradle. I’m just going to lie here like a sack ‘o’ taters.” Then check out the last wombat: “There is something about the bug eyed look of surprise combined with the clean hands and stethescope that has a really genuinely horrific sci-fi alien-probing unwilling-patient thing.”
• A wombat Casanova? “I don’t know what his secret is but he alread managed to get her fucking jacket off and now he’s working on the pants. Starting at the knee? Fuck it, dude. Whatever works.”
• The toe-spreading tapir.
• The first momonga sighting: “I think he ganked those eyes off of some cartoon character and come to think of it, this is what it would look like if animation worked backwards and cartoons could be made real.”
• The momonga motherload: “They can fucking fly.” and “Look at his big ‘ol eyes and his smug little fucking grin. He knows he’s cute. He knows he doesn’t even have to try. Some people have it so fucking easy.” The best is the swarm of momongas at the very end: “The one on the left. He looks like fucking Wolverine ready to pounce. Feel me? And his gaze is so intent. I’m creeped out. For real.”
• Beaver kittens: Canada’s mascot.
• Velcro bears: If Chief Ten Bears hasn’t blogged about this, hell.
• More velcro bears: check out the little back legs on the little dudes. Squeal! It’s like they’re those bathroom door icons. For Matt, a bonobo fact: “the females have evolved specially rotated pelvises so they can engage in better female-female missionary-style sex,”
• You know that cute Edvard Munch screaming otter that Vancouverites paste on their personals ads? Here’s what he’s saying: “I think he’s screaming about how cute he is or maybe, he’s yawning cuz he’s so tired from being so fucking cute all day.” This makes JALG the greatest real phone sex athlete in the world.
• Fourth down, a cute evil possum. I’ve only ever seen these guys dead on the centre line, probably because rednecks swerve to hit them. Yeah, you curse the world with your little Dracula hands, Mr. Possum! Then fifth down and I am sold on possums.
• Panda Dog
• Canada, Land of the Pika. This is why US neocons shit their beds at night when they dream of invading. Hands off. They’re ours.
• The honeybadger website link evaporated, but there’s the keep on truckin’ sifaka third from the bottom. “Where the sweet fuck is he going in such a funky rush. Groove on by dude!”
• Baby squid, last photo.
• Sloth in a box: “For god’s sake. The desperation and neediness is oozing out of the corrugated sides. Does he want out or does he want YOU to come in? I don’t know but what ever it is I’ll do it.”
• And finally today’s post, baby otters. Kind of reminds me of Tarepanda, the Japanese melting panda. As for the Xinjiang bear cub, it’s Jeremy! Let’s cuddle sometime, Xinjiang bear cub.

The British, I have heard, are into a TV quiz show called QI, or Quite Interesting. Hosted by Stephen Fry, yes, he of Blackadder fame, the show asks questions like:

• Why don’t pigeons go to the movies?
• Why are there no Alsatians in the Spanish army?
• What flavour is the oldest known soup?
• How do otters kill crocodiles?
• And what is the name of the 23rd tallest tree in the world?

The show is so good, Brits in North America beg their friends to send them the DVDs of the show so they can enjoy their culture on those multi-regional DVD players.

That good, huh?

I went to the QI website to find out about this wonder show. Turned out to be the usual British stuff, not much that I understood. Might take, as Blackadder did, years to understand, or, as Red Dwarf, ongoing confusion.

Sauntering over to the site’s Canada thread - it turns out that, before it was renamed Regina in 1882, this Saskatchewan city was called Pile O Bones. So this is the kind of knowledge imparted on the show!

I, for one, was almost sold on the show. I do want to know what the flavour of the earliest known soup was, to serve it at my next Neanderthal-themed soiree. I do want to arm myself against crocs with otters. And I really want my pigeon dates to have a good time when we go out.

Searching through the forum, I found the naked mole rat.

Ah ha! said my perverted little self. Mole rats. Naked mole rats.

Oh, the facts were good:

• The naked mole rat is the only cold blooded mammal.
• The naked mole rat doesn’t feel pain because it lacks the neurotransmitter Substance P.
• The naked mole rat is the only animal that resembles human male genitalia.

But wait! The accompanying picture of the human male genitalia-like naked mole rat…

…has fangs.

(More naked mole rats here.)

JJ1 has been described as bloodthirsty, clever, and fast. Bavarian governor Edmund Stoiber referred to him as a “problem bear.” Farmers claimed the bear “enjoyed killing,” because he had killed sheep without eating them. As of June 7, 2006, his kills included 30 sheep and 2 domestic rabbits.

Bruno, or JJ1, has alternately disputed the alleged charges and blamed his mother - a welfare crack whore - in the ongoing case. According to BBC News, “Bruno’s mother - who is blamed for his savage behaviour - has another three cubs.”

His lawyers are seeking a reduced sentence as their client is himself a victim of a tragic childhood marred by violence and a poor mother figure.

In a statement to the press, his law team spoke of lack of motherly affection, at a time when bears in Europe are almost extinct and a young bear needs parental attention. “Without a proper habitat, young bears turn to their parents for support - yet Bruno’s cries for help were ignored,” remarked a spokeswoman at the emotionally-charged press conference.

No word was given on the whereabouts of Bruno’s father.

Germany’s Spiegel Online describes JJ1’s descent into crime: “he began his rampage killing sheep, chickens and rabbits and stealing honey in the Alpine border region of Germany, Austria and Italy.”

The French and the Spanish, in response, greeted four Slovenian bears with “pots of honey laced with broken glass.” Other Slovenian bears reported racial slurs and being told to “stop stealing jobs from the natives.”

The suspect’s twin brother, JJ2, is still on the lam in the Italian alps.

Beth just sent me this about some poor emu that’s scaring horses and women in hamburg. “We’re still looking for either a naked man with huge eyes or an emu,” a Hamburg police spokesman.