Animal lovers, Isabella Rossellini made eight short films on insect (and arachnid and oligochaeta) mating, starring herself as all the slimy romeos. The earthworm one was very educational. See the films here. Thank you, Maikopunk, for sending them my way.
(Note: Unless you are a European parent, you probably won’t allow your kids to check them out.)
How about some genuine Texas armadillo?
This one’s for you, Lyn.
The only other armadillos I had ever seen were the two at the Plano Cockroach Hall of Fame, including the dessicated beer-drinking taxidermied armadillo, back in ’06. But those specimens, in the hallowed grounds of the roach museum, comical alcholism and all, seem too far from life.
My Highway 114 armadillo had shortly been alive. Its friend and partner scurried away from the body as we ran across the street. We’d driven half a kilometre before we realized what we’d seen. We u-turned and tracked down our find so that I could document my first encounter with the xenarthran.
I remembered then that armadillos carry leprosy. I got a bad feeling that I was stepping into armadillo ooze, that I would carry it back to the car, that it would get on the carpet, that the leprosy germs would drift up and I would end up diseased. Leprosy is treatable these days. But how would I recognize the symptoms fast enough to get medical help?
The armadillo had cracked open as if it had a gelatinous membrane. A little bit of red innard spilled out. And it was tiny, its body hardly bigger than a medium-sized cat.
I kept my distance – you know, bewaring of leprosy and corpse flies.
About a couple of kilometres later, we saw a second dead armadillo but we did not stop for it.
In 2002, when I was a teaching assistant in Japan, I worked at a school called Minuma Junior High in Gyoda, about an hour from Tokyo. Most of the girl students were fluffy airheads, aside from my now-friend R. and one or two other girls. The boy students had slightly more variations of human personality among their ranks: there were the thugs, the nerds, the Japanese strain of jocks with a healthy dose of Keanu Reeves surfer slack about them, the up-and-coming serial killer types, and so on.
Every year Gyoda would send out one boy and one girl from each junior high for a four-day trip to Australia. The all-expenses trip was a chance for many of these kids to leave Japan for the first time; the idea was that they would come back, be inspired to excel at English and in turn inspire their classmates, hence dragging Japan up to economic greatness again. My job in this was twofold. At first, my boss would make the chosen students stand on the table and look down on me, making them see that a white person could be a shriveled, unintimidating turnip from the right angle. Then, as I became a respected employee, I was entrusted with interviewing students at one of the junior high schools, to weed out the unworthy and narrow down the Australian-hopefuls to one boy and one girl.
One of my questions was, what do you know about Australia? Depending on the answer, I could gauge the student’s actual interest in visiting this foreign country vs. those morons who just wanted a free trip. Unfortunately, I was trapped in endless interviews with nothing but koalas as part of the answer, with the occasional kangaroo thrown into the mix.
Fuck, I thought, You’ll exhaust all conversation with your host family within two minutes, dummy! The interviews were just a squealfest of how cute koalas were and how the student thought Australian international relations involved marsupial fondling. By the fifteenth interviewee, I was ready to send off the lot to Australia and phone up that Crocodile Hunter dude to unleash a horde of rabid ebola virus koalas on them.
There was one glimmer of hope for Japan’s wayward youth. A boy I called Merlin. The outright choice for the Australian trip was a nerd who was into Harry Potter and general weirdness. I don’t know what his father did or if his parents were divorced – Japanese fathers, even without divorce, are often completely lacking in some families. His mother supported the family by cleaning houses. Merlin, when asked why he wanted to go to Australia, answered that he was curious about Aborigine culture and wanted to hear from Australians themselves why the Aborigines ended up with the bad-end of the stick. Merlin showed more political interest and, out of all the kids, demonstrated that he paid more attention to the world instead of just colours and sounds.
I argued that my choice deserved to go to Australia because he’d never traveled nor would get many chances considering his family’s lowly station, and he was motivated enough to learn something about the host country beyond the prosaic koala. Being Japan, the kid who went in Merlin’s place was a guy from a more traveled, richer, outgoing family. I think this latter kid had koalas as part of his reason for wanting to go to Australia on the exchange.
So I came to blame koalas for the inequity in the world. To me, they were the bitchy blondes on a the Top Model world stage, getting friends and showering influence only on the merit of their appearance. Koalas are soft and cuddly? Pshaw! Damn the undeserving furballs to hell!
Then, a baby koala wandered onto Tracey Young’s property in Maude, near Melbourne. Here are the Cute Overload photos. Photo #4 just killed me.
Soon afterwards, a firefighter called Dave Tree shared a bottle of water with Sam, a koala in Mirboo North, southeast of Melbourne. Watching the poor little fire-surviving thing hold the firefighter’s thumb as he drank was too much. Seeing the wee creature humbly accept the care of the wildlife rescue person as her paws were slathered with burn ointment further won me over to the koala platform. Here are more photos of Sam and other rescued koalas. I am happy that, out of tragedy, Sam has found love. (See the last photo.)
Finally, many photos of thirsty koalas drinking from ladles, bottles, water cans, pools and plastic containers have entirely convinced. These animals are pretty cute. I admit it.
The Japanese airheads may have been right on the koala front. I still reserve the moral standpoint, however, that Merlin should have gone to Australia.
Besides, the airheads forgot to squeal about wallabies. Now those are cute animals too.
(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:
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:
But great whites aren’t just about their appetites:
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:
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:
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:
But wait! The accompanying picture of the human male genitalia-like naked mole rat…
(More naked mole rats here.)
