For about a year now, numbers of visitors to this blog have jumped to an unbelievable number.

I went from around 10 daily visitors in early 2004 when I first added a site visit tracker thingie, to about 30 when I was blogging more frequently. Of that 30, almost 30 were readers as opposed to people googling hamster menstruation or slipper spanking (look me up, I am an authority of sorts in those fields).

Oddly enough, now that I only update once a week, my numbers have shot up to almost 400 visitors a day. Out of those 400 visitors, only about ten a day seem to be people actually looking to read this blog, meaning my readership is back to 2004 levels. The other 390 site visits are almost all from image links (like this). I sometimes just link to photos if I don’t bother to write to ask for permission to use photos directly or if I never get an affirmative response from the image’s copyright holder. Who knows why my links brings in so many visitors to my blog?

Mostly I ignore these visits. But sometimes a ridiculous amount of people come to just one post of mine. These days its the naked mole rat post. Last November I wrote about the British TV show QI and, in particular, about my discovery of the naked mole rat, a grotesquely fascinating looker of an animal. I linked to this picture.

A year ago it was hundreds, if not thousands of visitors coming to read the Resurrection post. I wrote that one after visiting Arizona in 2004 and, by writing it, I alienated one American reader who objected to my calling Americans “militaristic.” I was then de-linked by this individual. Then no one noticed that post for two years. Suddenly, people from all over the US were entering my site through that one post, making me suspect someone emailed the link to a bunch of their friends. Is it the “militaristic” comment? Is it that the Marines are deciding whether or not to take me up on my request to being recruited? Is it the Arizona tourism board finally deciding to use my idea of Krazy Kat marketing to promote their state?

Now it’s visitors from all over the US, Kuwait, Italy, Dubai, Britain, France, South Africa, Australia, Sweden, Syria, Turkey, Finland, Indonesia, Korea, Qatar and other countries coming to see pictures of naked mole rats. I’d love to know why that particular post.

In a rather stereotypical deduction, I am guessing that by the number of Islamic countries represented, it must be curious sheltered girls. The European countries also have sizeable Islamic immigrant populations, with yet more curious sheltered girls. These curious girls want to know what penises look like but they do not have access to art history textbooks and they cannot ask their brother’s friends to display their goods. Their parents or their government monitors their online visits.

Then I come in. I write: “The naked mole rat is the only animal that resembles human male genitalia.” Then I link to a picture of the penis-resembling naked mole rat. Voilà. Girls know what to expect their first time and I am a feminist hero. Well, hopefully the girls are not traumatized by the fangs. Or, if they are, hopefully they will be inspired by their nightmares to write some great horror novels that publishers will have the sense to translate into English.

So, what is it about naked mole rats? Seriously, I want in on the joke. Why so many visitors for this picture?

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.

My friend David recently published an op-ed piece for the LA Times:

It seems that the LA Times Editorial Dept. was kicking around the idea early last week that an American who had left the country for Canada due in some part to the reelection of Bush in 2004 might have some potentially humorous commentary on the fact that that they now live in a country with a Conservative Prime Minister while the US has since elected a Democratic majority in Congress.

David and his wife Pam moved to Vancouver in July 2005 from Boston. They were the first set of Bush-detesting US immigrants I’ve met and the ones whose adoration of this city put the rest of us locals to shame. Well-educated, cultured and kind, the Druckers have proven to be formidable Scrabble opponents.

David has, not unexpectedly, gotten some flack from the usual suspects, including one nutjob who seemed sane until he typed this sentence: “I believe we need to be confrontational with the Islamicists, and then after we’ve whipped them, help them into the 21st century through access to all kinds of education and technology.”*

David’s article has even been the most emailed on the LA Times website!

David posted the whole article here.

Great job, David!

*I do believe I am one of a very small number of laypersons who reads psychology textbooks for fun; the art of persuasion recommends a very different tactic for bringing people around. Besides, hasn’t this whipping method proven to be a troublesome hydra so far?

Catching up with all the blogs I missed in the last month, I descended upon the Invasive Species Weblog tonight.

Always good for a botanical chuckle or two, I nearly spat out my cherry-flavoured honey toast* when I read that rock snot (Didymosphenia geminate) is now on the Oregon Department of Agriculture’s top 100 dangerous invasive species.

How delightfully obscene – a plant called rock snot! The grade two boy in me wanted to know more.

Rock snot, also called didymo, is a diatom. Millions of these single-celled organisms turn fresh-water streams into vats of brown slime by latching on to rocks. Hailing from northern Europe, rock snot starts out as bubble-shaped warts on rocks that feel “like wet cotton wool.” In later stages, “streamers turn white at their ends and fragments float downstream similar to clumps of tissue paper”. Rock snot is highly invasive; to stop its spread, fishermen must sterilize their clothing and wet pets must be thoroughly dried off for 48 hours before plunging them into new waters.

Also on the list for those of us who like the bizarre are the following:

• Hazelnut bacteria canker (Pseudomonas avellanae): responsible for the decline of Nutella ingredients in Europe.
• Potato wart (Synchytrium endobioticum): with a lifespan of about 40 years, spuds become “unmarketable” for the “disease is comparative to a condition resembling elephantiasis, the human deformity suffered by John Merrick and chronicled in the movie The Elephant Man.”
• Dead man’s fingers (Codium fragile tomentosoides): also known as green fleece, green sea fingers, oyster thief and Sputnik weed, this algae smothers oysters, mussels and scallops, and makes waterfronts stinky.
• Yellow floating heart (Nymphoides peltata): a rather pretty type of east Asian waterlily sold in plant stores, this aggressive species chokes out other plants and sometimes stagnates water.
• Mile-a-minute weed (Polygonum perfoliatum): also known as Devil’s tail, tearthumb, tearthumb weed, Asiatic tearthumb, Devil shield, mile-a-minute vine and Chinese tearthumb, this plant grows around six inches a day.

And bonus point to the Inavasive Species Weblog’s Dr. Jennifer Forman Orth for more new vocabulary: myrmecologist (a person who studies the life cycles, behavior, ecology, or diversity of ants – which led me to hymenopterist, or a person who studies the life cycles, behavior, ecology, or diversity of wasps and bees) and piscicide (a chemical substance for destroying fish pests).

*I prefer my toast rare. If you should ever need to win favour with me by offering me toast, keep this in mind.

A mystery has been solved!

In my nerdsome youth, I collected a number of penpals from around the world. One penpal that I had for purely aesthetic reasons was a beauty from South Africa who, originally from Zaïre (now the Congo), wrote in a mixture of French and English. Her theory was that the French would improve my Canadian school system French*.

Thus my penpal always signed off her letters with bisous and A+.

A few trips to France later and I got my bisous down. Little kisses. According to BellaOnline’s French Culture Editor, Melissa Demiguel, “it is quite versatile as it can be used to finish conversations, sign letters and demand kisses.” There’s also plein de bisous and plein de petits bisous.

A+ is weirder and has remained a mystery despite my penpal’s explanation.

Now Le Meg of Le Blagueur à Paris has solved my mystery.

In her conversation with Le Mec – ha! I remembered that one! The colloquial for guy! – the revelation that A+ = à plus, or à plus tard, struck me with the force of finally getting it after fifteen + years of wondering. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

It was a good joke.

*For the bilingualism naysayers, I contribute my poor French not to the inadequacies of the Canadian school system but to bilingualism naysayers themselves and to my own debilitating shyness.

One of my favourite blogs has returned from the dead: Washington DC’s wonderful and super polite struggling writer Litblitz returned with a post on Library Thing. While it doesn’t seem likely that the Lady is back for a regular stint, we at least know she’s alive and well.

For those of us who dream of being (professional) writers, her archives are great background reading.