Ash brought me* a wolf spider, the other day, and left it at the foot of my sewing table. Aw, good kitty. Ew, creepy effing monster bug. The spider sat here on my desk like some creepy effing monster muse for a day and a half while I struggled to photograph him properly.

I named him Bob.
And then I threw him in the compost bin.**

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It was as if someone had used anti-teenager spray around the entrance, the way you might spray your sofas to keep pets off. Some shops[...] use "zit lamps," which drive teenagers away by casting a blue light onto their spotty skin, accentuating any whiteheads and other blemishes.

"The first thing that came to mind was an air guitar[.]"

in vitro meat wayward
can mean only
onto the moon

The researchers used the living film to [capture] an image of the "flying spaghetti monster".

Both male and female slugs inflate huge blue penises and later lay eggs.

"Guys who got five deferments [...] have become a catalyst for the violence."
Mr. Bush [said] [...] "That's irresponsible." Mr. Roh looked on silently.
Bush said [...] South Korea "had never been better."

Microcebus lehilahytsara, or Goodman's mouse lemur, lives in our guest room.

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The English sole and hornyhead turbot in the Pacific around Santa Monica and Huntington Beach have been found extra extra sexy. This pretty much requires that we dub hornyhead our Epithet of the Day [which begs for application to Mimi Smartypants' CTA wankers, but then suggests a more literal interpretation, requiring that one peek, and ew].

"I almost felt like I didn't deserve it."

Thank heaven for Ms. Smartypants, warning me well in advance about Ninja New York. If a troupe of yelping ninjas came at me with a "hailstorm of [...] mackerel, fishy in the extreme", I'm pretty sure I'd rain it right back upon them. Go-mayn.

[T]hey roam, romp and perform dopey magic tricks, including sleight of hand with rubber bands, over 6,000 square feet of darkened crannies and well-separated, quiet nooks. Each [...] nook [...] quickly takes on the aspect of a jail cell as the ninjas, delivering and removing dishes, laboriously slide the latticed doors open and closed, closed and open, ad infinitum.

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Behold: kalischild vs. the one-man disco atrocity (via Miniver Cheevy):


(Editor's Note: If you've never seen a Goth engage in a passive-aggressive dance-off against a disgruntled California Department of Motor Vehicle employee, we respectfully suggest you crawl out from under your rock and live a little.[)] I rehearsed the katas of cockblocking in my mind; The look-to-the-left-kick-to-the-right ankle stomp, the wavy-wavy-sigh-inverted-bitchslap (Australian Rules); and the forbidden "dreadlocks-to-yo'-ugly-face" hair flip.

It just doesn't stop. My favorite part is where he invokes, by some unclothed lysergic alchemy, the girlishly-screaming-and-running deer* of the Berkeley Hills.

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[R]esearchers at UC Berkeley say seismic waves can [...] give seconds to tens of seconds of advance notice of [The Big One] -- enough time for schoolchildren to take cover, power generators to trip off and valves to shut on pipelines. "One can [get] a magnitude before people have felt the ground shaking," said Richard Allen, assistant professor of earth and planetary science, who led the study. Details appear in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

Lucy Jones, the scientist in charge of [the USGS] in Pasadena, who was not part of the study[,] is skeptical. The United States is still years away from an alert system because of fears of false alarms and disagreement about what physical forces cause an earthquake to turn into a big one.

California sometimes seems like the ill-fated result of Kansas and Texas showing that hussy Louisiana who's boss. We came this close to seeing "unborn child" language in the state constitution last night, and today a measure of protection from natural catastrophe is discarded by a federal authority because of disagreement over a measurable phenomenon's origin. And it's not like we have earthquake drills, at all, ever. My emergency kit at present consists of an empty suitcase, an inland address, a radio and some water; a premature siren blast would at least get the tools packed up.

A model parades in front of street children, some of whom are sniffing glue, in the drug-infested 'Barrio Triste' in downtown Medellin. The event was organised to entertain the children by a member of a local charity.

I'm sure the organizing of that event was damned entertaining.

"Our neighbors have six chickens who wander over to our yard every day to visit the [feral] cats. They all like to curl up together and sleep in the sun."

[...] a 6.5-magnitude earthquake could collapse 30 levees, flood 16 delta islands and damage 200 miles of additional levees. [This] would allow salt water to rush in to the river system, causing an immediate shutdown of the pumps[;] cities would have to use alternative water sources and resort to rationing. Three state highways and railroad tracks would be submerged, and petroleum and natural gas pipelines would shut down. "This is not a worst-case scenario," [the California Department of Water Resources] said.
Strengthening levees around just three islands at the mouth of the delta could reduce 70 percent of the risk.
Lawmakers said there is not enough money for levee improvements.

At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest.

Some people think I'm jaded, but its really just a big facade. Every day brings a new measure of my naivete.
Today, for instance, I nearly broke my blue pencil after trying to diagram Scooter Libby's sentences. The first one was tough, with the ten-year-old madam and the child in the cage and the collected girls upon whom lovelessness and the compulsion to "be frigid" are affected in spite of their evident absence from this maze of subjects, objects, and prepositions. The real trouble, though, came when I tried to match the subject "they" of the second in the context of the first. Is it third person narration by a ten-year-old madam using the "royal we"? The only other answer is that writing this slovenly might actually see print, if a publishers predicates massive sales solely on the author's potential future infamy, which suggests an even broader conspiracy. So which is it?
I know. It's not so much a logic problem as a coin toss.

But who knew that both Yale and Columbia conferred degrees without proof of basic English grammar skills?

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This Halloween we were lucky enough to enlist the Legendary Professor Cardyhouse for candy distribution duty; his note-taking prowess was invaluable as Brendan and I cooed over our favorite trick-or-treaters. The kids showed up late, this year, and for a while we were worried the whole thing would be a bust - we didn't even see the little boy from next door until well past his normal bedtime. Then when we saw that ours was the only even-borderline-spooky house on the whole entire block. Everyone else, it seemed, had turned off their porch lights in favor of [Well-Kept Secret Deleted].

70 hearty goblins made the long trek to our door:

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