eat your words.

ohmygosh, librarian incredulity. play FreeRice and feed some people while enlarging your vocabulary. my highest vocab' level so far is 47, with three thousand grains donated. seriously addictive.

note: Dec 30th, 2007 = vocabulary level 49 and more than twenty thousand grains in one game, bitches. feel the love.

oh, my god.

can i just say something? where did orisinal.com even come from?! well, anyhow. it's a lovely little site full of simple, beautifully animated little flash games. digi-classical music soundtracks, cute lil' animals with fluid movements, and even the occasional moving panoramic view. and many, many of the games are rather brilliant in their simplicity. also, if you're feeling the least bit fragile or premenstrual, some of the games will make you cry. i'm just saying.

for example!

Deer Pong (genius!)

Magic Mouse Makes The Butterflies Emerge

Squirrel Runs Along Windowsills

Frog On Lily Pads

Mice Collect Sugar Cubes in Tea Cupboard

word of the day

escutcheon, bitches! too good.

national g' is still coolz

how great is it that cuteoverload was mentioned on nationalgeographic.com? i love it.

also, they found a "dinosaur mummy"! actually a petrified and strangely well-preserved duckbilled dino called a hadrosaur. about 3.5 tons, not quite a lightweight. but relatively small, as big dinos go?

what's the most embarrassing thing you've read on public transit? i just finished Nietzsche in 90 Minutes myself. It was quite edifying, and about the level I was hoping to read. Some lovely quotes the author excerpted from Human, All Too Human below:

"The fantasist denies reality to himself, the liar does so only to others."

"The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness."

"All poets and writers enamored of the superlative want to do more than they can."

"A witticism is an epigram on the death of a feeling."

oh my gosh, did i get pretentious just now? not a chance. because i got these quotes from Nietzsche in 90 Minutes. and i'm not afraid to tell you that.

book of the day

people, author richard schweid is one of the under-appreciated gems of nonfiction. seriously. i picked up this book on the strength of his last book, Consider The Eel. i wasn't interested in eels before i read that book, but schweid um, schwayed me. same with hot peppers - i like them, but i'm not obsessed. what could be interesting about hot peppers in louisiana? there's only a bunch of cayenne, right? WRONG. another wild success from richard schweid, who writes with a journalist's attention to significant detail, and a frank-yet-fluid narrative style all his own. pick up Hot Peppers: Cajuns and Capsicum in New Iberia, Louisiana, because it's fascinating, it's funny, and it's often a little startling. much like Eel. much like pictures of schweid himself.

an excerpt from Hot Peppers:

"In Swahili, red peppers are called pilipili hoho. The word pilipili is also slang for penis. Remarkably, the same word means the same thing in the slang of Cajun French. There is, in fact, a variety of Capsicum annuum, occasionally grown in Texas, that so closely resembles the male reproductive organ as to be universally monickered "the penis pepper." Almost every botanist I spoke to who specialized in Capsicum, would go for a laugh during the interview by saying - get a load of this - and reaching into the far back corner of a desk drawer to pull out of one these peppers."

richard schweid, you are awesome. you even sound a little exasperated with everyone else's attempts to be funny! and you have beautiful, measured syntax. marry me.

oh, my goodness.

i'm actually sort of envious! read this epistle from Best-of-Craigslist/Atlanta: Dear Boyfriend, I Love You, Please Don't Murder Me In My Sleep

bug-a-bird

so i was looking up "convergent evolution" in wikipedia (it's a long story), and one of the examples given was hummingbirds vs. hummingbird hawk-moths.

convergent evolution is, well, when two completely different species evolve very similar characteristics to deal with a common problem or similar environment. like armadillos and turtles! or hedgehogs and porcupines. or moles and mole-rats.

so now we have hummingbirds, and moths that look and act just like hummingbirds! the world is a crazy, magnificent place, yo.

the largest bambi that ever lived.

the irish elk is more properly called The Giant Deer; it stood up to 7 feet tall at the shoulder and had a known maximum antler spread of 12 feet. and it lived as recently as 7700 years ago, gettin' all ice age and whatnot.

yes, it's true. you've guessed it: ice ages slay me!

see more about the irish elk on wikipedia.

while you're there, you might try looking up megatherium, the "great beast".

alice in burtonland

according to boingboing and scifi news wire, tim burton will be directing the tim burton version of Alice in Wonderland in 2008.

omg. I AM SO EXCITED. Sleepy Hollow was such an under-appreciated movie! but everyone likes Batman Returns. and Edward Scissorhands. And Beetlejuice...just admit it, tim burton rocks. now quote me some delia dietze.

coffee (tea), cats, and...books?

so it seems like japan has a demand for cat-cafes catering to nerdy-librarian types who like to drink tea and be laid upon by purring felines. see it at cuteoverload: Cat Cafe! combine this service with a bookstore, and i see gold.

i can already taste the cat hair in my hot cup of sencha.

coyote cubly

again, not library-related. but it's just too good to pass up: The Daily Coyote, a photo-blog documenting the goings-on of an orphan coyote cub, his young female rescuer, and her tabby tomcat, eli. check back often for new photos, look through past galleries, or even order a coyote cub calendar.

i just died from The Cute.