say it with me - "vernal pool tadpole-shrimp"

click it, read it, fear it. or better yet, buy a few eggs and hatch them into terrifying pets scraping around your goldfish bowl. related to triops, another crunchy shrimpy waterfarm pet.

dear best-of-craigslist - you rock!

click here to read an amazing "dear john" letter from an exasperated wife to her grossity gross old hubby. i doubt you'll be disappointed!

space odyssey, customer service.

kubrick's 2001, anyone? seriously, child-size robots that come up and ask you if you're lost at the mall. what a terrifying future this is turning out to be.

see-my-pants. coe-la-canth!

an informative link from marinebio.org, which includes a dramatic b/w picture. i enjoy the coelacanth with its weird fleshy fins and its lobed tail. i like its relation to lungfish, and other fish that may have first walked up on land millions of years ago. a dramatic midnight blue or purple creature, with individual patterns of white flecks. i like that it's a "bony fish" - meaning excessive, splinter-like bones everywhere.

just so you know, cafepress sells coelacanth stickers. obviously i have one. i wish it were more scratchproof, though it certainly is water-resistant.

for more weirdness, look up "repenomamus" on wikipedia. mammalian carnivore of the cretaceous!

need an online stopwatch?

sometimes i need one, so maybe you do, too. this full-screen online stopwatch is just dandy. however, i'm still looking for one that will fit into my task bar at the bottom of my monitor. you know, while i'm watching music videos on the computer and dancing around my room half-clothed. certain people don't have money for gym memberships.

everybody likes to say thirty minutes a day will keep you trim. and that's probably true. but i achieved the most heinous sveltitude at 1.5 hours of working out, five days a week. that's all i'm saying. cardio sprinkled with heavy weights = i was a really hot librarian for two fricking seconds.

go forth, and tell the people.

another ice age animal which amazes!

so of course i'm reading a book about turtles (The Year of the Turtle by david m. carroll), and you just know that turtles - like everything else - were freaky during the last ice age. or, try the last several million years. ten million, you say? twenty million? fine. archelon is so far the largest turtle that ever lived, at 2 tons and 13 feet long. Yale university has the kick-ass skeleton in the picture above. it amazes!

here's archelon on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archelon

stellar is as stellar does

wikipedia has a list of the closest stars to earth, and a list of the brightest stars in the milky way. i think that's a nifty thing to have for ready-reference!

toilet art! (not that kind)

you know what's neat? decals and stickers for your toilet tank: octopi, divers, cowboys, bicycles, and my personal fave, the jellyfish! from etsy, and also mentioned by geekologie. and probably lots of other people. if anyone wants to buy me the jellyfish, i won't say no.

bentobjects is a nifty art blog, people

"The Party (cheese doodle is invited to the party)"

photos of sculp-churs and some comments, guaranteed - i think - to gitchoo all thoughtful and perked up. art by terry border who, i must say, has a bajillion cool links on his site. whee! found him through boingboing. i loves the internetz.

reading list (so far) - 2008

so i'm wild about the books i have stacked on my nightstand, and i want to tell someone about them. ready?

The Year of the Turtle, by David M. Carroll - natural history of turtles and other new england riverine flora and fauna. lovely ink illustrations.

The Road to my Farm, by Nora Seton - about a woman with a harvard degree in Classics who decides to become a farmer and grow some chickens.

Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America, by Richard and Dorothy Wertz - fascinating stuff on midwives, birth pain, corsets, and i don't even know what else.

Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy, by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr - can't wait to glean more information about repealed environmental laws, and see where things stand (or stood, in 2004).

Making Hay, by Verlyn Klinkenborg - i am just so into pastoral memoirs and meditations on farming these days. a curious subject that really takes me away from my day-to-day life.

Chocolate: A Journey of Dark and Light, by Mort Rosenblum - a fine writer, excellent journalist, and proven gourmand, rosenblum does his thing with chocolate in france and all around, with meso-american history included.

Women of the Pleasure Quarters: The Secret History of the Geisha, by Lesley Downer - inspired by Arther Golden's fictional Memoirs of a Geisha, the author takes her own journalist's look into the nearly-impervious world of the modern geisha. plentiful history lessons, cultural non-sequiturs, and excellent writing.

The Solace of Open Spaces, by Gretel Ehrlich - meditations on wyoming, landscape and people. i love erhlich's writing, by the way. i thought her book This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland was superb. she also has another book about her experience being struck by lightning(!), called A Match To The Heart(!!!).

chinese factory workers hate us.

the bug funeral kit comes with insect coffin, a scroll with poem and ribbon, hand-bound instruction booklet, and a packet of grass seeds. take consolation in the fact that your buggie friend will rest in lots of little...yeah, i can't say it.

GROSS. i would use this for a spider, or a big handsome stag beetle, or a creepily helpful predator-mantis. ladybugs. dragonflies. but wall-shrimp, aka house centipedes? no way! they don't really ever die anyhow. gosh, let's talk about something else.

purchase your bug funeral kits here! (courtesy of boingboing and davidbarringer.com.)

o sweet pulchritude?

Wordie is a social-networking site that bonds people through weird vocabulary words! you can make lists, submit, discuss, annotate. sounds fun, perhaps addictive for some. i think FreeRice would be a great game to introduce to the Wordie user base.

a new link to use all the time.

please welcome Frank's Compulsive Guide to Postal Addresses: Effective Addressing for International Mail. during work, i looked up the arrangements of australian and french addresses. um, useful? featured on PC World's 50 Most Useful Sites Ever. oh, the madness.