Haggish pursuits

Giant ground pangolin, Manis gigantea. Collected Apr 26, 1913, Niangara, Congo Belge. AMNH neg 222254, cat#: 53846

God,
this is what I miss about living in New York: high-quality roadkill, not like the squads of spermophiles we see around here. No no, kidding. But actually yes: viz the Carnivorous Nights Taxidermy Contest. It's not often I see something on boingboing that features somebody I know (used to know, at least): Darrin Lunde, collections manager in Mammalogy at the old ranch and author of the sort of unfortunately titled (but charming and informative - see how I sneaked in a tiny review there?) Meet the Meerkat. Jaime if you still see Darrin around, an autographed copy would be a really nice xmas present for your young friends that live in my house.

So
My new favorite blog is Morbid Anatomy ("surveying the interstices of art and medecine, death and culture" - sure beats "waxing gibberish" for a tagline doesn't it?). But I must mention that one of my old favorite blogs, BibliOdyssey, has gotten a book out! Yay for Paul in Sydney... and what good luck for someone who needs to buy me a Christmas present (it's too late for my birthday, you dogs, it's on Saturday and even the quick Amazon shipping wouldn't get it to me in time).



And while you're on Amazon
and while we're speaking of Brooklyn, which I swear wasn't that cool when we lived there, you could buy a copy of what the New York Times (no less!) calls the "slim and jaunty new graphic novella," Emily Flake's These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves. Miss Emily does the regular comic Lulu Eightball, which appears in Baltimore's Pity Caper, and! she made a superfantastic drawing of baby monkeys for Jules & Leslie's twins before they were even born! The likeness was uncanny!

I'm going to buy me a box (rather, a carton - get it? oh ho ho my goodness that's rich!) of Miss Emily's book and give it out to all the women in my Monday Night Prayer Group as xmas presents. Oh crap now I've spoiled it. We're all supposedly quitting when the smoking-in-bars ban goes through in January anyway - our kids are getting to be old enough to figure it out.




Although
I have to admit, they're not geniuses. Yesterday Mr. Four and I were discussing the cheery yellow van that had pulled up in front of my neighbors' house - the Double-Income-No-Kids guys on our block have a cleaning service (sob!) - and he asked if they were going to clean the whole house. As my mind's eye panned over my spotted bathroom mirror and truly disgusting kitchen floor, I sighed, "Yes. They're going to clean the whole house."

"Even those bumps on the outside?"
"Bumps?"
"These bumps." He patted the shingles.
"No, er, the rain washes those." Kinda. God, please let the paint hold until after we've finished the basement.
"But all the things inside we clean."
"Right."
"Except the clothes."
"What? How do they get clean then after you get them dirty?"
"We put them in the hamper and then they get clean again."

It's magic. I'm like some kind of elf or brownie. The sorting, the lugging, the horrible sounds our washing machine makes these days, the piles of folded laundry sorted out on the coffee table - it's all invisible.

Lastly:

want

want

want

not want