You know what I'm really into right now? Marine invertebrates. They're just so cool. Did you know that sand dollars can crawl? I don't even know what a living sand dollar looks like but apparently they're all covered in spines. Why don't I live by an ocean?
One of my friends from work goes home to Newfoundland as often as he can, and uses my house as a waystation for airport access. He brought me back an issue of Downhome, a local digest, which had an interesting article on seashells. There's a type of sea urchin in Newfoundland which is locally called a Whore's Egg. Apparently its radula, or tooth, is called an Aristotle's Lantern.
And you may recall from my poem 'Pyrite Pirates' that a shark egg is also known as a mermaid's purse. Sharks, of course, are marine vertebrates, or as I like to call them, ininvertebrates.
A couple of months ago in Honolulu they pulled up this weird cephalopod that looked sort of like a squid/octopus hybrid, though the photo looks pretty squiddy to me. Judge for yourself.
Other things I'm into right now include the new KoRn, Heroes Season 1 DVD, and ScienceBlogs.

My house is starting to look like the legendary electronics graveyards of old- all sorts of bleached bones and tusks sticking out of the sub-Saharan soil. Well, between my old camera (drowned), my old CD player (worn out) and the old desktop (honored retirement) it seems that way.
Michelle got me an early birthday present yesterday- a new Olympus Stylus 770SW, waterproof to 10 meters. It's got me itching to take up diving again, that's for sure. Also, it's shock-resistant, to the delight of the salesman who kept telling me in his Swedish accent how you could drop it and throw it- but he was no longer allowed to show me since the boss had recently forbidden demonstrations. He seemed very sad about this.
Anyways, the old FinePix was a fine camera and I found a great photo I took with it that I forgot all about- it's a shot of Abel Tasman National Park in New Zealand. I saw orcas that time, too, actually. Here, I'll let Elrond point it out to you on a map:

Remember when Krusty the Clown unveiled Poochy to his television viewers? He was wearing a tux and he gave the following address:
“Once in a great while we are privileged to experience a television event so extraordinary, it becomes part of our shared heritage. 1969: Man walks on the moon. 1971: Man walks on the moon, again. Then for a long time, nothing happened. Until tonight.”
Although he was talking about the history of television, I often think he was also kind of talking about the history of space exploration. In recent years, of course, lots has been happening. Nearly all of it done by NASA. Until tonight. Well, not exactly tonight. But still, Canada is getting in on the space race- we're sending a mission to Mars in 2009! The mission is called Northern Light, and it's mostly a partnership between universities and corporations- no government involvement. And the total budget is around $20 million. In terms of space exploration it's practically free.
What is free is Google Sky, the new universe portion of Earth. Earth and Sky, get it? 100 million stars! Wow. You can read about it here or just go download it from Google, I'm sure you know the way.
Speaking of exploration, NG has some pretty cool photos of a recent excursion to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Glass squids with polka-dot eyes!
All these robot explorers remind me of another Simpsons quote- when Bart and Lisa graduate from military school the principal or general or whoever runs it says in his commencement speech, "The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots."

More New Zealand herald stuff: Lord of the Rings technology being used in hospitals. I thought maybe rings of power but actually it's more digital in nature.
Just yesterday I mentioned how promising it is that a pod of blue whales was seen so far north (for the first time in 50 years actually) and then today comes news of an oil spill that affects 60 orcas, some of whom swam through it.

Well, it's back to normal for me after a pretty slack summer. Including the next four days of work, I'll have worked only 17 of 62 days in July and August. But now I go back to my normal schedule.
So, pretty much randomly, here is a blogger from the NZ Herald (I loved that paper when i was there and Harvey linked to it today so I was browsing around) who talks about the etiquette of reading other peoples' emails. When I was in China I often found a crowd of curious onlookers brazenly reading my emails over my shoulder so I guess the issue doesn't bother me as much. Also, I am not secretly maintaining a mail-order bride on another continent.
I've been enjoying a Flickr renaissance with my new iMac, since I now have a monitor large enough to see whole photographs! Here are two of my recent favorites : a poison dart frog of the Dendrobates azureis variety (I typed that from memory so see if I was right!) and the arms of a giant pacific octopus.
Did you hear that pod of blue whales was recently spotted near the Queen Charlotte Islands? We only saw orcas when we were there a few weeks ago but maybe some day we can go back to see the world's largest animal, possibly ever. I did have the privilege of seeing the largest toothed whale, the sperm whale off Kaikoura in New Zealand:

Yoda on Facebook
I had a funny dream last night where Yoda was checking his Facebook during Revenge of the Sith. His friend status updates were full of the usual-
Obi-wan Kenobi is fighting General Grievous. 36m ago
Chewbacca is wrreeeerrraarrghhh! 2h ago
Padme Amidala is pregnanter every day. 3h ago
But Yoda made an alarming discovery in his News Feed:
Anakin Skywalker and Darth Sidious are now friends.

I have crossed over to the light side- I bought an iMac today. The new models are coming later this week so the old ones are being cleared out. Actually there really aren't that many left. Yay! Freed from the tyranny that is Windows!
And now, a moment of silence for gabrielle's old PC which served so faithfully for so long. It wasn't its fault that Windows sucks so bad.

Most . . . Illogical



So Spock was actually an elf from Rivendell? Who knew? I certainly didn't, until I rented Ringers: Lord of the Fans, which is a funny little documentary about LotR and Rings fans, narrated by Dominic Monaghan, that hobbit from Lost.
To make up for searing your eyes with that misbegotten horror, I present to you some of the beautiful sketch cards Otis Frampton made for NewLine.
Reminds me I still have to read Children of Hurin- and speaking of which, here is a beautiful pencil sketch of Fëanor.
And, completely unrelated, did you hear about the polar bear who was found wandering around 300 kms south of where polar bears normally hang out? Maybe she was the mother of that grizz/polar hybrid and was looking for her old paramour.

Siroi Yami No Naka
. . . is Japanese for I have no idea what. I think it means crazy catchy Japanese rap, what House of Pain might have sounded like if they had emigrated to Hokkaido or something and managed to have a career. Anyways, it comes to my attention because I mentioned to someone on deviantArt that the bounty hunters from Cowboy Bebop, the best anime I've ever seen, should've tried and go for the bounty on Vash the Stampede of Trigun, the second best anime I've ever seen. And sure enough, someone had already thought of it and made a mashup video with Siroi Yama No Naka (by ShakkaZombie, btw) as the theme music.
So even if you don't know anything about Spike, Jet or Vash, just watch this video for the great tune:


Also, the best American anime ever is finally going to have its third season, and you can see the trailer here if you like.

I know of at least two guys who have been on my crew in the past three years who've been convicted of knife-related crimes. I was riding with the foreman in his pickup truck with a fellow oiler yesterday, discussing one of them. I had a hard time believing the rapsheet they were attributing to him since in my opinion, he's a perfectly normal, nice guy. I told them they were full of poo. The guy in question just happened to be ahead of us in his haultruck, and he gave us the signal that it was okay to pass, so foreman zoomed around him directly into the path of an oncoming haultruck. Narrowly escaping death by ascrushxiation, we swerved back in line to our own lane. "See?" Charlie crowed, triumphantly, "He just tried to off all three of us at once!"
The labour shortage in Alberta has meant there has been a lot of turnover at the mine, and we joke that the company has a recruiter stationed at the jail to offer jobs to new releasees. But even aside from the criminal element, the constant influx of new employees means that the minesite is crawling with rookie operators doing their best to keep 500 tons of rock and steel on the road. It can be a gongshow out there.
Mere minutes after the incident I described above, we were waiting at a stop sign when we saw 34 truck come sliding down the mud directly towards us. Charlie screamed that it was Kyle, a new driver who had no idea what he was doing and that we better get out of there. Foreman's face had a funny expression of concern mingled with concentration as he managed once more to get us out of harm's way.
I shook my head and said, "I love that we're terrified of our coworkers."

I was able to recover the last photos taken with my good old FinePix before it passed away. The rest of them are, as always, here.

I entered a writing contest over at Stainless Steel Droppings- the object was to write a Tiny Story of exactly 100 words, without using any word more than once. The story could be about anything so long as it actually was a story and it followed those two guidelines. I tied for third! Yay! You can go to his blog to read all the entrants- I especially liked the winning entry, "Father". 

Also, I wrote a poem for my DeviantArt friend Zimmy, (aka Emily Weber who has done some artwork for me in the past and whom I interviewed here) since she made me some giftart. You can read the poem where I bust up her characters' wedding day for no good reason here.

One of Michelle's friends told us about this one, a battle between water buffalo, lions and even a crocodile:



I can imagine a similar scene played out in the Cretaceous between T-Rexes, Triceratops and Mosasaurs.