I think it's way too early to be showing the Grinch on tv, and any other Christmas special for that matter. And I say this not because I am personally a grinch but for just the opposite- Christmas is a good time and the best way to ruin it is to make us all sick of Christmas before it's even December!
But I have to admit I have already purchased a copy of Josh Groober's Christmas CD. Why have I done such an insidious thing? Because I am married and that is what married men do. I get to be redeemed somewhat since I bought myself the brand new Corb Lund. Nary a Christmas song on that one.

Some time tomorrow you should be able to head over to The Science Creative Quarterly to read my story about squids. But why wait till then? There are many many great scientifically creative essays and poems and stories and such to read over there. Hardly any poems dedicated to Eotriceratops, though.
UPDATE- the story fell off the main page and can now be found here.

The world famous Royal Tyrrell Museum is only about three hours away from Edmonton. When Michelle and I went there this summer we were kind of surprised at how quickly we got there. So there's no excuse to not go there at least once a day! Okay, well at the very least maybe once every few years or so. Especiallly now that they are displaying the world's only specimen of Eotriceratops xerinsularis, a huge proto-ceratopsian discovered not far from Drumheller in a previously dino-free stratum. Cool, eh? Check out this photo of the skull. Just imagine how that would look in the garage next to your Jaekelopterus rhenania.
I will now write the world's first ever poem dedicated to Eotriceratops.

Eotriceratops xerinsularis, can I call you Ted?
You're a horned dinosaur with a gigantic head
I wish you were still alive and not quite so dead
O Eotriceratops xerinsularis, whom I call Ted.

When I was a kid I had scads of the original Star Wars figures, and my next door neighbour Dan had just as many. We would have these huge epic battles with elastic bands doubling as lasers and rolled-up socks doing asteroid duty. Not too many secret rebel bases survived the old asteroid bomb. Sadly I sold them all and have been crying ever since. Well, I saved three figures. A busted-up Snaggletooth, Bossk, and Hammerhead. Not exactly the mainstays of the series but I always liked the aliens. So I was pretty happy to find a Roron Corrobb figure yesterday. He was an Ithorian Jedi featured in the Clone Wars animated series. Here he is enjoying a family reunion.

This round of nightshifts was fairly boring- for the first three nights I was digging rocks on the shovel. Boring. There was a brief moment of excitement going home one morning when our bus driver nearly plowed into the back of a parked haultruck at 80 kph. Yeah it was dark but the truck is big as a house and hard to miss. Plus it had its backup lights on. And the only reason he didn't slam right into it was because a busload of miners was yelling at him to swerve. I don't think he'll be our bus driver anymore- that wasn't even his first incident, just the one that required the most changes of underwear.
Last night was also pretty boring except my friend Robin showed me how to find Ceres, the asteroid now classified as a dwarf planet. It's not bright enough to see with the naked eye but if you have binoculars it's almost visible. And by almost I mean not really at all. But it IS up there! And hopefully, that's where it'll stay.
Also, I changed my mind about the trilobite fossil- I'd way rather have one of these.

I finally found some trilobite fossils today, at West Edmonton Mall. Pretty nice specimens, and going for a pretty penny too. So I didn't buy one. But at least there's some news from the dinosaur world today. Is it still news when the specimens in question are 110 million years old? National Geographic has a cool (somewhat) interactive flash site up about unusual dinos. My favorite is the Epidendrosaurus.
Wanna win a children's book about squids? Well, you won't be able to, since I'm going to. But you can always try, right?
You know what's a terrible movie? Rise of the Silver Surfer. Lucky it was a freebie from the library. Seriously, it was extremely unfantastic. Oh well.
Also, I discovered that my wife doesn't like it when I use her toothbrush. And she likes it even less when I say, "But you never even noticed all the other times!"

Have you ever seen that Galactic Heroes line of Star Wars figures? They're fun. My friend Zimmy made a drawing of one today:


Little Imperial Guard by *zimeta08 on deviantART

And here is a photo I took:



I sometimes wonder what will happen when I have children and they want to play with my toys. . .

Yesterday I came as close as I ever want to get to killing a man at work. One little flick of my wrist and 1800 tons of machine would have ended my friend Neal. Luckily I felt this very slight shudder and stopped swinging. I had pushed a 70 ton bulldozer 6 meters and hadn't even felt it till it wedged up against my tracks. Neal had to kick in the window of his dozer to get out. If I hadn't stopped, or if I had been swinging even a touch faster . . .
That kind of thing can really shake you up. And I did everything right. That's actually worse than if I had been somehow negligent- it means shitty things can happen for no reason. Neal wasn't hurt, and he kept telling me not to feel bad, that it wasn't my fault, but I kept thinking what if. But you know, what-ifs are a kind of mental virus. There is no what-if, there is only what happened, and nothing you can do about it. In this case what happened was we both got to go home alive at the end of the day. Therefore, instead of feeling terrible, we should feel elated, excited, alive.
At least that's what I'm trying to convince myself of. Today I think I lost that battle. But tomorrow I'll go have a beer with Neal and we'll toast life and laugh, and not worry about what-ifs.

The Canadian Finals Rodeo is in town for its annual eviction of the Oilers from Rexall. You know what that means right? It means you should go watch KoRn's rodeo-themed video for Hold On.
And look- Ursula Vernon's children's book Nurk is almost out! Why don't you buy me a copy?


Did you ever wonder what you would look like if you had antlers, walrus tusks, crab arms, elephant legs and polar bear ears? Wonder no more!



Scientists have discovered a solar system with at least five planets! That's cool, though I think the opening sentence of the article could have been written better: Star 55 Cancri became the only star aside from the sun to have five planets . . . I'm pretty sure there are plenty of stars out there with five or more planets. And I like the part where it says the new planet is full of gas. Me too! Ah well, I pick at nits here. The important thing is that 55 Cancrians will soon be sending their gaseous space spoors to conquer Earth!

My friend Robin kind of amazed me the other day. He sat down next to me on the bus to work, a pile of astronomy magazines in his lap. He told me how the night before he noticed this weird new smudgey star in the sky where there never used to be one. None of his star charts, including the most current for November, showed anything in that region of space. It was kind of a mystery. Of course now Comet Holmes is all over the news for its anomalous brightness- it cracked or blew up or something so it went a million times brighter than it should've been. Which is why Robin was able to pick it out of the sky with the naked eye. The amazing thing to me is that he was able to recognize one star as being out of the ordinary.
So last night we took advantage of the perfectly clear sky to inspect Holmes, and admire Mars which is beautifully bright this month. One advantage of nightshift.
Anyways, Robin would like to enlist your help with something. He wants a telescope. Really really badly. More badly than you do. So here's what you can do- first, go to Astronomy Magazine and enter their win-a-telescope contest. Secondly, win a telescope. Third, give it to Robin. Okay? Okay.