Did you catch this year's Canada Reads panel? Georges Laraque! Sweet! One of my favorite of all Oilers alumni, up there with Gretz and Mess. He was great in Battle of the Blades in the sense of he had lots of fun. As if that wasn't cool enough, Sara Quin too! Sweeeet! Plus she's defending a graphic novel. Definitely have to read that one. Of all the Quin twins, Sara is definitely one of my favorite top two ever, right up there with Tegan.
Anyways, Homie Bear Reads has been pretty slow lately. I got Justin Cronin's The Passage from the library and only made it about halfway through before I had to give it back. Good book, he was at a SDCC panel we went to.
If you can believe it, I have been working on a Green Lantern collection (The Sinestro Corps War Volume 1) for almost four weeks! Not sure why six or eight comic books collected together is giving me such troubles. I really like it, even showed Michelle a cool part that I thought was well written and drawn (many power rings in search of new recruits all of a sudden . . . )
Doesn't help that at work during my breaks I'm trying to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Which so far doesn't seem to be much about zen OR motorcycles.
My own motorcycle is getting raked right now! Which gives me a very zen feeling deep inside.
Also, squid worm! Finally! I've only been waiting for one of those for like, my whole life.

Look! A new species of frog has been discovered, the first known lungless frog. Cool eh?
And you've probably already heard of the newly discovered flat-faced walking fish, but just in case you haven't.
And though there are no brand new species of cephalopods to tell you about, Mutley James is drawing a ceph-a-day in April. Remember when he did a creature a day? Because he's really cool. I can't figure out livejournal's interface to link to the creatures directly but they're from December 2007.

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.

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!"

Happy Thanksgiving!
I'm thankful that I have an extra day off today. I'm thankful that the Oilers are 2-0 so far in this young NHL season, and I'm thankful for:



Most people think of squids and octopi when they think of cephalopods (and well you should since they kick ass) but I think my current favorite foothead is the cuttlefish. CBC recently showed an amazing documentary on them (on The Nature of Things) which showed their amazing variety and surprising intelligence. Did you know they have a ring of brains inside their head? More likely a ring of neural ganglia but still that's pretty cool.

.Cuttlefish. by *Andoledius on deviantART

Here's just one of many cuttlefish vids on YouTube.
To further celebrate Cephalopod Awareness Day, visit the Cephalopodcast.

Attack of the Giant Squid!
Thanks to gabrielle for the headsup- we finally have some footage of a living, mature giant squid! Although you can mostly just see tentacle, which is okay because that preserves an aura of mystery about the mighty Architeuthis. Since the link gabby put in the Droppings doesn't seem to work for us Firefox users, I will send you here instead.
I guess that makes my story about giant squids obsolete! Which is a good thing- the whole point was to find one, right? Still no one has yet seen a living Longman's Beaked whale, though. That story has just now disappeared forever into the oceanic depths that are my archives, but you can find it here.
In fact I read that story at G-Arts, and commissioned an illustration for it, done by the very talented Emily Weber.



She specializes in fun pictures of General Grievous so go check out her gallery (by clicking on the picture)! Ninja Ewoks!

The envelope was addressed to "Mr. H. Bear". Mail for him? Yay! The polar bear waved a massive paw at the departing mailman, whose snowshoes were crunching softly in the Arctic snow. Eagerly, he went back into his den to see what the mysterious package could be. The last time he got any mail was months and months ago, when Cousin Berg sent him a postcard from New Zealand.
He used a sleek sharp claw to slice the envelope open. Inside was . . . himself! A picture of him, surrounded by a yellow border. He was on the cover of a magazine! He was making his best menacing snarl, a pretty scary sight for sure. Attached to the magazine was a sticky note that read, "Hey man, thanks for being such a great model! My first cover!", signed by that nice photographer fellow he had met over a year ago. He had forgotten all about that guy. Now he was doubly glad he decided not to eat him. It had been fun taking all those pictures, posing and making faces. He had no idea he would make the cover of National Geographic!
There were more pictures of him inside, in the article on polar bears and PCB contamination. Yuck. He knew all about that, so he flipped through the rest of the magazine. A story called "In Search of the Giant Squid" caught his eye and he began reading. It was so interesting- this article said that squids have blue blood, since they use copper rather than iron to bind oxygen. And they have ammonia inside of 'em! Yuck! Almost as bad as PCBs. But the most intriguing thing about giant squids is that no one had ever seen one alive. Well, the article mentioned one guy in New Zealand (maybe Berg knows him)who caught a few larval ones, but no one had ever seen a big one. No people. And no bears either- until now! Mr. H. Bear decided to go and see a giant squid that very day.
Grabbing his goggles, he headed outside. Judging by the position of the sun in the sky, Bear estimated it was not quite midnight, so there should still be a few more hours of daylight. Plenty of time to go to that lead he had passed the other day, where, if he was lucky, that pod of whales might still be hanging around.
The lead, a large swath of open water that remains ice-free year round, was a short distance away, an easy walk for a polar bear. When he arrived, he was pleased to find some whales lounging about, feeding and resting. They were big, much too big to worry about being eaten by a bear, so Mr. H was able to approach without frightening them away. Selkies, seals and even belugas would never let him get so close.
"Hey there!" he called. "Hallo?" Most of the whales ignored him, or maybe just didn't realize he was talking to them, but one swam over to him. "Hi!" she said in a sort of whistly voice. "Who are you, silly bear?"
"I am Mr. H Bear."
"Well than I am Miss C Tacean. Esquire." She giggled. "What can I do for you?"
"Have you ever seen a giant squid?"
"All the time! Why, you don't want to eat one, do you?"
"No, I just want to see one. Will you take me to see one?"
"Well, since you have such nice goggles, I guess I will! But mostly I see squid around New Zealand or Newfoundland, not up here in the Arctic. And you have to go pretty deep, and it gets pretty dark and cold down there, so I doubt we'll see one today. But it'll be fun to look! Hop on!"
And so Mr. H carefully climbed on Miss C Tacean's back, just behind her dorsal fin, and took a deep breath. Although he swam pretty much every day, he had never dove much below a couple of meters. He was excited. "Ready?" C called.
"You betcha!" H answered, and down they went.
The water was cold, but of course polar bears aren't bothered by that. At first, it was clear, blue and familiar in the way the sunlight diffused into straight edges. He could hear whale song, and see vague shapes nearby. But as they went deeper, the water turned black, and Mr. H could feel the pressure increase steadily- his goggles seemed to be trying to suck his eyeballs out. He kept them open, though, not wanting to miss the hordes of giant squid he felt sure were down here. Still they went deeper. And deeper.
Deeper still- farther than any bear had ever gone. His lungs felt like they were on fire, and the pressure was threatening to turn him into a furry snowball. With one last look, he scanned all around, but couldn't see anything. Finally, he tapped Miss C Tacean's fin and she started the ascent. Slowly, so he wouldn't get the bends. It was agony, but Mr. H didn't really mind- what a great adventure! Even if it was a failure.
When they broke the surface, Mr. H rolled onto the snow, gasping for breath. He looked like some exotic new species of drowned Arctic rat, and Miss C Tacean laughed. "Are you alright, silly bear?"
"Yeah," he said, between breaths, "I'll be okay. Did you see any?"
"No, there weren't any down there. Just us whales."
"Oh well. Thanks for the ride! I'm going to go home now. Bye." And he turned for home. Despite not being successful in his quest, he was still excited to learn more about all the crazy things in this world. He loved that there were still things on Earth that no one had ever seen. Maybe someday he would be the first to meet a hitherto-unknown species. Wouldn't that be exciting?
Miss C Tacean watched the funny creature walk away. One of the calves in her pod of Longman's Beaked Whales swam up to her and asked, "I saw you underwater and there was some white alien or something on your back!!! What was it?"
"A polar bear. I bet as long as you live, you'll never see anything like a deep diving polar bear again."
"Wow, cool."