Platypuses
Thanks to transiit and National Geographic, it has come to my attention that platypuses are even awesomer than I already thought.
From the article:
…remains of what was believed to be a distant forebear of both the platypus and the echidna—the fossil species Teinolophos—actually belong to an early platypus, according to scientists who performed an x-ray analysis of a Teinolophos jawbone.
The finding means the two animals must have separated sometime earlier than the age of the fossil—at least 112 million years ago.
Platypuses survived what dinosaurs didn’t. Booyah.
Eyeballs and G&Ts
Today:
- organizational charts
- a cheeseburger
- free test contact lenses *plink plink*
- digital photographs of my eyeballs
- three Drupal training sessions
- food and G&Ts at Leopold Bros.
- cheesecake at Zingerman’s
- half a free baguette
America's Mitten
Thanks to mitten via twitter for this awesome video.
Long story short, Michigan is fucked. Michigan got punished by the DNC for moving its primary up to today. The Dems have pretty much abandoned the primary here. If one decides to vote Democrat (Michigan’s primary requires you to declare any party at the polling place and then select a candidate from that party), one can vote for Clinton, “Uncommitted,” [edit: or Kucinich, or Gravel; Dodd dropped out], with no write-ins. Either way, Michigan sends no delegates to the national Democratic primary [edit: except now they are saying that if there are "enough" Uncommitted voters, uncommitted Democratic delegates may be allowed to attend the national Dem primary].
For once I feel relatively smart for maintaining Pennsylvania residency and absentee balloting there.
Anyway, this lack of Democrats has created a vacuum of Republican caterwauling and chest thumping. McCain is doing well here, So there’s an active push by Michigan Democrats for Dems to vote Romney. Romney is, in addition to being an asshole, a pretty hilarious guy with so many differing positions over the years and so much money to spend, how could we possibly take this opportunity away from him? Michigan won’t get Democratic delegates, but we will get a more drawn out, more entertaining Republican primary season.
So this is pretty much summed up in this video. Not sure why I wrote it all out. But there you go.
Empire Beauty School Punks
My mom works part-time at a fabric shop downtown in a tiny college town. Apparently there has been a rash of broken windows and other general low-brow punk behavior as unemployment and the number of kids with nothing to do have gone up.
One night this week she was leaving the shop and walking through the parking lot to her car when she saw two kids with skateboards milling about in the lot. There’s a skate park nearby and skating in the (poorly lit) parking lots behind Main Street has been outlawed, so she wondered if they were up to no good. One of the kids spoke. She froze.
“Don’t you think that lady has nice hair?” one kid asked the other.
The other kid, clearly mortified, did not answer.
My mom, trying very hard not to laugh, got in her car and drove home.
picture/date/place
An ORG project still going strong, with more people participating.
Once a month, on a given date and time, friends from all over the world take a picture. Sometimes it’s themed; past themes have included reflections, feet, and paper. This month there was no theme. Photos were taken at 8pm GMT today, so it’s a nice little slice of everyone’s weekend (I was at the co-op this month).
Silent film
I’ve found a way to get a point across with video but prevent myself from having to listen to my voice.
past and future (with sound) from viscousplatypus on Vimeo.
(This is also a test to see how well Vimeo embeds in Wordpress.)
The music is the very beginning of an epic composition by Dan Deacon called “Wham City.” I’ve been raving to everyone who will listen about him.