It’s the little things

A couple weeks ago, one of my Twitter accounts was followed by a spammer. This is not unusual; a huge percentage of Twitter accounts are spammers. The thing that caught my eye—though perhaps not quite as the spam machinery intended—was in the bio: “dip me over and fuck me doggystyle. Whatever you want I will try it (NO ANAL).”
Let’s say I am so naïve that I believe an actual person has set up this Twitter account, and has invited 267 other people to do her doggystyle; do I find her more enticing because her “Whatever you want” is qualified? Especially given that the qualification excludes a pretty mundane practice—am I to infer that she’s up for (in lieu of listing several other possibilities that would likely get the blog undesirable search engine attention, I’ll just say) bloodplay? I just don’t know.

Dead Mann Walking Review

Dead Mann Walking: A Hessius Mann Novel, Petrucha. Yes. Petrucha has created a unique (to my knowledge) first-person narrator in Hessius Mann. I am looking forward to the next installment to see if he can maintain the level of interest, given Tana French’s rationale in giving each of her Dublin Murder Squad books a different protagonist: it’s hard to justify life-changing events happening to the same person over and over. Some aspects of DMW resonate with another recent work I also enjoyed; I think it rather validates Petrucha’s vision that a different group of talented writers went in a similar direction given a related premise. The only passage that pulled me out of the narrative was the improper (and strained) use of “to coin a phrase.”

The universal translator merely burbles quietly

My favorite animal chronicler, Sy Montgomery, has written a great article on the octopus and the bewildering nature of octopus intelligence.

Read the article and imagine yourself in the distant future, aboard a galactic ship crewed by beings from across the universe. You’ve got a new roomie, one from your home planet. Oh, boy! Another human, after years of being the only one onboard! Nope. It’s an octopus. She eyes you from the comfort of a brown beer bottle as you nervously search for a copy of the Octopus Enrichment Handbook in the All-Earthican Digital Library.

Antique radiation

After the excitement over the Fukushima nuclear plant, people in Japan are (understandably) a little jumpy about radiation. This seems to have led to the discovery of a bunch of antique radiation sources. A recent radiological survey of the Puget Sound area was done to establish what the normal baseline radiation level is (because the similar surveys in Fukushima had not had a pre-reactor-problem level to compare to). They were expecting to find a lot of non-disaster related radiation, and I wonder if they found any old bottles of radium, too?

I’m willing to believe there are 99, and it’s definitely photography; I’ll give them that

It has, again, been a while since we’ve had any good FP examples here, so I was initially thrilled to see this link to 99 self-declared “Excellent Examples of Forced Perspective Photography.” When I followed the link, though, I was disappointed to find that while several of the photographs are excellent, very few of them use FP very well, if at all.