I’m pretty sure we’ve locked down the ninja vote for our upcoming election. Take that, McPalin!

Hi-ya!

(And there you go, that’s today’s word of the week. It can nestle up alongside “hi-yo” and “heya” in the ongoing conversations I have with particular people. Well, a certain person. You know who you are. Hi-yo!)

Image via

We’ve got oval-mouthed muppet cows doing a little new year’s number, and a cameo of Kermit doing his wrinkle-face at the end. Enjoy!

Via

Oh, pretty! I love the rubbery umbrella look of these baby jellies in motion. I once hiked over a breath-stealing ridge to get to Wineglass Bay in the Freycinet National Park off the east coast of Tasmania, only to find the beach littered in blue jellyfish—I mean, just thick with them. “Don’t step on one!,” my boyfriend kept barking at me. I think he had visions of slinging all 6-feet of me over his shoulder for the 3 mile hike back over the hill to the car.

Via

In 8th grade, I was in “Reflections,” the all-girl swing choir at my Junior High. We wore matching rust-colored dresses from Sears. Easy-breathe polyester, of course, and THANK GOD I am an autumn, so the color worked on me.

I auditioned by singing “Don’t Give Up On Us, Baby,” which has almost no notes and is low enough for a breathy alto to vamp her way through. The only song I remember doing in the group (we performed at pep rallies and old folks’ homes), was a fifties medley that included a rockin’ cover of “Rockin’ Robin.”

If you knew me in person and plied me with drinks, I would rock you in the treetops all night long, complete with arm gestures that are two steps past jazz hands on the living dork scale. Reason enough to make a new friend, right?? Tweedly-deedly-deet!

I went to public school and was in a congregational church choir, so we never did any uncomfortably sexual christ beseechery, ala the ladeez above (although their powder-blue polyester is what set me off on this tangent).

Exquisitely unkind imagery via This Isn’t Happiness (really, I feel bad already and plan to help a neighbor or rescue a fallen baby bird to build back my karma points). I like to think they make up for the optics with their god-shocking big girl voices, though.

At our highest point, we were a ten chihuahua family. Now there are only five in the pack. We said goodbye to my sister’s two girls on Saturday.

Fern:

Phoebe:

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Barack Obama, 5 minutes before the first presidential debate, September 26, 2008.

Photo by David Katz.

First, notice the mouth. It’s o_o in action!

This story trips all the sensors on my maternal/protective axis of adorability: a newborn Siamang gibbon, saved by round-the-clock bottle feeding and the love of a stuffed camel. I can trace my exquisite sensitivities to back when I was a kid and saw a photo of a psychological test monkey being “raised” by a wire and terrycloth mother.

The researchers were examining the importance of love and attachment by denying it to newborn rhesus monkeys. The ones in the control group were raised by their mothers and grew up normally. The monkeys in the second group were taken from their mothers and kept in empty cages, fed at a distance with long-nippled bottles. Without touch, they all died quickly. A horror, to be sure, but it’s the third group that really kills me. (more…)

Last winter, I pussed out after months of relentless snow-n-ice (the locals call this winter, and I can tell you, I am not a fan) and drove west with two chihuahuas, one barely 3 months old. We ended up spending 7 weeks on an air mattress in my still-empty old San Francisco flat. There was nothing there except a chair (which I stood on in the kitchen, since the only place I got wireless was on the top of the fridge), a ladder, my blow-up mattress (surprisingly comfy, until about week 6), and the box the air mattress came in next to the bed, with a borrowed lamp on it.

Sleeping—or lounging—on air is a little like being on water. It’s got a different give than a regular mattress, especially when you make any side-to-side motion. Air is not as immediately sloshy as those old Land-and-Sky waterbeds you sometimes see at garage sales, but if you’re not fully inflated, you can fall into an air pocket (or, more precisely, a no-air pocket).

For fun, I rented DVDs and watched them on my 12-inch Powerbook wearing my puffy headphones; the kind more commonly referred to as “cans.” That’s how I watched my first episodes of The Office, propped on pillows against the wall, sunk deep into my cloud of air. I even watched out of order: Season 3, then season 2, then season 1 (which was annoyingly difficult to find, and by that point I was jonesing like a scabbed-out crack monkey in need of a hit). And finally season 4, downloaded from iTunes while at work, then watched in the evening, decorated by dogs. (more…)

Not his best angle, for sure, but do you think he bothers with body image? Archie fully inhabits his skin, even the bald bits on his neck and belly. He only cares about the cat meowing on the DVD or the dog on the leash across the street. And squirrels, he’s very concerned about the squirrels.

This pic is NSFW, BTW.

I’ve often described San Francisco as the tip of the thumb, but I never realized you could map the greater Bay Area with both hands. Of course, San Francisco is rocking the black nail polish on its thumbtip footprint. (Always gotta be different. Posers.)

Since west is usually left on a 2D map, not running along the bottom, you have to imagine you’re treading water in the mighty Pacific, looking east. If the map showed more detail, you could see Mt. Diablo in the distance, or the Sierras. Or perhaps all the way past the great plains to my tiny home on the eastern edge of Nebraska.

This is from a Cartoon Guide to California, circa 1938. Yep, looks about right. Thanks, Strange Maps!