News You Can Bruise

We walked through Central Park to a Japanese restaurant that Andy likes. While we ate, he brought us up to speed on his research into the creation of mutant mice. He creates a mutant mouse by taking a mouse embryo and replacing the DNA inside some of its stem cells. The mouse develops with two sets of DNA (it's a "chimeric" mouse), and you check the color of its coat.

The mouse embryo would naturally have, say, a white coat, and the new DNA is for a mouse with a black coat. If the chimeric mouse has a dark coat then it's a good bet that most of its cells came from the modified stem cells. Specifically, its sex cells probably came from the modified stem cells. This means you can breed it with another chimeric mouse and get a mutant mouse.

A mutant mouse comes from a modified sperm and a modified egg, so it's not a chimera. It's what you would have gotten if all the cells of the original mouse had come from modified stem cells.

Here is the part I'm not as clear on. Andy is trying to breed mutant mice which have a certain gene truncated. The truncated gene will not be able to produce a certain protein. The protein is in charge of attaching a chemical tag to cells that need to be garbage-collected (or maybe the protein is, in fact, that chemical tag; I'm not sure). So if Andy's mad plan succeeds, these mutant mice will not be able to engage in cell death.

At this point in the pop science article I would talk about the applications of this revolutionary new technique for "the fight against aging" and leave it at that. However I have two other things to tell you. The first is that these mice will not be immortal just because they can't kill their own cells. They will probably get some sort of anti-cancer and die (I speculated as such and Andy didn't correct me). The second thing is that this is not a really new ability. You can already create a mouse whose cells don't die by giving the mouse a new gene, one copied in from a virus. I don't remember what the virus gene does, but obviously it works differently from Andy's technique; I think it might prevent cells from accepting the garbage-collection tag. Andy's technique has the same end result, but it doesn't require genes from other organisms. Once he gets some mice whose cells behave in an interesting way (or he fails in an interesting way), he can write his dissertation and he's Dr. Andy.

I wrote this mainly as a writing excercise, but it's a pretty interesting set of hacks and I never really understood how genetic engineering works, so maybe you'll find this interesting too. Rewiring mice stem cells sounds like a pretty dull job to me, but Andy likes it. I have more interesting stuff to write from our conversation, such as the operations you can perform on a gene or genome, and when you can copy a gene from one species to another. I will write this other entry if people are interested, or if I am bored.

In the museum I told Andy lots of trivia about prehistoric animals and evolution which I'd think he would know, as a biology major, but he was appreciative of the trivia. Maybe he was just humoring me. For instance, they had an Irish elk skeleton. I told him how biologists used to think the Irish elk demonstrated that evolution could get stuck in a rut, with the male Irish elk getting larger and larger antlers long after it ceased being any kind of advantage. This continued until the males couldn't lift their heads anymore, leading to extinction.

This page yields some more Irish elk trivia. For instance, the antlers of the Irish elk are not particularly large for its size. They just look abnormally large because the animal is so big. And the Irish elk also figured in a more prominent scientific argument: whether or not animals could go extinct at all.

I bring this up now because there's an Italian deli on Valencia I've always wanted to go into, and today we were there when it was open and we did go into it and they had little bags of squid ink for sale. We were on Valencia to have a dinner to celebrate my newfound unemployment. We ate at the fittingly-named Last Supper Club, which was tasty. Sumana liked it more than I did. I would probably have liked it more if we'd had a cheese course instead of dessert: I really had my eye on the gorgonzola fondue.

The first time we ate on Valencia it was at an Italian restaurant called Bistro Annex. I got suckered by the romantic candles on the tables. It was not good eats, though apparently it's a spin-off of Watercress, which we've been to and liked. Bistro Annex had subcontracted their desserts to a dessert company, and the dessert company had printed up a dessert menu that was a lot flashier than the main menu. It was, I realize, disturbingly like Brendan's restaurant that instead of having a kitchen just goes to other restaurants to fulfil your order.

Basically we should have gone to the Salvadorean restaurant next door. We still haven't been to that restaurant, but it probably would have been pretty good.

Anyway, I have just recently started to really observe restaurant kitchens. The neatest thing at Last Supper Cafe was how they cook the pasta. They have deep-fryer machines full of water which they occasionally top off from a pot set under a barely dripping tap. To cook a bunch of spaghetti they drop it into the basket of the deep fryer. When it's done they pull out the basket and reuse the boiling water. It's probably some specialized $600 pasta-boiling machine but it basically looks like a deep fryer full of water instead of oil.

Animal battle: the Oakland zoo has bats, elephants, alligators, and enormous tortoises. The SF zoo has kangaroos, gorillas, lemurs, and an anteater. The Oakland zoo has a really heavy emphasis on Africa and (to a lesser extent) southeast Asia; the SF zoo has animals from all over.

I don't think I'd ever seen a bat close up before; they're really odd creatures. I had seen approximately 12 million bats fly out of Carlsbad at eventime, but you don't get a good look at any particular bat when that happens. I bought a stuffed bat to hang from the ceiling along with my stuffed pterodactyl.

Number of dumb "Foo at the Zoo" jokes on a single notice board: 3. ("New", "Boo", and "Brew" (?!))

Outside of this documentary, mega beasts are known as megafauna, but clunky CGI renditions of the wolly mammoth and the buckeye giant beaver demand a clunky partial translation into English. Everything must be MEGA in this world of 64-ounce colas and ever-larger computers. Uh, computer monitors.

Quotes from the program so far, from memory:

• "The mega beasts were united by only one thing: their size."
• "Eleven thousand years ago, these wooly mammoths suffered a mysterious fate: total extinction."
• "...not realizing that they, too, were about to become the hunted."
• "Humans had both opportunity and motive for megabeast extermination." Yes, the butler, who I'm convinced, first gored the Colonel to death before trampling him to smithereens.
• "McPhee's disease theory sounded plausible, but it lacked one crucial element: evidence. ... Perhaps the beasts of Monster Beach could give it to him."

I love how often a line of narration in this documentary has the structure of a joke, and is funny, but is not actually a joke.

2007 Update: I found this annotation in Google Book Search, in the Northwestern University Press's edition of Moby-Dick (ISBN 0810102684):

Apparently a misreading as the name for the elephant's owner. The editors of the Hendricks House Moby-Dick... point out that it does not occur in Melville's source passages and that its form is an impossible one in Greek. The NN [presumably another edition] editors have no explanation or emendation to offer.

I'm pretty sure Melville made up a dirty story and ascribed it to ancient history.

When we went to the Monterey Bay aquarium last weekend there was one awesome permanent exhibit with a lot of jellyfish. Also a "The Art of Jellies" exhibit which was pretty gimmicky if you ask me, though it did position a tank of jellyfish in a mirrored room, giving you the impression that they had you surrounded. But apparently the marine biology cartel now wants you to say "jellies" (or, I suppose "sea jellies") instead of "jellyfish", because those things are amazingly not fish.

The only other non-fish with a fishy name I can think of is "cuttlefish". I've never heard anyone saying you should call a cuttlefish something else, but I checked "on the line", as the kids say, and "cuttle" is the hot new name for that beast. How long has this been going on? Did people used to refer to cucumberfish, anenomefish, and urchinfish until someone rewrote the aquarium displays to encourage the biologically correct usage?

In an interesting reverse of this trend, at the aquarium I also noticed that the fish that used to be called a "dolphin" is now called a "dolphinfish". I think chopping "fish" off the names of obvious non-fish is not really worth it, but I'm glad about the "dolphinfish" change because that was really confusing. I'd hear about sport fishermen catching a bazillion dolphin and wonder why nobody was upset about that.

We did see a guy who works at the aquarium and was a college friend of Pete Peterson II, and the jellies were incredible. They were illuminated from within the tanks, and in one of the tanks you could push a button to turn off the light and see the jellies become nearly invisible.

Coming soon: sea creature nomenclature prescriptivism: exposed!

Sometimes they get married and everything's fine. Sometimes they get married but then eaten by a fish or a heron or a cat. Sometimes they get eaten in the sixth verse for no real reason. It's like a probability distribution of all the different ways the lives of the frog and mouse could end up. They probably got eaten, but I prefer the versions where they don't. Cause having them get eaten just seems like

I'm tired of singing this song to you, mm-hmm
I'm tired of singing this song to you, mm-hmm
I'm tired of singing this song to you
They all got eaten by a bird, and away it flew
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, the end

Especially when it happens in the sixth verse.

PS: if you're new, the coffinfish is one of NYCB's most beloved and least marketable creations. Reminds me a little of Bill the Cat, actually.

Maybe Demon Dog is Quiet Coyote's evil brother. Or I could see them in an Odd Couple type matchup.

I really like the idea of trying to resurrect Shaw in a The Frogs scenario, but look at those excerpts. You can actually see the play get less funny with each remake. (I am not a total purist; I think those attempts to translate the Greek puns are awful.) I bet the frogs in the most recent version all look like Michigan J. Why not just make a new play about Shaw that pays homage to The Frogs? (I know, name recognition).

Bre-ke-ke.

I bring this up because in the odd "randomly placed bookcase" exhibit at the dinosaur museum in Utah, and then in the same used bookstore where I bought Infinite Jest, I found a 1981 book called After Man. It takes the relatively short view of 35 million years in the future, but it's a nice book because it's imaginative, illustrated with watercolored line drawings and written like any other zoological monograph. I can't find any information on this kindred spirit, but I know it exists and it's preventing me from doing a proper NYCB about After Man. Does anyone remember this?

Sensors also available in "boring box" edition. Maybe it has a compartment for you to hide your house keys in, or something to make up for the fact that it doesn't look like a frog.

Site does some stupid Javascript thing so I can't be bothered to find better links. Produit de France.

"I had that 'hip deer in the headlights' look."

"Yeah, I know that one. 'Oh, I'm too cool to--[whump] Aaah! My trucker hat!'"

Anyway. check out this free stock photo site. What's the catch? Well, this page conveniently lists the main catches, but photographers may reserve the right to attach additional catches to their photos. Not too onerous.

The Asian elephant is very sad because her friend had tuberculosis and was euthanized. We did see the African elephants who were happier, partly because they'd just had bales of hay stuck tucked between their tusks so that they would walk around and eat from a sort of beer hat of hay. I think when they complete the "African Savannah" habitat they should put the Elephas in with the Loxodonta and verisimillitude be damned.

The lake in the "South American Rainforest" habitat had been drained for no reason I could see, so there were no vegetarian piranha and the sole caiman was crammed into an isolation chamber along with the giant python. No turtles either, but elsewhere in the zoo they had Madagascar spider tortoises walking around on the grass, the tiniest chelonians you've ever seen.

Also, I recently found out that Zack makes candles, so I brought and gave him my now-ruined "Powerful Elvis Prayer" devotional candle for him to recycle. It's nice to be rid of it in a way that makes me feel like someone will appreciate it.

Q: What pet does a vampire keep?
A: A coffinfish!

I can't believe Big Book Of Jokes For Kids didn't accept that joke.

PS: Let me restate my plea for a news photo wire where the photos don't go bad after a month. Anyone? Should I just set up my own silent, copyright-infringing filcher?

"What animal are you?"

"Human."

[GLARE]

It turns out I am actually a sheep. I was thinking it would be nice to vary the Chinese lunar calendar to give other organisms a chance. We would have cool years like the year of the elephant, year of the saber-tooth tiger, year of the mola mola, year of the E. coli, etc. Just another idea from Leonard Labs, where we're always working orthogonal to your best interests.

i took my roommates goldfish and she found out now i'm scared!

My understanding is that there is a Chinese swallow that sticks its nest together using its viscous saliva. This dries into a brittle mass. In Chinese cooking, the nest is boiled and reduced and whatever chemical makes the saliva gooey is used to thicken broth. "Bird's Nest Soup".

I tasted some once on a CSF trip to San Francisco--I ate lunch with the Ho sisters in a dim little out of the way place they knew about. The menu was only in Chinese and the offerings were scary. The soup was nothing to write home about.

Swallow's nest: the honey of the vertebrate world!

There was a show where Jack Hanna was in Thailand at an elephant refuge. It was bath time for the elephants, so he rode an elephant into a river and scrubbed it and kept falling into the river. Fun. In the next scene the elephant was on land and Jack, surrounded by onlookers, rinsed off the elephant with a hose. Then he turned the hose on the onlookers and sprayed them with water for twenty or thirty seconds, laughing manaically the whole time!

The onlookers were laughing, too, and it was supposed to be all in good fun, because of course Jack was already soaking wet from spending so much time in the river. But the scene went on way too long, and it got sort of creepy. It was as though Jack, sick of not quite being the Crocodile Hunter, had finally snapped. "You're all elephants! I know it! Ah ha ha ha ha!"

re: breaching sharks
go to your library and have them order a documentary video entitled "air jaws". it totally delivers.

re: garlic cracking
i always keep a hammer in the kitchen for this purpose. well, i don't
keep it there just for this purpose, but it suits this purpose fine.
just give em a little tap. don't mess with garlic presses, even the
purportedly self-cleaning ones- these things are for yuppies only.

I hope you're keeping caught up on Brendan's Jake Berendes West Covina graphic novel. Embarrassing factoid: that blotch on Jake's nose on the bill is a slip of the Gimp pencil that I didn't notice for about a year. Then I was too lazy to do anything about it, and now it's being reprinted elsewhere. Let this be a lesson to you: never undertake any action!

PS: here's Air Jaws, which definitely looks better than Air Bud. Quote from Amazon review: "For the first time, you can watch a huge 15-foot white shark flies [sic] in the air with a seal in its jaws!!" No seals were harmed in the making of Air Jaws.

There are also some cool photos of penguins, kept safely on a separate page. The photos are not terribly large, but at least the copyright notices are kept out of the actual images.

PS: also a good advertisement for trilobites, if you want one. Many of the trilobites in these pictures are still up for adoption! (People who have already requested trilobites: you will get them, I promise.)

The company that owns the trilobite quarry is U-Dig Fossils. They have no web site but there is a fan site which is probably better than their actual web site would be.

The quarry is about 50 miles from Delta in central-west Utah. The whole area used to be a lake and it looks like the quarry is sort of near the north shore of the ancient lake; it's in the foothills of some small mountains.

To get to the quarry you go about 30 miles down highway 6 from Delta (Delta itself is about 100 miles from Provo), then turn onto a dirt/gravel road. The road goes north about 20 miles with some twists and turns. On the way there and back we saw some deer and some penned-up cows.

The actual approach into the quarry is pretty scary; it's a very steep downhill slope. We made it fine in my mother's SUV, and people on the website talk about making it in their rental cars.

We were the only customers at the quarry. The guy in charge was working down in the quarry under a tent. He came up to the office (a shack), showed us some samples, gave us buckets and hammers, and made us sign waivers. My mother brought an old geologist's hammer but the ones they gave us were better. He then took us to a hill on the east side of the quarry, above where another man was working under another tent, showed us how to find the "bugs", and left us to dig.

The modus operandi of the quarry seems to be to dig up a bunch of small rocks with a backhoe and leave them in huge piles. You then climb on a pile, pick out a likely rock, and split it open. Try to get as many slabs out of your rock as possible; every time you split a slab you have a new chance of finding trilobites. The quarry employees reserve especially rich trilobite veins for themselves; they have a sideline selling trilobites to rock shops (actually, their sideline is probably letting people come to the quarry and dig).

The trilobite vein was very rich; I found some sort of fossil in perhaps half of the rocks I cracked. A lot of the fossils were the tiny Peronopsis interstricta which I eventually started ignoring because they're not as cool.

Unfortunately, in my inexperience I ruined several trilobites and caused several others to become disloged from their stony homes. There are a lot of trilobites, so the loss to science is not great. When a trilobite is knocked out of its matrix, it skitters away into the pile of rock chips at your feet and becomes less valuable, like a comic book taken out of its wrapping. Sometimes I was able to recover the fleeing trilobite; other times I was left with only its impression in the rock. If you pick through the fragments you can find loose trilobites lost by others; my mother and sister started doing this when they got tired of wielding the hammer.

The literature says to wear safety glasses but I found it was too hot, and the flying rock chips weren't getting anywhere near my eyes, so I got rid of them after I filled my first bucket. I wore garden gloves the whole time; that is definitely a good idea. I was wearing shorts but came to regret it. It's pretty hot, but it's more useful to wear pants so that you can kneel and lie down on the rock without getting scraped up. Also, bring lots of water--I went through two big squeeze bottles in 2 hours. We brought back 7 bags of trilobites. I had the most because I worked longer, by my mother's looked the best as she has more experience collecting rock samples. Total cost for 3 people: $36.

After the dig we were dirty and exhausted. We are not cut out to be full-time trilobite diggers. We went back to Delta and crashed at the Best Western.

Last night I cleaned the trilobites with my nonexistent trilobite cleaning tools. I used a hammer and screwdriver to chip away some excess rock where I could (I ruined the screwdriver; good thing it was just a dot-com giveaway), and wiped off some dirt with water and cloth. One trilobite negative dissolved when I tried to wash it; I wasn't expecting this and felt bad about it.

I probably have a total of 20-25 non-Peronopsis trilobites, mostly Elrathia kingi. 15 of them are loose or in their own rock matrices, and the rest of them are hiding in two big chunks of fossilized lakebed.

The trip was a lot of fun. I definitely recommend it if you want to go fossil hunting or have a day to spare on a Utah or cross-country vacation. If you were going from San Francisco through Salt Lake City on the 80 it would be a doable 1-day detour.

TEASER: Susanna: married? I have the story! After this!
CONTENT: Susanna got married. I wore a tuxedo. So did John (ye groom), and a bunch of his young cousins. We all stood around at Tuxedo Junction and had pictures taken of us. It was jolly good fun. The next day there was a reception in Bakersfield. Everyone who was anyone was there, except for certain someones. Sumana looked glamorous in various dresses. Susanna looked glamorous in one dress. Life became a dizzying blend of cake, sliced fruit, and more pictures. Party followed the previous portion of the same party. Would it ever end? Yes, but not til pretty late.

Next week: I head to Utah to attend a second reception there, and then to sneak up on some trilobites with a geologist's hammer. Try to hide in the sedimentary rock, will you, trilobites? Take that! Whap!

• You thought there was only one of these pictures.
• But there's a bunch.
• There's more.
• etc.
• What's he doing?
• OK, enough elephants. Here are some elephants.
• And an elephant.
• And some safety elephants.
• How'd he get in here?

The story also contains the hilarious sentence "They have a tube which comes out of their mouth to perform the feeding, like this (Warning: annoying midi music ahead)."

News You Can Bruise: Hello.

Coffinfish: Hello.

NYCB: Is it true that you can walk on the ocean floor using your fins?

CF: You'd better believe it.

NYCB: Where do you usually walk?

CF: Just around.

NYCB: But like where? Like to the store?

CF: There are no stores in the depths of the ocean!

NYCB: Well, have you ever thought about opening a store?

CF: Why?

NYCB: Because it's never been done before. The market is completely open. I think it would be a good business for you if you opened up a convenience store off the coast of Australia. You could sell to the other deep sea fish and to the squids and crabs and whatnot.

CF: Look, do you know what fish use for money?

NYCB: No, what?

CF: Nothing! 'Cause we're fish! We have no economy! Our relationships with other fish are predator/prey relationships or mating relationships or rival relationships! So stop with the store idea!

NYCB: Do you think that the ocean as a whole would be more productive if you had an economy?

CF: No.

NYCB: Why not? Humans have an economy.

CF: Yeah, and what do you get out of it? You have to work all day to get your "money"!

NYCB: But you have to work all day as well. All day you lure smaller fish to their doom with the glowing bait atop your head.

CF: That's not work! I just sit back and the fish fall into my gaping maw! It's fun!

NYCB: And then you have to evade predators.

CF: To evade predators, I simply swallow an enormous amount of water! I bet that doesn't work for you!

NYCB: No, but if a predator did get you, how would your family survive without you to provide for them?

CF: That is a moot point because I don't provide for them now.

NYCB: I'm saying that maybe it would be a good idea if you took out an insurance policy or something.

CF: I have an insurance policy!

NYCB: Really?

CF: I am insured against theft, and damage from earthquake!

NYCB: That's pretty useless.

CF: We fish trade only in things that have no value! If we have something valuable, we keep it for ourselves.

NYCB: But what about symbiosis?

CF: Symbiosis is for sea anenomes!

NYCB: You're a very unpredictable interview.

CF: You are a very unpredictable interviewer. Why do you ask me about economic activity all the time? Why don't you ask me some more stupid human questions about how I walk, just like you do? Huh? How about anthropomorphizing me some more? Blaaah! I'm a coffinfish! Blaaah!

NYCB: So, uh, when you walk, are you all walkin' down the street like this, or are you all walkin' down the street like this?

CF: The first one.

NYCB: 'Cause that one's cooler?

CF: Yeah, whatever.

NYCB: Look, you wanted more questions about the walking thing.

CF: Why don't you ask me about my new book?

NYCB: You have a book?

CF: Yes, it's called "Passion and Power: The Political Houses of the Great Barrier Reef 1951-1956".

NYCB: What's it about?

CF: It's got it all: politics, food, sex, budding, intrigue, all set against the stunning backdrop of the postwar Great Barrier Reef.

NYCB: So is it a history?

CF: It's more of a fictionalized memoir. It takes place from the perspective of a young polyp who grows unobserved in the chambers of the ruling class of corals.

NYCB: I'm intrigued.

CF: It also has my favorite recipe for fish. I call it "Fish a la Fish".

NYCB: Would you like to share the recipe?

CF: Yes. First, you stay very still with your mouth open. Then, you eat the fish.

NYCB: So, it's more a means of acquiring fish than a recipe.

CF: It's both. The second part is the recipe.

NYCB: Your book sounds very interesting. Do you have a publisher?

CF: I was planning on disseminating it through oral tradition.

NYCB: You should get a publisher.

CF: Is that another economy thing?

NYCB: Sort of. I think a lot of humans would pay good money for a book written by a coffinfish.

CF: And what would I do with this "money"?

NYCB: You could buy a bunch of really tacky knicknacks and scatter them over the ocean floor, and then show them to other fish.

CF: Your human ways have corrupted me! Now I too must have these tacky knick-knacks!

NYCB: Sorry.

CF: Tell me where are the knick-knacks!

NYCB: Like what do you want?

CF: A little castle! I must have a little castle that gets algae in it! And a treasure chest that opens to reveal fake treasure!

NYCB: That sounds like classic aquarium store material.

CF: All right, I will try your aquarium "store".

NYCB: Thanks for inaugurating this series, coffinfish.

CF: Blaaah! [swims off]

We audition for people with skills associated with how-to shows: cooking, home improvement, gardening, etc. Our ideal candidate is someone who thinks he or she is very good, but who by any objective measure is awful. We film a "pilot" with each candidate, which is broadcast as an episode of the actual show. For instance, we'd have a cooking show set where people would do their cooking show pilots. We'd have everything they might need, but they'd be done in by their lack of skills and/or imagination.

The show is awful, both in a cruel way and in a campy way. The audience watches both to vicariously enjoy the victim's incompetence and to secretly hope that they'll actually do well and put one over on us. However, we use deceptive editing to eliminate any aspect of that.

The other idea from our group I liked was Jason Brittain's "The Great Weiner Dog In The Sky Show", in which a troupe of trained dachshunds perform death-defying high-wire and trampoline acts.

The stuffed elephant has been to Belgium, too.

(Via AMAI, another in the endless series of weblogs found via Downhill browsing)

Figure 1: Relative Coolness Of Two-Headed Things

Thing	Coolness
Ettin
Pushmi-pullyu
Two-headed snake
Two-headed tortoise

(Inevitable reader response:)

Dear Sir,

It seems clear you've never spent any time in South Africa. The Wellington Garden Weasel, it is true, bears a strong resemblance to a two-headed tortoise. However, the secondary "head" is merely the weasel's fifth leg, which can be shed like a lizard's tail in a bid to escape from predators. The similarity between the weasel and many famous tortoises has led some zoologists to compromise by placing it with lampreys in the family Petromyzontidae.

Hoping this finds you,
Yours etc.,
Brigadier General Macro Kowalski, O.B.E. (Ret.)

• flounder, trout, red drum flounder, trout, red drum flounder, trout...
• 'Trap door' nets save dolphins
• Baby dolphin stranded in Georgia recovering in Panhandle

There's also Waters thick with ravenous fish, which is non-dolphin-safe, but I like the headline.

Eryops wasn't a thecodont, but a labyrinthodontid amphibian. Thecodonts, I gather, were reptiles.

Why did I think it was a euryops? Because of Trans-kingdom Speciation Through Typo Codon Insertion.

Update: Pete Peterson II says: "That's actually quite a bit like how my offshore sheep rendering plant worked!"

Whale shark links:

That same page says that American Gods is now out in paperback. "If you've avoided American Gods because of the high price of hardcovers, grab yourself the paperback now." Why, that's exactly why I was avoiding American Gods! I always feel bad buying books in hardcover. I bought The Years of Rice and Salt in hardcover; I used my gift certificate but I still feel bad about it.

Hm, "Not buying some information you are interested in, in favor of waiting for it to be available in a lower-cost medium" sounds like a New Copyright Crime. After all, it's a slippery slope towards wanting to download it off the Internet for free.

PS: Page 13 of the comic has a cool drawing of a crocodile.

Gotta love Oceans of Kansas and its Real Kansas Wildlife shirt. Also has more cool artists renderings by Dan Varner, who did the vaudeville one.

Saber-toothed herring!