putative.com

It's a fact: cattle shows are semen friendly

Walking around the livestock areas at the National Western Stock Show is sort of like walking around Las Vegas in that you're constantly confronted with fliers soliciting sex—but in this case the sex workers are bulls. 

Their names usually occupy a Venn diagram that's roughly concentric with personal trainer and erectile enhancement drug names—e.g., Gladiator, Stimulus, Wall Street, Encore, Storm, Ricochet, PowerUp, and Majestic Lightning. Occasionally you get a nice but still robust-sounding non sequitur like Ghost Buster here:

And zoom:

 

This of course gives a whole new meaning to not crossing the streams.

Since when did Bed, Bath & Beyond get remade into a Japanese grocery store?

I should be clear: they still carry the same stuff they did before, but now it's organized and displayed... well, beautifully, from floor to ceiling:

The pictures don't do it justice. I'm not usually one to recommend going to BB&B, but it is absolutely worthwhile if you're in the neighborhood. They've apparently been slowly redoing the store since Thanksgiving.

There are only five Republican states left?

As Kevin Drum says, "Heckuva job, GOP!"

David Lee Roth Assteroids

"Van Fuckin Halen":

Who needs to hang around? I've got Dungeons and Dragons

Wow, Wizards should do a whole campaign just re-using these awesome old print ads:

Obama's meeting with Republicans not a "drive-by P.R. stunt"

I'm anxious for the economic stimulus package to hurry up and pass already, jesus. So this is reassuring, a story about Obama's meeting with Republicans on how to work together on it:

If Mr. Obama’s separate sessions with House and Senate Republicans on Tuesday did not win him any immediate additional support, they got high marks from Republicans for outreach.

Republican lawmakers said his efforts were a good start toward building a relationship with them that would be vital as Congress and the administration turned to politically divisive issues like health care, tax reform and the long-term financial problems facing Medicare and Social Security.

“This was not a drive-by P.R. stunt, and I actually thought it might be,” said Representative Zach Wamp, Republican of Tennessee. “It was a substantive, in-depth discussion with our conference, and he’s very effective.”

“He knows that the debt and the deficit are huge long-term problems as well,” Mr. Wamp said, “and he made a compelling case. He sounded, frankly, a lot like a Republican.”

Just like he did on the campaign trail. Kevin Drum was making this point yesterday: during the campaign and now in office, Obama always has a plan, he tells you what it is, and then he executes it. This shouldn't be surprising to House Republicans, who would already know he is serious and thoughtful if they had ears to hear.

True stories of electrical weirdness

We had a partial power outage in our building this morning (I eventually called City Light and found out that a seagull had hit a transformer and caught on fire, I'll save you from saying it: "better to burn out than..." etc.), but it was very strange because we didn't lose power completely. Parts of the building had full power, but in many units—like ours—light bulbs would turn on but just glow dimly. I didn't even know that was possible in this modern world. And who knows what that means for electronics, so we unplugged everything we could.

The stove and microwave and clocks had enough power to keep the time after the initial blackout, when they went off and then reset, so they timed how long the outage lasted, blinking from 12:00 to 12:01 all the way up to 1:30-something. Here is the true story of electrical weirdness: our bedside radio clock alarm, an old red LED jobber, kept *double* time. So, e.g., when the stove and microwave said 12:17, it said 12:34. 

Weird! I know. So it must be so old that it somehow uses the current instead of a microchip to keep time...? Any electrical engineers in the house?

Hermit crab cuisine!

Tom just sent me this site:

I bet the secret to hermit crab cuisine is making pots that look like shells and and then loading them with all the perfect seasoning, so that when a crab goes from their shell to the fake seasoned shell, you can just throw it on the stove.

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Which, according to Jason, translates from Mandarin as basically, "I hope you make more money next year." And that's a fittingly hard-working sentiment for the start of the Year of the Ox, as seen here greeted in Beijing:

Slow-motion backyard bird photos

I believe the adjective for these Rick Lieder photos is "ridiculous" (found via Boing Boing):

"Not the face!"

And the splashing rain, wow: