Insuffiently educated to actually judge whether this is a big deal
Filed Under Uncategorized
#3 is, perhaps, one step closer to being a thing of the past: researchers in Houston have succeeded in killing the HIV virus.
Also, an abzyme sounds like something out of a China Miéville book.
Shelf stable
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The Pepsi I just got out of the vending machine has a Transformers-themed label. It does indeed taste as though it’s past its “best taste” date.
It’s unlikely to kill me. But I believe I shall use this as an excuse to avoid the vending machine in the future, and feel a bit less silly about bringing my own soda or juice.
A happy weekend
Filed Under Life
I went to a wedding where an excerpt from Shriek: An Afterword was one of the readings. It made me smile because a) it’s not the sort of thing one necessarily expects to see printed in a wedding program, b) it’s exactly the sort of thing one could expect to see printed in this particular wedding program, and c) a chunk of the guests might simply have thought it was an appropriate reading and never felt distracted by thoughts of squid and mushrooms.
Too late for Squid Week
Filed Under Calamari
But it’s an octopus, anyway.
Or was, before limb regeneration went wild.
Ah, Japan. Without it, the internet would be a much less interesting place.
Be a squid
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Or a Zygon. Whatever floats your boat.
Eat a squid
Filed Under Calamari
From everybody’s favorite food geek Alton Brown: dry and wet fried calamari recipes.
Squidy sex
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Scientists at the Institute of Marine Research in Vigo investigated sex between giant squid, which they deem “a fairly violent affair” involving a penis that is “a bit like a high-pressure fire hose.”
But having such a big penis does have one drawback: it seems that co-ordinating eight legs, two feeding tentacles and a huge penis, whilst fending off an irate female, is a bit too much to ask, and one of the two males stranded on the Spanish coast had accidentally injected himself with sperm packages in the legs and body. And this does not seem to have been an isolated incident since two of the eight males that had stranded in the north-east Atlantic before had also accidentally inseminated themselves.
But fans of squid slash can take heart: “It is also possible that the sperm packages had come from other males that they had ‘bumped’ into, in the dark depths of the ocean.”
Squidy kitty
Filed Under Calamari
Squidy graffiti
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Squidpunk
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I can think of no more fitting way to kick off Squid Week ‘08 than with Jeff VanderMeer’s Squidpunk Manifesto:
Fiction that unlike New Weird, Steampunk, or Slipstream, is at its core not only about squid, but about the symbolism of squid as color-changing, highly-mobile, alien-looking, intelligent ocean-goers. As a powerful ecosystem indicator, the squid is a potent symbol for environmental rejuvenation. Squidpunk is almost exclusively set at sea and must contain some reference to either cephalopods or to anything that thematically relates to squid, in terms of world iconography and tropes. Squidpunk is never escapist or whimsical. It is always serious and edgy. This combination of a hard punk aesthetic with the fluid propulsion system common to the squid has produced a unique literary hybrid beloved by Mundanes and Surrealists alike.