This Is Why One Should Always Keep A Couple Of Googly Eyes In One's Pocket

This Cat Jump!

Natura!

Deactivate A Cat

Hypnotize A Chicken

Hypnotize A Lobster

Pretty Much Why Photography Was Invented

Naked Women With Big Cats

Breaking: Lobsters Less Poor, Stupid Than Originally Imagined (But Still Equally Delicious, The Poor Things)

Apparently, it was all a joke! Good joke!

Poor Lobsters. Poor Stupid Lobsters. Poor Stupid Delicious Lobsters.

This is clearly a metaphor for the human condition, no?

We Live in a Diminished Age; Behold the Paraceratherium

The MichaelCeratherium was smaller, but charminingly twee

This Short Story Gives Me Delight

The Animal Mummies Wish to Thank the Following

by Ramona Ausubel

(Found via the Paris Review)

Here Is Some Trivia About An Animal That Unfortunately For My Trivia Became An Internet Meme And Now Probably Only Gets Read By People Looking For That Meme (Sigh)

1. Honey Badgers are not really badgers (they are more closely related to weasels and skunks)
2. They got that name because they go around tearing into beehives, but they don't even really want the honey as much as THEY WANT TO EAT THE BEES (or anyway, the larvae). They get stung hundreds or thousands of times and they do not give a shit.
"FUCK BEES" -- a Honey Badger
3. They routinely fight off much larger animals in order to defend their territory or their kills. They have been documented fighting with lions and winning - because the Honey Badger likes to get underneath the lions and RIP THEIR BALLS OFF. I'm serious.
4. Honey Badgers eat pretty much everything. They have one of the most diverse diets in nature and are true omnivores. They will eat all parts of an animal they kill, including the bones.
5. They eat cobras. They get bitten by the cobras when they try to eat the cobras. Cobra venom can kill a human in under half an hour. The venom nearly kills the Honey Badger, too. They get bitten and then fall over, paralyzed, their bodily functions shutting down. To all the world, it looks as though the Honey Badger has been killed. Then, after a little while, the Honey Badger sort of shakes it off, comes back to life, and goes right back to killing everything in the world and just generally being BOSS.
6. They eat tortoises. Because their jaws can crush the shells.
7. They have been known to dig up corpses to eat those, too.
8. Their skin is extraordinarily thick and loose on their body so, even if you manage to pin one or something, it can turn around enough inside of its own skin to bite and claw you to death.
9. An army of Honey Badgers could take over the world. Luckily, they don't give a fuck about politics. They just want to murder and eat everything they can get their teeth or claws into.
Here is a charming little video about Honey Badgers doing all those things (and more!)

Perfect, Inspired by Perfect

I admit, up front, that it is entirely possible that the only reason I liked this well enough to post it here is that I am deep in the thrall of medicine head, buried under fathoms of Nyquil. Still, she does seem to get it, doesn't she?

Video found by someone at Buzzfeed.

Jeff versus Owls

Someone's dream of owls reminded me:

Once, years ago, on leaving a woman's house in the wee hours just before dawn, I walked to where I had parked my (convertible) car. There, perched on the steering wheel, was a small black owl, more or less the size and shape of a coke can.

I paused in the deserted street and watched it for a moment.

I slunk closer and closer, gripping my keys in my fist to prevent their jangling.

When I drew near enough that a lunge could have allowed me to touch it, it fluttered away into an overhanging tree. I watched for a moment and then pulled myself into my car, drowsy and anxious to get home to sleep away the day.

Just as I was shoving the key into the ignition I was smacked in the head by what I was sure was a rudely thrown pinecone.

But, as evidenced by the muffled flutter of wings in the branches above me, I had, in fact, been divebombed by an owl.

Another owl. Perhaps the mate of the one who had been sitting on my steering wheel. In any case, I lept out of my car and stood in slack-jawed shock in the middle of the road.

When I felt sure the little owls were going to stay put, I sauntered back to the car. This time I saw it coming and ducked.

One of the little, yellow-eyed terrors just clutched at the hairs on top of my head as it went past. I screamed or laughed (or both at the same time). I ran back to the girl's front door and knocked until she answered, already half asleep and now in only her underwear.

After a minute of convincing her that I was in earnest, she followed me into the street while I tried to find the owls in the tree. We must have stood there for three or four minutes, me gesticulating wildly and shouting in the now pinkish dawn, her in her panties and t-shirt, clutching herself underneath her breasts from the cold. Eventually, she assured me that she believed me, but begged off witnessing anything in favor of bed. Reluctantly, I let her go, sure that she thought I was exaggerating at best and lying at worst.

Just as she turned to go - pinecone to the back of the head.

I shout. Girl turns. Girl sees owl flying back into tree, away from the general area of my cranium. Girl sees self-satisfied Jeff, thrilled to have provided evidence of mad owl instead of owl madness.

She ended up standing there, jumping up and down and waving her arms - distracting the vicious things - long enough for me to jump in my car and speed away.

I often think about those stupid owls. What did they want with my car?

The Giant Bee

This would have been sometime in 1999 or 2000. I was living in a little apartment in and going to school. I didn't take drugs.

The sound was as clear as could be: scrabbling, as of insect legs on the pillow, next to one's ear.

I was awake and on the other side of the room almost instantaneously, with no intermediate steps between. I flipped on the lightswitch.

On the pillow was a monstrous bee.

It was the size of a nerf football, hairy, its chitinous body glistening. It moved back and forth and up the pillow in the herky-jerky manner of bees and, cresting the top, crawled behind into the space between pillow and headboard.

I knew I was hallucinating. Of course I knew it. But I didn't only see the gigantic bee; I could hear it. When it moved its segmented legs on the fabric I could hear the rustling and when it agitated its wings now and again, as it did absentmindedly, I could hear the sound of its buzz emanating from its vibrating thorax.

I stood there, on the far side of the room, my hands on my head, for a long moment, breathing raggedly. I was panicking.

What did I eat today? Did anyone give me anything? What was the year? Who was the president? What is the fourteenth letter of the alphabet?

Had I been drugged? Was I having some kind of seizure?

I went into the kitchen and paced furiously. I knew there was no bee. But why didn't my eyes and ears know it? I poured myself a glass of lemonade and tried to calm down. I looked at the clock on the microwave. It was past four in the morning.

I went cautiously back to my bed. Did I check behind the pillow?

I did.

I have never seen the bee or any other nocturnal vision again.

I have wiled away hours on the internet trying to explain the experience. I often wonder if I had hallucinated another kind of animal if the whole episode would have qualified as a religious experience. Would the giant bee be my spirit animal? What if, god help me, I had hallucinated a person? What would I have thought, then?

The only thing I ever came up with was that, apparently, it is quite common for people to have audio-visual hallucinations just before falling asleep, all the while knowing full well that they are hallucinating. These are called hypnogogic hallucinations and are related to another strange nighttime phenomenon, the feeling of being paralyzed while asleep.

However, what I seem to have experienced is an even rarer form of the same sort of thing. Called hypnopompic hallucinations, they occur upon waking up and are basically the artifact of a brain still caught in a dream even after it has woken up.

Nowhere, however, have I read of anyone seeing giant bees.

Hard to Swallow

Got to talking about how, when we were in school, Nathan and I used to eat lunch together. He would eat a sandwich or something with maybe chips or a piece of fruit. Sometimes I guess he’d have a cookie or a cupcake. It used to drive me nuts because he didn’t drink while he ate. He would eat all sorts of foods and take no fluids for the whole hour. I would remark on it pretty much every day.

"How come you never drink anything?" I’d ask.

"I don’t need it" he’d reply.

I thought that was just bizarre. I used to bring people around to watch him eat things without drinking anything: Bags of peanut butter; chocolate bars; sawdust on dry toast.

My mom once told me how, when she was a girl, her parents used to take her over to have dinner at some friend’s house once in a while and no one was allowed to drink at the table in their house. They’d sit there, the whole family, eating chicken or something, and no one was allowed to have a drink.

There weren’t even glasses on the table.

I imagined it as just this long, wheezy, coughy, sticky-mouthed torture hour. I asked my mom why they weren’t allowed to drink and my mom said she thought it had something to do with the parent’s thinking the kids would fill up on liquids and then not eat their dinner.

I’ve never heard of that in people, but once I read how dolphins, because they don’t drink and get all their moisture from the food they eat, can’t distinguish between the sensations of thirst and hunger. So, sometimes, in captivity, they’ll spray a hose into the dolphin’s mouth and it won’t eat for a day or two because it thinks it is full. But I understand the dolphin’s point of view.

Hose water just tastes better.

The End of Elephants

In the small town of St. Thomas, in Ontario, there is a massive (and life-sized) statue of an African elephant. This is because St. Thomas is where, on September 15, 1885, Jumbo the Elephant died after being hit by a steam locomotive.

Jumbo had an interesting life, for anyone, elephant or human. He was born free, sometime around 1861, in the Sudan. The French, who then controlled the Sudan, captured Jumbo as a young elephant and brought him by rail to Cairo, where he was sold and then taken by boat and then again by rail to Paris, where they exhibited him in the Jardin des Plantes near the railway station. He was probably chained.

In 1865 he was given to the London Zoo. More boats on the ocean and trains chugging across unfamiliar landscapes.

In London, he became a favorite among children for the remarkable docility he showed. Even though by this time he was far and away the largest elephant ever held in captivity (standing some four meters tall), and though he had never been trained to do it, he routinely allowed visitors to the zoo to ride on his back. In fact, he so impressed one particular visitor with his demeanor and ever-increasing size, that he ended up being sold again for the tidy sum of $10,000 - to P.T. Barnum. This transaction was made over the public protestations of Queen Victoria herself, who had taken rather a fancy to Jumbo, it seems.

Jumbo then became the star attraction in the Barnum and Bailey circus. He became so famous that his name (a corruption of the Swahili word for ‘hello’) became a household word. His name has survived in the English language to this day as a descriptor for anything gigantic.

He was an icon of the early industrial age, traveling all over the globe in an era when most humans never went far beyond their hometowns. He was, very nearly, the most famous anything in the world. People waited in line for hours just to see him and feel awe.

In 1885, while being led onto his car on the circus train along with the smallest elephant in the circus, Tom Thumb, Jumbo was struck by an unscheduled (and yes, speeding) locomotive coming from the other direction.

Later, P.T. Barnum would claim that Jumbo’s final living act was to grasp Tom Thumb with his trunk and throw him twenty yards away, out of the path of the hurtling train.

The beast of iron and wheels met the “mountain of bone and brawn” and was completely derailed - was, in fact, so damaged that it had to be scrapped - but Jumbo too was crushed, and his six and one half ton body was badly broken.

It took 160 men working together to drag his body into the ditch alongside the rails where he finally died.

Jumbo’s handler, Matthew Scott, stood guard over the fallen giant all night, waiting for the heavy machines to arrive which would be able to lift Jumbo’s immense corpse onto the train that would take him away.

When Scott finally collapsed from exhaustion, scores of eager souvenir-hunters rushed the body with knifes, hoping to hack off a piece of history. Scott had been fighting them off for more than ten hours and wept pitifully when they finally overwhelmed him.

Jumbo's bones now reside in the New York Museum of Natural History. His skin was stuffed and displayed at Tufts University (whose mascot Jumbo still is) until it was consumed by fire in 1975.

Jumbo is only the most famous in the surprisingly long roster of famous elephants killed in tragic circumstances far from their homes. To wit:

Abul-Abbas, the famed elephant of Charlemagne, who died of pneumonia after swimming the Rhine in the winter of 810.

Hanno the Blessed, elephant of Pope Leo X, who died after he was given a laxative by the Pope’s doctors in 1516.

Topsy, who was fed a lit cigarette by her trainer in 1903 at Coney Island’s Luna Park and then went on a rampage in which she killed three men. Topsy was electrocuted to death by Thomas Edison, who wanted to use the opportunity to further his war with Westingouse and Tesla and alternating current. Edison filmed it for his propaganda. You can watch the film he shot on YouTube, but is is graphic and it will stay with you.

Mary, the circus elephant who, in 1916, finally reacted to years of physical abuse by throwing her trainer against a drink stand and then deliberately crushing his skull with her foot. She was hung. On the first attempt she snapped the chain meant to hang her and fell to the ground, breaking her hip. They strung her up and tried again - this time successfully.

And perhaps not finally, but less depressingly, there is the still living Ruby, the famous painting elephant of the Phoenix Zoo, who once had a painting of hers sell for more than $10,000 - the price of one Jumbo.

Someone in this Story is Gregor Samsa

While sitting on the sofa the other night, watching the Colbert Report, my mirth was shattered by a piercing scream from another room.

Chiara.

I leapt from the sofa and ran toward the shriek, to the kitchen, all the time crying out “Chiara!? Chiara, are you okay!?”

There, in the kitchen, Chiara was paralyzed with fright.

I grasped her hands and asked her what the matter was. She pointed to a narrow gap between the fridge and the wall.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A aneemal!” she shrieked.

(She nearly always calls all living things simply ‘animals’ - insects, spiders, lobsters, snails, mice - it makes it exceedingly difficult to steel oneself appropriately for whatever variety of household critter removal one might have ahead of oneself.)

With a silent, frustrated eyeroll, I poked my head around the corner of the fridge. Sure enough - an animal. It was a big cockroach looking thing. The size, perhaps, of a circus peanut. I had no idea how to proceed.

I was afraid to try to spray it with an insecticide, thinking that it would simply dash under the fridge before I could deliver a lethal amount of poison. I was equally afraid to reach back there and squash it with a paper towel - what if it jumped on me? I quickly determined that Chiara would not allow me to use any of our kitchenware to capture it. I was in a pickle.

I went back to the fridge to see if the little bastard was still there. On closer inspection, it was belly up on the linoleum, its horribly articulated legs curled in a final supplication. But ominously, as I watched for any signs of life, its antennae waved gently.

I knew not if they moved by operation of the last spark of life granted the miserable creature or from the slight flow of air created by our central heating. I secretly feared it was only resting in some mockery of mammalian sleep and would leap to attention and arm-crawling-on as soon as its reverie was disturbed. I reached toward it tentatively with the broom.

It was as dead as a coffin nail (as Dickens would have it). I swept it into a specially prepared zip-lock bag and sealed it tight. I resolved to have an exterminator out the next day to whom I would show the insect. Hopefully something could be done about the army of its friends I imagined watching from under the broiler and from behind the dishwasher and inside the vents.

The exterminator’s name, when he arrived the next day, was Ken. Ken took one look at my trophy and pronounced it an oriental cockroach. Basically solitary, Ken assured me, they live outdoors and only come inside by accident or to get out of a deluge.

Ken offered to spray around the perimeter of our apartment so as to dissuade any other oriental cockroaches from coming in. While he did so, he talked.

Ken has horrible stories that we will never have. He has horrible bee stories and ant stories and raccoon stories and termite stories. He knows which restaurants to merely avoid (he wouldn’t tell me) and which to avoid like the plague (all the fast food places).

I gave him a glass of water and he said a curious thing: “I don’t want to drink out of your glass because I am sick.”

Did he imagine that I would drink from that particular glass before washing it? Did he have some sort of disease that dishwashing couldn’t thwart? Whatever his reason for trepidation, he was quickly cured of his worry or his disease as, by the time he finished refusing the water, he had already begun to drink thirstily.

As he was leaving, I pressed him to reveal what he described as “the worst job I ever been on.” He hesitated, but having brought up the topic himself, he was cornered. It involved an opossum, he warned me.

An opossum? What’s so bad about them?

“It was stuck in a drainpipe when I got there, wriggling and twitching,” he began. “I put on my gloves and reached down to pull it out. I grabbed it and gave it a tug and it just tore in half. The whole thing was filled with maggots.”

Then he left. I didn’t shake his hand.

I went upstairs and tossed the cockroach in the trash and then covered him with a layer of crumpled paper towels so that I wouldn’t have to see him every time I threw something out in the coming days.

Sic Transit Pestilentia.

On the Platypus, Bitches

1. Although it is a mammal, the female lays eggs. The only other mammal to do so is the (related) echidna.

2. It maintains an average body temperature well below that of all other mammals - about 90 degrees fahrenheit.

3. Its ‘duck-bill’ is not a bill at all and does not open. it is their nose, more or less, and the mouth is underneath. Also, as adults, they have no teeth.

4. The platypus is one of the only venomous mammals. The males have spurs on their back feet which deliver a powerful toxin that, while probably not fatal to a human, can cause excruciating pain lasting for months.

5. You might think (as I did) that they are about the size of a beaver or river-otter - that is, more or less the size of a smallish dog. In fact, they are tiny. They are scarcely larger than a small housecat. And that includes the tail and everything.
6. The platypus uses electrolocation to hunt for its prey, sweeping the sensitive bill back and forth underwater to detect the tiny electrical currents given off by the muscles in the bodies of small crustaceans and the like. It is the only mammal known to have such a sense.
7. When the animal was first taxidermied and brought back to europe, naturalists were convinced that it was an elaborate hoax.

8. The plural is not “platypi” as this is a Latin-style plural and “platypus” is a greek word (it means flat-foot). The correct plural is either "platypuses" or "platypus" or even "platypodes." (Incidentally, this is also true of octopus, another Greek word often incorrectly given a Latinate plural.)