The Ghost of Thanksgivings Past

It's actually the thing that holds turkey legs together, but it looks like my dear departed Cody Beast.
Turkey butt was always his favorite.

The Dymaxion Moth

I have seen the future and it is streamlined, sleek and aerodynamic. The ephemeralization of insects is the Next Big Thing.

In Hopes of Reaching a Wider Audience

"Found" in this context means he came to our home and has not left.

Unearthed by Dogs

Some things should never see the light of day. Actually they cannot, as they have no eyes.

Shape of the Day

A collaborative sketch by myself and my friend George of his clay animals, to remember them after they got squashed back into the rest of the clay and put away.

Cody Beast

I don't even like dogs. Hate the barking, hate the smell, hate the neediness and all those little hairs.
But this guy was a good one.

This was my favorite of all his hats

He was ten thousand in dog years, and if you clipped off all his warts & skin tags you'd have both hands full, not even counting the thing on his leg that looks like a testicle

Thusly

and the nearly-matching one he had removed from his nub-of-a-tail back when we dared anesthetize him.

I say nearly-matching; it was about three sizes bigger and tufted with little clumps of hair. Entirely cosmetic, say the vets. (Boxers are tumor factories from age three onwards, say the vets, off the record)
I had it in a jar for the longest time...But I digress.

He was not too bright, or handsome, but I liked him. He was a gentleman who stayed out of the kitchen except to wash dishes, and blithely tolerated the endless stream of foster puppies & cats I used to bring. When he was happy, which was nearly always, he'd bend himself in half, showing butt and face together as if for comparison, then turn & repeat. He boxed, he danced. He thought he might be a lapdog. I'm glad he was around for Thanksgiving and Christmas leftovers, and was too deaf to be unsettled by the New Year's fireworks.

a decent sort

He was old and falling apart, and I miss him already.

He didn't come back from his 2nd stroke as well as he did the first one, but we wove our routines around his new self. The steroid-induced floods of pee were like tides that rushed him outside, but only out the back door because the step down wasn't as much. And only in through the front door, because that's how he'd always done it. His old recliner became unclimbable to him, then his cushion from the old couch started  to roll him across the floor when he stepped on its spongy surface, so he had a bed of blankets, a dusting of baby powder, a long alley of carpet duct-taped to the linoleum. He still liked his butt scratched, which I think counts for a lot in terms of quality of life. 

The tragedy of dogs is that they wear out, that it falls to us to decide how many days of immobility and confusion shall be their share. Yesterday was the worst of his bad days.  I hugged his neck, rubbed his ears; he let off a couple of his infamous farts. His vet came out to the back of the car, gave him the good medicine.

He was a good dog.

I'd vote for her!

<insert rant about the inefficacy of two-party politics>

Animal of the Week

lately the Youtube has been too good not to share.

Phoning it in

sometimes I have interesting thoughts of my own, but today i am merely regurgitating some pilferings from the sweet time-sucking crack that is Facebook.

THUSLY.

{(a picture of a whale)}

In 2004, The New York Times wrote an article about the loneliest whale in the world. Scientists have been tracking her since 1992 and they discovered the problem:

She isn’t like any other baleen whale. Unlike all other whales, she doesn’t have friends. She doesn’t have a family. She doesn’t belong to any tribe, pack or gang...

She doesn’t have a lover. She never had one. Her songs come in groups of two to six calls, lasting for five to six seconds each. But her voice is unlike any other baleen whale. It is unique—while the rest of her kind communicate between 12 and 25hz, she sings at 52hz. You see, that’s precisely the problem. No other whales can hear her. Every one of her desperate calls to communicate remains unanswered. Each cry ignored. And, with every lonely song, she becomes sadder and more frustrated, her notes going deeper in despair as the years go by.

Just imagine that massive mammal, floating alone and singing—too big to connect with any of the beings it passes, feeling paradoxically small in the vast stretches of empty, open ocean.

{(a link where you can hear the song of the lonely whale, and the songs other whales who enjoy well-populated lives for comparative purposes)}

...

In other news, don't buy avocados from the refrigerated produce section, even if they're only 50 cents apiece. They are all dead, I tell you; dead and brown and mushy inside.
^^^I wrote that part myself without help from social media.

Swallow the Sea

Today's Animal of the Week is a sea slug

glaucus atlanticus

Also called the Sea Swallow.

It's pelagic, which means it lives anywhere there's an ocean, except for the deep or sandy or cold parts.

It's hermaphroditic, hence the neutral pronoun ("morphodite", as the locals say).

It has counter-shading, which means when you look up from beneath, it's light to match the sky, but when you look down, it's blue to match the ocean. The up-side is the creature's belly; it floats relaxedly in the surface tension.

They get about as big as your hand (depending on the size of your hand) and eat jellyfish, saving the stingy bits for later use.

Animal of the Day

An eight-legged bear dressed in a painter's tarp and sporting a gas mask,
shrunk down to itty-bitty size and sprinkled liberally over the Earth's surface
(especially the wetter parts)

He or She is a Tardigrade, which is fun to say.
It means "slow walker"; Also known as Water Bears, go figure.

Resistant to heat, cold, toxins, dehydration, radiation, pressurization and Outer Space.
Tough little buggers.