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I have another cat named Chowder and we found him living in our house under a couch. He has the biggest head my vet had ever seen and his tongue is too big for his mouth. 

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Gonna go paint gold betta fish all over my dark green bathroom walls. Posting this as motivation to actually follow through on it.

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[auri-studies]

my Local Neighbourhood Squirrel DEADASS just leapt onto my window pane, maybe a foot from where i am sitting and just fucking stared at me with his hands on the glass he violated my privacy and im calling the cops

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[auri-studies]

should i post the walmart comic

or should i simply wait

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the dubious philosophy of salmon

[auri-studies]

Do you have any favorite examples of bizarre sexual dimorphism in nature?

sure do!

the blanket octopus is a wonderous creature. reaching about two meters in length, the females glide majestically through the tropical south seas, trailing two huge vibrant coattail cloaks of fused tentacle webbing behind them!

they use their brightly-colored cloak as an intimidation factor, tricking predator and prey alike into thinking that they're MUCH bigger than they actually are! look at this, would you mess with this?? I would not mess with this.

the males, on the other tentacle arm, are about an inch long.

*squeaky toy noise*

[auri-studies]

Medieval scribes writing things like “fuck the abbot” (their boss) and “I am so hung over I feel dead” and “that goddamn cat got in here and pissed on the manuscript” and drawing penis monsters and purposefully unflattering portraits of public figures and animals in the marginalia is funny, yes. But more than that it is so deeply quintessentially human. It reminds you that they were largely just frustrated young adults who did an extremely repetitive and tedious job 6 days a week during daylight hours in poor conditions and felt the same malaise young adults feel now.

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A neighbor called and said she saw a swarm on a fire hydrant so I grabbed my bucket and ran there as fast as I could. I dabbed some lemongrass oil on the bottom of it and they walked in. After about 5 minutes I just scooped the rest in and bam! Free bees!

I got the queen on the first scoop too though. Apparently she was a new one because she was piping in there really loudly. This is my first personal swarm catch so honestly I’m not sure if that was supposed to happen or not.

[auri-studies]

my nephew, who is like 11 or 12, is playing “5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel”, which is exactly what it says on the tin, and I have never been more terrified of the youth of today

[auri-studies]

Tumbleweed decided to dress up as a cobweb for Halloween

He was upset that I didn't appreciate him trying to share his costume by rubbing against my legs

[auri-studies]

Meet the Birth Centrifuge

Or to use its more accurate name, the Apparatus For Facilitating The Birth Of A Child By Centrifugal Force, patented by George B and Charlotte E Blosnky in 1965.

You wondering "Surely this isn't an elaborate centrifuge where you whirl the patient round and round until you make the baby fly out? Surely?"

That's exactly what it is (and stop calling us Shirley).

As is the format for patent documentation, George B and Charlotte E Blosnky begin by explaining why the world needs a birth centrifuge. Apparently the foetus needs "considerable propelling force" to leave the body. The Blonskys say that "Primitive peoples" have the muscle and skeletal system to supply this while "Civilized Women" do not, so it's a racist birth centrifuge, too.

The way the contraption is supposed to work is this: "When the gynecologist decides that the most opportune time for childbirth has arrived", you are strapped supine to a stretcher at the head, legs and feet. The stretcher is then loaded up into the centrifuge. It then gets spun round and round at an alarming speed until the baby comes out.

The Blonskys are cagey about the appropriate speed at which a foetus would be "dislodged" (their word). At one point they mention around 8gs, then conclude that would probably be a bit much and suggest starting at around 2gs and going up from there.

In a supine position, a human would black out with in a few minutes at 2gs, and quicker at a faster speed. The Blonskys are well aware of this, and that the birth will therefore have to be achieved by centrifuging alone. They don't see this as a problem, because they have supreme confidence in their birth centrifuge.

At this point, we should point out that the speed at which you'd have to centrifuge someone to make their baby fly out has never been tested. It's uncharted science. There isn't really any data to show whether or not, when exposed to particular g-forces, things will go flying out of the human pelvis.

To prove or refute the concept of the birth centrifuge, can any astronauts, pilots or others who have had high-g training tell us if they let out a bit of wee or poo when you were in the centrifuge?

Anyway, enough about the poor soul strapped into this thing. What happens to the baby? Do you have midwives on hand with lacrosse sticks? Don't worry, it doesn't go flying across the room! There's a net to catch it. There's even a little bit of cotton wadding to prevent it being slammed into any machinery.

The net still raises unpleasant questions as a newborn baby's skull bones aren't fused yet so being accelerated into a net probably isn't good for its head.

Also, the Blonskys don't tell us what's supposed to happen to the placenta. Does it slam straight into the baby from behind?

The biggest question, we suppose, is why?

According to the story behind their design, the Blonskys - husband and wife - had visited the zoo and seen an elephant twirling in circles. A zookeeper explained to them elephants do this before giving birth.

Which, by the way, they don't, because centrifugal force isn't necessary for birth.

So maybe it's an elaborate piece of art critiquing the medicalisation of birth rather than a cursed doohickey conceived from zero understanding of the human anatomy. If so, the Blonskys played a blinder, as the patent documentation is delivered entirely straight-faced and with huge attention to detail.

Unsurprisingly, the birth centrifuge never went into production. The achievements of the Blonskys were recognised in 1999 with a posthumous Ig Nobel Prize for Managed Health Care.

You can enjoy the entire patent document here, technical specifications and all.

[auri-studies]

I think we should have a turn of phrase for "I'm not in the right, but I AM annoyed with this situation, so I just need to go bitch to a friend about this before I suck it up and go do the right thing" because more and more I'm finding this is a critical element of functional adulthood.

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[auri-studies]

Do you ever see a post that is simply so Gideon nav coded