Headline

Supreme Court Gives Gore's Oscar to Bush

From The Borowitz Report

Thylacine

The thylacine, Thylacinus cynocephalus, is a now-extinct carnivorous marsupial from Australia and Pacific islands.

It is commonly know as the Tasmanian Tiger or Tasmanian Wolf. I always thought that the formal name sounded like a chemical. It's obviously Greek, but a few Google stabs did not lead me to figure out where the name came from.


Thylacines drew my attention in part because they are an easily recognizable case of convergent evolution - thylacines became top-level predators, and their body plan paralleled that of dogs or wolves. Even though the marsupials branched off from the other mammals long before there were dogs or wolves.

They were a really beautiful animal, with their distinctive hindquarter stripes.

So it was a thrill to me to learn that there is video, from 1933, of one of the last of these creatures.

Less than a minute.
Remember, you're looking at what you might as well call a possum.

Links:

Found via GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life at ScienceBlogs.

The Thylacine entry at Wikipedia is excellent.

There's a nice interactive cladogram of mammals here.

Editorial

Meta-stuff about pictures

Based on a cursory review, here are some the most-viewed images here at Dirty John Bonny.

This DJB avatar gets a high Google rank probably because of people searching on the misspelling "animie" in the file name.

(Original credit long lost, and probably really embarrassing, if not illegal in many places. My own cropping and costume addition.)

This one deserves its rank for being so strange yet flat-out gorgeous. But it's really just representative, a lot of the photos from that post are viewed daily.

Like with many of these, I don't know why people aren't just finding the originals.

Taureau Blond d'Aquitaine.
(Credit.)

Part of a series at Dirty John Bonny. Maybe the small notoriety here will lead someone to start selling this fridge magnet again. Viewed just today from someone in Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran.

Boys kissing.
(Credit long lost.)

Lost boys.

From a production of Peter Pan.
(Disappeared from the web before I could give credit.)

Just boasting

Dirty John Bonny's Technorati rank is 790,341 out of 68.6 million blogs.

I got linked by coturnix at A Blog Around The Clock at ScienceBlogs. No evidence that anyone actually clicked on it, but we takes 'em where we can find them.

About

In case anybody is trying to figure out what this place is all about, here are some Google search terms that recently led here:

dildo chisum asshole prick (click)
lemur catta cladogram (click)

It's my blog, so I get to say "fuck," too. Fuck. Along with "cladogram" and "morphology." And scrotum. Giving free rein to my inner twelve-year-old, right out for the world to see.

By the way

It's "free rein," not "free reign," folks. Think tack: horse's stuff, not king's. Beware the eggcorn.

Ballsack

The Higher Power of Lucky, by Susan Patron, won this year’s Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children's literature.

Now the book has the usual suspects clutching pearls, collapsing on the fainting couch, and banning the book from schools and libraries. The horror:

scrotum

Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much. It sounded medical and secret, but also important.

Yes, right there in black and white, the word scrotum. Referring, specifically, to one belonging to a dog. This is the incredible length people can go to to get uptight about sex. For pity's sake, you can see a dog's ballsack walking down the street on any day at high noon in any town in America.

Dog's balls.
(Credit.)

Link: The New York Times, With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar.

Related: Lions' balls at Dirty John Bonny.

Shamelessly gratuitous link to Neuticles.

Blue

Blue Man Group.

After this at Dirty John Bonny, I got me a-thinking: How many blue animals are really blue?

See, the blue in bird feathers and insect wings and in most fish is produced by a kind of selective iridescence, scattering light, like the blue sky does. Link.

That's sometimes called structural color as compared to pigment color.

I think that my featured frog and the nose of a mandrill are examples of blue pigment.

Blue animals in Wikipedia here.

Five part piano version of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue performed by The Five Browns.
About four minutes

Picture

Boyhood crushes

#3: Kookie

Gawd, this is embarrassing.

I wrote, posted part, and then dropped this series. Only to revive it again now.

77 Sunset Strip was a late fifties (1959-1964) television detective show about a brat-packy group of PIs starring Ephram Zimbalist, Jr. Next door to their office was a club where the young and very hip carpark Kookie (Edd Byrnes) worked. Dean Martin's nightclub was in the neighborhood.

We're talking major fifties hip here.

(It says: "to John,"
but sadly, not mine.)

Kookie was the TV version of the beatnick - slangy and wisecracking - and listening to his new transistor radio. And he was always combing his brilliantly Brycreemed hair.

You could buy a Kookie brand-named comb and show it off proudly.

Like everyone else, I thought he was totally, like, the cat's pyjamas and cute as hell.

You sorta had to be there, I guess.

About a half-minute

Related: Boyhood crushes #1, boyhood crushes #2

And since Disney has killed the videos that I used in the the Tramp #1 post above, here's another of the spaghetti scene:

Two spaghetti especiale.
About three.

Oh this is the night,
it's a beautiful night
And we call it bella notte.

Look at the skies,
they have stars in their eyes
On this lovely bella notte.

It won't last long, I'm afraid.

Poison

That blue frog, Dendrobates azureus, is so cool looking that I had to go learn more about it. Here's some of what I found:

They're found in Suriname, in South America.

I have this strange mental block that every time I see the name of Suriname, I place it in Africa. I know better, but it's just stuck there. Note to self: upper-right, in that strip of French and Dutch places.

Their skin excretes a deadly neurotoxin.

They lay their eggs on land, not in the water, like most frogs.

Poison frogs don't make their own poison, they get it from the insects (mostly ants) they eat and then retain it in their own defense.

Poison frogs are found in South America and Madagascar - a remarkable example of a parallel convergent evolution in two species, both the ant and the frogs. The ants devoloped the poison, and the frogs developed the resistence and co-opted it for themselves independently. Link.

Other animals similarly get their poisons by eating the species that synthesize them in the first place. The snake Rhabdophis tigrinusb eats poison toads and retains the toxin. Mothers even pass the toxin down their offspring while they're eggs. Link.

See them all at the Poison Frogs Home Page.

Back to bunnies and boys kissing soon. Promise.

Ark

Blue Poison Dart Frog,
Dendrobates azureus.
Click for bigger.

Since the 1980's herpatologists have noted an alarming decline worldwide in populations of amphibians. Habitat destruction and climate change have been suggested as possible causes, but one thing that can be pointed to with certainy is the fungal disease Chytridiomycosis.

A mysterious outbreak of fungal disease has wiped out an estimated 170 species in the past decade, and put more than one-third of the world's remaining amphibians at risk.

A group called Amphibian Ark is calling on zoos and aquariums to join in the conservation efforts and become sanctuaries for these species while they disappear from the wild.

By the way, how many kinds of blue animals (besides frogs) can you think of?

fish
butterflies, and other bugs
birds
(I don't think blue whales count)

Galileo

February 15 is Galileo Galilei's birthday.

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

Galileo is perhaps best known for the story of his demonstration dropping balls of different weight from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, showing that they did fall at the same rate - counter to intuition and the view of Aristotle. Most historians of science doubt seriously that the dmonstration ever happened.

From what we do know about his actual experiments regarding the physics of mass and motion, Galileo rolled balls or cylinders down inclined planes. When I first read about this back in high-school days it stuck me as particularly clever: Galileo needed to slow down the phenomena, since he had little with which to time his observations other than his own pulse.

Perhaps not coincidentally, he also advanced the development of the pendulum clock.

Galileo at Wikipedia.

In an homage to Galileo, astronaut David Scott from the Moon mission Apollo 16 (1971):

In my left hand I have a feather, and in my right hand, a hammer. I guess one of the reasons we got here to day was because of a gentleman named Gallileo a long time ago, who made a rather significant discovery about falling objects and gravity fields ... I'll drop the two of them here, and hopefully, they'll hit the ground at the same time.

About 0:45

White giraffe

Click for bigger,
from nationalgeographic.com.

Story here, about a white giraffe in Tanzania at National Geographic.

Charles Foley of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) first heard reports of the white giraffe in Tarangire National Park in 1993. For 12 years he kept an eye out for the living legend while conducting his daily business of studying the park's savanna elephant populations.

According to Foley, the animal is not a true albino but is merely a lighter color than the average giraffe.

Related: We likes us some giraffe around here.

Darwin Day

Master Charles Robert Darwin.

February twelfth is the anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin in 1809. He shares his birth day and year with Abraham Lincoln.

Beginning with the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle in 1859 he developed what has become the central unifying theory of the biological sciences: the common descent of all species modified by natural selection.

His last published work was The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms. Stephen Jay Gould observed how these books were of a piece: both are built up from the simple fact that small actions can accumulate over enough time to create large and fundamental changes. This is the power of what in Darwin's words were "small agencies and their accumulated effects." He was very much influenced by his contemporary Charles Lyell, whose theory of geology argued that slow forces accumulated over millenia gave rise to presently-observed features.

Both Darwin and Lyell founded science that provided a workable alternative to the creationism and catastrophism found in the book of Genesis.

Darwin is entombed at Westminster Abbey along side Charles Lyell, Ernest Rutherford, and Isaac Newton.


Links:

Charles Darwin at Wikipedia.

Charles Lyell at Wikipedia.

[ Update, February twelfth: That plant is a potted Lachenalia, from South Africa. I couldn't help but chase it down.

I sort of wanted it to be a Mimbulus mimbletonia. ]

Link

Editorial

Navel-gazing and meta-stuff

Usually a look at the logs results in a WTF? moment - what were these people doing or thinking?

This time a look at the top search terms at Dirty John Bonny shows the public to be mostly spot-on.

DJB's recent top search terms. No links; have fun with your own searches:

why do mentos and coke react ?
pictures of oxpeckers and cape buffalos
vache brune
what did the public think of judy garland? (OK, they missed here)
salvador dali photograph with flying cat and water
lion facepaint
taureau
bats aren't bugs
nucleation in mentos and soda
peep & the big wide world
roy orbison and kd lang crying
barbie and kens after break-up interview
the excorcist reenacted in 30 seconds by bunnies
dirt made my lunch

There's still about two thousand visitors each month, and about fifty returners. But that's based on a cookie, and if your anti-spywarwe is up to snuff, that cookie is soon dead. So I dunno. Traffic from Google Image search overflows the limited free storage space I have at StatCounter, so again I'm not sure of what's all going on. A recent surge of hits from Viet Nam and China have me almost curious enough to pay the money and get more detailed stats.


Meanwhile, we're still first page on Google Blog Search for "lion's balls."

Oh, and here's the The Banana Slug String Band doing a bit of Dirt Made My Lunch that was featured at DJB here.

MP3, less than a minute.
I honestly have no idea whether this widget works on any but my own browser. Aplogies, etc.

Thank you, dirt.

Poem

Prufrock

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

Carl Sandburg, eat your fucking heart out.

This is one of my favorite poems; I once had most of it memorized.

This is a long post. It takes some work, but if you've got the time, enjoy.

It looks and sounds like free verse, but really it's mostly strict iambic pentameter. Or so I think. I'm hopeless at scansion, and can't dance either (I think those skills must be related).

The rhythms are complex and intermingled. Listen also for the musical play of assonance and consonance.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

This reading by T.S. Eliot is wonderful. Many poets are crap at reading their own works; Eliot is an exception.

WAV audio, about ten minutes.
Follow the bouncing ball.
You browser may want a mouse over the control until enough is cached.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say:
“That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

-T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Link

Cute

Neotony is the retention, or even the revival, of juvenile morphological and psychological traits of youngsters in adults. Among vertebrates, and especially mammals, these traits include a proportionally large head, and proportionally large eyes and smaller limbs. The psychological part involves behaviors of playfullness and submission.

Somehow we humans respond to these cues in what might be seen, if looked at objectively, as exaggerated and excessive. Hence Pokemon, Hello Kitty, various Hallmark products, and DJB's own AnimalPals.

An essay by evolutionary biologist and science historian Stephen Jay Gould first published in Natural History magazine (1980?) used the evolution of the drawing of Mickey Mouse to illustrate the appeal of neotony.

He speculates that the Disney artists gradually came to recognize the appeal of childlike characteristics, and over time, Mickey grew a proportionally bigger head and eyes and smaller limbs.

He also observed that at the same time, other more "bad guy" or intentionally less sympathetic characters, tended toward more adult proportions.

Using this illustrative jumping-off point, he goes on to suggest that humans might be looked at as neotonous chimpanzees, and hints at what it may mean to our evolution.

(Photo credit long lost)

Other experts have expanded the rules of cuteness, as seen here, at Cuteoverload.com.

There is considerable evidence that cats and dogs have been bred and selected for for neotonous characteristics. My own old-man cat occasionally goes tearing around the house in pursuit of imagined prey, to the amusement of both of us.

It seems to me that when considering theories about the evolution of psychological characteristics versus morphological characteristics, the former is vulnerable to just-so stories while the latter has the relatively harder genetic, evo-devo, and historical fossil evidence.

But, to indulge in just-so analysis, it makes sense, given how complex our brains and social interactions are, that evolutionary psychological conditioning can spill over, so to speak.

So, our receptiveness to cuteness allowed our development of large brains and long, long, childhood and the required support and nurturing (note, for example, that we are the longest-lived primates). So long as the spillover is not overly maladaptive it would not have been selected out.

So we like cute, wherever we find it.

Links:

Stephen Jay Gould, A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse.

Wikipedia: neotony.

Wikipedia: cuteness.

Scienceblogs: Gene Expression, Cats.

Some Cute search links at Dirty John Bonny.


[Update: February nineteenth: Cat link fixed.]