The spout box has been getting a lot of empty submissions lately; it’s clearly time to re-jigger the whosit filters. Then, of course, there’s the ultimate emptiness of life to contend with:

ho do you measure it

Not being intimately familiar with angst metrics or ho scales, I’ll defer to the experts. While they’re thinking, I’ll do something useful with my time:

Make scones with hagfish slime.

How many proteinous goopy glops are there in nature? Lots! SCONES FOR EVERYONE!

i like love darts

That’s all well and good, but can you bake with ‘em?

Vaingloriously tracing search engine hits has inevitable drawbacks. I just found a blog devoted to the bathrooms of Iowa City (which has gone untended for a couple of months, leaving a trail of comment spam that’s about as interesting as a prescription drug-themed IRC chat log* - but actually better because Xenical asked the whole room out for beer).

The abandonment of this blog leads me to a novel hypothesis: the bathrooms of Iowa City have all disappeared! No one has mentioned it in the press, because everyone is very embarrassed by the whole affair. Drunken UI frat boys continue to pee as usual.

Also, the spout box is working again.
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Slug sex. With pictures. Eeew.

So I finished my quilt top last night. Go me!

It’s not as impressive as I’d planned, what with the laziness and the scrap collection mysteriously short on colors other than blue helping to shrink it down to a small lap quilt with little overall pattern. It’s especially not as impressive after a peek at the Fiber Revolution, which naturally progressed to more peeks at Judith Reilly, Gloria Hansen, Judy Cuddihee (warning, contains non-eroticized quilted penises), Martha Sielman, and other “fiber artists” whose web sites were less rewarding.
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Really obnoxious Dallas Morning News registration required for this story about a monkey - my spam email is yami_mcmoots [at] yahoo.com, password mcmoots.*

“This was a case of people who truly loved and cared for that animal who were unable to carry on a normal life without the monkey,” [Mr Lawyer-Man] said.

If the City of Dallas prohibits the keeping of primates as pets, then the City of Dallas prohibits the keeping of primates as pets; the article doesn’t bother to explain how or why animal cruelty became an issue. And it only has one picture. But it’s monkeys doing monkey things!
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• Ahh.
• A helpful little reminder of the correct attitude to display towards womanly friends with cold extremeties:
  

  I think even at my cellular core, my body recognizes that I’m incredibly lucky to have this woman, and so my DNA screams at my bewildered capillaries: “Code Red! She wants our BTUs!”

  Particularly recommended for anyone living in a moderate climate with an absurd joke of a furnace and a gas bill that mysteriously doubled last month, cough cough.

There is a delicious frisson of Catholic-style guilt in that classic New Year’s resolution to eat better: I’m still working through the Christmas candy. I’ve made it to the Giant Bar.

The Giant Bar is not actually as intimidating as one might suppose, given that the yellow wrapper was designed to evoke some dim genetic fear of tigers. You don’t eat the milk chocolate with almonds, the milk chocolate with almonds eats you! Symbolically, of course - what is actually supposed to happen is that you are consumed by gluttony, gobble the whole thing down at once without even pausing for a drink of milk, and expire in glee.

Which is why I’m grateful to the Transportation Security Authority at the Quad Cities regional airport. They smashed the Giant Bar into tiny and completely non-threatening portions. Hoorah!

So when you decide not to become a curmudgeonly hermit, you accept (among other things) the small but non-zero risk that a friendly acquaintance will end up floating in the Potomac.

But, um, the minor characters and standers-on in cliche mystery novels never seem to be this baffled by it all.

Without my trusty news feed aggregator, the Internet seemed pale and uninteresting. But now I’m home, and the Internet is grand! There’s a kvetching-about-Orodruin’s-movie-representation post inside me somewhere, too, but kvetching posts are tricksy beasts. Meanwhile:

• chicken-swinging!
• Get Fuzzy has an RSS feed
• Take a virtual trip to Iowa - proof that Howard Dean is the most excitingest candidate EVAR. Which is not to imply that my vacation was anything less than exciting and hijinkful, because it was in fact fabulous, despite the lack of snow.

…and I guess the Internet is still only two links worth of interesting (I’ll leave y’all to pick which two). But my decompulsifying has been managed for the evening, so good night.