Monday, January 31, 2011

When Animals Assault

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Why do animals shag other species?  It's hard to say.  Evolutionarily speaking, there's no real point in it.
--Christie Wilcox

There is science and then there's Science for Mature Adults Only.  Click here to be offended.

This is the sort of science blog post one finds after being as-good-as-snowbound for a few days.


And I got boing-boing'd . . .


For, of all things, the picture I posted Sunday of the snow heap in my back yard.  Back when I was much younger and my son was a little boy, I used to make some wonderful stuff . . . snow forts with monster faces, sphinxes with saddles and so on.  But nothing I did could hold a patch to what my father did when I was a kid.


This was in Schenectady, New York, when there'd been a snowstorm so tremendous that the front yard filled up and my father had to pile up a lot of snow in the back.  Dad was originally a farm kid, 4-H ribbons and all, and knew some cool tricks.  So the next morning we woke up to discover he'd built a snow slide in the back yard, set a ladder up against one end, and then poured a bucket of water down the surface.  It was the best -- and fastest -- slide I was ever on.  Ever!


Thanks, Dad.  Half a century later, I'm still grateful for that.



And I'm on the road again . . .

. . . blogging from the Megabus on its way to NYC.  I'll report on the experience later.


Above:  The Monument to Dinosaur Sodomy in front of the Academy of Natural History, here in Philadelphia.

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2 comments:

Theophylact said...

Dragons! And Sodomy!

Michael Swanwick said...

Actually, Chip Delany's STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND has quite a bit of dragon sodomy and humans-with-dragons sodomy. Literally.

As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.