More Links For Your Amusement and Eddification

Today's workout was great, although I didn't get to use the overhead rope pull thingermabob. Big, strong guys kept hogging the machine. Next time, I'll just have to muscle my way in. Walking away from the gym, I felt the endorphins blooming. That's not why I work out, but it's an awfully nice side effect.

Babies: Creepy, and infectiously funny.

Seremuppety: Muppets meet Firefly (try the links in order on the top right).

Sicko "Marriage Contract" One For The Ages: Sounds like a pretty standard BDSM sex slave contract, except that the Dom in question is a pedophile and kidnaper, and his "slave" didn't consent.

New material means 'x-ray specs' no longer required: " A new optical effect has been created in a London laboratory that means solid objects such as walls could one day be rendered transparent, scientists report today in the journal Nature Materials."

Holocaust denier Irving is jailed: He is being imprisoned for an academic opinion. And it's one he even recanted on finding evidence to the contrary. This is just wrong.

Whollylove: NSFW. It's a Christian sex shop (no, no Divine Interventions stock to be seen).

Complete breast is grown from single stem cell: "A complete, functioning breast has been grown from a single stem cell, by researchers in Australia. It was done in a mouse, but experts believe it won't be long before it happens in humans." The article jokingly discusses customisable breasts, but doesn't mention the not-so-obvious applications. You know all those crazy, Japanese hentai with women with numerous superfluous mammaries? I think it looks like this might become the next fetishy fashion trend for the body mod extremists.

A Story With Legs: "Meet the Kackstetters. The father-son duo were involved in a rather bizarre traffic incident last weekend in Oregon." I won't give away the best details of the story.

Cancer: An actual grade eleven English essay, narrated for your amusement and education. The student's paper did not get a passing grade.

Regarding Dumpling

One day, our cat Trubble had kittens. I promptly claimed the homely grey one with peach markings as my own. I gave my grandmother the honours of naming her. "Oh, I don't know," she said. "How about Dumpling?"

So Dumpling she was christened, although I also rather inexplicably called her Unna Mung Bean.

She was the strangest cat I've ever had, and also one of my favourite. She had an enormous personality, loved heavy metal and reggae music (she'd purr and rub herself on the radio whenever it was playing), liked tomato juice, and bore grudges.

She really wasn't into the pregnancy thing, and the first time she got pregnant, she wasted no time in aborting the kittens. She did this by vaulting off the top of our travel trailer. She'd land on her abdomen across the edge of the back our truck. The first time it happened, I thought it was an accident. But then she kept doing it over and over again. And this was a process she kept up for a considerable length of time.

When the kittens came out, they were quite dead, and my father had to act as midwife. The birthing was painful, and very disgusting. The kittens stank, were falling apart, and were a-wriggle with maggots. I don't know how Dumpling didn't die. Dad barfed for quite a while, afterwards.

The next time Dumpling got pregnant, she opted out of the coathanger solution. She still wasn't into kittens, so she foisted them off on her Mom and sister (who also had kittens around the same time (barn cats are like good Catholics with all those kids)). When the kittens reached adolescence, that's when she took interest in them. She took back her kittens, as well as her Mom and sister's. They were happy to be rid of them. They liked babies better than teens.

Cats often have their kittens in small, confined places. But Dumpling was weird with her choices. I used to make my beds military-style: tucked so type I could bounce a penny of it. One day, when I came home from work, I saw a small, hard lump in my bed. When I pulled back the sheets, I found Dumpling, three blind kittens, and a huge, gory mess. I never did get all the blood out of the quilt my grandmother made for me.

The other litter of note was birthed in a bird's nest in the eaves of our porch. The very gravid cat had to crawl upsidedown off the roof, around a tight turn, and through a small hole in the roof. I don't know how she even found the spot in the first place, but it was ideal for her. It was bizarre to see her emerging from the hole, followed by a frantic bird. As the kittens grew old enough, Dumpling used the fledgling birds as training tools for hunting. The kittens appreciated it, although the birds did not.

Dumpling acted more like a dog than a cat. She regularly went on long walks with me, running ahead, bounding through the woods, and, when I was skiing, chasing the tips of my skis through the snow. One day, I walked with her and my friend Julie Nahornov through the neighbour's Christmas tree farm. We'd been out there quite some time when a massive thunderstorm arrived. The sky dumped waterfalls on us, and huge booms of thunder cracked constantly. My mother drove out to find us, and whistled until we came running.

We made it to the car, but Dumpling was left behind. We called her, but she didn't come. So we went home without her.

Now bear in mind we weren't that far away from home: maybe a five or ten minute walk, tops. When we got home, we called and called for her, but she didn't come.

We got a bit worried. Then, about an hour later, after the storm had passed, we heard loud meowing. She showed up, wetter than if she'd been held in a lake. Everyone ran out to pay attention to her, to cluck over her state, and to dry her off. She meowed piteously, wallowing in the attention. But she turned a cold shoulder to Julie and me. She wouldn't even look at us.

She bore the grudge for a full day. But she forgave me completely the next day.

She was probably my favourite cat, ever, but when she started crapping in my bedroom Dad found out and killed her. I'm still upset by it, almost twenty years later.