Symbion is a tiny animal about half a millimetre long, shaped like a bulbous tube with a ring of tiny hairs – cilia – at one end.  They live on the hairy mouthparts of Norway lobsters, with tens or even hundreds per lobster. They feed on bits of leftover food and seem to be harmless to their hosts.

Ok, fair enough.  Strange, but such is life.  So what’s so labyrinthine about them?

Things start to get complicated when you consider their life cycle. Let’s start with a feeding animal living on a lobster’s mouthparts: this individual – it’s hard to assign a sex – can then produce one of three kinds of offspring: a “Pandora” larva, a “Prometheus” larva or a female.

Wait, what?

The Pandora larva develops into another feeding adult – a straightforward case of asexual reproduction. By contrast, the female remains inside the adult and awaits a male – but, attentive readers will be crying, what male?

Not sure about crying, but I’ll bite.  What male?

The answer lies in the Prometheus larva. This attaches itself to another feeding adult, then produces two or three males from within itself. These dwarf males, which are even more internally complex than the other stages, seek out the females and fertilize them – though the details are unknown.

It produces males from within itself?  Who’s sole purpose is to find women and have sex with them?

Once the female has been fertilized, she leaves the adult’s body and hunkers down in a sheltered region of the lobster’s mouth-parts. Her body, no longer needed, turns into a hard cyst. Inside this, a fertilized egg develops into yet another stage: the chordoid larva.

In due course this larva hatches and swims off to colonize another lobster. Once it has attached itself to one, it develops into another adult and the cycle begins again.

Of course, now that I think about it, I think I saw that about 10 years ago on Jerry Springer.

Yep.  Definitely saw that on daytime TV.

The evil that men do lives after them.
The good is oft interréd with their bones.
~WS

Cloves are potent and should be used sparingly. Because whole cloves are difficlult to grind, it’s suggested that you buy them ground. Reserve whole cloves for infusing flavor into hot liquids or for inserting into ham/bread.

• Brian P.
• Terry B.
• Tarleen S.
• Lavon S.
• Sarah B.
• Allison T.
• Suzanne A.
• Jenny S.
• Nisha A.

After the third one turned out NOT to be related to the person I knew, I stopped talking to them.

Also, people look at you oddly if you do back bridges in the US Airways gate in Philly, who would have thought.

I recieved the following a few weeks ago:

Subject: hello

hay

u want 2 do lunch later?

~J

I almost didn’t bother to respond to him, but my conscious got the better of me.  He broke many of my email rules. So many that I considered marking it as spam for the hell of it.

1. The subject tells me nothing about the contents of the email.
2. It’s not obvious from the excerpt above, but it was sent from an email address that he doesn’t normally use, and thus I didn’t recognize it right away.  The signature, “J” tells me nothing.  That’s alright if I’m in a long email chain with somebody, but for an initial email?
3. Would it kill somebody to use proper English?
4. The number 2 is just that, a number.
5. If you can’t spend the 10 extra seconds to type out “You”, don’t send me an email. (Could take that long on a crackberry, I’m trying to give benefit of the doubt here!)

More of email etiquette here and here.  My favorites include:

• Don’t Use The Forward Button.  Ever.
• Nothing is more wasteful than to reply to an e-mail by including a complete copy of the original with the words “I agree”, “Okay” or “Ditto” at the bottom.
• Use of upper-case words is the equivalent of shouting in some one’s ear. ONLY use upper-case words when trying to make a point (such as I just did). Even at that, you should be careful with who you are exchanging messages.

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m guilty of many of these.  Heck, today, I was guilty of many of these.  But what’s that line from Family Guy….?

“You know what grinds my gears?”

Bad email etiquette is the answer of the day.

Note: I did reply to him, I did have lunch with him, and I failed to mention the anguish that his note caused.  Maybe he’ll read this.

In our rush-aholic world slowing down seems subversive. In the workplace we have to be “seen” to be working. Even though doing a task more slowly can often produce a result faster, many of us get caught up in unnecessary meetings and tasks. You may be suffering from too much speed. After all, you are reading this. We humans are not always-on, efficient machines that can run seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Burning the candle at both ends results in, well, burnout.

Humans need rests, relaxation, and recreation. We need time to think about things, to clear the mind, and to have fun. But to a person overburdened with claims on her time, fun seems only a distant remembered state of mind.

Slowing down is a way to incubate, conserve, and harvest our energy, not about relief from boredom by just watching more TV or going shopping. You may have to confront boredom at first. Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better.

The article breaks it down quite nicely:

• Don’t slow down quickly
• Have a slow hour
• Slow and calm
• Eat slowly
• Exercise slow
• Do one thing at a time
• Slow your attention
• Slow down now.

It also occurs to me that I should follow my own advice… but well, … soon. Maybe.

I have.

Murphy’s Second Law:
Everything takes longer than you think.

Murphy’s Third Law:
In any field of scientific endeavor, anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Murphy’s Fourth Law:
If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong.

Murphy’s Fifth Law:
If anything cannot go wrong, it will anyway.

Murphy’s Sixth Law:
If you perceive that there are four possible ways which a procedure can go wrong and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for and usually worse, will promptly develop.

Murphy’s Seventh Law:
Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.

Murphy’s Eighth Law:
If everything seems to be going well, you’ve obviously overlooked something.

Murphy’s Ninth Law:
Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.

Murphy’s Tenth Law:
Mother nature is a bitch.

Murphy’s Eleventh Law:
It is impossible to make anything foolproof, because fools are so ingenious.

My love is on the ocean;
I think I’ll let him swim,
For in my heart I feel it,
I’m just as good as him;
His love is in his pocket’
It’s a little in his heart;
The way he divides it,
He gives each girl a part.

REFRAIN
Adieu to cold weather,
Away with the frost;
I’ll sing and be as merry
For the old beau that I lost;
I’ll sing and be as merry
As the nightingale in the tree;
There’s rest for the weary
Since he went back on me.

Many a pleasant evening
Together we have walked;
Many a pleasant evening
Together we have talked;
His talk was always pleasant;
His watch was always slow;
And many a time I’ve told him
To take his hat and go.

REFRAIN

The last time I met him
Was in a shady grove;
He smiled on me so sweetly,
He offered me a rose
Thinking I’d accept it;
I quickly let him see
That I could get another
That was just as good as he.

REFRAIN

Via Alice Ridgeway Tucker, Davidsonville, MD

You’re going to have to spread a rumor that you have a drinking problem. Get caught drinking and driving once. The company has a program in place to handle the rehab, and the cops can’t put you away because they know you’ll be killed by mob associates minutes after you arrive in your cell. Get pulled over and everyone will assume that you didn’t want them to ride with you because you need to sip from a hip flask in order to see straight in the morning. Better that they see you as a drunk than that you turn their kids into orphans and their wives into widows on the day Fat Mikey finds out you been hiding out in Iowa ever since you turned rat.

Funny stuff.

Atheists believe that life is meaningless.
On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness … well … meaningless.

Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.
People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

Via

Now, when you encounter a crazy screechy monkey, there are many things you should not do, and one of the things not to do is go up to it and jab it repeatedly with a stick. Because all that does is enrage the crazy screechy monkey, who will then hoot and hop and call to all his crazy screechy monkey friends. Then suddenly you’ve got a whole colony of crazy screechy monkeys hooting and flinging their poo at you, and all you have is a stick. You can’t poke them all. They move too quickly, and eventually their poo gets into your eyes. If you try, everyone watching you is going to say “look, that person is trying to fight an entire colony of crazy screechy poo-flinging monkeys with a stick. What an asstard.” Then they’ll laugh and point at you.

Eventually you’ll have to retreat; declare moral victory if you like, but the fact is, the colony of monkeys is still screeching crazily at you, people are pointing and laughing at your asstardery, and you’re covered in monkey shit.

Leave the crazy screechy monkeys alone.

Now go read the original post if you haven’t yet.  Cause it’s true.

Via Brian and LiftPort’s blog.

“People say they’re trying to ‘make their mark on the world’ before they die – that’s another kind of silly thing to say. You can’t make your mark on the WORLD unless you’ve got a bulldozer or know the secret of making crop circles when no one’s looking.

I figure if you’re going to leave your mark, you should leave it with people rather than inanimate things.

Leave it by the words you say, or the things you do. The good things, and the bad things. They go hand in hand. i do’t think there’s a ‘big mark’ you leave, so much as little ones, all over the place. here and there, people repeat something you said, because it was a good idea. Or you make them think something differently. Or you just loved them, is all.

All those little marks you leave, they’ll add up to a big one, someday. And in the meantime, you should just live your life the best you can with what you’ve got to work with, and call it good.

I guess that’s what I’d recommend. And while you’re at it, try not the take the world to seriously, because sooner or later you’re going to end up its punchline. And you can choose to be pissed off about it

-or you can choose instead, to laugh.”

Via

Montgomery County needs more goats.