so i'm looking through the lab drawers for toys to use as stim for my next experiment, and this lab has some weird shit. partial list: build-your-own plastic sandwich set (complete with generic processed meat, cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers, and bread that you velcro together), plastic fruit (some of which has been mysteriously painted white), an 80's era purple canvas belt with tan leather trim (the horror, the horror!), several paintbrushes of varying sizes, most of which have white paint residue on them (i would've thought spray paint would've been a better option for the fruit), a 3" long toy spatula, a real spatula, a miniature dutch wooden shoe, a pipe (the professorial kind, not the pot kind), a single-serving bottle of bacardi (it was empty when i found it i SWEAR), a funnel, and my personal favorite, a toy can of tuna that really opens (though sadly (or perhaps not) empty).

this is in addition to the beanie babies we've amassed for experimental purposes (hah hah! experiments on beanie babies! does that pavlovian beanie dog salivate to a bell? look for experimental results in an up-coming issue of the journal of articles in support of the null hypothesis). i tell you what, we've got many a collector beat. we've got eagles and eels and elephants oh my! beetles and butterflies and bunnies galore. snails and snakes and seahorses, cheetahs and chipmunks and chickens, ostriches and oxen and otters coming out the wahzoo. wow, i could keep doing this all day... lions and leopards and lobsters, beavers and buffalo and bears, fish and flamingos and flies, puffins and puppies and pandas, roosters and rats and rhinos, horses and hippos and hedgehogs, scorpions and squirrels and skunks, kangaroos and koalas and killer whales, monkeys and moose and mice, deer and ducks and dolphins, fawns and fireflies and frogs, camels and crabs and cows, turkeys and turtles and tigers... okay, even i'm getting tired of this by now. but here's what's a killer: i cannot for the LIFE of me find a stuffed albatross online.* okay, well, there's one (about 2/3 the way down the page, between "tui" and "pukeko") but it's a chick!

*i'm guessing that you're wondering right now why, exactly, this lack of stuffed albatrosses is rising to the level of international crisis. see, animal-animal onset cohort pairs, which i need for my research, are hard to come by, and alligator-albatross is one. but i can't use it if i can't find a stuffed albatross that is recognizable as such, and not just as "bird".

this is what i do for a job. be envious or frighted, your choice.

know thy shrub

20 January 2004 - 2:57 pm

all i want is for people to vote. vote informed.

so john kerry, eh? john kerry, the "comeback kerry" as he described himself, pulls an upset in iowa. i'm a dean supporter myself, but when the time comes, all i really want is for january 2005 to see the inaugeration of President Someone-Other-Than-Bush. friggin' al friggin' sharpton would be better than the shrub. not much, perhaps, but at least he'd be entertaining.