Author: Dave

Wombat wombling

I was watching this thing on the ABC this afternoon all about a couple of guys who were doing PhDs in the alpine ecology of the Kosciusko National Park area, and they had some really cool footage of all sorts of animals running around in the snow. Kangaroos, Emus, Wombats.

Now wombats look cool enough at the best of times, with their cute little trundling and wombling around, but they really look cute running around in the snow, chewing on the patches of grass sticking through, and drinking from melt streams.

So that’s what 1200 donuts looks like…

Penny arcade has a bloody funny little story going at the moment.

It all started when they posted a comic where they were giving Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) a hard time and comparing SOE’s games to some rather unorthadox pastry products.

In reply to this Sony sent the boys at Penny Arcade 1200 Krispy Kreme donuts. Gabe and Tycho simply didn’t have any comeback. The photos are on the site at the link above. It’s quite priceless.

It’s a jungle out there

Our house’s lawns are begining to look distinctly jungle-ish – almost like something out of Jumanji*, just without the elephants and the homocidal gentleman with a pith helmet and a blunderbuss.

For various reasons we have not had it mowed in about 4 or 5 weeks, and with all the recent rainfall here the grass has somewhat taken off.

Jack of course finds this a wonderful development, as it gives him plenty of cover for sneaking and stalking in (I got to watch him hunt a skink under the house the other day – it was very cute), but as for us humans it tends to be a little irritating as the long grass gets us wet when we leave early in the morning, and offends our sense of tidyness and order.

Still, I suppose that as long as rhinos don’t start stampeding out of it, and we get around to cutting it eventually, it will all be ok.

* I saw the other day that they are releasing a semi-sequel to Jumanji called Zathura: A space adventure, which while not being about any of the original Jumanji characters revolves around the same premise of a game that alters the reality of the players until the game is finished. I can’t decide if I want to see it, but given that I have relatively little time for movies at the moment I will probably wait until it comes out on DVD.

Jack the fat cat

We took jack to the vet the other day for his next round of vaccinations, and got him officially weighed at the same time.

Turns out that in 4 weeks he has gone from 2.2 to 2.8kg, which while not necessarily constituting fat, as the title possibly misleadingly indicated, still points to the fact that Jack is going to grow to become a rather large cat.

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An end to stationary

As I was shopping for filing cabinet folders today I realised that graduating has (temporarily at least) negated another of my bizarrely favorite activities: shopping for stationary.

These days whenever a drug or equipment rep wants to sell us something to us they give us pens, notepads, rulers, calculators, more pens.. well you get the idea, so shopping for stationary becomes a little unnecessary. On the one hand this is good, because I should be spending my pay on paying off my credit card anyway, and besides, I don’t really have the free time any more to be randomly perusing stationary stores, but I did always find it a strangely satisfying looking at the dizzying array of colours and shapes that the pen isle offered up.

Incompressible

One of the things about getting married as a staid white guy is getting used to wearing a ring, and one of the things I’ve been noticing recently is how I’ve become used to having my ring on.

Now, when I have to take it off to go into theatre of whatever I find it quite weird that when I squeeze my third, fourth and fifth fingers together my ring finger is soft and squishy, rather than being firm and metallic and incompressible, as I have become used to it being.

Artsy

I was poking around some art related stuff last night and wandered onto the Louvre’s website, which is pretty cool.

I spent the first 5 minutes just looking at the section of the main page which showed random pictures of items from the museum’s collection. There was some really cool pictures in there.

Then I delved a bit deeped into the site and found that they have quite well constructed galleries of photos from their various collections (I got trapped by the islamic art section).

It’s all well worth a look.

Creepy! Crawley! Bugs are cool!

I’ve been watching the David Attenborough series Life in the Undergrowth, which is all about the fascinating diversity of insects and arachnids (spiders and scorpions) and the evolutionary adaptations that they have developed in order to master all the world – wings, silk, armour, breathing without being in water, breeding without water.

It really is pretty cool the various things they have done in order to fill all the millions of little ecological niches that they occupy.

The whole thing takes me back to my childhood, where we used to watch nature documentaries all the time, which was always a strangely enjoyable family activity, despite the fact that it made me vastly geeky (and by extension in primary school, unpopular).

New and exciting

If it’s been a while since you last visited the site, I’ve been very busy writing lots of stuff (the new setup makes publishing stuff heaps easier than my old system) and uploading lots of photos, so take a look around and have a laugh at the piccies etc.

Tendons are cool

Now this is going to be a very medical post, but I was watching a patient get a release of their Dupytrens contracture today, which basically involved opening up the skin on the palm of the hand along the axis of the little finger, and chopping out the contracted fascial tissue, allowing the patient to flex and extend their finger normally again afterwards.

Now while the operation is in progress you can see all the flexor tendons for the little finger, which usually lie deep to the fascial sheet, and it struck me while I was watching things that it tendons are damn cool things. Given what they allow us to do they really are pretty underappreciated, and seeing them so clearly and so well on display was frankly cool.