Category Archives: Miscellany

A Trip to the Zoo

So the other day I came across this little gem: God Made Dad & Mom. In a nutshell, the message of this book is that Heather must have exactly one mommy and one daddy and that’s that. You can see what readers’ reactions were on Amazon.

I haven’t been able to get my hands on this book, and I’m not particularly interested in spending any money on getting it, so I’m going to have to use my imagination here. The book’s description says that the story goes like this:

In school, young Michael learns that God made men to be fathers and women to be mothers. After school, his father takes him to the zoo, where he learns that animal families consist of a male, a female, and their offspring.

For all you people on the internet who are not lucky enough to possess a copy of God Made Dad & Mom, here is my proposal for the zoo sequence:

A Trip to the Zoo

That afternoon, Michael goes to the zoo to learn about animal families. First he goes to the lion enclosure.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Lions live in groups called prides. A lion pride is made up of one or two males, five or six females, and their cubs. Each male will mate with all of the females.

Here’s the hyenas!

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

The female spotted hyena has a pseudopenis, which makes her look like a male. She will give birth through this pseudopenis.

Let’s move on to the bonobo exhibit.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

…

It looks like they’re kinda busy right now. We should come back later.

These are the whiptail lizards. They live in the deserts in North America.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

In some species, every whiptail lizard is a female. When they lay eggs, the baby lizards are exact copies of their mother.

Let’s move on to the aquatic exhibits.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Corals are animals, even though they don’t look like the animals you may be used to. Corals never mate. At a certain time of the year, corals release egg cells and sperm cells into the water. The eggs and sperm join to form a new coral, which drifts along in the water until it can find a new home.

If you look closely, you might be able to see clownfish hiding inside the sea anenomes.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Clownfish live in groups called schools. The leader of the school is a female clownfish. When that female dies, one of the males turns into a female and becomes the new leader.

You don’t even have to go to the zoo to find animals with interesting families. If you take some dirt from your backyard and look at it under a microscope, you’ll find a kind of worm called C. elegans.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Most C. elegans worms are hermaphrodites, which means that they are both male and female at the same time. They can self-fertilize, so one worm is both daddy and mommy to its eggs!

The Liebster Award

liebster2

Some while ago, Carrie over at The Mad Reviewer nominated me for a Liebster blog award. The purpose of the award is to draw attention to up-and-coming bloggers who have less than 200 followers. Thanks, Carrie!

Here’s how the award works:

I have to post eleven facts about myself.

I have to answer the eleven questions posed to me by the blogger who nominated me.

I have to ask eleven questions.

I then have to nominate eleven other blogs under 200 followers to receive the award.

Eleven facts about myself:

  1. I am an adult and I am still afraid of zombies in books and movies.
  2. I find the entire premise behind the Warm Bodies movie to be deeply disturbing. See above.
  3. I like to stick brownies into the freezer for a few hours and then eat them cold.
  4. I have grapheme-to-color synesthesia, which means that I always see certain colors when I see different letters of the alphabet and numbers. The letter A is always school bus yellow, for example. It’s a part of its A-ness. The number 3 is always green.
  5. I spend more time looking at cats with captions than I really should.
  6. I’m a very neat and tidy person. Everything in my apartment has a place where it’s supposed to be.
  7. I once tried to teach myself Esperanto. Nowadays, all I remember is that “pordo” means “door.”
  8. I’m exceptionally bad at going down stairs. Up is fine, though.
  9. I got to pet a sea hare once. It was awesome.
  10. I dream of living long enough to see humans discover evidence of life on another planet.
  11. My favorite movie of all time is WALL-E. My favorite movie robot of all time, though, is Bishop.

Answers to Carrie’s questions:

1.  Which post do you feel is your best blog post and why?

“Tongue-Rolling: Lies, I Tell You!” Because it’s an interesting fact that tongue-rolling may not be as genetic as we learned in high school biology class, and because it was fun to take that photo.

2.  What made you start blogging?

Purely selfish reasons. I started blogging to promote an early work I’d just put up on Podiobooks. Then, blogging started to be fun and I started getting into it. That book is still mouldering there somewhere inside Podiobooks, but the blog took off.

3.  Skittles: Do you eat the red ones last?

What? Is this something that people do?

4.  What’s your biggest pet peeve?

Sweetened yogurt. I don’t like the taste, but that’s neither here nor there, it’s just a personal preference. What really bugs me is that sweetened yogurt gets marketed as a health food. Nonfat sweetened yogurt has more calories in it than plain yogurt with fat in it. It’s predatory to sell people a dessert like that.

5.  What do you love the most about blogging and why?

Interacting with readers. Writing is a lonely profession, and sometimes you wonder whether you’re sending all your words out into a black, shapeless Internet void. But the interactivity of blogging has been a way to make a lot of new Internet friends.

6.  If you had to pick one book that defined your childhood, which one would it be and why?

The Golden Compass and its sequels by Philip Pullman. I read them just as the last book was being published, at the impressionable age of 12. Wow. If you want to talk about an ambitious literary project, the scope of these books is not just the entire universe, it’s the entire multiverse, and God himself makes a cameo appearance.

It terrified me then, and still terrifies me now, that there might be a way that somebody could take your soul away from you. We live in Will’s world, where souls are invisible, so would you know it when it happened? Would you feel it? Would you become like the zombie nurse at Bolvangar?

7.  Coca-Cola or Pepsi?

I don’t drink soda pop.

8.  What’s your favourite song and why?

Oh, gosh, that’s a tough question. I like a lot of different genres, and what kind of music I want to listen to at any particular time really depends on my mood. So I’ll give you a song that I really, really love. It’s “Ghost Love Score” by Nightwish. The song is an epic that clocks in at over ten minutes. Imagine if Wagner had been born in the modern day and he’d had access to electric guitars. Yeah.

9.  What’s your current favourite TV series?

Game of Thrones, but that should come with the caveat that it’s also the only TV series that I’m watching right now. The show is kindof sortof a book, right?

10.  What do you think of blog awards? (Like ‘em or loathe ‘em?)

I’ve never tried them before, but this seems like fun.

11.  Does bad grammar bother you?

It depends on the situation. If somebody is e-mailing me to ask a question, especially if I know that writing isn’t their thing, I’ll ignore it. But if I am reading a story and I find a grammatical error, that’s it. I’ll stop reading. If you as a writer are serious about the craft, you should take the time to have somebody proofread your story for you.

Eleven questions for the next blogger:

  1. Can you roll your tongue?
  2. Is there anything that scared you as a kid that people wouldn’t normally think is scary?
  3. Have you ever dyed your hair a different color? If so, how did it go?
  4. What’s the airspeed velocity of an African swallow?
  5. Are you an early bird or a night owl?
  6. What’s your favorite robot in fiction? Or do you just not like ’em at all?
  7. What was your favorite class in high school and why?
  8. Do you remember before the Internet?
  9. What do you least like about the place where you live?
  10. What was the best pet you ever had in your lifetime?
  11. Do you like to eat anything weird?

Eleven blogs that I nominate:

Plants Are the Strangest People

The Illustration a Day Blog (I know Kaufenberg is over the limit on followers, but it’s a really good blog.)

Turtle and Robot

The Chocolate Peanut Butter Gallery

A Solo Singer in America

Still Curious After All These Years

Gman’s Galaxy

Frugal Feeding

Dreampunk Geek

Seth Snap Photography

The Baking Bird

The Mad Reviewer Reading Challenge

Happy No Apocalypse Day, everybody!

Secondly, I’m signing up to participate in the Mad Reviewer Reading Challenge. You may have heard of The Mad Reviewer, as she’s guest-posted on STandG a couple of times in the past. She’s a crazy-fast book reviewer who’s challenging other book reviewers to do the same thing.

You can read more of the details of the challenge at her site. You choose a challenge level, pledge to read and review that many books in a year, and put a little progress meter on your blog site. Anybody who meets their goal is entered into a prize drawing. I’m going for the Sane Reviewer level, but who knows? I might make it to Slightly Sane.

If you’re a blogger and you’re interested in book reviewing, I encourage you to check it out as well.

National Association of Science Writers 2012

This week I’ll be traveling to the National Association of Science Writers’ annual conference in Research Triangle Park.

The National Association of Science Writers is a trade organization for science journalists, university public information officers, and scientists with an interest in communicating to the public.  The conference is going to run from October 26th to the 30th and will include workshops on writing craft and the latest developments in science.  Expect to see photos when I get back!