Month: January 2010

Rabbit Hole Day Repost

Rabbit Hole Day 2010 has nearly been and gone without my doing anything to recognize it.  Too many distractions this year.  But this seems a fine time to collect in one place the Twitter and Facebook messages I churned out a year ago today.

MICROBLOGGING RABBIT HOLE DAY 2009

Jan. 26, 11:42 pm: Oh hell. Less than half an hour to go until Rabbit Hole Day, and I turn into a jellyfish.

Jan. 27, 11:31 am: Tentacles got too tangled up in the bed, so I slept in the toilet tank. Woke up wet on the bathroom floor, rust stains on my arms and legs.

1:18 pm: Rust stains were actually steampunk spores. All sorts of little dials and whistles budding up now. Will see if body trimmer can work me in.

2:05 pm: Made it to body trimmer, but had to wait 20 minutes listening to a jackhammer outside before I got in his chair and he sliced off the brass.

2:08 pm: Jackhammer reminded me of the aerial shots my dad took of Siberia during the war. Fields of frozen compressors made to steal the atmosphere.

2:26 pm: I think my generation takes the air for granted. I’ve turned off neutral buoyancy for the day. Time to remember what weight feels like.

2:58 pm: Fuck! Weight feels like horrible bending pain in shins, cracking sounds in my knees, and empty cherub husks poking painfully into my feet!

3:17 pm: Non-Texans: Seasons are weird here. Cherubs emerge from ground and molt in Jan rather than Nov. Cat ate so many husks, it needed an enema.

3:33 pm: Uh oh, I’m in trouble. Just got an angry text message from the cat, who is upset I told the internet about its enema. This won’t end well.

4:07 pm: Cat is now threatening to join the neighborhood gestalt. It knows how poorly I handled things when my dog did that where I used to live.

4:11 pm: After my dog sublimed, birds in branches, and the neighbors’ fish would ask me probing questions about my personal life. Total freakout.

4:28 pm: Of course, if the cat does sublime, things won’t be as bad this time. I’ve never let it into the bedroom. ClawBot meets my needs these days.

5:18 pm: Managed to patch things up with cat on phone. Now need to head home before things get angry. Emoteorologist says an affront is blowing in.

6:50 pm: Yeah, I made it home okay, but everything still sucks. I’m SO ANGRY! I just want to go outside and bash people’s thoughts in with a stick!

7:02 pm: Oh god, I’m so ashamed of myself. I actually did go out and pop some kid’s thought balloon with a mop handle. I couldn’t stop myself.

7:06 pm: It wasn’t until that little cloud over his head had burst that I realized what I was doing. I hadn’t even read it! I just didn’t care!

7:08 pm: I don’t usually let angry weather effect me like this. I’d better apologize to his parents tomorrow. I wonder if they like cherub pie.

8:37 pm: Caught enough cherubs. They are always distracted during their mating flights. An even mix of male and female helps the pie taste better.

9:30 pm: Guess the pie in the oven is for me now. The kid’s dad just tattooed an obscenity on the skin of my house. I think that makes us even.

9:49 pm: Brought up the house’s bios to tell it to start breaking down the tattoo, and noticed it is mounting a huge immune response. No idea why.

10:02 pm: OH NO! It’s the steampunk spores! The whole bathroom is infected and overgrown with pipes and stuff! It didn’t even occur to me before!

10:16 pm: Oh my god, there is so much wrench and hacksaw work to be done to get down to the floor before I can even APPLY the genrecidal medication.

11:11 pm: And while working on the bathroom, I forget about the pie in the oven until the delightful smell of tiny burning limbs fills the house. Ugh.

11:21 pm: The spores got into ClawBot. My night is well and truly ruined. Would have been better today to have just stayed a jellyfish. Going to bed.

Hunting Strategies of Aquatic Mammals

There’s a neat video going around of a hunting strategy pursued by bottle-nosed dolphins in shallow waters.  They swim in tightening circles and use their tails to make fences of cloudy water to trap schools of fish:

Very cool.  But at the end of it good Mr. Attenborough pronounces that dolphins are the only known species to pursue this fishing technique.  Yet right there in the related videos panel is an even more dramatic video of humpback whales using air bubbles to do essentially the same thing in deep water.

I wonder how widely known the “schooling fish are afraid to swim through churned up water” behavior is among ocean mammals.