More zoo photos...

A not-very-good picture of a Gaboon viper. I include it for two reasons (other than the fact that it just looks cool and it's almost as fun to say "Gaboon viper" as it is to say "boomslang"...)

1. The reason that it is not a very good pic is because I was taking my photos with available light, unlike the self-centered jackass in front of us who stopped in front of each tank in the darkened half ot the snake exhibit and lit off his flash. I was ready to grab his DSLR by the zoom lens and beat him to his knees with the camera body. I checked the news this morning in the hope that he had died in a crotch fire on the drive home, but no such luck...


2. Also, the sign on the tank proclaimed that the scientific name of this subspecies of Gaboon viper is Bitis rhinoceros, which, as Bobbi pointed out, is Huck the Cat's life's ambition.

On the list of "Things That Creep Tamara Right The Heck Out", go 'head and pencil in "The Legs Of A Marabou Stork" at the bottom. (Although if I remember correctly, you could get Marabou Barbie's knees to bend like this, too, which made for very authentic pink Corvette wrecks.)


Obviously these two white rhinos are tired out after a tough day of rhinocerosin'. Either that, or someone just told them that the nickname of their species is "square-lipped rhinoceros", and they're sulking.

Two by two, tongues of blue...

One of the more popular attractions at the Indy Zoo is the twice-daily opportunity to feed the giraffles.

(For those who didn't know, giraffles have tongues a foot long or so. And they're blue like a chow dog.)

BONUS!: Meta-giraffles!
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We've got lions and tigers only in Kenya...

There is no zoom-lens trickery involved here. Thanks to Indy Zoo's new tiger exhibit, which has a 1.5" pane of glass separating you from Shere Khan, you can get right up close. I waited for a hole in the wall of kiddies and dropped to my knee to get eye-to-eye with P. tigris.

Of course, there are little pink hairless monkeys lining the walls of the viewing area, and el tigre's pacing the glass like Huck presented with a bell jar full of squirrels, hence the difficulty in getting a crisply-focused pic...

I'm going back on a weekday when I can spend more time trying to get a good shot. (Er, with the camera, not the .405 Win T/C Encore...)

*yawn*

Went to the Indianapolis Zoo with roomie today. Had a great time and took lots of pics, but I am just whupped right now; it's been a long day in the hot sun. Bobbi is already napping and I'm thinking about doing likewise. More later...
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Overheard in the Office:

Me: "...and when I was little, we'd go downtown and ride the monorail on the roof of the big Rich's department store! It'd go right along the edge of the roof, six stories up, and it was shaped like a pink pig, and you rode inside the pig..."

RX: "No, Tam, I'm afraid those were the drugs they gave you."

Me: "No, really!"

EDITED TO ADD: Apparently, back in the '50s, before liability lawyers were invented and it was discovered that fun was actually hazardous to children, there was a fad for these miniature monorails in the toy departments of big city department stores. (Although it took an especially inspired madness to make it look like a pig and put it on the roof...) Sadly, it looks like none are actually operating anymore.

Wouldn't it have been have been fun to be a salesman for the Louden Machinery Company, traveling from city to city, going into department store boardrooms and singing...

Well, sir, there's nothing on earth
Like a genuine,
Bona fide,
Electrified,
Six-car
Monorail!
What'd I say?

MONORAIL!

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Tab Clearing...

• From deep inside the reality distortion field: Steve Jobs destroys entire computer industry with kung-fu punch! "Within a couple a years Windows will be the niche OS."


• "Oh, Dave Weber, no!"


• Months, not days: "Kinetic" Operations would seem to imply that things are actually moving. Thankfully you need to have boots on the ground or a Republican in the White House for the press to use the "Q" word.


• Licensed coffin makers? Next thing you know, you'll be telling me you need a government permission slip to cut hair. Where do think you are? East Germany?

Always scouting for talent...

via reader BGMiller in email:

A Secret Service agent on assignment in Iowa to help with presidential security has been arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence.

City Police Chief Bill Nixon says 40-year-old Daniel L. Valencia was off duty when he was arrested Saturday in Decorah.

Well, Agent Valencia, I'm sorry to hear that your fed career has probably crossed the double yellow of life.

Look on the bright side of things, though! Should the USSS ash-can you, you've obviously got just the résumé for the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department. They're always looking for a few good men who can conn a Crown Vic while they're half in the bag.

Timewaster...

Waiting for the dishwasher to finish up before going to run some errands, I'm reloading Alan's blog over and over to see the different pictures he uses for the header. (Even though he has them all on one page linked in his sidebar...)

I think the one with the torpedo tubes is my favorite.

I am such a dork.
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Well, actually maybe that wasn't so funny.

So Robb Allen posted the other day about Project X-Ray, the World War 2 plan to make primitive guided incendiary cluster munitions by strapping timed pyrotechnic devices to bats and stuffing them into bomb casings so that, when dropped over Japan from USAAF B-29s, they would scatter and roost under the eaves of houses come the dawn.

As it turned out, we were incinerating entire Japanese cities just fine without chiropterid assistance, and so the project was shelved without burning down anything but test targets and the occasional non-target building on the base.

I was going to make a joke in his comments section that we were going to burn Japanese cities with bats in revenge for them trying to burn our forests with balloons.

I seemed to recollect that the Japanese balloon bombs caused the only civilian fatalities in the continental US due to enemy fire during WWII, and so I went to research...

And indeed they did. Not just any casualties, either: A young minister, his pregnant wife, and five Sunday school children went out for a picnic. While the pastor was laying out the picnic goods his wife and the children ran over to investigate what looked like a crashed balloon. It exploded, killing all six right before the reverend's eyes. There's a memorial on the spot today.

Pastor Mitchell, the widower of almost 20% of US Home Front KIA in the Second World War, eventually remarried and traveled to French Indochina to minister to lepers. While there he was taken prisoner by Viet Cong guerrillas and marched into the jungle in 1962, and was never seen again.

And for some reason, I had completely forgotten what I was going to joke about.

"Over __ Days Since Our Last Gaffe!"

An IMPD officer was arrested the other day. Was it for:

A. Streaking
B. Filling In A Wetland Without An EPA Permit
C. Operating A Vehicle While Intoxicated

If you guessed "C", you're absolutely right! Once again, it is proven that the letters stand for "I Must Patrol Drunk". (And while we're on the subject of drunken Indianapolis cops, there's still a stick through the spokes of the wheels of justice in the matter of IMPD Officer David "Bottles" Bisard.)

Ah, IMPD! As long as you keep doing this, I'll never lack for blogfodder.

Overheard in the Office:

I'm reading through LabRat's post on manatees, chatting over my shoulder with Bobbi, who is standing behind me and notices something flash by on the screen...

RX: "What? 'All over Table Mountain'?"

Me: "Oh, yes, they go flopping up the sheer slopes to their traditional breeding grounds at the summit."

RX: "Wait..."

Me: "It's where they lay their eggs!"

RX: "I don't think these are the kind of manatees I'm familiar with."

Public Relations Protip:

When touring the shuttered factories and idled industrial plants of the heartland to bring hope and change to people whom you would like to vote for you, you shouldn't do it in a foreign-made RV. I cannot believe that this gaffe slipped right by all the 20lb brains on Barry's PR staff.

Mr. President, if you had a scheduled stop in Elkhart, IN, you may want to just go 'head and cancel it now that this story has got out.

What're you gonna do? Vote Republican?

In response to Rep. Maxine Waters' public gripefest about the Dear Leader, Bill Quick retorts:

You have no clout. You gave it away. I mean, what are you gonna do? Call him a racist for ignoring you?

Ouch.

(Incidentally, is it just me, or is Maxine actually getting crazier?)

This is what happens...

...when you let the kind of people who worry about shoulder things that go up to write firearms law:

So I bought the book a few months ago, from Parow Arms & Ammo. Completed the open book exam, made an appointment, was handed a closed book exam asking the easy half of the questions from the open book exam, exchanged that for a competency certificate they had printed the week before, and then had to put ten shots into an A5 paper target at 10m with a Norinco LM4 (I think).

I’ve heard that one can fail the competency but if you do you should probably have someone help you with the shoelaces thing in the morning as well.

The above quote is from a post in which Wouter is describing his travails in getting rubber-stamped to buy a semiauto rifle in South Africa.

It's a pretty fine kettle of fish gun owners seem to have found themselves in down there: The Great Big Firearms Law they passed was apparently as convoluted as a bucket of earthworms and has only gotten more Through-The-Looking-Glass with successive attempts to "fix" it.

Overheard in the Office, Part Deux:

Me: "RWC just said 'Wait until next week when they offer the board bender package'..."

RX: "What's a board bender?"

Me: "I dunno... hang on..." *clickity-click* "Here you are."

RX: "Oh, one of those! Those are neat! You use those when you're building decks and..."

Me: "Wow, you could really f#@$ somebody up with one of those things!"

RX: "You say that about everything: tools, flashlights, shoes, wine bottles..."

Overheard in the Office:

While we were at the State Fair, Bobbi picked up a couple of neat-o garden auger bits that could be chucked up in a drill motor and used for planting bulbs and suchlike in the clay soil of the raised bed in the back yard.

This morning I was messing around on Amazon and saw one of their Dealio-of-the-Day things.

Me: "Hey, Amazon is having a sale on this "Milwaukee Fork Meter & Cordless Drill" thing. I don't have a drill motor and I don't know what a 'fork meter' is..."

RX: "[arcane explanation involving amps and volts and things that can electrocute me and which I therefore avoid like the plague]"

Me: "So that's something you could find a use for, then?"

RX: "It could come in handy."

Me: "Is $99 a good deal?"

RX: "What do they normally sell the meter for by itself?"

Me: "Almost that."

RX: "So, free drill."

Me: "Right. On the way."

Tools are neat things. I'm glad that some people know what the heck they do. Me? I'm mostly an idea person; execution is generally somebody else's department.

Ouch.

Three more hours of Almost-A-Doctor Mandy all up in my grille with a drill yesterday. I feel like I got socked in the mouth by Mike Tyson.

The worst part about afternoon appointments down there is that they frequently drag on perilously close to 5PM, and then turn you loose on in the middle of a large urban university/medical campus to do the bumper-to-bumper shuffle with a faceful of Novocaine.

On the plus side, it was a great day to drop the top for the drive home, and all the better for having "Die Young Stay Pretty" cranked on the stereo.

I $ New York.

Checking the news this morning, I glanced over something about New York City and bridges and money. "Nope," I muttered to myself, "I wouldn't do it for four bucks and I won't for fourteen bucks. You're going to need to offer me more than that."

And then I realized that that was how much they were going to charge me to drive across the bridges into their wretched hive of scum and villainy, not how much they were going to pay me to do so.

You have got to be out of your ever-loving mind.
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Tab Clearing...

• Jim at the Travis McGee Reader attended the Iowa Straw poll and has a series of posts on the topic written in his inimitable style. I was somewhat disappointed to see no photographs of actual straws.


• Santa Rosa, CA PD SWAT sets up a little display for the kiddies at a neighborhood festival, including a couple of firearms on the junk-on-the-bunk table. Said kiddies are allowed (under supervision) to touch. The Eloi at the local newspaper issue a Code Brown PSH Alert. Good thing the Army recruiters didn't set up a booth; those guys bring 240 Bravos and grenade launchers.

Blogmeet.

Okay:

What: Blogmeet-type thing.

Who: You and whoever else feels like showing up.

Where: The Broad Ripple Brew Pub.

When: Sunday, August 28th, starting at 3PM and running 'til whenever we get bored or they start putting chairs on tables and making expectant throat-clearing noises.

Why: Well, duh. Because we can.