Con crud.

[truepenny]

DO NOT WANT.

The same applies to the house centipede lurking along the ceiling in the bedroom. Also to the doctor's appointment I have this afternoon. (Which is unrelated to the con crud. Checkup, Annual: see above re: Boring Health Problems.)

Therefore, if you have something good or interesting or fun you want to tell me about (this includes general burbling about Fourth Street, if a person felt like it), the comments to this post would be a superlatively appropriate place.



And I found something interesting on my own even! A nifty article about the intelligence of octopuses, via jaylake.

Also, dd_b's snapshots of Fourth Street.

Comments

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry to hear about the con crud. And sorry that we couldn't come to Fourth Street, even if there was con crud there. But I did get the package with the mobile--thank you! And S and the parents-to-be also say thank you.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I do approve of there being new people in the world, even if I don't want to have anything to do with the production of them myself.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Logical. That's how S feels about new books, so it seems like a fair trade-off.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Mind now going off on odd directions wondering if we count as beta-readers for this baby.

[heresluck]

Okay, here is the cat story I called about while you were at Fourth Street:

Last week, The Princess Cat played with Theo! He was hiding behind a box, being very unsubtle about getting ready to pounce on her; she saw him, but did the "La la la I am the only cat in this room la la nooooooobody here but me la la" thing that she does when The Big Kitty gets ready to pounce on her: she rolled around on her back, waved her paws in the air, etc.

Then when Theo went to actually POUNCE, she instantly flipped over and sauntered away, tail held very high, leaving the kitten nonplussed but purring at how cool she is.

The end.

Also, check your email. *g*

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

She wins. As usual.

[jenett]

I wish, as usual, that I had had more time to talk to you! But I have hopes of more of that.

It was incredibly cool seeing you and Bear together as tag team panelists: some of my own best experiences are bouncing off friends like that, and I love seeing the synergy other people have, and how it works. I could have watched that for days, even without all the clever and thoughtful and thought-provoking stuff that was said.

Erm. I think I am still out of interesting. I have plans to go to the zoo with my sister and bits of her husband's family, and look at bears and boars and tigers and stuff. It's about where my brain is.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

I have two octopus stories. I can't produce a shred of proof that either one is true, but I both like and believed them.

1. A friend of mine was at a big aquarium - not sure which one - which had a big display tank as one wall of the cafeteria, so that you could eat your overpriced sushi tuna-fish salad cheese sandwich while enjoying a gorgeous display. One of the many examples of marine life in the huge tank was an octopus, and it was sleeping at the point when he found his table near its nook and sat down, a couple feet and some very thick glass away from it. It was that muddy no-color that octopodes get when they're asleep, and not moving - except that, as he sat there, the faintest blushes of color would sweep over it periodically, and the very tips of its tentacles twitched from time to time. He asserts and I agree that it was dreaming.

2. Someone had many fish-and-assorted-aquatic-things tanks in his home. At one end of his main room, there was a tank which had an octopus in it, with a very secure lid. At the far end of the room from that, there was a big fish tank.

One day, he thought it seemed like there were fewer--yes, you can see where this is going, it's the implications that are staggering--fish in the tank. A couple days later, he was sure of it. He never caught the octopus in the act, but he did one day find a wet trail along the wall at about shoulder height.

Yes, predators, they eat fish. But this one was

A: opening its pretty secure tank cover and climbing out
B: crossing to the other end of the room and getting into the fish tank
C: only eating one or two fish at a time, and then
D: going back to its own tank and
E: shutting itself in again.

It's not a big shock if you find your octopus in the fish tank, glutting itself cheerfully. This required orders of magnitude more cunning.

Oh, maybe it couldn't eat more than a couple at a time, and maybe it was the wrong kind of water for it so it wanted to go back to its own tank when it was full, and maybe reports of how secure the tank was were exaggerated.

I prefer cunning.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Noooo! Fourth Street ought to be completely free of con crud!

...says the person who just got her first full night of sleep in a week....

It was good to have lunch with you, even if lunch itself was not that great. Wish we'd had the time to take you somewhere interesting, but you've been here often enough to know that Mpls food does get better than that.

[larryhammer]

Department of Something Nifty: Kennedy Space Center in Legos.

---L.

cool stories & pix

[themadblonde]

I did not know before today that snopes.com has an entire page devoted to pictures of natural phenomenon, accompanied by their "true" stories. Some amazing shots & some enlightening info there:

http://www.snopes.com/photos/natural/natural.asp#storm

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not sure about good or interesting or fun, but it is rather amusing, and it does pertain to the cephalopod/eldritch horror and the intelligence thereof...

http://lolthulhu.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/donovan-oops_anim.gif

Also, http://www.flickr.com/photos/specklet/222975107/in/set-72157594204828139/ for sheer adorability.