Field Guide to Biologists

Now, at last, with this handy reference and a pair of binoculars, you too will be able to identify biologists.

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Notice the unusual markings. These varieties of biologists are clearly wearing no pants, one of the characteristics of the bench biologist, a delicate breed that favors air conditioned environments and wilts if not well-watered with money. The hardier subspecies of field biologists usually do wear pants, although it may be difficult to tell if they are also wearing hip waders.

I ♥ this letter

I wish Samuel Clemens were still alive, so I could piss him off and he’d write something like this back to me. It would be such an honor.

Nov. 20. 1905

J. H. Todd
1212 Webster St.
San Francisco, Cal.

Dear Sir,

Your letter is an insoluble puzzle to me. The handwriting is good and exhibits considerable character, and there are even traces of intelligence in what you say, yet the letter and the accompanying advertisements profess to be the work of the same hand. The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link. It puzzles me to make out how the same hand could have constructed your letter and your advertisements. Puzzles fret me, puzzles annoy me, puzzles exasperate me; and always, for a moment, they arouse in me an unkind state of mind toward the person who has puzzled me. A few moments from now my resentment will have faded and passed and I shall probably even be praying for you; but while there is yet time I hasten to wish that you may take a dose of your own poison by mistake, and enter swiftly into the damnation which you and all other patent medicine assassins have so remorselessly earned and do so richly deserve.

Adieu, adieu, adieu!

Mark Twain

Mark Twain would have been an awesome blogger.

Speaking of ridiculous…

…it’s books about how our pets go to heaven.

Author Ptolemy Tompkins tracks the history of the relationship between humans and animals in the new book, “The Divine Life of Animals.” Prompted to write by the death of his pet rabbit, Angus, Tompkins looks to the ancient past for the best models of animal-human interaction.

Och, Angus, ye cain’t be daid!

What of Mr McGregor? Burnin’ in hell where no wee bunny goes, no doubt.