I Like My Eggs Fertilized

10/9/07

I’m pretty sure most people are brain damaged. How else can you explain the reaction human beings have whenever someone announces they are having a baby? Naturally the most vocal on the subject fall into that most disturbing of categories, the unwed, middle-aged office lady who is way too attached to her pets. These people are so rife with unrequited love that, were you ever to actually allow their drooling insanity within spitting distance of your child, you’ll have to keep a close eye on them to make sure they aren’t sprinting for the parking lot with your progeny.

Why is the announcement of your very average and normal ability to fertilize an egg a cue for automatic congratulations? I mean, I get it if you’ve got like one ovary, have been trying for a year, or have been using hobo sperm and a turkey baster or something, but what precisely is interesting about the fact that you fucked and wound up preggers? Shit, stray dogs and poor people do that all the time, and they don’t seem all that impressive to me. I’m pretty sure something almost anyone can do is not grounds for immediate congratulations. And I can understand if you are the sort of baby-crazy psychotic who has been keeping your coworkers constantly updated with the status, cycle, and consistency of your uterus for the past 6 months. But other than that, it’s just weird. It’s like congratulating someone on their birthday. Hey, good work! Way to keep breathing this whole year!

Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be excited if someone in your family gets knocked up, (providing their not say, sixteen and really into knives,) but to be thrilled about a person you are forced to spend 40 hours a week with and never even think of unless you need to borrow some White-Out is venturing into Lunatic Land. Hooray! More people who will probably buy lottery tickets and go to Eddie Murphy movies and drive an SUV and cause me to repeat myself and just generally clog up the planet and judicial system while contributing nothing to society! Rejoice!

I guess I can give the women who are breaking this earth-shattering news a break; after all, you will eventually figure out that they are swelling to abnormal proportions, so it sort of makes sense for them to tell people about it. But there is no excuse for male coworkers to bring this up, given that we don’t know your wife/girlfriend/one-night-bang, don’t care about the fact that your nuts work properly, and can’t possibly imagine a situation where I would have to be privy to information about the spawn that fell out of your partner’s vagina. Great job with the sperm and everything, Carl, but how about we just go on pretending that we all wouldn’t rather be somewhere else and leave your germination skills out of the workplace, okey-dokie?

Wow. I must be in a particularly spiky mood this afternoon. Clearly, I’m advocating eating babies.

10/7/07

My friend Andi showed me this last night. All I can say is "awesome."

Check it.

Gerbils and Caterpillars and Moths, Oh My

10/4/07

Is that a gerbil in your pocket, or are you just some weird pervert?

First of all, sad days, ladies and gentlemen; my goldfish of some five years finally croaked and went belly-up on us. Despite my reputation as a bit of a procrastinator, it took me a mere 2 days to actually fish him out of there and throw it away. My wife’s constant urging over the two weeks that followed to actually clean out the empty, stagnant and rapidly algae-blooming aquarium, was probably just her way of dealing with the grief. I finally succumbed under threat of abstinence and we were left with this empty tank staring us in the face every day. What to do? Clearly the best course of action was to fill it with rodents.

Disturbing sexual urban myths notwithstanding*, Hanni and I decided to get a couple of gerbils. We finally settled on two males from Pet Warehouse, mostly because they were the only place within a 20 mile radius that fucking had gerbils. I don’t know if there’s recently been a run on the tiny creatures, but Springfield is certainly uncontaminated with them, ladies and gentlemen. Here are the lucky winners:

We ended up naming them Alexander and Hamilton, ‘cause I roll Founding Father style. They are slightly cuddlier than a fish, and more entertaining to watch. I just hope to Christ we didn’t make some egregious error and actually ended up with a male and a female. I’m not really into swarms of rodents. Should that be the case, we may have a new promotion here at Drunken Ramblings: Read the blog, get a free tiny mammal!

That’s not the only life Hanni and I have cultivated in the last few months, either. My mother brought me a parsley plant one day that ended up having like 6 of these guys stowed away inside it:

After some research and a hastily-assembled and spartan terrarium, I determined they were Black Swallowtail caterpillars. The really fun thing about them, aside from their wicked-awesome coloring which I’m considering copying for a suit pattern, is a little orange, fleshy fork that comes out of their head. Yeah, they totally rock a stink gland.

You would, by the way, be astounded at how much a caterpillar can poop. Fed steadily for several days on a staggering amount of parsley, the guys soon climbed the makeshift sticks and settled back into these kick-ass silk hammocks.

For whatever reason, I always thought caterpillars spun silk into a chrysalis, but that’s not the case. In fact, they attach themselves with silk, but the actual pupae is the result of a molting which we were lucky enough to watch on one of these guys, though sadly we didn’t get it on video. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen and only takes about a minute for them to complete. Here's a pretty good simulacrum of the process through a little Monarch time-lapse, y'all! -

About 10 days later here’s what we got:

Pretty, huh? We also found a caterpillar of a different sort in some corn we bought at the farmer’s market. Not quite as stunning, is the corn worm.

Also, they turn into perhaps one of the god-awful ugliest moths I’ve ever seen. But, you know, we can’t choose our species, I suppose.

That’s all the news from Jett’s Wild Kingdom, dear readers. I’m thinking our next animal project will be rearing and training a massive hoard of loyal spider soldiers to unleash upon my foes. BWA-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!




*Stuffing a gerbil, shaved or not, lubed or not, into one’s asshole is clearly physically impossible if you just think about it for a few seconds. Essentially what you’d end up with is a slippery, crushed gerbil corpse acting as a terrifically inefficient and bloody dildo. Leave poor Richard Gere alone.