Life and stuff

Great John Toilet

yanked from The Daily Mail and Salon

Scientists in America have found the first evidence that common chemicals used in products as diverse as cosmetics, toys, plastic wrap and plastic bags may harm the development of unborn baby boys. Researchers have long known that high levels of substances called phthalates have gender-bending effects on male animals, making them more feminine and leading to poor sperm quality and infertility. The new study suggests that even normal levels of phthalates, which are ubiquitous, can disrupt the development of male babies’ reproductive organs.

Considering the dependency of America on plastics, I wonder if this could lead to a whole generation of she-males …

I was browsing some Mozilla developer blogs, and an entry by Blake Ross on The Daily Stanford and its link spam caught my eye. In a nutshell, The Daily Stanford was (and still is) helping search-engine spammers game google by advertising crap such as diet pills and online degrees. They also advertise online casinos with this amusing quote, “Stanford plays slot machines and blackjack daily at established online casinos where black jack and slots are safe and rewarding.” (originally references www.allslots.com). A later post from Blake shows that the Daily Californian is playing the same game, though a bit less deceptively.

So this got my curiousity going a bit, and I decided to go check out The Daily Bruin. I expected nothing in the way of integrity from them — especially after they used one of my Natcar pictures last year and attributed it to “Daily Bruin Staff” (grrr) — and lo and behold they have the dirt on the bottom of the front page. No plugs for poker, but plenty for (probably fake) “Online College Degrees” and a funky one advertising a “Love Spell” (http://www.egyptian-witchcraft.com/).

With all this kind of shit happenning, no wonder why searching gets harder by the day.

For about 7 weeks we had two “male” hamsters. That is, until last night, when Peekaboo, gave birth to 5 baby hamsters sometime in the last few days. About all we know is that the babies are a few days old and don’t have any hair yet. Well, that and the other hamster, Bitey, looks like he’s been taking a beating from Peekaboo, but thats another matter entirely …

Haven’t had much time recently to process and post pictures, but I thought these two shots were worthy of jumping to the had of the queue:

The moon again, slightly longer exposure: