apocalyptic odds & ends

Remember, I'm putting my new Wonder Woman costume to good use this week over at Return of the Reluctant, where the Battle of the Guest Bloggers is heating up. Drop by and say hi, or email me nifty links.

In the meantime, sometimes a blob is just a blob and not the great cthulhu come to swallow us all, scientists say.

But now a team of six highly skilled, if somewhat whimsical biologists centered at the University of South Florida has applied DNA analysis to the blobs and, alas, solved the mystery. The answer is all too mundane: The blobs are old whale blubber.

"To our disappointment," the scientists wrote last month in The Biological Bulletin, "we have not found any evidence that any of the blobs are the remains of gigantic octopods, or sea monsters of unknown species."

Is being somewhat whimsical like being a little bit pregnant? Probably not. More like being a My Little Pony or a Porn Star (classic, if you haven't seen it, click).

Also, in trying to solve our bird problem this morning (apparently we're living with it for a few weeks), I happened upon this Cryptozoology message board. Hours of fun. The pelicans aren't acting quite right, if you know what I mean.

worm "It's a Hit," Rilo Kiley (it's definitely a worm)

namecheck Matthew "Good Taste in Short Fiction" Cheney