My favorite image from another of Huffington Post’s stupid slideshows. Yeah, I know, it’s HuffingtonPost, but I can’t help myself. It’s funny, though, I remember hearing this conversation not too long ago sitting outside a Starbucks’ in Vancouver, there was a dog there and this woman said “I couldn’t have a dog with a curled up tail like that, I wouldn’t want to be staring at its butthole all the time.”

The doggie butthole cover. No, it's not a joke.

If you flip through the slideshow, what’s interesting is that half the products infantilize pets (the high chair), and the other half of them enable adult vices (like Bowser Beer and the doggie sex toy). My guess is that the former are aimed at female pet owners, the latter at male pet owners (with male dogs, apparently– are you gonna give Fifi a “bowser beer”?). So for women, dogs seem to serve as surrogate children, or extensions of your dolls when you were a kid, for men they are kind of like your “wing man.” Just sayin.

My other favorite: people crackers. I swear I had this same idea for a product, years ago in college, but never thought it would catch on.

Via my friend Craig, here is a long-lost classic TED talk by the late, great, and much-missed Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and a bunch of other very, very funny books. Adams is beloved by many in the scientific community (Richard Dawkins eulogized him at his funeral a few years ago), not only for his sense of humor but for his acute understanding of science. It’s well worth watching the whole thing:

He begins by telling a long and very story about a visit to Madagascar to search for a highly endangered species of lemur called the aye aye. I have been to Madagascar, and seen a variety of lemurs, but not the aye aye, which is found only on Nosy Mangabey off the north coast of the main island. But for those of you who haven’t seen photos of an aye aye, they’re worth seeing– easily one of the oddest looking animals in the world.  (From National Geographic, here):

Baby aye aye

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So for a couple years now, I have been following the controversial opening of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky (just across the river from Cincinnati). My good friend Sean Miller, director of the John Erickson Museum of Art, proposed that I do a show for one of the museum’s location-variable galleries, that would somehow take in the phenomenon of alternative natural histories via Biblical literalism. Sean is a pretty brave guy, and while I have been keen on the project, the prospect of vexing the famously well-armed and bellicose security staff at the museum has put me off it for a bit. Besides, funding seems to have run dry.

Well, now Vanity Fair’s A. A. Gill has a scathing review (hat tip to Pharyngula). He does the dirty work so you don’t have to. There’s even a slideshow with lots of pictures.

The Creation Museum isn’t really a museum at all. It’s an argument. It’s not even an argument. It’s the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism. This whole building is devoted to the literal veracity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis: God created the world in six days, and the whole thing is no more than 6,000 years old. Everything came at once, so Tyrannosaurus rex and Noah shared a cabin. That’s an awful lot of explaining to do.

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The ancient Egyptians loved mummifying other things besides people. I remember visiting the Egyptian Museum in Cairo once, years and years ago, and, despite just being overwhelmed with the sheer amount of amazing things to see, somehow the mummified crocodile stuck in my mind. I found an image of one quite similar on Flickr:

Mummified crocodile. Apparently from a museum in Wien.

The Egyptians also mummified cats. The image here is funny and macabre at the same time. It looks as much like a homemade child’s doll from a pioneer homestead as it does an Egyptian mummy– or possibly a rejected prop from a Brothers Quay film.  So much attention is paid to the ears and eyes, they are rendered right in the cloth, and the pupils are even painted on. It’s cute and slightly eerie at the same time.

A mummified cat on display at the British Museum, London.

From this article in Scientific American on the origins of the domestic house cat:

By 2,900 years ago the domestic cat had become the official deity of Egypt in the form of the goddess Bastet, and house cats were sacrificed, mummified and buried in great numbers at Bastet’s sacred city, Bubastis. Measured by the ton, the sheer number of cat mummies found there indicates that Egyptians were not just harvesting feral or wild populations but, for the first time in history, were actively breeding domestic cats.

Apparently the export of live cats from Egypt was banned for centuries, but there was a thriving cottage industry in cat mummies, which were created as offerings to the goddess Bastet and, assumably, sold to pilgrims, who them presented them to the goddess at the temple. Which, I suppose, would explain the effort expended to make them look cute– who wants to go to church with an ugly kitty mummy tucked under one’s arm?