Please,said George,
be so kind as to stretch your neck so I can tie your head to the top of that palm tree over there.
Cecily G. and the 9 Monkeys by H. A. Rey.
We finally got some rain.
And it’s now cool enough to walk Molly — in the middle of the day.
Professor Soap – Spirit Quest Journey by Ryan Mauskopf via booooooom.com
This spiny turtle, like other turtles, has an upper shell that forms as ribs widen and fuse into a bony plate.
Never mind Aesop and his fables. Japanese scientists are telling a new story of how the turtle got its shell. A shield from the elements and from predators, as well as a mineral reserve in low-oxygen environments, the turtle’s shell is unique in vertebrate anatomy. Still, a turtle’s embryo starts out looking like any spined animal’s—say, a chicken’s or a mouse’s. But about a third of the way through in-ovo development, says Shigeru Kuratani of the Riken Center for Developmental Biology, “an anatomical rule is violated” that remaps the animal’s physique. The ribs grow over the shoulder blades instead of under them as humans’ do, forcing the body wall to fold in on itself. What would have been an internal rib cage fuses into a bony plate under the skin and becomes a part of the turtle’s outer armor. In 2008 the fossil record delivered elegant support for this theory—and for another, more disputed one: that shells evolved from the bottom up. With a belly plate but an incomplete upper shell, 220-million-year-old Odontochelys semitestacea, found in China, seems an in-between form—one that looks a lot like an early stage in modern turtle development. More bony finds may someday tell the rest of the turtle’s story. —Jennifer S. Holland
Photo: Joel Sartore. Art: Hiram Henriquez
Source: Hiroshi Nagashima, Riken Center for Developmental Biology
via national geographic tumblr
… and blankets, and the sun, and warm fires, and being tucked in.
And Molly dislikes the cold.
But there is one grammatical mistake that I particularly enjoy encountering. It has become almost fun for me to come across people who take the phrase “a lot” and condense it down into one word, because when someone says “alot,” this is what I imagine:
The Alot is an imaginary creature that I made up to help me deal with my compulsive need to correct other people’s grammar. It kind of looks like a cross between a bear, a yak and a pug, and it has provided hours of entertainment for me in a situation where I’d normally be left feeling angry and disillusioned with the world.
For example, when I read the sentence “I care about this alot,” this is what I imagine:
If someone says something like “I feel lonely alot” or “I’m angry alot,” I’m going to imagine them standing there with an emo haircut, sharing their feelings with an Alot.
Read the whole brilliant post on how alot’s can help you cope with people’s spelling errors on Hyperbole and a Half
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