A few days ago, I posted a design for a Giant Squid Multi-Costume that I'd sketched up for a friend of mine. Well, here is the implementation:

Giant Squid by Lauren Bell, Max, Liz, U-B., and Elsa.

It's difficult to see in the photo, but they had an absolutely brilliant idea for the squid's beak. It was a huge piece of black paperboard folded into a "fortune teller", like the ones we used to make in elementary school (with fortunes such as "your face looks like a squid" written inside).

I would show you pieces of pie, but no pie has stayed around long enough in this house to snap a picture of it. I tell you what  I'll do for my readers: when I'm shopping today, I'll buy some. Just for you. I can make this sacrifice since you've come to expect photos of stuff. I'll add them in. Ain't that sweet of me?

Why pie? What makes me bring up pie? You want some, don't you?

I was looking at twitter and a tweet caught my eye:

One of my friends recently asked for help in designing a giant squid costume to be worn by multiple people. So I sketched this up:



In case you can't read my AMAZING handwriting, here's the text:

- one person per arm + tentacle OR arm tips on roller skates
- uses handles to rotate eyes
- waves arms to move fins
- arms could be stuffed or just flat fabric
- use sturdy fabric

the GIANT SQUID MULTI-COSTUME
fits 2-12 lunatics

Rough days like today demand a little humor. I've long wanted a Madonna in a tub in honor of my grandmother (who was Catholic and from New York), but these are hard to come by in West Texas so I made do with a Buddha frog and a tub figurine. 

Serious cursing was heard in the Wombles household when Blogger inexplicably failed yesterday and still wasn't fixed today. I wailed. I nashed my teeth. I seriously thought of getting off my arse and doing something else. And then I remembered. I am on other sites. That's right: besides the fourteen bloody blogs I've got on blogger, I have several at wordpress. I'm at Open Salon. I'm at Before It's News (I want to open a site called After No One Gives A Shit). And let us never forget, I'm at Science 2.0 (my favorite place for sciency-ness, like truthiness, only better). Of course, this last one is for sciency stuff and that requires effort and some modicum of seriousness. Do I strike you as in a serious mood?

XKCD makes fun of the fact that a 95% certain test is to 5% uncertain, and so, if one just often enough tests, a false positive will at some point result. Ha ha ha, good message, but I have to poop on the party, sorry – party pooper – don’t know me yet? I mean, I would applaud if this were directed at misusing error analysis and statistics, as I criticized before, but this seems to go against the media again, not the scientists.

Manchester Confidental postedd a rather creative April Fool's Day article called Squid ink is the new Garra fish. Garra is the genus of fish, sometimes called doctor fish, that will nibble all the dead skin off your toes if you go to a fancy spa. That's real.

This is not:

The squids, which are sourced from off the west coast of Indonesia, have been found to produce a rare ink that stains even the fairest of skin a beautiful olive colour when applied from precisely 23cm away.

But it's pretty funny.