Shaved pussy[cat]

I shaved my cat the other day.

She looks damn funny now.

She also looks very skinny. I have to keep reminding myself that this is the normal size of a cat and it's only American housecats that typically look like teddybears.

In case anybody's wondering why I did this, Lina has this amazingly silky, beautiful fur which is great for thermoregulation - in winter. In summer what we end up with is a sad pancake-shaped puddle of cat stretched out on the kitchen floor tiles desperately trying to cool off.

The other pertinent issue is grooming. Last year near the end of the summer in fruiting season, she would come home with a coat full of burrs which I would then have to spend hours picking out, and in many cases, I'd give up and out would come the scissors.

Also, hairballs. For those not familiar with the concept of "hairballs", a hairball is a mat of fur and food particles (mostly lipid) that accumulates inside a cat's stomach as it grooms itself. Sometimes, if the hair doesn't pass into the intestine and out the other end, the poor cat spends a good long time hacking and retching before vomiting it up. Before acquiring a cat, I imagined they were sort of dry things like owl pellets. Nope. They look like turds. There is a whole division of the pet product industry devoted to hairball control.

No hair -> no hairballs. Kitty happy, me happy. And since cats generally don't pass the mirror test, she doesn't know how silly she looks.

Sexist styles

OK so WHAT THE TOOT is going on with all this "boyfriend boyfriend" crap in women's fashion?

There are "boyfriend" sweaters, "boyfriend" T-shirts, "boyfriend" shorts, and "boyshorts" underwear, and now these watches. The theme here seems to be that no decent woman could wear any item of clothing that's not suffocatingly tight, or accessory that's tiny and useless, unless she can pretend that she's borrowing it from her boyfriend (and of course she must pretend that she has a boyfriend who will let her borrow his stuff).

I weigh about 46 kg/100 lbs right now so I definitely can fit in "skinny jeans", but you know what? I hate tight pants because I prefer to carry keys and cards around IN my pockets rather than lugging a stupid purse around. I think miniscule watches that you have to squint at to read are pretty pieces of crap. If you want to call my pants "boyfriend jeans" go ahead, I'll call you a bimbotic idiot.

Some of Fossil's "men's" watches are really, really nice-looking and it makes me angry that they don't make them in small, a.k.a. "women's" size. The Fossil women's range for the most part is decorative but nonfunctional. Back in college I had a Swatch Irony that was nearly as wide as my wrist. It was a men's watch, an automatic with a transparent back crystal through which you could see the workings. Being a cheap one, it became wildly inaccurate (+/- 3 minutes a week) after I accidentally hit my hand on the wall a couple of times, but it's still my favourite ever.

NB: I know a lot of my friends like pretty, feminine things, and I do too - albeit once in a blue moon. The point of this post is not to make value judgements on anyone's taste in fashion, but to say that I'm sick of the ridiculous condescension by those responsible for marketing women's products.

Robot lover

One of the old PhYW members (okaylah, old Phases Young Writers member is not oxymoronic any more since we're all in our mid to late 20s) posted a link to this story. Then Jerng got all excited and started putting together a personnel list for a firm to make them. Then Buswrecker, another old acquaintance who's a short Chinese guy who likes big bikes*, wrote:

"don't waste your time. buy a motorbike. quick before all the gas runs out."

Wahahaha!

*Nickname has nothing to do with his chosen mode of transport...it's a much longer story than that.

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Man, I need to write BADLY. It's been a long time since the last good blog post. I've had an essay on the cultural impact of Nipah virus on the back burner for ages, and I've got an idea for a funny story for the Futures page in Nature. Nature is awesome, it's the only real scientific journal (plus one of the other Nature Something family journals) I know that's got a page devoted to science fiction.

2 become 1

This is the year of "friends doing exciting stuff". First Magda and Tim had a baby, and today Krista and Dave got married. It's the first time friends my age reproduced, and also the first American wedding I went to that was the marriage of friends and not some random wedding I got dragged along to.

The wedding was great, with one of those entertaining touches necessary to make a boilerplate sacrament memorable - Dave tried to sneak a kiss while the pastor was busy getting the rings, Krista being unready recoiled, and everybody laughed.

Congrats guys! And thanks so much for having me and Steve join in the fun.

Oh yah...also the first event I was officially invited to as part of a couple :eyeroll:

New haircut

Say goodbye...

...say hello!

Zombie cuisine

I had the BBC on but was reading webcomics and not listening, and finished looking at comics in the middle of a sentence that sounded like,

"...and some people can't get the brain so they just get the powder and mix it with water and make it into soup..."

It was like a minute before I got the picture that it was a story about famine in North Korea and the word had been grain.

Axis of email

My uni has a fairly random method of assigning email addresses. The typical email address is [first initial][middle initial][surname]@wisc.edu. However, sometimes it will simply assign [surname]@wisc.edu, which is the case for me since I have a fairly rare surname - not so much for some other Chinese students who have names of the lao bai xing, or "Old Hundred" common surnames. For some reason, instead of assigning an initial plus surname, the system gives some poor suckers things like "lee22@wisc.edu".

But the really weird part is that, one would expect that the first person of a given surname to enter the system would get their surname, and subsequent accounts would have initials tacked on, right? Not so. Steve's email address is his initials plus surname, but his second younger sister's is just their surname (the first younger sister went to UW-Milwaukee).

What's worse is that a professor has the bizarre ID of [initials][truncated surname which was short to begin with][2 - yes, the number 2]@wisc.edu. An UNDERGRADUATE who has a similar first name and surname didn't get her name truncated, nor the numeral.

One of my coworkers has been bombarding the poor girl with questions about flu viruses, molecular cloning, lab mice, etc. because he's a bit of a careless typist. One time he sent an email to her, then fired off some follow-up thoughts to the "real" Stacey Schultz-Cherry. The next time he checked, he had two emails from two different women beginning with, "I have no idea what you're talking about..."

My hypothesis is that in some period before a few years ago, there must have been some requirement for all IDs to be 8 characters, but still, it's very weird...