Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I was promised a recession.

Not all heroes wear capes.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

This fight is for everything.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

No one could have predicted…

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Second rate reporter says what?

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

This blog will pay for itself.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread – All Creatures Short and Squat edition

Open Thread – All Creatures Short and Squat edition

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The International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University has chosen their top ten new species for 2011.

The thing above, which looks a little like something you would find in your refrigerator when you get back from holidays, is a Louisiana Pancake Batfish, and lives in the Gulf of Mexico in the region of the oil spill.

The incredible list also includes a jumping cockroach, a cricket that pollinates a rare orchid, a mushroom that grows underwater and a leech which was “discovered feeding from the nasal mucous membrane of a little girl in Peru”.

Reader Interactions

45Comments

  1. 1.

    Origuy

    FYWP keeps eating my comment, which is (trying for the 3rd time):

    Louisiana Pancake Batfish? Anyone we know?

  5. 5.

    Cliff

    Well I’ll be goddamned, it looks like my state provides something of value to the world after all.

  6. 6.

    Cliff

    Also, I just saw the video of Matt Taibbi vs. McMegan on Goldman Sachs. McMegan’s default argument seems to be “stuff is hard to do, don’t do it.”

  8. 8.

    Roger Moore

    @Comrade Luke:
    There’s an old (by internet standards) saying that “for any nutty theory, beyond-the-fringe political view, or strange religion there exists a proponent on the Net. The proof is left as an exercise for your kill-file.” For the uninitiated, a kill-file was similar to a pie filter back in the good old days.

  10. 10.

    trollhattan

    @Origuy:

    Bobbie Jindal in his pre-shapeshifter form? Needs a word balloon saying “Volcano research”

  17. 17.

    Yutsano

    @ruemara:

    This may turn a lot of his… progressive fans off on.

    Fixteth that for you. Assagne literally can do no wrong no commit no sin in their eyes. They will rationalize this away.

  19. 19.

    eemom

    I’ll grant you I’m in a shitty mood, but…..if you’re gonna go out of character at will, you kind of blow the beauty of being fictional. Jussayinzall.

    Anyway, fuck this stupid blog. If I had any sense I’d never click on it again.

  20. 20.

    Yutsano

    Hmm…I may have a party to get ready for here soon. Or an epic orgy of drunkenness and shenanigans that will make the Olympics look like a tea party.

  24. 24.

    kdaug

    @Joseph Nobles:

    So say we AHHHHHHH!

    “What do you hear?”
    “Nothing but the rain, sir.”
    “Well, bring in the cat and grab your gun.”
    “Boom, boom, boom.”

  26. 26.

    Frankensteinbeck (The ex-Uloborus)

    @Arclite:
    Do you really think there’s the remotest similarity between those two issues? John Edwards is a routine indictment for violation of campaign finance laws. Those rarely go anywhere, but they’re not controversial. The other involves trying to prosecute the former president of the opposition party for that president’s policies. That is ‘destroy your presidency’ controversial, certainly not going anywhere because of the murkiness of the legal question of presidential powers, and would not in the remotest deter future offenders. Or do you think Cheney would have taken as much as five seconds to go ‘But *I* won’t get caught’? Since he and Bush still get pissed at the American people that we don’t understand that they were always right in every way?

    Odds are you disagree with some of my arguments there. Fair enough. But I hope you see that there is no comparison between these two prosecutions whatsoever. You cannot judge one by the other.

  28. 28.

    Slowbama

    I knew that Hochul had won and won big when I turned on my teevee this morning and there was not a word being said about it, anywhere.

  31. 31.

    JGabriel

    From the top 10 new species list, Darwin’s Bark Spider:

    This orb-weaving spider builds the largest orb-style webs that are known to science. Webs of this species have been found spanning rivers, streams and lakes with “bridgelines” reaching up to 25m in length and total web size reaching up to 2.8m2. The silk spun by these spiders has an average toughness of 250MJ/m3 with the highest measured at 520MJ/ m3. This makes it, “the toughest biological material ever studied, over ten times stronger than a similarly-sized piece of Kevlar” and more than two times stronger than any other known spider silk.

    This is the kind of discovery that makes you realize how much we still have to discover. I mean, how could we miss the world’s largest spider webs? How is that we didn’t even know about the creature that makes them until a couple years ago?

    Because we still have so much to learn:

    The unusual behaviors of this new species will allow us to understand size dimorphism, mate guarding, and self castration (among others).

    Size dimorphism, mate guarding, and … excuse me?

    Holy shit.

    Never mind. I don’t want to know.

    .

  32. 32.

    JGabriel

    Darwin’s Bark Spider:

    The unusual behaviors of this new species will allow us to understand size dimorphism, mate guarding, and self castration (among others).

    I hereby award this sentence the Double-Take Before Breakfast award. I haven’t even had my coffee yet.

    .

  36. 36.

    El Cid

    @Suffern ACE: My thoughts exactly. Just what the Louisiana pan-frying industry needs.

    And what with the Gulf, you wouldn’t even have to add oil to the pan.

  37. 37.

    Citizen_X

    @eemom:

    I’m in a shitty mood

    Jaysus, I guess so. Anyway, Sarah, thanks for putting cool stuff like this on “this stupid blog.”

  39. 39.

    shortstop

    @JGabriel: I’m not fond of spiders, but the research being done in Costa Rica on the super-tough properties of the golden orb spider’s silk fascinates me. It can be used for medical sutures, among other things. Will have to check this barking spider out…er, castration and all.

  40. 40.

    JGabriel

    @cleek:

    it’s the flying vomit alien from Operation: Annihilate!

    Damn, those flying aliens really were fake vomit:

    The neural parasites were made by covering individual novelty vomits with a clear, inflatable bladder.

    I had no idea.

    .

  41. 41.

    HL_guy

    FYI- the self-castration thing, in spiders, really amounts to one of two situations. The first is where one or both of the copulatory organs (palps) is broken off and left inside the female. This makes sense if the male is unlikely to mate again (often true), because it is ‘reproductively dead’ anyway, and especially if it serves to prevent subsequent fertilization by other males (possibly true).

    In other spiders, the palps are over-large and impede locomotion, so the male twists *one* off at maturity and carries on with just a single copulatory organ. Since many familiar animals get by with just one copulatory organ, you can understand how this really would not be ‘castration’ at all. Just dumping extra ballast to ensure a chance at landing somewhere reproductively promising.

    It is never a case where the spiders cut their willies off and join a monastery or follow a comet- usually it’s a post-mating exercise, seldom reduces fecundity of the males, and can improve it relative to competing males.

  42. 42.

    shortstop

    @HL_guy:

    It is never a case where the spiders cut their willies off and join a monastery or follow a comet

    Hilarious.

  45. 45.

    Wallis Lane

    I thought “Louisiana pancake batfish” is what James Carville is going to go if they don’t stop talking about Newt Gingrich’s candidacy.

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