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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Wine Foil Art & Open Thread

Wine Foil Art & Open Thread

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It’s supposed to be a pig. It’s not my best work, okay? I blame the poor quality foil from the decidedly inferior wine.

My kid texted me all upset from a pet store that has a lemur for sale. She said the poor creature is going mad in its little cage. Luckily, my mom didn’t BUY it for her. But lemurs sold as pets? WTF?

Please discuss whatever.

Reader Interactions

70Comments

  8. 8.

    scav

    Clearly a Pig-Dog, designed specifically to sniff out truffle-clams with the mysterious bamboo thing in tow.

  11. 11.

    Josie

    @Alison: I used to keep and breed cockatiels and Amazon parrots. I had a few parakeets at one time, but I never bred them.

  14. 14.

    Alison

    @Josie: Ah well, may as well throw it out just for laughs anyway. My folks and I are wondering what might cause two parakeets who have shared a cage for a couple of years to suddenly start getting amorous.

    Like, actual bird humping. Multiple times over the past couple weeks, all of a sudden. Nothing has changed in their environment or food or whatever. We’re thinking someone slipped v1agra into their birdseed or something.

    It’s kind of funny to watch, while also a little disturbing.

  16. 16.

    Josie

    @Alison: Are they a pair? If so, maybe they figured out how things are supposed to be. Sometimes it takes pet birds a while to catch on. If it is a pair, it might be interesting to attach a nest box to the cage and see what happens.

  18. 18.

    Amir Khalid

    @eemom:
    Jonathan Winters and Annette Funicello richly deserved RIP threads here, but didn’t get them. Jean Stapleton deserves one too, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

  19. 19.

    Alison

    @Josie: We don’t even know what sexes they are. Not sure what you mean by a pair – my mom got them together, but just from the big cage full of birds at the pet store. I imagine they just took two she liked?

    Also, no no no nest :P We don’t want to deal with baby birds in an apartment.

  21. 21.

    The Dangerman

    Kinda looks like Tunch. Well, except for the color and the girth. Mostly the girth.

    ETA: Deep thoughts – how many bottles cases of wine would needed for a good foil Tunch?

  23. 23.

    Alison

    This is the tiniest of tiny things, but I really wish in the Leave A Reply fields, the “L” in URL was capitalized so it didn’t look like URI.

  24. 24.

    Josie

    @Alison: In a male the little area above the beak is blue; in a female it is sort of brownish beige. When they are mature enough to mate, the colors deepen. If you don’t want babies, I would get them some fun new toys and millet sprays to try to interest them in something besides each other. They might even have to be separated for a while.

  25. 25.

    Dee Loralei

    @AdamK: You win the thread!

    So, the author, Gabe Berman follows me on twitter. I told him that I read and liked one of his books this week. He asked me to write a review for it on Amazon. I did. He tweeted back that my review was phenomenal and maybe his favorite so far. And he posted it to his facebook. I don’t know why that tickled me, but it did.

    ETA: The book I reviewed was “The Complete BullShit-Free and Totally Tested Writing Guide”. His other book is “Live Like a Fruit Fly “

  26. 26.

    ? Martin

    @Amir Khalid: Here’s my theory on dead people threads on BJ:

    If they’re huge names and/or unexpected deaths they get a thread. Michael Jackson. Whitney Brown.
    If they’re obscure but influential and not getting coverage on big mainstream sites, they usually get a thread. David Rakoff.
    If they’re in the middle – household names that died as we expected them to, usually in their 80s or 90s and would be covered at big mainstream sites, they usually don’t get a thread.

    I think the first category is to give the commenters an outlet. I think the 2nd to give the FPers an outlet. I’m not sure there’s all that much to say about the 3rd category.

  27. 27.

    Mnemosyne

    @Alison:

    That annoys me as well, but it hasn’t been fixed yet even though I’ve brought it up a few times in “how is the upgrade going?” threads.

  28. 28.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Alison: Thankyouthankyouthankyou!! That has been driving me berserk! I have thought so often about saying something about it and decided that would be petty of me. So on behalf of all the petty pedants out her — THANK YOU!!

  31. 31.

    quannlace

    Definitely a pig, but looks like he’s already been barbecued, or at least spent too much time in the Florida sun.. Crispy skin.

  32. 32.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Hey, I immediately thought “pig” at the first glance!

    So don’t be so hard on yourself, Betty!

  33. 33.

    Violet

    @Alison: Yes! Thank you! Another change I’ve noticed is that if for some reason I accidentally click back on the page while I’m typing a comment, when I click forward again, the part I’ve already written is gone. It used to still be there. It’s almost always an accident when I do this, so it’s very annoying to find that I have to start over typing.

    I don’t know if this is my browser or a change in B-J since the update. I have only noticed it since the update, but since FF (my browser) updates all the time, it could be coincidental timing. Anyone else notice this?

  34. 34.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @? Martin:

    Don’t know how I missed it at the time, but this is the first I knew that David Rakoff had died. That’s too bad, he was a funny guy. I liked his books.

  35. 35.

    JoyceH

    If you hadn’t said pig and asked us to guess, I would have guessed it was Hyperbole And A Half’s ‘simple dog’.

  36. 36.

    quannlace

    A lemur? Is that even legal? Wouldn’t you need a license to sell exotic animals?

  37. 37.

    MikeJ

    @Mnemosyne: @SiubhanDuinne: @Violet: Wikipedia says:

    In computing, a uniform resource identifier (URI) is a string of characters used to identify a name or a web resource. Such identification enables interaction with representations of the web resource over a network (typically the World Wide Web) using specific protocols. Schemes specifying a concrete syntax and associated protocols define each URI.

    I is right.

  38. 38.

    Alison

    @Josie: Ah okay, then it does seem we have a boy and a girl. And they have a bunch of toys and a cuttle bone and stuff to keep them busy. Not sure what else to do, we don’t really have room for a second cage. I guess if eggs turn up even without a nest we’ll just have to deal with it :P

  41. 41.

    Mnemosyne

    @MikeJ:

    So the box is not to put your URL into? It’s for your URI? I would have no idea what my website’s URI is.

  43. 43.

    MattF

    @quannlace: Also, besides the legal issue, the question “Should animals that are not domesticated be sold as pets?” has a simple answer: ‘No’.

  44. 44.

    ? Martin

    @MikeJ: Eh. I would argue no. URI is a superset of URL. URL is specific to web pages, where URIs are more generic and apply to email addresses, ISBN numbers, and a mess of other things. I’m not sure URI is the intent of that field as what it produces is clearly laid out for a web page (URL).

  45. 45.

    Violet

    I just viewed the page source. It’s actually an upper case I (“eye”), not a lower case L. So they meant it to be ewe-are-eye.

  46. 46.

    WereBear

    @MattF: Absolutely. They aren’t going to cope in captivity, they often have health or exercise needs that won’t get addressed, and sometimes they grow up, go crazy, and become very very dangerous.

  47. 47.

    TaMara (BHF)

    @Alison: Obviously one night while you were out, you left the tv on and forgot to cover the birdcage and they started showing bird porn (admit it, you were watching the mermaid special on animal planet and left it on that channel, right?) and that’s all it took. Now they want to try it for themselves.

  50. 50.

    scav

    The technical pedants do seem to prefer URI. further along in the wiki

    Technical publications, especially standards produced by the IETF and by the W3C, normally reflect a view outlined in a W3C Recommendation of 2001, which acknowledges the precedence of the term URI, rather than endorsing any formal subdivision into URL and URN: “URL is a useful but informal concept: a URL is a type of URI that identifies a resource via a representation of its primary access mechanism (e.g., its network “location”), rather than by some other attributes it may have”.[1] A URL is simply a URI that happens to point to a physical resource over a network.[2]

    And, just because we have only used (or could use) that field for
    URLs in the past doesn’t mean that’s all it could do — the ways of FYWP are mysterious.

    Practically speaking however, the “I” is also now a cheap and easy troll to the beloved •cough• users. Looking a little like a middle finger might just add to the frisson.

  52. 52.

    MattF

    @TaMara (BHF): Wait… mermaid porn? Isn’t there a problem there? I have a recollection that Bette Midler had a song about that, back in the days when she was disreputable.

  53. 53.

    TaMara (BHF)

    @Alison: Here’s the thing about domestic birds – just because they lay an egg, they don’t necessarily know what to do with it. So it might not be an issue. You may find one in the corner of the cage abandoned…

  54. 54.

    Alison

    @TaMara (BHF): That’;s what we expect, especially if they don’t have the right conditions to try to raise it. I wonder how big a parakeet egg is?

    Also, LOL at bird porn. Wonder what the cat thought of that…

  55. 55.

    PurpleGirl

    My Peekskill friend N went to a pet store one night (not sure which one). He saw an albino ferret. She was the last of her litter and had been alone for some time. She was huge in size, too. She was not socialized and becoming a bit crazy. He felt sorry for her. So he bought her. We couldn’t really let her out to roam the house because she nipped at ankles and such, but we did try to give her some playtime. (I found she liked to go inside a plastic bag and have the bag twirled overhead — you’re flying, you’re flying, LOL.)

  56. 56.

    eemom

    hey Betty — please consider reporting that pet store with the lemur to a local humane society; there may be something they can do about it. And it may indeed be illegal.

  57. 57.

    Betty Cracker

    @eemom: Yeah, I thought I’d check it out when I get home and see what’s up. Seems wrong to me.

    Big thanks to whomever recommended “Cloud Atlas” (the book). Thoroughly enjoying it so far (about 1/3 of the way through).

  59. 59.

    Mnemosyne

    @scav:

    And, just because we have only used (or could use) that field for
    URLs in the past doesn’t mean that’s all it could do — the ways of FYWP are mysterious.

    There’s already a separate field for e-mail address, so what else does FYWP picture people using the field for?

  60. 60.

    BarbCat

    Can anyone do anything about the lemur? I’m screaming here in CA feel helpless. Of course I want to send in the Feds. Totally illegal.They are the most numerous species of primates AND way endangered. Shit like this is why Gawd made Xanax.

  63. 63.

    Ruckus

    Walking down the street today I was stopped by an older gentleman on a bike who wanted to know how far it was to Anchorage. Said that over the last year he had biked from Key West to southern Calif and wanted to go to Anchorage. I told him it might be less mileage but the trip would probably be much harder. Said he is going west till the coast then heading north. I’ve known several people who have toured thousands of miles on bikes but this guy was the most interesting ever. Ratty old mtb, scruffy beard(and I should know from beards), and I’ll bet every thing he owns on his bike. A few clothes and that’s it. Amazing.

  65. 65.

    karl

    Looks like your interpretation of what a pig by Giacometti would look like. Sort of.

  66. 66.

    Mnemosyne

    @Ruckus:

    He’ll need a passport nowadays to get across Canada — they don’t let you cross the border with just a driver’s license anymore.

  67. 67.

    scav

    @Mnemosyne: Not 100% sure, but on the top of head blue skying, could use it to identify a voluntary icon file (intead of a home page) and the programming could identify which sort of thing it is and handle accordingly. There might be pragmatic reasons to allow only one or the other forms of personalization to each user. The intertubes always be changing underneath us.

    Eta. there could also be changes afoot underneath where the address part of the URLs are handled more automatically by programming and all we really need to do is uniquely identify what we’re looking for /linking to That would solve a lot of moved the file dead link issues.

  68. 68.

    Ruckus

    @Mnemosyne:
    Forgot about that. Last time I went to Montreal I forgot mine and they let me go. That was 2007 I believe. Five years is a long time in the world of the TSA. How many shoes have they had to smell and how many 80-90 yr old ladies have they had to molest? Maybe that just makes it seem longer.

  69. 69.

    Mnemosyne

    @Ruckus:

    Even if he gets turned back at the Washington/Canada border, that’s still one hell of an impressive ride.

  70. 70.

    Origuy

    @Ruckus: Not sure where you are, but Google says the shortest way to bicycle from LA to Anchorage is up US 395 into Nevada for 3500 miles. You have to go pretty far east to catch the Alaska Highway. Unless he took ferries along the BC coast. Seems like something you’d actually want to plan ahead for.

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