Globidens + Turtles = Yum?

The mosasaurid Globidens had rounded teeth evidently adapted to cracking tough shells. Usually I hear of those chompers being used to crack ammonites, but why not turtles? Turtle flesh would make a more filling meal for a large predator than calamari-cargot.

Obviously Globidens wouldn’t put a dent into Archelon or some similar genus but maybe it and its relatives were part of the selective pressure that caused the gigantism that is so characteristic of the Western American Seaway’s Late Cretaceous chelonians in the first place?

As Articulate as a Third-Term Abortion

In response to a Youtube comment declaring Sarah Palin to be intelligent and articulate:

sarahPluvsabortions
shes as articulate & intelligent as a 3rd term abortion shes fucking stupid give it up

Well said, sarahPluvsabortions. I just wish you had used proper punctuation while doing so.

Michelle Obama’s Dress

Shut the fuck up about it. You contribute nothing to society or public discourse. You are boring, banal human beings and I hope you die.

He’s Not Missing Anything

I left chemistry early today to watch Barack Obama be sworn in as President of the United States on the TV in my university’s student center. Just after he finished the oath, I noticed that one of the Black students in the crowd that gathered to watch the occasion had her small son with her. The boy was ambling about, drinking from a sippy cup, and completely oblivious to what was going on.

And I thought to myself “I feel really sorry for that kid. Here he is at this historic moment, and he’s too young to understand the significance of what’s going on. He probably won’t even remember it.”

Then I realized that this not a bad thing at all. By the time he’s old enough to have fully understood the significance of today’s events, had his older self been here to witness them, he’ll be living in a world that’s moved on from the idea that a Black president is a radical notion. He’s going to grow up in world where a Black president is not a distant hope or a revolutionary agenda, but a mundane fact of history.

That boy’s better off never having to celebrate the election of a member of his race to the nation’s highest office, never needing to be overjoyed at something that should have never been an issue to begin with. Let him forget today. Let this be the end of an ugly era gone unremembered.

Today’s true victory is not the election of a Black president but our country’s resolution to move beyond a state wherein the achievment of certain accomplishments by certain groups of people need be considered a victory.

I don’t know that I have a large Black readership, but should anyone of you be reading this, I want you to know that I congratulate you. I am so unspeakably happy for all of you. If any group of people has ever earned anything at any time or place, you guys have earned today. Thank you for being my fellow countrymen.

Creationism is Sexy

I swear, sometimes my blog gets traffic from the weirdest search engine queries. Check out this one from a couple weeks ago:

I assume they were looking for unintentionally erotic religious art of Adam and Eve but recoil at the thought of thinking too deeply on this. He (or she) only clicked once, so my blog was evidently a disappointment on their quest for, uh, Bible porn.

Rite of Passage

Yesterday I was hanging out with a buddy of mine and I accompanied him on his errands to a local Meijer. He picked up a six-pack of Budweiser and while I looked on mostly uninterested, he says “Abyssal, you know you’ll be partaking of this, too, right? Some things you just gotta do whether you want to or not. It’s a right of passage.”

I didn’t disagree with either contention. I had no desire to drink, but I might as well. I’ve been 21 years old for over a month now and adn’t had so much as a sip of acohol since I was around 13 when the same friend spiked a Pepsi of mine with his mom’s vodka at like 3:30 in the morning when I was too tired to figure out why my pop tasted so damned funny.

So it was that last night I had my first beer. And y’know what? It tasted even worse than I imagined. But it was a Rite of Passage or whatever, so it’s all good. In the end, I learned three things:

1.) My alcohol tolerance is rather low; by midnight I had great difficulty attempting to input the phrase “The anus prober” into my friend’s Xbox 360.

2.) Beer tastes like piss, only carbonated.

3.) I have no pity for alcoholics any more. There’s no way in hell you can get addicted to that shit without trying. It’s well nigh undrinkable.