Diskage:
DVD • Ronin
CD-ROM • D2X
CD Player
• Audioslave - Audioslave
• Metallica -  S&M
• Tool - Salival
• Faster Pussycat - Whipped
• Tool - Undertow

Books Lying Open
• The Great Hunt, Robert Jordan

Soul-Devouring Worry
• Today is the first day of the rest of my life.

When I Grow Up:
• Warm bootsies will be more fashionable.

Curse of the Day:
• May your appetite for pie fade when faced with the actual entity.

But that's neither here nor there.

Mostly I want to get the novel done, and this is a way to try and force myself to do it.  I work better with a deadline.  Well, I work more with a deadline.  I'm not sure I work better, but certainly comparing "nothing" vs. "hurried something" the winner is clear.

News.

• One of the annoyingly-whiny brothers in Oasis got into a huge brawl inn a German hotel and had several teeth punched out.  Amazingly-enough, Russell Crowe is not mentioned in this article.

• Amusing article about the practical (or lack there of) uses for semen.

It wasn't until recently that I learned the truth about the caloric content of semen. In reality, a typical load of semen contains about five calories, the same amount as the slice of tomato on that Whopper. Hindsight is 20/20, but I'm still not sure why I believed my dance classmate. If a teaspoon of semen really contained 610 calories, oral sex would be used in third world countries to combat malnourishment.

• Not a joke to make.

"People were angry and making fun of the driver, yelling 'Do you know what you're doing up there? Do you know where you're going?' He clearly was annoyed," she said.

Weisbrot said the driver then shot back: "'I'm taking you to the Taliban."

She said the driver was only joking because he was upset, but some people panicked and called 911 on their cell phones. Within minutes, 18 police cars surrounded the bus and pulled it over, she said.

Dara Salcman, a passenger from New York, said passengers were ordered to get off the bus with their hands in the air. Officers had their guns pointed at the bus, she said.

Now if the cops were smart (I know, just play along) they would have tailed the bus, and when it arrived at Osama's secret lair outside of Pittsburgh, they could have made the arrest that the hundreds of millions we spent bombing Afghanistan (further) back into the stone age failed to achieve.  Or perhaps not.

• Drink-spiking is apparently a near-epidemic in Perth, Oz.

He said there were three kinds of spikers, known by police as the "three Ps": Pranksters spiked drinks just for a laugh; Practisers were learning how much of a particular drug was needed for the desired effect; and Perpetrators knew exactly what they were doing.

Sgt Guest said it was a myth that only women were targeted. He had heard of a recent case in Victoria in which young men unwittingly starred in pornographic videos and photographs after having their drinks spiked.

They were drugged!  They didn't mean to look at the crowd of naked men around them with eyes full of lust, appearing to be only trying to decide which cock to suck first.  Drugged, you see.

The self-serving nature of the, "there aren't gay animals" argument aside, it's also totally wrong.

There is a review of a book by Bruce Bagehihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, and it's a fascinating read.  The book review of it on Salon goes three pages and covers quite a bit of ground.  The book was published in 1999, but I'd never heard of it until now when a friend sent me the URL to the Salon review.

The book was exhaustively-researched over ten years, and runs 768 pages.  In it, the author illustrates dozens of examples of what is clearly homosexual behavior in all types of animals, and discusses why they may be acting that way.  You hardly ever hear about this stuff in mainstream scientific journals, or if you do it's always rationalized or out right lied about or omitted. There is usually shock and disbelief even on the part of the researchers.

The scientist gasps and drops the binoculars. A notebook falls from astonished hands. Graduate students mutter in alarm. Nobody wants to be the one to tell the granting agency what they're seeing.

A female ape wraps her legs around another female, "rubbing her own clitoris against her partner's while emitting screams of enjoyment." The researcher explains: It's a form of greeting behavior. Or reconciliation. Possibly food-exchange behavior. It's certainly not sex. Not lesbian sex. Not hot lesbian sex.

Hot lesbian monkey love.  That outta turn up the search engine hits a bit.

A zoo penguin approaches another, bowing winsomely. The birds look identical and a zoogoer asks how to tell males and females apart. "We can tell by their behavior," a researcher explains. "Eric is courting Dora." A keeper arrives with news: Eric has laid an egg.

They've been keeping it from us: There are homosexual and bisexual animals, ranging from charismatic megafauna like mountain gorillas to cats, dogs and guinea pigs. There are transgendered animals, transvestite animals (who adopt the behavior of the other gender but don't have sex with their own), and animals who live in bisexual triads and quartets.

It's not just opportunism or boredom that's causing this either.  Lots of animals do it full time, to the exclusion of heterosexuality.

Two percent of male ostriches ignore females and court males with a lively dance that involves running toward your chosen partner at 30 mph, skidding to a stop in front of him, pirouetting madly, then "kantling," which includes crouching, rocking, fluffing your feathers, puffing your throat in and out and twisting your neck like a corkscrew. A male ostrich courting a female omits the speedy approach, shortens the display, adds a booming song and may include symbolic feeding displays. Male ostriches have not been seen actually having sex, unlike male flamingo pairs, who mate, build nests and sometimes rear foster chicks.

Male black swans court and form stable pairs. With two males, they are able to defend huge territories from other swan couples, which sounds like a double-income-no-kids situation except that they often manage to wangle some eggs from somewhere -- all right, they steal them -- and become model parents, twice as successful as straight parents.

Just like gay humans! Well, aside from the stealing babies in the night part.

Why don't we hear more about this sort of thing? Basically since the researchers are self-censoring, knowing that work on this topic will likely receive a poor welcome.  Or simply be deleted.  Page three of the review has some nice examples, including animals making tools to masturbate with, bonobo hand signals for better sex, and lots more.

Bagemihl ridicules ingenious explanations researchers have given for why animals might appear not to be straight arrows. It's dominance. It's a contest of stamina. It's barter for food. It's aggression. It's appeasement. They're confused and don't realize that they're both the same sex. It's a way of reducing tension. They're just playing! And my favorite: It's a greeting.

A report on killer whale behavior that described homosexuality in male orcas was reissued as a government document for the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission with those passages -- and only those passages -- deleted.

Anyway, I'm just quoting the whole damn article, so obviously I think it's worth a read.  My own training in biology is limited, but I have maintained a captive society of furry rodents for nearly a decade, and made extensive observations of their behavior and courtship rituals during that time.

In other words I have pet rats and they are screwballs.

My female rats engage in faux-lesbianism all the time, but with them it does appear to be just dominance stuff.  There is sexual excitement to them, but just for one of them; there's nothing like mutual gratification.  Hmm, sounds like heterosexuality there, come to think of it.

One female will be in heat and running around, and the others will chase and leap up to mount her.  The one in heat arches her back just as she would for a male, then after a second leaps and runs free.  The non-heated ones get all fired up and into the chase, and some instinct in them compels them to mount, but as they have nothing to hump with, it's just a sort of horseplay.  Girl rats in heat will behave like that for anything also.  If one is in heat I can immediately tell when I pick her up (assuming I can catch her, the normally eager to play and calm creatures grow springs in their legs when they're in season).  If I hold one and squeeze lightly on her sides, or hips, she'll usually tremble like a paint mixer, and squeak and struggle after a moment of assuming the position.  They'll do this upside down or in any position, and whether or not there's a male rat within 5 miles.

The females aren't sexual at other times, aside from licking themselves all over on occasion.  There's no female to female genital grinding, or anything of that nature.  They groom each other, but the erogenous zones for that seem to be the back of the neck and face, since the groomee will twitch and squeak in a sort of nervous ecstasy when the groomer does those areas.  And they'll do the same thing if I scratch them there, whey they're in the mood for it.

Now as to why the other females get the urge to practice male humping behavior when they've got nothing to hump with... I dunno.  They don't ever do it when someone isn't in heat, hence my thinking it's just sort of a fever that they catch of excitement.  There's never any of the hot monkey genital rubbing stuff.

Males who are in a frenzy will run around humping anything they can catch, sort of like a Schnauzer, including other males.  But I've never seen another male do anything other than stand there.  There's no back arching or anything approaching penetration or even genital contact.

So none of my rats are gay.  They're just confused at times, and get caught up in the mood of the party.  A common human post-drunken-party lesbian/gay excuse, from what I hear.

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