While I was digging around preparing for a presentation about eLearning, I stumbled across this awesome activity. It's a build-your-own-comic-strip. It lets you choose from a bunch of characters, then select emotion that you want them to portray, then add word balloons... very fun. Yes, I'm 12, so what?

Question of the day: Toe cleavage. Gross, inappropriate, don't care, just fine, awesome? VOTE BELOW.

I found this website through some convoluted internet maundering and spent like an hour looking at all his cool extreme weather photographs. Very neat stuff.

In other news, two birds are in nests. Success!

Ahem. I should explain. I have four finches, and little did I know when I got them that finches are MEAN. Well, not all the time, just when they're horny. Which is often. They chase each other around, pull out tail feathers, and generally act like little jerks to one another to establish mates and territory. You've got to let them mate every so often or they go a bit crazy. LIKE PEOPLE. Er, anyway, to do this, you put nests in the cage to ... encourage them... to breed.

About a hundred THOUSAND times a day male finches sing and dance, you see, and this song and dance is unique for each bird (although it's passed down from father to son with little variation, teenaged birds muck around with it until they start to develop testosterone, at which point it "freezes" and becomes theirs.) What they're saying when they sing and dance is "Have sex with me! Have sex with me! Have sex with me!" Not unlike at a nightclub. And we get woken up regularly at dawn by the lovely little sounds of finches in love, singing their tiny little hearts out in an everlasting attempt to ... get laid.

What was unusual was that a few weeks ago, one of the female birds started "displaying." Usually the male sings and sings, and occasionally his mate will decide to, um, capitulate, at which point she flares her tail feathers and chatters her beak in a finchian equivalent of putting on red lingerie, which the male finds absolutely irresistible. Two seconds later, and then two seconds more, and, well, Bob's your uncle.

But she started displaying CONSTANTLY, for no reason, and her mate, he wasn't enthralled at all! Which is very rare. But it's also rare for the female to attempt to initiate The Sex. And she was going NUTS.

Some finches will reject their mate if they're not seeing any babies, you see. And we hadn't put a nest in there to trigger any baby-making, but obviously the little lady didn't care, she wanted to make babies and social security be damned. But her mate was steadfastedly ignoring her desperate flirting - I told her not to come on too strong, guys hate that, but who listens to me? But it was getting to the point where we might have had to replace him, because he was just having none of it, and what could we do? Finches come in pairs and, some casual adultery aside, tend to stay mated, so she was destined to live a life of not-so-quiet desperation if her mate didn't want to, er, mate anymore.

Anyway, after all of the finches started losing their tails and getting tufts of feathers from anywhere she could grab as she chased them around, I went out and bought two nests and put them in there, hoping it would encourage some fornication. The things we do for our pets.

And after several terrible fights about who got what nests and whether to paint the insides seashell green or peach-pit blue, they got down to lining the nests with cotton balls and then, FINALLY, well, you know.

Now everything is back to normal. Well, as normal as it ever was.

Here is a map of my del.icio.us links. Neat! This pretty much sums up the last year in one fell swoop.

From Wordle.

The best story the CBC ever ran - the one about the giant iguana running loose in Ottawa - has a happy ending: they've found a healthy home for it. Once again, the comments are bloody hilarious. For example:

1. How did the police apprehend it without using a taser?
2. There's still one more lizard living down by the Ottawa river that needs apprehending.

I saw an albino squirrel today! It was white! And had beady little red eyes, as opposed to the usual beady little black eyes. Nifty. Rats with good PR.

First day of the new job - I'm going to love it. I can just tell.

Canada Day went well. We went down to the waterfront and handed out orange glow bracelets with candidate cards attached. Some of the young 'uns snapped off the cards, but many of the parents kept them. One woman said that she was a Liberal, but could she keep the bracelet? Oh, ok. Go democracy!

Tomorrow is Damian's birthday, so we went out for dinner tonight and had his favourite: hamburgers and ice cream. Yeah, I got myself a real gourmet. Who only eats imported ice cream. From Sweden. With chopsticks.

Then, after we had stuffed ourselves stupid - what's a birthday without contributing to the obesity epidemic? - we went to see Iron Man. Correction: we had planned to see Iron Man, but theatres are insane and no longer run movies for more than two weeks at a time, so Iron Man wasn't playing anywhere anymore, and how do they expect movies to develop an audience, exactly? Hmmph. Instead, we went to see Wanted, which I kind of enjoyed, but which Damian did not, at least I don't think he did because when I asked him what he thought the words he used included "piece of" and "derivative." Also, "fucking." Me, however? Well, I just couldn't stop staring at Angelina's tattoos. Because wow, that lady sure has... a lot of them. And very bony feet.

THEN we saw Wall-e. And I really regretted paying for Wanted and sneaking into Wall-e, because if we'd paid for Wall-e and sneaked into Wanted then at least we would have helped the box office of a good movie instead of the box office of a movie that will probably gross higher just because it has lots of posters with Angelina Jolie's lips on them right next to a shiny gun. Not that the posters are wrong - the movie delivers what it promises! - but you know what I mean. There was no comparison - Wall-e was fabulous. It was as great as everybody says it was, and you should go and see it. RIGHT NOW. Because it was sweet, funny, wonderfully animated, with a great story and incredible characterizations. I would like people to go and see it because I would like to encourage Hollywood to continue this trend of putting out good movies, instead of bad ones. Because the next time I hear that Adam Sandler has been allowed on celluloid I'm going to punch my television.

Also, Happy Birthday Damian! You're old!

Hey, Canada Post has a new service: Picture Postage. That is very neat.

I've always kind of liked Canada Post. Not just because my grandfather worked for them for 30 years, but also because they disbursed my student loans in the good old days of yore. Aah, the memories of crushing debt and tiny, filthy shared apartments.

And I have a secret shame... I am a stamp collector. Philatilists unite! I have commemorative stamp albums going back to 1985 (er, when I was five) up until the present, along with bottom-right-hand corners on all new issues. This is entirely thanks to my grandpa, who started the tradition at Christmases. And now my secret is out: I have shelves full of stamp paraphenalia. (They really put a lot of effort into stamp issues, some of the art is incredible.)

I do wish, however, that I lived in a neighbourhood where we actually got mail delivery. Something about seeing the postie coming up the walk always makes me happy. Now we have a bunch of impersonal green boxes at the end of the street, and somehow it's just not the same.

So this is where they come from. Found at worth1000.com, no attribution available. Click here to make the little fella bigger.