This past week, well, disasterous is the best way to describe it.
I prize punctuality. Perhaps it all started when I was a wee tot and my mother never made it anywhere on time, not even to pick me up from school. She was a busy lady, and I hated her for it. It never mattered why she was late, just that she was.
So...
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I prize punctuality. Perhaps it all started when I was a wee tot and my mother never made it anywhere on time, not even to pick me up from school. She was a busy lady, and I hated her for it. It never mattered why she was late, just that she was.
So...
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VIEW 5 of 5 COMMENTS
I just had a rather harrowing, or what could have been a harrowing experience.
My apartment building was on fire.
My roommate knocked on my door and said the alarm in the hall was going off and there was heavy smoke. Sure enough, it seemed as if the fire originated across the hall from us in our neighbors apartment.
The most upsetting part is that...
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My apartment building was on fire.
My roommate knocked on my door and said the alarm in the hall was going off and there was heavy smoke. Sure enough, it seemed as if the fire originated across the hall from us in our neighbors apartment.
The most upsetting part is that...
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VIEW 8 of 8 COMMENTS
videoeye:
why not???... you should be upset.
fraktalp:
ummm, hello? where are you babe?
please check in.
please check in.
did my grocery shopping and cleaned and even ate dinner. damn i'm slick. spent the rest of the day in bed post party hungover. ughhhhhhh. why is it I work 5 days and have only 2 off? it should work on a 3:4 ratio. 3 on, 4 off. yup.
I need sex. jesus. yes its come to openly discussing the need for it here in...
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I need sex. jesus. yes its come to openly discussing the need for it here in...
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VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
bepps:
Belive me, I'm not laughing at you for needing sex. I could use a bit of raunchy ass slappin' neck bitin' sex myself. 
geist81:
sorry you're sick, but as far as needing sex...welcome to the club. your membership card and window sticker will be in the mail shortly.
oh yeah, and i need your number.
-josh
oh yeah, and i need your number.
-josh
how is it I can be so antisocial when I have so much fun going out? party tonight...kickass. in a nutshell the most comfortable yet entertaining get together I've ever attended. conversation is like sex to me lately. maybe it's the lack of sex desensitizing my brain from any intimacy, even conversationally, that causes that feeling.
if you were wondering, yes I partook in the...
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if you were wondering, yes I partook in the...
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VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
fraktalp:
little robots. what's the point yeah?
guitargeek:
Our planet's rain forests - rich matrices of life which exist primarily in tropical regions - provide us with unique opportunity to observe life in all of its manifold and perplexing beauty. Most rain forests date back some two to three hundred million years. This extreme age has allowed many unusual and complex relationships to develop among the inhabitants of these tropical ecosystems.
In the rain forest of the Cameroon in West Central Africa lives a floor dwelling ant known as Megaloponera foetens, or more commonly, the stink ant. This large ant - one of the very few to produce a cry audible to the human ear - lives by foraging for food among the fallen leaves and undergrowth of the extraordinarily rich rain forest floor.
On occasion one of these ants, while looking for food is infected by inhaling a microscopic spore from a fungus of the genus Tomentella. After being inhaled, the spore seats in the ant's tiny brain and begins to grow, causing changes in the ant's patterns of behavior. The Ant appears troubled and confused; for the first time in its life the ant leaves the forest floor and begins to climb.
Driven on by the growth of the fungus, the ant embarks on a long and exhaustive climb. Completely spent and having reached a prescribed height, the ant impales the plant with its mandibles. Thus affixed, the ant waits to die. Ants that have met their ends in this fashion are quite common in some sections of the forest.
The fungus continues to consume first the nerve cells and finally all the soft tissue that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks a spike appears from what had been the head of the ant. This spike is about an inch and a half in length and has a bright orange tip heavy with spores which rain down onto the rain forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale.
As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it's time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg's host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach's mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head.
The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach's brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.
From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it--in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex--like a dog on a leash.
The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp's burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes.
The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon--which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative.
I find this wasp fascinating for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it represents an evolutionary transition. Over and over again, free-living organisms have become parasites, adapting to hosts with exquisite precision. If you consider a full-blown parasite, it can be hard to conceive of how it could have evolved from anything else. Ampulex offers some clues, because it exists in between the free-living and parasitic worlds.
Amuplex is not technically a parasite, but something known as an exoparasitoid. In other words, a free-living adult lays an egg outside a host, and then the larva crawls into the host. One could easily imagine the ancestors of Ampulex as wasps that laid their eggs near dead insects--as some species do today. These corpse-feeding ancestors then evolved into wasps that attacked living hosts. Likewise, it's not hard to envision an Ampulex-like wasp evolving into full-blown parasitoids that inject their eggs directly into their hosts, as many species do today.
And then there's the sting. Ampulex does not want to kill cockroaches. It doesn't even want to paralyze them the way spiders and snakes do, since it is too small to drag a big paralyzed roach into its burrow. So instead it just delicately retools the roach's neural network to take away its motivation. Its venom does more than make roaches zombies. It also alters their metabolism, so that their intake of oxygen drops by a third. The Israeli researchers found that they could also drop oxygen consumption in cockroaches by injecting paralyzing drugs or by removing the neurons that the wasps disable with their sting. But they can manage only a crude imitation; the manipulated cockroaches quickly dehydrated and were dead within six days. The wasp venom somehow puts the roaches into suspended animation while keeping them in good health, even as a wasp larva is devouring it from the inside
Scientists don't yet understand how Ampulex manages either of these feats. Part of the reason for their ignorance is the fact that scientists have much left to learn about nervous systems and metabolism. But millions of years of natural selection has allowed Ampulex to reverse engineer its host. We would do well to follow its lead, and gain the wisdom of parasites.
http://www.mjt.org/exhibits/stinkant.html
http://loom.corante.com/archives/2006/02/02/the_wisdom_of_parasites.php
[Edited on Apr 23, 2006 2:26PM]
Our planet's rain forests - rich matrices of life which exist primarily in tropical regions - provide us with unique opportunity to observe life in all of its manifold and perplexing beauty. Most rain forests date back some two to three hundred million years. This extreme age has allowed many unusual and complex relationships to develop among the inhabitants of these tropical ecosystems.
In the rain forest of the Cameroon in West Central Africa lives a floor dwelling ant known as Megaloponera foetens, or more commonly, the stink ant. This large ant - one of the very few to produce a cry audible to the human ear - lives by foraging for food among the fallen leaves and undergrowth of the extraordinarily rich rain forest floor.
On occasion one of these ants, while looking for food is infected by inhaling a microscopic spore from a fungus of the genus Tomentella. After being inhaled, the spore seats in the ant's tiny brain and begins to grow, causing changes in the ant's patterns of behavior. The Ant appears troubled and confused; for the first time in its life the ant leaves the forest floor and begins to climb.
Driven on by the growth of the fungus, the ant embarks on a long and exhaustive climb. Completely spent and having reached a prescribed height, the ant impales the plant with its mandibles. Thus affixed, the ant waits to die. Ants that have met their ends in this fashion are quite common in some sections of the forest.
The fungus continues to consume first the nerve cells and finally all the soft tissue that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks a spike appears from what had been the head of the ant. This spike is about an inch and a half in length and has a bright orange tip heavy with spores which rain down onto the rain forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale.
As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it's time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg's host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach's mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head.
The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach's brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.
From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it--in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex--like a dog on a leash.
The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp's burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes.
The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon--which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative.
I find this wasp fascinating for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it represents an evolutionary transition. Over and over again, free-living organisms have become parasites, adapting to hosts with exquisite precision. If you consider a full-blown parasite, it can be hard to conceive of how it could have evolved from anything else. Ampulex offers some clues, because it exists in between the free-living and parasitic worlds.
Amuplex is not technically a parasite, but something known as an exoparasitoid. In other words, a free-living adult lays an egg outside a host, and then the larva crawls into the host. One could easily imagine the ancestors of Ampulex as wasps that laid their eggs near dead insects--as some species do today. These corpse-feeding ancestors then evolved into wasps that attacked living hosts. Likewise, it's not hard to envision an Ampulex-like wasp evolving into full-blown parasitoids that inject their eggs directly into their hosts, as many species do today.
And then there's the sting. Ampulex does not want to kill cockroaches. It doesn't even want to paralyze them the way spiders and snakes do, since it is too small to drag a big paralyzed roach into its burrow. So instead it just delicately retools the roach's neural network to take away its motivation. Its venom does more than make roaches zombies. It also alters their metabolism, so that their intake of oxygen drops by a third. The Israeli researchers found that they could also drop oxygen consumption in cockroaches by injecting paralyzing drugs or by removing the neurons that the wasps disable with their sting. But they can manage only a crude imitation; the manipulated cockroaches quickly dehydrated and were dead within six days. The wasp venom somehow puts the roaches into suspended animation while keeping them in good health, even as a wasp larva is devouring it from the inside
Scientists don't yet understand how Ampulex manages either of these feats. Part of the reason for their ignorance is the fact that scientists have much left to learn about nervous systems and metabolism. But millions of years of natural selection has allowed Ampulex to reverse engineer its host. We would do well to follow its lead, and gain the wisdom of parasites.
http://www.mjt.org/exhibits/stinkant.html
http://loom.corante.com/archives/2006/02/02/the_wisdom_of_parasites.php
[Edited on Apr 23, 2006 2:26PM]
Howdy Bitches!!!
Whats new? Things here are improving by leaps and bounds. Found a place, that ISNT a basement apartment in some old bitches house. Yippee! Signed a years lease. NO MORE MOVING! Can you feel the enthusiasm? I was about 2 seconds from moving back to Texas little over a week ago.
I have finally found a place in DC, without breed restrictions so...
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Whats new? Things here are improving by leaps and bounds. Found a place, that ISNT a basement apartment in some old bitches house. Yippee! Signed a years lease. NO MORE MOVING! Can you feel the enthusiasm? I was about 2 seconds from moving back to Texas little over a week ago.
I have finally found a place in DC, without breed restrictions so...
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VIEW 8 of 8 COMMENTS
nox:
Yay! I'm glad things are taking a turn for the better.
bluelight3:
Texas -1, DC +1 !
Howdy all,
Looks like I'm moving AGAIN. Jesus christ this moving shit is getting old like George Burns. This will make move #6 in 6 months. With that average I doubt I'll ever live a stress free life, but fuck it.
To everyone trying to get ahold of me on here, your best bet is to gmail me a message at:
TheSpilledMilk@gmail.com
And if you...
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Looks like I'm moving AGAIN. Jesus christ this moving shit is getting old like George Burns. This will make move #6 in 6 months. With that average I doubt I'll ever live a stress free life, but fuck it.
To everyone trying to get ahold of me on here, your best bet is to gmail me a message at:
TheSpilledMilk@gmail.com
And if you...
Read More
VIEW 12 of 12 COMMENTS
prolongingdeath:
can always dump some cats on ur way to find a new place. hehe just kidding
just come to L.A. we accept dogs and cats
just come to L.A. we accept dogs and cats
amberlie:
im glad im not the only one who moved on april fools!
Hey yall. Thanks for all the awesome birthday wishes. You guys rock. Im, wel, bored as hell to be totally honest. My social life has been reduced to going out for drinks after work with co-workers. Not that I can really complain, though I am. Theyre all great people and fun as hell, but I miss Texas. I cant believe Im saying it, but I...
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VIEW 18 of 18 COMMENTS
guitar_wolf:
Hey so you're in DC? I'm in Alexandria, VA. If you ever get any time to enjoy outside of work and you want something to do let me know, I'll be busy exploring the area. Plus I have a really cute dog that you will find impossible to not be entertained by. 
Due to my suck-ass supervisors, I'm unable to perform the aforementioned duties. Fuck those bastards. brit1rawk2, I miss you immensely, and can't wait to fulfill the previous entry's actions.
...can't fucking wait!
...can't fucking wait!
VIEW 24 of 24 COMMENTS
lara6666:
Happy Birthday!
quasi_sean:
may your fort smell like buttholes and burritos. 
I'm heading back home soon (but not soon enough) to visit the family and have MUCH dirty/rough/send-you-straight-to-hell sex with brit1rawk2. Aren't you all jealous?
VIEW 6 of 6 COMMENTS
nox:
Yay!
ironcherry:
Turning up the heat in hells kitchen.
Well Hellloooo. Im back from NYC and exhausted, to put it mildly. I like to think of my recent jaunt up there as a reconaissaince mission rather than an actual mini vacation, as just about everything that could have gone wrong did.
A few things I learned from my latest adventure re: NYC
*Never book a hotel online that doesnt provide pictures, even if it...
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A few things I learned from my latest adventure re: NYC
*Never book a hotel online that doesnt provide pictures, even if it...
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VIEW 15 of 15 COMMENTS
err:
wish i had known you were gunna be in new york for the holidays. I was in florida the whole time so you could have used my apartment which is only a short subway ride away from manhattan.
bepps:
Heya sexy stuff. Hope you're havin' fun.
So Im sober, and much happier now that I have a cup of veggies and rice on board. I was sorta getting spacey what with not eating and all. Wowits truly fabulous to regain your brain.
Headed up to NYC tomorrow and am super excited about that. Found out my cat was FELV positive today and just about sobbed.
Ive pretty much lost the ability...
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Headed up to NYC tomorrow and am super excited about that. Found out my cat was FELV positive today and just about sobbed.
Ive pretty much lost the ability...
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VIEW 10 of 10 COMMENTS
kentclark:
I'm sorry to hear about your kitty; a friend of mine's cat tested positive for that, and it's still going strong 12 years later, so be of good cheer.
I'm been living in DC for three years, and I still feel more at home in NYC than I do here.
I'm been living in DC for three years, and I still feel more at home in NYC than I do here.
Hiya Bitches!!!
So, I'm drunk. Really fucking drunk. Tonight was the work "Christmas" party, which I had to work for, so I went out afterward and got trashed with the already trashed employees at an afterhours bar. Can I just say me+gin and tonic+men=bad news. I end up making out withj some total stranger in an alley behind the bar...my friends ditch me there, I...
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So, I'm drunk. Really fucking drunk. Tonight was the work "Christmas" party, which I had to work for, so I went out afterward and got trashed with the already trashed employees at an afterhours bar. Can I just say me+gin and tonic+men=bad news. I end up making out withj some total stranger in an alley behind the bar...my friends ditch me there, I...
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VIEW 7 of 7 COMMENTS
nox:
Sorry things are rough. I hope your holiday gets better.
Please take care of yourself. Eat something for me!
Please take care of yourself. Eat something for me!
trilobyte:
Sorry to hear about the misadventures... I'm in the drunk mode myself, still in a fucked up state from last night into today's activities... Though dammit I just want to get some fucking rest...
Missing someone specifically, or like me and missing the idea of someone?
~Trilo~
Missing someone specifically, or like me and missing the idea of someone?
~Trilo~
and I should mention: three hours is not 'late', three hours is 'taking part of the day off'...
sure you're getting to bed, no - wait, getting to sleep early enough?