What Your Sexy Animal Halloween Costume Says About You

Sexy Raccoon: You are most likely to be killed in a hunting or traffic accident. You are not able to run or jump great distances because of your short legs. At a party, you can probably be found in the bathroom, washing saltines in the sink. Most likely, you have rabies, or at the very least, worms.

Sexy Skunk: Otherwise known as a "Polecat" (you have to get your communications degree somehow), you love to scavenge for garbage, or dig for fat juicy grubs. You are pretty much blind. There are two glands located by your anus which spray out a thick musk of sulphur to protect you from predators. Oftentimes, people smell you and assume there is weed nearby.

Sexy Red Fox: You love to use urine to mark your territory, which is everywhere since you are an invasive and unwelcome species. You are seemingly capable of complicated communication, but it is all barking. People are constantly trying to kill you and cut off your hair for souvenirs, or at least thinking about it. Sometimes, even though you aren't hungry, you kill as much prey as you can, just for fun. Other predators find you extremely annoying, especially in packs. You get mange, a lot. At the party, you will most likely be outside the bathroom, stopping other foxes from using it.


Sexy Bumblebee: Lots of people like to use you for cross pollination, and you are easily confused by radio and cell phone signals. You will most likely die from bacterial infection or ingestion of industrial grade pesticides. People use you as a sign of oncoming environmental apocalypse. When you finally die, the party's over. You throw up in your mouth a lot.


Sexy Clownfish: You love to live in hostile environments, and are a hermaphrodite. At the party, you will most likely be found in the bedroom, trying to coat various surfaces with your sticky eggs. You are a very common pet, thanks to your very popular "children's" movie, in which you are a cripple.


Sexy Turtle: You are an ancient reptile, descended from the Late Triassic period. You were most likely sold off at a young age to an aging raver kid, and are capable of biting off a man's entire thumb from the joint. Lots of people think you would make a very good soup. You are able to retract your head entirely into your bone-like shell. At the party, you will be crawling around on the floor, searching for warmth and trying not to get stepped on.

Edit: Per one of the site's request: here's a link where you can buy the Sexy Sea turtle, which besides the raccoon, is easily the best one.

Massive Photo Overload

The rest of the pictures can be found here.

Here's how our New Years trip started... in a horrible non-drivable winter storm.

Which then brightened up considerably by the time we got to Maryland.

Here's the view from our hotel room. That building in the front right is the aquarium.

And another view, cause we literally spent all our time in the room taking pictures of the view. A bunch of people had booked the hotel just to watch the fireworks over the harbor, and they were really mad when the windstorm cancelled them. I could hear the old guy next door swearing like crazy at the concierge on the phone. Luckily, we had no plans to sit in our hotel room sedately.

A few of my favorite pictures from the aquarium...

I didn't take any pictures at Wu Tang, cause I didn't know if I could bring my camera into the venue, and it turned out i could have, but honestly I was so wasted, I would have dropped it or lost it or traded it for drugs or something. So it's a good thing. We're in the front row by the way



The next morning we drove around Baltimore, and ended up in the ghetto, since ALL of Baltimore is the ghetto and "Charm City" is like the most ironic nickname ever for it. Here is the Charm City rape/sniper/jumper tower.

Next S. drove me to West Virginia to play the slots. We stayed at a hotel owned by Cinnabon.

Which makes sense, since Newell WV is also a hellmouth.

And finally the giant starlight octopus that gave me a bunch of money in exchange for my future Social Security payments.

A Message from the Staten Island Zoo

Alright, lets start at the beginning...my cat. She's obviously my lifeline, so why not the beginning too? Long time readers and also anybody who knew me last winter, will remember the drama of "why won't my cat clean her ass and why does she insist on scraping it on every fabric covered surface in my apartment?". Well, that's died down a little now, thought not completely. Only when I forget to clean her litter box. However, Eddy never used to do that.

I got Eddy when I moved into an apartment in Duck Island, a silly tiny efficiency with painted shut windows and no room for a proper fridge. Peter died that winter, on Christmas, so I was going to bar by myself quite a bit. One night I went to Edison's, and that chubby blonde girl was working there. Anyone remember her? She had really curly blonde hair and enormous breasts and was quite short and not very cool at all. She collected stray cats from Tremont. So when this little kitten ran in from the snow and hid under the stairs, she wouldn't just throw the poor thing out. She said "I'll buy free drinks for whoever will take it" and so I did. I walked down to the cornerstore and bought a foil pan for a litter box and some cat food, then ripped the cat from under the stairs and took her home. She definitely did not want to go. Just think, if I hadn't taken her, Eddy might be a Edison's bar cat right now. She might be hiding under the steps mewling during Open Mike. She might have been killed by an errant dart.

So I drove her home and yes, she pooped all over the back of the car, and all over me as I walked her up. Which is why I know now that you should never feed stray kittens milk. She hid under the bathtub for a long time. I decided that I would make a practice of taking her to bed with me every night, so she'd be used to it. She has never gotten used to it. I bought her toys and tried to play with her. She stared at me, but then started a lifelong love affair with the chain from the bathtub drain. I used to sit in the bathtub with my knees up and she would sit on them.

Eddy has lived in multiple places. With other cats. With dogs. With people she doesn't like. She was okay at David's, but not happy, being stuck in the attic the whole time. Oh my god, have I always lived in attics? She was happy at my parent's house, she got to roam outside and sleep with my mom. But she ran away for a week then, and when she came back her tail was a bloody mess, she was pregnant, and she had no more interest in going outside. She had one kitten from that litter, the rest were stillborn. And it was a happy little kitten, and we gave it away. Then she got pregnant again, before we fixed her. We didn't know at the time, but when my mother took her to get fixed, she had a whole litter almost born. Mom insisted on aborting them, and we lived with Mom, so we didn't really have a choice. She took her to this dingy yellow house on 65th with dirty siding where The Man did cheap surgery on feral cats for cheap. Leaving her there overnight was the hardest thing. So Eddy has lost babies to the cruel structure of society. Her stomach has never recovered, its still saggy and waddly. I'm not completely convinced that there isn't cotton wadding or calcified kitten corpses still in her gut. When she sees kittens, she tried to kill them. Literally. She's a psychopath.

We moved in with other cats, in other apartments, and she seemed okay. There was living with Rob for a brief second and his cat. Then I went to my job interview and the bar downstairs caught fire. I came back to find Eddy in a carrier case, and we had to go track down Rob's poor kitty in the next door apartment. So she's been in a fire too.

Back she went to Mom's house, while I crashed at Buddy's, and I didn't have her for almost a whole year. Then we moved in with Sean. And Eddy really loved Sean, he rubbed her belly in the way only he could, because he has much bigger hands than I do. But then the butt scooting started, and other things happened, and we moved out again.


So now Eddy and I are all alone. I keep thinking about getting another cat, to keep her company. Because I'm not home half the time, and she's all alone. But I think she prefers to have me to herself, and also, she might kill it. When Sean comes over, she won't go to him now usually, as if she's afraid he's going to move back in and take my attention away. Every morning she wakes me up by shifting her 13 pounds onto my hipbone violently, and when that doesn't work, she paws me in the lip. Recently she decided that she only eats fancy feast, and when the litter box is not cleaned, she tips it over. I got a laser pointer recently, and she watches it very intently, with no intention of moving.

Things she has killed:

The mice in the stove
A bat she left by my bed
Multiple birds
2 large spiders
A purple feather

She still gets a little upset if I don't pick her up when I come home. And she freaks out when there's no food. And she freaks out about going on the porch, because if I shut the door, you know I might not let her back in. My cat and I are extremely similar.

What does it mean that I now rely on my cat for survival? Does it mean I really ought to have a child instead? :) Or does it signify my full fledged entry in Cat Lady-dom? I've been planning on getting a dog when she finally kicks it for years, but knowing her, she'll live forever. Is my cat fucked up because I'm fucked up, or because I suck at cleaning litterboxes? Does she come over to be with me when I'm crying because she cares, or because she likes licking the salt? How long could Eddy survive by gnawing on my corpse?

Rowr.

Random Wiki Today: The Lion of Belfort




Every once in a while, I get an offer from someone I don’t like very much that I find very hard to refuse. So I don’t. Every time, this has turned out to be the right decision. That being said, if someone would offer to take me on a tour of really really big things in the world, it wouldn’t matter what they looked like, or talked about. I would even excuse the inevitable double entendre. I like to think that if I keep my standards low enough, some day this will happen. You’re thinking “but Bridget, what about all the really hot 20 yr olds out there with even lower standards?” I like to think that I would be less intimidating, with more lasting entertainment value. Sarcasm never gets old, right?

The Lion of Belfort is one of those amazing things that you have no idea exists unless you live in Eastern France, or you happened to major in something weird in college, like Historical Architectural Design. It’s iffy even then. If I were randomly in Belfort one day, and I saw this by accident, I would seriously then consider moving there so I could stand under its shadow every day.

I feel this way about a surprisingly large number of monuments.

The Lion of Belfort was designed by the same guy who did the Statue of Liberty, Frederic Bartholdi. Did you know the actual name of the statue is “Liberty Enlightening the World”? Also that Bartholdi was originally going to do a statue for the Suez canal called “Egypt Bringing Light to Asia”, which was a woman holding a torch, modeled after the goddess Libertas? Yeah. I get it. He was an artist, and he needed an excuse to get some government to fund his giant bronze woman. I don’t fault him for repackaging the concept.

The Lion was probably a little nearer to his heart though. Bartholdi was an officer during the Franco-Prussian war, and this cat is dedicated to the siege of Belfort during the last gasping heaving campaigns against the Prussians. Bartholdi was an officer under Garibaldi, an Italian who originally fought with the Prussians, then switched his support to the French. Now there’s an interesting guy, Garibaldi. Anyway, so Bartholdi originally is fighting for the Prussians, then the French. He makes this giant lion as a testament to the small contingent of brave French who hold off the Prussians at Belfort for 103 days, only to have to surrender in the end because the Armistice is signed. Can you imagine having to surrender because your government tells you to, after 103 nightmarish days of beating unbelieveable odds? It's unthinkable, walking out to lay down your arms to the enemy after something like that. He then faces the lion east, as a warning to any stray Prussians who might be thinking conquistador thoughts. Only at some point, there were enough German protests about it, they MOVED it to face the east.



This thing is big. 22 meters long and 11 meters tall. That’s 72 feet long, 36 feet tall. I remember reading a ZooBook when I was a little girl, and it said that Bengal tigers were 8-9ft long. And someone told me that was roughly the same size as our couch. Since then, whenever I’m trying to imagine a tiger, I think of a couch. I googled “72ft” to see what I could compare this to, and what I came up with was some giant inflatable billboard at the 08 PGA Open, that beat all previous giant inflatable billboard records. Maddeningly, I can’t find a picture of it.

Don’t you wish you were the kind of person who saw giant lions on the side of mountains, and colossal women standing in the water at the edge of ports? And then convinced international governments to give you money to build them, with hundreds, thousands of workers and years of time, all so that this huge lion can guard this town for the rest of known time? That's immortality.