Grub the dead critter

I've noticed that there are many more vegetarians on the Left coast than in the rest of the country. I wonder why that is; here in the middle, many more animals are raised than on the coast, so you'd think that empathy would be stronger for the creatures here as opposed to more urban areas. As for myself, I have a problem with vegetarianism because of my natural predisposition to evolutionary explanations of our biology. We're evolved to eat anything, more or less, and I think it would be a crime against our nature to forswear meat products out of our artificial morality. After all, we're animals too, and plenty of animals kill to live. That being said, I don't think it's necessary to be cruel to our animals, for they really are doing us a favor by allowing us to eat them. That's why I don't eat veal or fois gras or other products of (inordinate) suffering. Notwithstanding my penchant for flesh, my views on animals overall are quite out of the ordinary, I would guess, because I do believe that the line between us and humans is a rather artificial one. I've read a number of Peter Singer's works, but the one that is currently getting a lot of attention is this article where he argues that perhaps bestiality isn't a bad thing. (I guess the Candiru thinks the same way, heh heh. Hmm. On further reading it sounds like I'm in favor of bestiality. Well, no. Some taboos aren't worth challenging, as far as I'm concerned.)

As long as I'm on the animals kick, I blogged about animal cognition quite a while ago and haven't updated much. There is finally an explanation for the long range communication that elephants seem to display in the wild: they can hear ultrasonic vibrations through their feet. This explains their behavior when they suddenly and seemingly instinctively move towards a major rainstorm many miles away, as well as providing a mechanism for hearing distress calls of other elephants hunted by poachers. Elephants are very impressive creatures and I don't believe we know very much at all of what goes on inside their massive craniums. For instance, I wonder what the elephant who was brought to Show and Tell at a Dallas kindergarten thought about toting a bunch of kids around a parking lot. Ok, one more Oliphaunt link: This one is to an elephant webcam in the Pittsburgh Zoo. There's a baby elephant there and it's pretty cute (cue: Henry Mancini).

Stupid links and a crude LAPI or two

In years past, when I saw the top censored stories of the year I was always amazed and disenheartened that those stories were suppressed. This year I'm feeling smug because I already knew about most of them. YES!

Here's a bizarre sex laws page. I note that Minnesota has the very first listing, in that we proscribe a male having sex with a live fish. Will someone please tell me how this is supposed to work? Fish have teeth, you know. OW. If that doesn't do it for you, you could always get a My Little Phallus (Jeff said that page was sophomoric. Well, duh.).

Finally, I leave you with the top 14 Luddite Films, as rated by the Luddite Reader. Am I the only one who finds the concept of a Luddite website ironic?