Odds and sods

1. To avoid any association with Eric the Unread's blog (no link supplied), colour schemes will shortly be altered.

2. Blogger has been behaving atrociously for 2 days, declining to publish here and at others' blogger-run comments.

3. The serrated lines of Warhol's 1958 pencil sketches of 'Boy Picking Nose' evoke and may represent the choreic tremor ('St Vitus dance') he claimed after a childhood bout of rheumatic fever.

4. Pharyngula, an evo-bio blog recently discovered via Kate and Philobiblon, also mulled animal penises last month but from an entirely different viewpoint from that here. I learn that some reptiles have double penises and some birds none. Given that avian reproduction involves internal fertilisation, this last Killer Fact continues to perplex me, and I shall dig deeper to find out how the sperm meets the egg.

5. Another happy blog discovery was Existencil, a gem of a fotoblog of local Edinburgh graffiti and wall-art. Good examples of anti-war graffitos, especially in her first entries in 2003. But she hasn't yet captured (AFAIK) the Star Wars stormtrooper gracing the stucco wall outside the Appleton Tower, probably the ugliest and most vicious of the civic vandalisms inflicted by the Univ of Edinburgh on its residents.



6. Thank fuck it's Friday.

Addendum-
4a. Pharyngula's statement on avian penises is correct, because while a few genuses possess a phallus (and some a jaw-dropper), this is an organ dedicated to insemination and not the common conduit for urinary excretion, as in mammals. Bird (and reptile and amphibian) excretion (in both sexes) is accomplished via the cloaca.

Learn more than you could ever need to know on avian reproduction, with pics, here.