Mindlessly running up and down the stairs mindlessly running up and down the stairs mindlessly running up and down the stairs mindlessly running up and down the stairs mindlessly running up and down the stairs

God I'm bored.

>From: Valla Bernhardt
>To: "'mbonnan@hotmail.com'"
>Subject: RE: sauropod necks again>Date: Fri, 16 Jul 1999 11:28:04 -0500>


>Firstly, Matt, thanks for once again echoing my skepticism of a scientific
>article. :-)>However, I do have a question....>

> >> What if Barosaurus didn't rear? Is the mammalian way
> > of mating (i.e., rearing up) the only way to mate? <<> >
>I may be compleatly insane for this, but I can't quite imagine another way
>for them to do it, aside from external fertilization which doesn't seem >like
>it would work well amongst incredibly large land vertebrates.
>Any theories? Or is that too bizarre?>>

To: vbernhardt@dallas.clarkbardes.com
Subject: On rearing to mate (was RE: sauropod necks again)
From: "Matthew Bonnan"
Date: Sat, 24 Jul 1999 11:07:30 PDT
Cc: dinosaur@usc.edu
Reply-To: mbonnan@hotmail.com
Sender: owner-dinosaur@usc.edu


Well, I'm not an "expert" by any means on reproduction (take that however
you like =) ) but consider the fact that mammals really have nothing in the
way of tails. Mammalian tails are not the huge, powerfully muscled tails we
find in reptiles, and therefore mating by the male rearing up over on top of
the female is not "problematic" in the sense that there is no huge tail in
the way.

Furthermore, consider thyreophorans, the armored dinosaurs: stegosaurs with
spikes and plates on their backs, ankylosaurs with large armored tails and
backs. Did these animals rear to mate? No one, of course, knows the answer
to a question like that (yet), but it would be very interesting indeed if
they did!

I don't have a source, but I've been told that some cammels have a situation
where the female lays sideways on the ground, and the male mates her from
above. Maybe sauropods used a system like this? Maybe sauropods used
water, and lay side by side with their underbodies facing each other? How
did they get their big tails out of the way of their vents? Was there an
integumentary structure that allowed sperm to travel to the female's vent
from the outside (a modified form of external/internal fertilization)?
It's a fascinating subject, and I know there are paleontologists out there
more knowledgeable than I on this subject, but unfortunately we are left
with a lot of speculation and very little testability. Bruce Rothschild and
David Berman (1991, Fusion of the caudal vertebrae in Late Jurassic
sauropods. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 11(1): 29-36) looked at the
tail verts of various Jurassic sauropods and noted that about 50% of them
had fused tail verts suggestive of sexual differences -- the reasons elude
me now as I haven't read the article in quite some time. You may wish to
look at that article, though, because if memory serves I think they have
other references cited in it that may be of use.

In any case, rearing to mate is not the only option available for dinosaurs
to procreate.

Matt Bonnan
Dept Biological Sciences
Northern Illinois University

Well, now you know.

Blackbat2 = online friend you people don't know.

SFX 87: Oh my god, I think I've discovered the worst webcomic of all time
Blackbat2: ?
SFX 87: *crawls into a fetal position* The horror! The horror!
Blackbat2: WHERE? :D
SFX 87: Now.. don't be deceived.. the art is good.
SFX 87: But I want you to read like.. five months of this in one night, as I have..
SFX 87: http://rovana.keenspace.com/
Blackbat2: JUST LINK ME XD
SFX 87: WILL THE BAD ROMANCE NEVER STOP???
SFX 87: (it does. Five months later. Which is when the bad political bickering begins)
Blackbat2: **is reading from the beginning**
SFX 87: Which is what I did
SFX 87: see, it's not even bad for entertainment value.
Blackbat2: This is...
SFX 87: I've seen some comics that are so bad they're funny
SFX 87: but this is just bad.
Blackbat2: This is WOW
Blackbat2: XD
SFX 87: Can we give it an award or something?
Blackbat2: EEW! I cant read this. XD I'll never get my homework done
Blackbat2: How did you find this? XD
SFX 87: Link.
SFX 87: From another comic which I previously had thought was the worst webcomic ever
SFX 87: I was like, "Hmm, can't be as bad as that one"
SFX 87: also the art looked good.
Blackbat2: LMAO!!! XD
Blackbat2: You are a glutton for punishment :D
SFX 87: I need to make a site.
SFX 87: See, this artist is a fan of the other artist.
SFX 87: So I found the link through fan art.
SFX 87: the art's infinitely worse but the other one gets points for having heart, and also for entertainment value.
Blackbat2: It amazes me how you have a knack for finding the weirdest/funniest links ever. XD
SFX 87: I think I've seen worse, but not as an actually updated webcomic.
SFX 87: no, wait.
SFX 87: I've seen worse.
SFX 87: But I haven't read as much of it.
SFX 87: I wonder if I should stop reading this
Blackbat2: Like I sad - GLUTTON FOR PUNISHMENT XD
SFX 87: I've seen worse, but only drawn by my online friends. (not you)
SFX 87: "Oh no! The dolphin's dead!"
SFX 87: (paraphrasing, but you get the point)
Blackbat2: XD
SFX 87: "NOOO! NOT THE DOLPHIN!!!"
SFX 87: *angry tears* "You KILLED the dolphin!"
SFX 87: "I couldn't save him."
SFX 87: something like that. God it sucked donkey balls.

Palmer and Colton slashy fiction!

I had this dream wherein, in the new GameCube game "Mario Sunshine" (the very latest in this proud series about Italian plumbers), Mario and Mario's evil clone (in my dream, not Wario, but just someone who looked exactly like Mario but evil) became gay lovers. They didn't look like Mario... they looked like average burly mustached Italian men. They had mansex in Mario (Mario 1)'s Italian villa.

I was so freaked out.

I also had this dream wherin it was discovered that there was this new girl at RM who looked and acted exactly like Rachel M, and I was like, "Hey, have you met Rachel M?" (They weren't clones or twins; though for all intensive purposes they could've been- it's just one of those dream things where you just know stuff. They were two seperate people) And she was like, "Yeah, I she's my friend." And they met each other in the hall. And that's when I woke up, very freaked out.

You know, snow is so pretty when it's fresh, and now with blizzard conditions, the world is silent.

R&G presentations lead me to think: Most people are bad actors, aren't they? But most people don't know they're bad actors. There's this subtle difference between reading a script and acting, and even when people think they're being "emotional" in their script reading, it usually sounds very fake.