Yay bob!

And belated Yay for Allyson!

And {{}} for msbelle and mac and others who need them.

It is pouring here. Monsoon level pouring!

There was a blog posted I saw recently that had the header "Email, text, call if someone's dying, and for fuck's sake don't leave me a voicemail." That pretty nicely captures my sentiments on the matter.

For little things that aren't urgent, I find texting much more efficient than calling because you can just ask the question ("Did you remember to buy milk?") without wasting time on chit-chat.

[eta: And yes, I would MUCH rather get a text than a voicemail.]

Except at work, I almost never listen to my voicemail anyways. I just see that someone called and usually call them back. I guess I only listen to voicemail if it is someone I don't really want to talk to.

New research shows that chimps have sex toys:

The tool for sex, he explained, is a leaf. Ideally a dead leaf, because that makes the most noise when the chimp clips it with his hand or his mouth.

“Males basically have to attract and maintain the attention of females,” Dr. McGrew said. “One way to do this is leaf clipping. It makes a rasping sound. Imagine tearing a piece of paper that’s brittle or dry. The sound is nothing spectacular, but it’s distinctive.”

O.K., a distinctive sound. Where does the sex come in?

“The male will pluck a leaf, or a set of leaves, and sit so the female can see him. He spreads his legs so the female sees the erection, and he tears the leaf bit by bit down the midvein of the leaf, dropping the pieces as he detaches them. Sometimes he’ll do half a dozen leaves until she notices.”

And then?

“Presumably she sees the erection and puts two and two together, and if she’s interested, she’ll typically approach and present her back side, and then they’ll mate.”

My first reaction, as a chauvinistic human, was to dismiss the technology as laughably primitive — too crude to even qualify as a proper sex tool. But Dr. McGrew said it met anthropologists’ definition of a tool: “He’s using a portable object to obtain a goal. In this case, the goal is not food but mating.”

Yay, Bob!

A librarian friend I know just told the story about how her twenty-something son, and his twenty-something girlfriend ran up the phone bill by thousands of dollars because they were texting each other while on the family trip to China (they live in Denver) while sharing a hotel room.

A couple of friends (*cough* Perkins *cough*) sort of dragged me into texting, but I don't mind it. For a chatty catching up, though, I much prefer a phone call or email.

I still don't know how to check my email on my phone, though. That seems beyond me.

Exclusive: Amazing photos of the Gulf Coast oil rig exploding, sinking

Some of them remind me of photos of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

I finally succumbed to texting this past December on my road trip when it became a useful tool to coordinate with people. It's good when you just want to relay short pieces of information or ask a single question to get an answer. For instance, when you want to let a couple dozen people know that Joshua Jackson just jogged right past you.

Our cell phone plan charges for texting so we don't use it. I have nothing against texting, I just don't want to pay for it.