Opals are gorgeous, wonderful, have all sorts of promising qualities for people born in October. They are "supposed" to bring dire luck if worn by people with birthdays in other months. H has an October birthday, and I don't quite dare fate by wearing "his" opals.

Mine's amethyst, which is quite nice. I prefer colored and opaque stones to glittah.

I know mine. I had tiny sapphire studs as a kid, so I don't remember not knowing.

Me too, to all of that.

Your mother has a fake birthday?

::eyes -t suspiciously::

her fake birthday

Hmmm?

I think most fish just splooge all over the eggs once they are laid, but sharks have something they stick inside the female. Er, not that I know anything about fish sex really. Oh billytea! Where are you?

That's actually pretty close to what I was going to say. Male fish have testes, which produce sperm. Most species have sperm ducts via which it is splooged on demand; a few have abdominal pores. Male sharks use claspers for intgernal fertilisation. Not all sharks are viviparous (strictly, ovoviviparous - eggs hatch internally and the embryos then develop before birth). The oviparous ones usually have an egg case keeping the eggs together. (Incidentally, Port Jackson shark embryos experience an 89% mortality rate even before birth. Also, more or less, the case for some of the ovoviviparous sharks, where early hatchers will eat the other eggs, or even other hatched embryos, while still within the oviduct.)

Concerning the splooging species, I would like to direct your attention especially to the European bitterling, which is into inter-species threesomes. the male and female find a mussel to involve in their tawdry sex games; the male squirts sperm down its inhalation siphon, while the female squirts eggs down its exhalation siphon. Fertilisation occurs within a protected environment. When the baby bitterlings leave, the mussel (who wasn't offering its services for free, being apparently a fallen mussel, or perhaps a mussel of the night) attaches its own young in cysts on the babies' sides.

There are a lot of undersea stories I think are just ripe for conversion into a Disney cartoon.

So whales have hair and three middle ear bones?

They do! With two caveats. Some whales have a leetle body hair, on their upper lip say; others grow hair while developing, but then lose it. Whales do, as far as I know, have the same middle ear bones as other mammals, but in addition, instead of an eardrum, they have an earplate - a tympanic bone. (Hearing underwater is a different prospect from hearing through air, so the mechanisms by which whales hear are quite different. Given their use of sonar, however, those mechanisms can be very efficient.)

I know my birthstone, but prefer the oddly-colored variants to the regular topaz.

Your mother has a fake birthday?

Well, she doesn't observe it, but her original birth certificate is a lie, doctor dated it wrong. She's got an amended one with the right date that looks really fake.

Though I had forgotten all that when I copied and pasted. Weird.

Does everyone know their birthstone?

Yes, but I also know anniversary year gifts, And most of the other birthstones. And a lot of time zones. I think from reading the "useful" pages in my mom's pocket calendar when I ran out of things to read. Also, I am pretty sure in the 70's fakeish birthstone jewelry was in as a gift for young girls.

I know I have said this before, but my mom (a single mom in the 70's) did NOT want a boy, and did not even pic out a boy's name. She also bought and knitted everything in blue, because she felt she had such bad luck that if she prepared for a boy, she would end up with a girl. Cooincidentally, blue is also her favorite color, and sapphire is my birthstone, and I HATE both.

Well, she doesn't observe it, but her original birth certificate is a lie, doctor dated it wrong

That's fucking creepy, that's what that is.

Hmmm?

My mother's birth certificate says April, but she was born in June. She's also not sure what year she was born in. The woman who filled out her birth certificate was a bit...willful. My mother got off kinda easily, except she fills out forms nowadays with her assumed right birthday, so nothing can actually be verified. Which drives everyone batshit. Her younger sister had her birth certificate filled out with a different name from what her mother intended, which was infinitely more annoying but easier to address, when she eventually got around to it.

Is one of NPH's kids a girl and the other a boy?

So Wikipedia tells me. Uh, not that I've spent a lot of time today researching NPH and his adorable family.

Hey ita, I just realized the other day that I didn't send you the instructions for the acupressure wrist bands. (Did you get them, btw?) I have no idea where the instruction booklet is, but the way you position them is: put your three middle fingers on your arm, just below your wrist (so your ring finger is right up against the line between your hand and your arm). Directly underneath your index finger, in the channel between your two central tendons (right in the center of your arm), is where you place the button on the band, facing downward. Does that make sense?