9 feet tall

edit – i just saw this one too and now my sides hurt

Finally uploaded my camping photos from Sequoia National Park. Some of these came from my friend Brian and also my cell phone. As usual, you can hit the right arrow on your keyboard to advance to the next photo.

And here’s a panoramic snap I took with my cell phone that you can click on to enlarge. Was able to cram 11 out of the 15 people huddled around the campfire into the frame!

I’m back from a fun and scenic camping trip in majestic Sequoia National Park. i’ll upload pics later, but for now here are two videos of my friends warring & retaliating with stupidity. brian aims rocks into the pet door of young’s tent early one morning and then young and gabe collapse brian and kelly’s tent early morning after they made bear noises in the middle of the night and shook our tents to scare us. War never ends.

Ahhhh!!! These little fuckers are so cute. It would be sad if there were no more left for future generations to stare blankly at on computer screens during hungover mornings at work.

from Evilmonito

Half salamander half H.R. Puff ‘n’ Stuff, the Mexican walking fish is on the verge of turning belly up and floating down the river of extinction. Known widely as the Axolotl salamander, these cute little buggers are being seriously threatened by water pollution and habitat destruction. Another big problem is that they are easy prey, basically defenseless, against the non-native species, like the Tilapia and the Asian Carp, that have been introduced to their habitat by the fishing industry. If the Axolotl survives the attack with a missing limb, they have the unique ability to regenerate most of their body parts.

i need to have a cute baby javelina like this boy. odd that they aren’t members of the pig family.

I also need a garden so I can put this zombie garden sculpture in it and scare people

Scientists threw a coming-home party Wednesday for 20 African penguins at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park and I’m offended that I was not invited. They were on the news the other night and looked like they wanted to get snuggled by me. I’m not a penguin stalker or anything. the news also showed some images of the reconstructed Cal Academy of Sciences building and it’s incredible, I get giddy just thinking about it. I think the 2nd grade field trip here was a universal experience for many who grew up in the Bay Area so I am really happy that it’s been rebuilt and modernized. this is what it looks like:

all that green on top is a living roof, 2.5 acres of native plants will thrive there. 99 days til the grand re-opening! i feel like i’ve been waiting forever.

when my camera battery died in big sur i started relying on my phone camera as backup. then i remembered the panoramic stitch function on my phone camera which was made for trips like this. click each image for the big picture

so a bunch of gigantic unknown animals were found off of Antarctica. young showed me this nat’l geographic link. what the hell are these things? other than beautiful, awesome and amazing, i don’t know.

maybe those guys can tell me what this x-rated sea creature is that i picked up at the monterey bay aquarium when i was a kid. i’m starting to think it is a sea cucumber of some sort.

this woman looks so much more happier to be holding her sea cucumber than i am

then again, hers looks like a Pokemon character. mine looks like something not on a kid’s show…

(hot dog bun)

i like spiders on my tv, but if there were one in my room i’d freak out big time. anyway, bolas spiders are so cool. they use a single thread of silk like a lasso to capture moths flying by. and they will capture many during a lasso session and wrap em up, like saran wrap for later i guess.

trapdoor spiders have really interesting behavior as well. they dig small tunnels and construct a camouflaged door amongst sticks and leaves to hang out in. when they feel something move up above, the door springs open and the spider snatches it up in no time. i would be so shook if i was a cricket.

ok, so i told you guys not to mess with llamas, and now i’m telling you not to mess with blue jays. brian tried to scare a few of them away from our site cause they make this godawful racket and they straight swooped down on him The Birds style. Cliff caught it on camera except for the blue jays, so we have all been photo-shopping his friends in.

alexis’

mine

young’s

so yesterday when i was going through my photo albums and reminiscing about all the areas i’ve explored in the bay area, i came across this photo i took the last time i was in Big Sur (2004?). we drove past this DONNY DARKO ass llama and were like “what the…?” it was so frightening. i was like I’ve GOT to take a picture. so we back the car in front of the llama and it’s starting to get even weirder, i can’t even describe the noises it was making. i had to get out of the car to get close and i’m freaking out and fidgeting with my camera and the noises are intensifying and it started shaking its head from side to side!! i almost expected some mutant john carpenter craziness to occur, like something out of The Thing. i finally took the picture, unfortunately the quality leaves much to be desired. I immediately jumped back in the car right when it was ready to spit on me. i had no idea. later i told a friend and he said, “yeah, that’s what llamas do, spit.” oh word?

moral of the story: do not fuck with llamas. especially scary donny darko ass ones.

here is the infamous picture.

sorry, i am not about to img src that shit because i don’t want to see this thing looking at me everytime i post a new entry here.

3 minute score for me loving the hell out of life right now
[audio:killthepower.mp3]

i started watching Life in the Undergrowth and decided i’m going to make copies of the series and give them out to friends. i feel i need to spread the gospel of David Attenborough/Alastair Fothergill nature documentaries cuz i think i love them as much as i love beer (exhibit a exhibit b). Life in the Undergrowth is better than Planet Earth (which is still amazing) and just as good as the Blue Planet. they make the most ethereal and original nature documentaries ever. i’m always shocked at how they can record wildlife so intimately mimicking human behavior. not to mention there is humor and a perverse tone always, i think i counted 9 times where Attenborough said sperm in the first episode alone. slug sex is really disturbing. there is even a scene where 2 scorpions engage in a western kind of dual complete with faux ennio morricone music standing face to face a few inches apart and they can’t decided whether they should sting each other to death with venom or make a scorpion baby together. it’s brilliant. the writers, the music, narration, editing & photography are top shelf. did you know that some snails have mouths where their stomach is supposed to be? also there were some prickly centipedes that were so cute with their different colored stumpy legs, it reminded me of something from Spirited Away until they devoured their prey in slimy the blob style horror. what i like about this particular series compared to the other two is that Attenborough is narrating on location instead of from the studio so you can see him touch 3 foot long centipedes or hold a pinhead to a mite. he also walks amongst a plain of termite hills which is seriously not of this world.

i’m a total nature show junkie and i’m still amazed at how much more i keep learning about nature’s idiosyncrasies. It’s gonna suck when David Attenborough retires. i can’t believe he is 80 years old! Before I knew what he looked like, I pictured an elf or jockey narrating.

he rules. you can read up on his great career in wildlife broadcasting here.

i’ve written about elephant seals a total of 3 times here and it must have had some bloody mary effect cause there is one terrorizing local beaches right now. a really psycho, sexually frustrated 2,500-pound one.

Sorenson says that soon after the bull first appeared, he tried unsuccessfully to mate with the (much smaller) female harbor seals. Then, last year, after trying again to mate, he turned violent and began to kill. This year, he is staying around well past his usual departure date at the end of March, and now has started to consume his kills.

“This bull does straight-out murder,” said Keary Sorenson of Sebastopol, a former surfer who volunteers for government and nonprofit agencies in Sonoma County. “A week ago, I saw him chase down a female harbor seal, use chest blows to crush her, then bare his upper canine teeth and drive them down onto her head and back.”

“Nibbles” has killed a dozen seals and flew out of the ocean without warning to attack a pit bull. seriously…pit bull vs elephant seal, did that really happen?

“I saw the elephant seal come out of the water like a torpedo, angle down on the dog and land on him,” said Lowrey. “Somehow the dog wriggled out and turned and squared off with the seal.”

Erinn Flaherty, the dog’s owner, said Garcia told her Sativa barked defiantly at the seal while Garcia hurled the stick at him. Garcia then escaped with the dog, which suffered a puncture wound the diameter of a quarter in one thigh.

i can’t believe this made the front page of the chronicle today. i mean yeah it’s my kinda story and whatnot, but still. i was up in sebastopol/sonoma just two weeks ago. how awesome would it be if i could have photographed a real elephant seal? pretty awesome. not so awesome if i’d get killed though.

monkeys are not cute, they’re scary. i don’t like them and i don’t understand this tradition of watering down their image to depict them as these cuddly & warm creatures when they’re unpredictable, territorial, and capable of intense violence. in that movie aguirre wrath of god, there’s an infestation scene w/ klaus kinski that makes my skin crawl. i also saw an episode of Nature on PBS where aggressive baboons in south africa mug people in the parking lot for their groceries like total thugs. the people they confronted were stunned and slowly backed away from their bags like they were being held up by gunpoint. i’m familiar with evolution and all and understand we are primates, but it still weirds me out how human they are. i find it unsettling and therefore necessary to talk shit about them

so, one of the ‘highlights’ in the jungle episode of planet earth was a segment on chimpanzees. i thought everything was cool. they were showing the chimps hanging out gorging on figs and it was all so innocent and calm. later, about 30 of them banded together creeping about the jungle in stealth mode and then suddenly declared war on their rivals’ territory, shrieking and wielding branches as weapons. it was insane. then they ripped apart a rival chimp and starting eating it, which was traumatizing. cannibalism is already messed up psychologically but adding more to the inherent mindfuckery of it all, their mannerisms reminded me of people. they weren’t digging into the carcass with their mouths like lions & tigers do. they sat in a circle and shared the entrails and organs amongst each other with their hands. it was like a sit down dinner with the family. one of the chimps held out its hand while the other was cleaning out a skull, and it obliged and courteously passed the skull to him. strange & scary. it’s behavior that seems both civil and uncivil, the civil being the sharing & good manners and the uncivil being the war waging & cannibalism. one minute eating figs and another minute an enemy’s brain? i don’t get it. strange how chimpanzees are our closest evolutionary relatives and yet they get down with eating their own. there’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere.

in conclusion, monkeys are not cute. eating brain is NOT cute. and paul frank is wrong

aside from violent chimpanzee gangs cannibalizing their rivals in the jungle, this has to be by far the most terrifying and perversely beautiful segment from the planet earth series. cordyceps fungi attack insects, infiltrating their body and mind “like something out of science fiction” and causing weird alienlike deformities after death. it seems like nature’s version of invasion of the body snatchers mixed with a little of macabre david cronenberg special effects

only it’s the real deal. nature is so awesome. i can’t wait for these dvd’s to come out next week

I got excited when I heard that the producer of my favorite nature series evar The Blue Planet had produced another series called Planet Earth which is airing on the Discovery Channel now. Then I find out that they yanked Sir David Attenborough’s narration and put Sigourney Weaver’s in for the US version, which is so very lame. I couldn’t hang so I started watching the BBC version that i had to download and everything felt right with the world again.

The Planet Earth series is really damn amazing and comprehensive as per usual with Alastair Fothergill and his crew. There are many majestic sweeping shots of animals and the time lapse stuff is intense and impressive. The quality of direction, narration and the stunning photography is unmatched by any other nature documentaries I’ve seen.

There are 11 episodes in all with themes ranging from mountains to fresh water to caves to ice worlds. I can’t really sum up all the episodes I’ve seen because they are all very unique and disparate with their environments and regional animal life. I did noticed that The Planet Earth series is a lot more gory compared to The Blue Planet but I guess a shark tearing apart it’s fish prey isn’t as unsettling as seeing the exposed bone and gristle of a land animal as it’s being eaten alive by its predator.

these ducks were total dorks. they saw that young had a bag of bread from about 30 feet away and they waddled over so fast that they kicked up a bunch of dirt. it was too much. mike and young attempted to feed by hand thinking that a duck bill clamping down on the fingers wouldn’t hurt, but they found out that their mouths were full of little rocks and sand. in addition a few ducks hopped up and down trying to grab the bread from our hands. it was comedy. i would like to keep a duck as a pet but that sounds illegal. plus i feel weird about it cause i find duck delectable and ducklicious. yeah, i just wrote that.

i like how the video starts with a duck snatching a
piece of bread off the ground and then running away fast

I didn’t know about this 2-ton elephant seal Minazo until i saw some amusing pics of him with a bucket and his tongue hanging out that made him look special. He kinda reminded me of a character out of a Studio Ghibli movie, like Spirited Away or My Neighbor Totoro.

Anyway, Minazo lived in some aquarium in Japan is famous for being the biggest elephant seal in captivity and liked to carry around a bucket of fish, i am guessing for snacking purposes. He supposedly was also very shy which is surprising because I’ve seen elephant seals fight on The Blue Planet series and they get buck wild bloody. He died in 2005 and Merzbow released a two volume Minazo tribute album with artwork of him sitting on a cloud with bucket in hand.

Somewhat related, I believe the same Japanese aquarium that Minazo lived at is where these poor walruses with big mock cellphones currently reside.

it’s the size of a dog.