Folks, this dog is the CUTEST PUPPY EVER.

Seriously.

Now please do not say I've gone soft ;P

So this is inevitable it seems. Here's my meme (got to hate Dawkins, after having worshipped him).

Cultural meme of 2007

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Meme directions: bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't/didn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi: a novel (94)
The name of the rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
The brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79)
War and peace (78)
Vanity fair (74)
The time traveler's wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The kite runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great expectations (70)
American gods (68)
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (67)
Atlas shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury tales (64)
The historian : a novel (63)
A portrait of the artist as a young man (63)
Love in the time of cholera (62)
Brave new world (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Anansi boys (58)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A clockwork orange (59)
The once and future king (57)
The grapes of wrath (57)
The poisonwood Bible : a novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & demons (56)
The inferno (56)
The satanic verses (55)
Sense and sensibility (55)
The picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One flew over the cuckoo's nest (54)
To the lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver's travels (53)
Les misérables (53)
The corrections (53)
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time (52)
Dune (51)
The prince (51)
The sound and the fury (51)
Angela's ashes : a memoir (51)
The god of small things (51)
A people's history of the United States : 1492-present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50) still reading it
A confederacy of dunces (50)
A short history of nearly everything (50)
Dubliners (50) -
The unbearable lightness of being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-five (49)
The scarlet letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : a novel (47)
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47)
Cloud atlas (47)
The confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger abbey (46)
The catcher in the rye (46)
On the road (46)
The hunchback of Notre Dame (45) Notre Dame de Paris (45) Folks, this is the bloody same book
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (45)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (44)
White teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The three musketeers (44)

I am an elitist and this is my absolutely rarified journal. I really have no wish to share it with the general public.

To me LJ is not exactly a community to which I am beholden, and I have severe problems with the public sharing of personal life. I never read my Friends' Page, and the group dynamics of friending attitudes and soul-exposure scare me to death. What I write here is mostly to myself alone, plus a few one on one conversations, and the rest is public. I do not write a journal for my friends. So while I am a mostly silent member of a few communities, the people in my friend list happen to be there only because either they are family or I chanced to have private conversations with them. So do not take it personally if we have talked elsewhere, or you have friended me, and I have not added you... I do not add friends to show them my appreciation, it is just a convenience.

Still, if for any reason you really violently believe you should be added to my friends' list... drop a line here. I'll answer, at minimum.


***edited as of July 2006***

The glove of the Ghost Queen.



( More of the same... )

Quod si fictus aliqui dolor suscipiendus esset et si in eius modi genere orationis nihil esset nisi falsum atque imitatione simulatum, maior ars aliqua forsitan esset requirenda: nunc ego, quid tibi, Crasse, quid ceteris accidat, nescio; de me autem causa nulla est cur apud homines prudentissimos atque amicissimos mentiar: non me hercule umquam apud iudices [aut] dolorem aut misericordiam aut invidiam aut odium dicendo excitare volui quin ipse in commovendis iudicibus eis ipsis sensibus, ad quos illos adducere vellem, permoverer.

Neque est enim facile perficere ut irascatur ei, cui tu velis, iudex, si tu ipse id lente ferre videare; neque ut oderit eum, quem tu velis, nisi te ipsum flagrantem odio ante viderit; neque ad misericordiam adducetur, nisi tu ei signa doloris tui verbis, sententiis, voce, vultu, conlacrimatione denique ostenderis.

Ut enim nulla materies tam facilis ad exardescendum est, quae nisi admoto igni ignem concipere possit, sic nulla mens est tam ad comprehendendam vim oratoris parata, quae possit incendi, nisi ipse inflammatus ad eam et ardens accesserit.

PITA

The big four in the open.

Caramel Popsicle is a neatly patterned Boa constrictor imperator (original strain from Columbia). Fwapb and the Sandman are Hog Island boas (still Bc imperator). Fractal is a Dumeril's boa (Acrantophis dumerili).

( Cut just because I have some friends with friends' lists )

I do not know him. After having found iampunha's comments all over my friends' page for a while, I was taken by an itch of curiosity and happened to read this link he posted.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=313067

Nothing to say about the subject, I never enter such arguments if I can avoid them.

Only a gloss on the margin... http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=6082578&postcount=22

"ad absurdem" ?

Gramercy, the (alas young) guy should be a stickler. And the masses do not need to learn yet another spurious piece of bad Latin.

There is a reason, usually, why sticklers are disliked.

Our attitude is often one of arrogant nitpicking. Many of us, while feeling a handspan above the uneducated masses, get so intoxicated by the feeling that we become unable to distinguish between typoes and errors, personal lingos or wilful modifications of language and ignorance. We become the collegiate proofreaders who would mindlessly jump and correct a Joyce's text.

Pointing out the blatant mistakes in some teenager's journal is the effortless masturbation of the lazy intellectual. We should have a community dedicated to exposing bad grammar and spelling in the media, in university publications, anywhere people present themselves as intellectuals or pretend to teach something. And NOT exposing the misplacement of a character, for slips of tongue or hand do not ruin of a culture make. The creeping general infection of the possessive it's, the plague of un-apostrophed possessives and apostrophed plurals, these do.

Such a community would be fun.

Why so many people on this continent use only common names for snakes and refer to them as though they indicated with accuracy actual sub/species, while the same common names are used by different people to denote different sub/species, and completely accurate scientific names exist instead? It makes things a thousand times more difficult, because communication is screwed up.

Even established herpetoculturists do that. They sell, for example, a so-called Colombian boa, without adding which subspecies of Boa it is. They sell a Central American boa as though it were something completely different from its so-called Colombian neighbour. After some repetition of this fumbled information, and expecially by perusing internet websites, the beginning snake owners think that such a thing as a typical Colombian boa exists and that it is recognisable by the characteristics (often exclusively of colour shade) of the specimen they have acquired.

And they drive me crazy when I listen to their talk, because they go on at length about completely fictitious characters, and even surmise that the care of the animal might be different between these non-existent varieties.

Take the Colombian boa, and the phantomatic Central American boa. A brief search on the net shows that the generic name of Colombian boa is given to a generic B. c. imperator type (brown to brown-black or maroon saddles on pale tan background, reputed to become quite large - because in fact, the c. imperator from Colombia, with whom the markets were flooded a few decades ago, happens to have a higher rate of large individuals). The generic name of Central American boa is given to whatever and anything altogether, either as a synonym of Colombian or as a different type (which most people seem to believe will be smaller but cannot agree on the looks), without any consistency of denomination. Moreover, both are often happily called the Red-tail boa, together with the B. c. constrictor that is a DIFFERENT subspecies.

What a damnable confusion. And of course. In Colombia are found both subspecies of Boa constrictor (the nominate and the imperator) and in some biotopoi they overlap; and while there are insular localities in Central America that offer highly typicized smaller or peculiarly patterned constrictor imperator, in the same countries those localities belong to, other and different constrictor imperator can be found. There is not, anywhere except where it is recognised by scientific research, a consistent bunch of characters invariably passed over to the progeny, which is the basis for defining a subspecies.

Of the same parents, in the same litter, you always find individuals with slightly different patterns, paler or darker, this shade or that, and colours change with age as well. As for size, it cannot be gauged until the animal has reached adulthood.

A completely fantasious nomenclature is what people try to make sense of, made of the stuff of business, laziness and ignorance. Taxonomy is a complex thing, for many a bothersome thing, but the only one that can be used to define species and subspecies. Some people continue to say that taxonomy is uncertain and constantly changes. But it is not so. Serious and reliable publications of herpetological societies and herpetology researches exist, are available and define the grounds. It is the pet trade that changes its names with the fashions of the moment.

You can fix almost any character by selective breeding techniques and a knowledge of basic genetics. Still this does not make a subspecies. I have nothing against the many breeders who breed snakes for patterns and colours. But the honest ones name their products what they are, with the name of the species and the name of the more or less fancy "phase", often ssp.

A Boa constrictor constrictor is the same subspecies whether it is born in Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Surinam, Guyana or Trinidad. A Boa constrictor imperator is the same subspecies whether it is born in Colombia, Honduras, Nicaragua, Belize, Costa Rica, Equador or Mexico. Animals could not care less of political boundaries either; they will show their provenance from an insular biotopos instead, like the Hog Island boa, which is a naturally occurring hypomelanistic 'phase' of the B. c. imperator. But generally colour phases are not significant to a subspecies or a location. I have seen an extremely wide range of shades in imported animals of every provenance. Scale count, size, general shape and saddle patterns are what is significant to taxonomy and used to define where different specimens belong.

Breeders and fans of phases are welcome to play with their palettes and their punnett squares, lines of beautiful snakes are always a pleasure to see and own, so long as the desired morphs are not accompanied by physical deficiencies. Still, to educate people is also a duty of those who make a living out of snakes, and honesty is a good trait.

There are six never questioned subspecies in the Boa constrictor species: B. c. constrictor, B. c. imperator, B. c. occidentalis, B. c. amarali, B. c. orophias, B. c. nebulosa. Then the five subspecies B. c. melanogaster, B. c. longicauda, B. c. ortonii, B. c. mexicana and B. c. sabogae, whose status some zoologists do question though the taxa remain valid. And the three subspecies B. c. isthmica, B. c. sigma, B. c. eques, all of which are today considered synonymous with B. c. imperator and invalid as autonomous taxa.

Should people decide to finally call a snake by its damn taxonomic name (or by the species or even the genus if lineage is uncertain) and add whatever fancy phase/aberration label BESIDES that, plus the original provenance of the bloodline only if this is known for certain and proved, many mistakes, misunderstandings and disappointments would be avoided.

I know it will never happen.