The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme

I was tagged by Monkeygirl for a meme. It was started by PZ Myers at Pharyngula as a means of demonstrating evolution in cyberspace.

First, the rules:
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".
Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
* You can leave them exactly as is.
* You can delete any one question.
* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question.
For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...", or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".
* You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".
* You must have at least one question in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions. Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.
So, without further ado:
My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My great-great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My great-great-grandparent is Primate Diaries.
My great-grandparent is Thus Spake Zuska.
My grandparent is a k8, a cat, a mission.
My parent is Monkeygirl.

The best young adult novel in SF/Fantasy is: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
The best teenage movie in comedy is: Clueless
The best uplifting song in country music is: We'll Meet Again by Johnny Cash
The best cult novel in contemporary fiction is: Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
The best high-carb food in Mexican cooking is: Flour tortillas
The best dissertation-related words I ever received from a scholar are: Do the project that you will be most passionate about.

I am propagating this meme on to:
Hamster_grrl
Sneks
Dr. Brazen Hussy
Geeka
Anyone else who wants to participate!

Love the cute!

I love it when the CO goes all non-furry!

Plus, inverts are seriously awesome.

cool science updates

Back in November, I posted about 'panda porn.' Turns out, CNN is reporting this again today but it really didn't work. Artificial insemination will be used instead. I didn't research this enough to know why they were trying it in the first place. I thought pandas were pretty solitary so when in the wild would they have ever seen other pandas going at it anyways? Maybe they learn other things in captivity from watching other pandas? Maybe they are just trying anything and everything they can think of? Either way, I still have to giggle that Google alerts will give me 'the latest news update on panda porn' though. I'm 12.

On a different note, you may remember that I recently endorsed 'Billie' in the Great Turtle Race. It was a tough call. I almost went with 'Stephanie Colbertle' but in the end, it was Billie, with a good combination of nest number, clutch size and experience (been laying since 1995) that I had to support. And SHE WON, taking a more Northern route than any of the other turtles. Way to go Billie!

The Great Turtle Race!

Real Sea Turtles!!!

Not even our cat named Turtle (although maybe we should be having races with her too!)

Pick a favorite and follow them along!

But who? Do the biggest clutch sizes (number in a nest) mean a faster turtle? Or does that just mean they are slow due to all that egg laying? I like Stephanie Colburtle, Stephen Colberts' turtle. Freedom has some good stats too. I wish they had actually pictures of the turtles.

I think I have to go with Billie- she is sponsored by the Offield Center for Billfish Studies!

The squirrel is mine....the dog-gone squirrel is mine**

Squirrels terrorize our urban garden/jungle of a backyard every summer. They sit in the trees and chomp on nuts, leave half eaten tomatoes on the edges of planter boxes and scare the crap out of me by rustling in the bushes. Finally, someone is going to figure them out. A biologist at the University of Chicago is going to track city squirrels and figure out these crafty little buggers. They are really cool actually- they (the squirrels not the scientists) PRETEND to hide food and fake out the other squirrels by taking the nut with them and burying nothing. They prefer different types of food based on how much they need nutrition *right now*. They also forget where they hide things and 80% of them die under cars.

Urban ecology is far more important as urban spawn seems to grow exponentially so it is nice to see the national media picking up on it!


** Yes, the Michael Jackson/Paul McCartney song "The Girl is Mine" really did come up on my shuffling iTunes while writing this post.