rthstewart | THE END IS NEAR

As you've probably gathered (in fact, I've even said it on a NFFR podcast once), I live in the greater Baltimore/DC metropolitan area. This means that on Tuesday we had an earthquake. As a California native, I of course did not recognize it was an earthquake. I thought my air conditioning unit was crashing through the ceiling.

Now me and 55 million other Americans are bracing for Hurricane Irene. I live in an area where our power grid routinely fails for days and weeks at a time (to quote the Doctor, it's held together with a kettle and some string), so I've purchased 30 pounds of dry ice for the freezer, cranked everything down as cold as it can get and stood in line at 8:30 AM for more batteries. Good luck to all of you in a similar state or worse and hopefully we'll all see each other (virtually) come Monday morning.

This week then, the earth opened up, the skies are opening up and while walking the dog I found cicadas (a sort of locust, but not really). The Apocalypse is obviously at hand. In a discussion this evening with

lady_songsmith wherein we discussed said apocalypse, she urged, "Read all the fic now." To which I responded, PRINT all the fic and take it with you into the bunker because when the power grid fails there will at least still be paper when the nuclear winter falls. I will then be able to twist all of my TSG notes into little tiny logs and throw them on a charcoal brazier made out of my cast iron skillet and my cookie cooling racks.

Should I and my laptop survive, I leave you with this awesome bit of news courtesy of io9, the same folks that informed of the gay finches. We learn that female chickens practice birth control.

According to Dean [the researcher], "these results show that promiscuous females can actively bias sperm utilization to exert a strong and predictable influence on the struggle for fertilization." And in doing so, they manage to "retain control of paternity even in species such as fowl where males can force mating." In other words, even if a female chicken is unable to withstand a rooster's sexual advances, the sperm of a socially subordinate rooster is significantly more likely to get rejected. Rejected hard.

So, female chickens who are unable to spurn the sexual advances of lower social order, less desireable roosters, forcefully eject the sperm once copulation is completed. In other news, another fic is done and should be going up in the next week or so. I'm well.... hmmm... not nervous. I'm excited about this one. Really excited.

Sorry for all the edits but LJ keeps screwing with the formatting.

THE END IS NEAR

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