I tend to wake up with earworms, sometimes bizarre ones. Usually they have no connection to whatever I was dreaming. (The 1812 Overture is stuck in my head currently, for example, and I certainly wasn't dreaming about it.)

And then the trees subsequently get strangled by kudzu. (I see trees like this all the time where I live.)

Rafflesia! isn't that the one that's pollinated by flies, and hence smells like rotting meat?

Aww, from the title picture I thought the article was going to cover the sundew. Carnivorous plants are my favorite.

I thought I was pretty well versed in slash fanfiction weirdness, but obviously it's been a while since I've been heavily into any fandoms. My first thought was "since when do mpreg and furry have such a major intersection?" Then I read it started as a werewolf-story kink and it made more sense to me.

It was my understanding that a third of the human population worldwide is harboring toxoplasma infections already (they've also found a correlation between the parasite and schizophrenia/OCD in humans, among other mental illnesses.) Toxoplasma infection is the one that makes rats attracted to the scent of cat urine…

I was thinking it reminded me of wild carrot and hemlock (all members of the carrot family, natch) — then I saw the scale. I think these are triffids, not weeds.

Gas masks, lucky cat sculptures, and 60's/70's vintage SF paperbacks.

Your relationship sounds awesome. Best friends make the best spouses.

An excellent article, as per usual. I especially think 1, 3, 7 and 11 are important pieces of advice — 11 in particular, because a sex scene that totters under the weight of its own seriousness is frequently unbearable. And 1, because innuendo is one of my favorite things.

I picture it being a bit like that Japanese porno I watched with two actors on an inflatable pool raft (on the floor, not in the pool), covered in lube. Just covered in it. The best part was the outtakes — they spent most of the time sliding in every direction but the right one and eventually they were just laughing…

Ouch. People can be so tactless.

I am firmly convinced that a stronger empathic response in humans — where you automatically "felt" other people's emotions, pain included — would be the most surefire route to world peace. Reading emotions would also put people a step closer to being psychic: how far would suicidal or homicidal individuals get if…

This is what I thought an "open" relationship was: you're in a relationship with one person, but both parties are allowed to have sex with others. (I've been in the same open relationship for nearly a decade and have no complaints whatsoever.) The article seems to be describing polyamory, which feels a lot more…

I used to work for the pet store and can vouch for hamsters — the "cutest" rodent pet according to many people — being the nastiest of the lot. Various sorts of critters would get out of their cages and we'd always have to chase them down trying to recage them. Rats, mice, gerbils, etc. would just run away from you;…

I'm sorry about the mammogram, ouch. But I heard the same thing about trauma and memory — some sources suggest it could be better to do something distracting immediately after a traumatic event, like playing Tetris for example. The idea is that rehashing something stressful right after it occurs will store the memory…

My grandmother seemed to have a non-age-related form of dementia, which led to her being unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality. But she also recalled, or seemed to recall, bad memories from six or seven decades ago — a lost spelling bee, a bad date, etc. Of course these could have been fabrications — a lot…

English is a pretty disorganized language in some ways, I think. And it's easy to put together a grammatically correct sentence that still "flows" all wrong, due to the fact that people use a pretty narrow range of common phrases in a lot of their communication.

Absolutely — this is how I learned Mandarin. And sometimes it's really convenient being able to talk to your partner in public and have nobody else understand you.

All hail the new flesh!