h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Kids often when first learning to talk go through a phase in which they're speaking what is called 'expressive jargon' (a standard developmental psychological term).

Usually unintelligible to adults, though often not to kids only a couple of years older, its a consequence of not yet having mastered glottal stops, the short pauses between words that set spoken words apart.

Talking to them about it and illustrating the process with a touch of exaggeration of the pause, or glottal stop, helps.

Of course they eventually pick it up unconsciously in any event.

In't that peacocious!

She turned her nose into a peashooter.

Why do dogs sniff at trees and posts?

Checking their weemails.

That may be true, butt....

That is why they sniff the grass

F S

I'm not sure this is as big a thing over there as it is here in the States, but if you're familiar with the phenomenon...


Whatever happened to white dog pooh? Back in the '70s and '80s (and presumably earlier) dog poohs would turn white after a few days. Then slowly, imperceptibly it seemed that they stopped.


The reason is better dog food. The old stuff (and some cheap food still) contained a LOT of bone meal. Hence, the white doggie bombs in the yards.


The more you know.

Actually its more a case of the bone meal being replaced by cheap fillers as the bones, hydrolized under pressure, were diverted to manufacture of hot dogs.

You're trying to turn me into a vegetarian!

Mrs G is a vegetarian so I don't cook meat.

Got to admit it makes increasingly good sense. GB Shaw used to counter the argument that meat is necessary for strength by pointing to bulls and horses. Now we can point to Nate Diaz

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ac4_1457245086

"Back in the '70s and '80s (and presumably earlier) dog poohs would turn white after a few days. Then slowly, imperceptibly it seemed that they stopped." [Baron Grim]

There might be selective methodology being used there. Maybe the people whose dogs made white pooh were more likely to pick it up than the people whose dogs didn't. Or maybe stricter laws have made *everybody* more likely to pick the stuff up, so what you see now is too small a fraction of the total to make accurate assessments about. At least that's my theory. Except for stray dogs. They eat whatever they can find. If they're finding good stuff, that's pure luck.

A tale of a sun-bleached dog fewmet...




Once, a long time ago, I went for a walk in a waste area, the most unutterably worthless piece of real estate I've ever seen in my life.

It was utterly flat, somewhat overgrown with a patchy cover of grasses and weeds that nowhere came up as much as a foot in height, with shallow drifts of fog, four to six inches deep, laying on it in the early morning, burning off well before mid-morning.

It was the kind of a place where Dracula might have parked his coffin right out in the open and probably no one would have troubled to investigate.




The first time I visited the place, there was a cotton-tail jack rabbit on it.

The next time I visited the place, the rabbit was gone, but there was stray dog, wearing a collar, so it was defintely a stray, not a feral or wild dog, with a motley, shaggy coat, that looked like it had some St. Bernard, some Rottweiler, perhaps a touch of English sheep dog in its ancestry, which had apparently wandered in from a nearby housing development, on the site, sniffing at its own fewmet, which was still steaming in the early morning chill.




I never saw a rabbit on the site again, but more than 20 years later, I found the fewmet was still there, bleached by rain and sun until it was almost white, though there was still a touch of yellow on it near the ground.




I had a sense of being in the presence of a coprolite in the making, that in some distant future, it might be discovered by an archaeologist doing a study of the region, even might possibly be linked to a back-yard dog burial in the nearby housing development.

I've hear of incremental topic drift, but this is excremental drift.

Admitted, a strong negative appeal at least until they do become actual fossils, then just one more grubby rock.

Coprolite can be quite attractive. Here's a $13,000 watch with a coprolite dial.

http://www.ablogtowatch.com/waiter-there-is-some-shit-in-my-artya-watch/

To be honest, I think the coprolite is the best part of this watch.

If it falls from the sky in a thunderstorm, is it coprolightning?

That would be a shstorm.

Some of it might even hit the fan.

There are coprolites found locally în the Coachella Valley left over from before thè Salton Sink was walled off from the Gulf of Çalifornia by the delta of the Colorado River about 6000 years ago, when the area was a popular whale nursery on account of the warm, shallow waters, about 70 meters in depth.

Since the female whales don't eat while they're nursing their young, the coprolites are exclusively those of nursing infants and tend to be very uniform, composed of a opaque and greyish species of dolomite of rather glassy mechanical properties.

A Google image search for "Coachella whale coprolite" returns a very bizarre collection of images.

The most common type is flat like a pancake with a somewhat bubbly texture.

Closest match under the Google image search given: http://www.google.com/search?q=Coachella+whale+coprolites&client=tablet-android-verizon&prmd=inmv&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiq4YS8scjLAhVG6WMKHTzOC0EQ_AUIBygB&biw=962&bih=601#imgrc=EpeNPDyG1oZ0qM%3A

Most of the coprolites illustrated are not whale coprolites.

Saltwater crocodiles were also common here at the time.

Quite a number of the specimens shown look like harbor seal dung.