where not to poke your finger in pasadena

From blackwidow

From blackwidow

Last night, we were out hunting crickets (that's a thing we do), and we found that we had some competition. A large, wily cricket got away from Cap'n Bringdown, but ran into this nasty looking black widow (see pics). The scuffle that followed was very quick and efficient. Cap'n Bringdown thought we should try and catch the spider, but, as you can guess, Cap'n Bringdown was not the brains of this particular cricket-hunting expedition (Aside: I have got down quite the cricket catching system. It involves a large plastic juice bottle, a plastic cup, an envelope, and a funnel (a rolled up piece of paper).) Anyways, we left it alone, and I stopped by on my way to school during the freak rainstorm this morning to check to see if she was still there. I took some pictures from as close as I could put my camera. Despite all the wonderful advice I received that I should stick my finger in there and get her to come out for a better picture, I did not, and thus I survive to go tell the world about the practical applications of fruit fly behavior analysis. So, the take away message from this blog entry is to be careful where you poke your fingers on the corner of Wilson and Cordova in Pasadena :).

From blackwidow

From blackwidow

praying mantisauri week

It must be time for the praying mantisauri to come out, as I have encountered four mantises in the past couple days. Four! Wowiwiwowwow! First, I found Dwayne on Thursday on the wall of my apartment complex.

From mantisauri

I caught him and put him in a cookie box, as I had had a pet praying mantis last year and she was an awesome pet. I then spent too much time that I should have been working on finishing my infinishable journal paper digging in the dirt and catching bugs to feed to Dwayne. I put a bunch of roly polys (see my exposé on roly polys here), then a couple snails in Dwayne's box, but he didn't seem interested at all. I thought maybe he was a choosy mantis and did not like thick exoskeletons, so that evening I also caught him a cricket and a juicy caterpillar. Still, he did not seem interested! I gave him til Saturday morning to think about what he was doing, at which point all the juicy bugs were dead and crispy at the bottom of the box, then I let him go. There are a bunch of photos of our long goodbye on Picasa here.

While I was getting leaves to make Dwayne's box more homey, I saw this guy, let's call him Crudmuncher, on the wall.

From mantisauri

I put Dwayne in this plant in my apartment complex, where there happened to be another mantis, we'll call him Death from Above:

From mantisauri

Okay, last one! We found Mean Green Eugene yesterday while walking from our picnic at Caltech to our snack at Starbucks.

From mantisauri

I caught her and put her in my lunch box for safe keeping. It is perhaps wrong that I am still catching bugs and keeping them in my lunch box. Anyways, Mean Green Eugene is an awesome pet! I put her in another cookie box, and have fed her a bunch of juicy spiders (see above photo). She is ruthless! I took a video of her eating the last spider, which also had a nice juicy egg sac attached. It's not all that interesting, as she is in her cookie box and you can't see her that well, but, whatever:

Get the T-Shirt, for real

I've been designing silly T-shirts again. The latest is an Electric Monk "Double Bologna" World Tour concert shirt (Electric Monk is Kyle's currently-on-indefinite-hiatus band). In case there are other people out there who want to show that they're so hip they're into bands that don't exist yet (saw that tag line on Threadless at some point), I thought I'd make the shirts I made purchasable by others at my new Cafe Press store, Monkeytron Jujubee's Fantabulous Emporium of the Ironic. I also put the Suteki shirt I made for Kyle's birthday and the "i like fish" shirt I made for my dad's birthday. Cafe Press only lets me put one design per shirt style for free, so if you have some design/shirt/color combination in mind, let me know.

Here is the back in more detail:

Down and out in Caltech and my Apartment

Here are some random pictures I took ... recently. Pictures are fun.

From random photos taken around labor day 2008

Obligatory picture of my mice doing something weird. In this case, they are sleeping. Poppinfresh likes to sleep in the corner in between their house and the walls of the cage. I think that is rather strange.

From random photos taken around labor day 2008

I discovered my camera has a mode called "Night Portrait" or something like that. It takes multiple exposures and uses the flash twice. I guess it must be figuring out what is foreground based on what is illuminated by the flash and single-exposing that, while double (at least) exposing everything else. I don't know why it would have to flash twice for that ... maybe to let you know that it is capturing data and you should stand still. Well, being the rebels that we are, we did not stay still, so there are a lot of Ghost Kyle pictures, which amused me to no end (until my camera's battery died ... I am very simple). This is one of the more solid looking pictures in front of the Beckman something or other at Caltech (every building at Caltech is named Beckman this or that). I like fountains. When I think about how I like to sit near pools of water, I am reminded of the monkeys in the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

From random photos taken around labor day 2008

And here is me, in front of a different Beckman building. Like I said, I am simple.

From random photos taken around labor day 2008

This is a really weird picture of Kyle swinging a construction cone in front of Baxter which appears to be on fire, oh, and the trees are made out of awesome lightning (PS I learned how to spell lightning today!). AWESOMO!

From random photos taken around labor day 2008

Here is Kyle doing his special in front of the library. If you know what a special is, then you, too, are supercool.

From random photos taken around labor day 2008

I think this picture has kind of a Ninth Gate kind of look to it.

Okay, that's it for now. Oh wait! Here's a video of me feeding the turtles at the pond here: