Monthly Archives: April 2013

The Water Bear

Courtesy of National Geographic

Courtesy of National Geographic

My friends, I would like to bring attention to one of the most amazing and least known of all of God’s creatures. The fat little bugger in this photo is a water bear (of the phylum tardigrada, also known as a moss piglet) and are sorta like wormy little bugs that live in pond scum and only about 1 millimeter in length. They are one of the coolest and weirdest critters I’ve ever studied, so when my biology teacher said we had to pick an animal to do a presentation on, I picked the water bear.
Now water bears are extremophiles, meaning these little fellows equal about 40 Bear Grylls when it comes to awesomeness. Water Bears can live pretty much anywhere, and when I say anywhere I mean ANYWHERE! Moss Piglets have been found on the top of the Himalayas, the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and the middle of the dry desert (one little 120 year old piglet was found alive and still kicking in a patch of dried moss in the middle of the Sahara).
They can radiation levels 1000 times stronger then any other animal, they can be dehydrated to a mere 3% of their water composition, and they even survived being heated to a sweltering 304 degrees F, frozen to temperatures at -458 degrees F, less then a single degree above Absolute Zero (which mind you, is the theoretical temperature at which the atoms themselves stop moving).
Water bears are so tough we’ve even shot them up into the freezing vacuum of space to see if anything could kill them. Guess what? Those hardy little beasties went 10 whole days in dead of space where there’s no oxygen, no pressure keeping their little organs intact, no moisture, temperatures as low as -290 F, and a whole gazantaton of space radiation blasting into their flabby little bodies. And guess what? They all came back in just as good shape as they went out in.
Forget cockroaches! If its a nuclear wasteland, I’m going to be a water bear! Only God could design such a strange and magnificent animal!

Pockets

Let me take a moment to address a great injustice in our society, a wrong that has plagued our world for a very long time, at least as long as I remember. This outrage is that of the inequity between an aspect of fashion that has infuriated women worldwide. This aspect is that of the appalling and quite unfair preference that the fashion industry gives men in regards for pockets.
Now let’s try an experiment. Guys, think about the clothes you are wearing at this moment, the jackets, blazers, jeans, and hoodies. Odds are you all have at least one functional pocket, if not dozens. There’s pockets galore, pockets within pockets, secret pockets, special pockets, pockets for every item you’ll need.
Now girls, look at the clothes you are wearing. If you’re anything like me, you’ll notice a shocking lack of pocketry. The pockets on your jeans are sewn shut, the pockets of your jackets and sweaters are merely decorative, and often, the pocket may merely be an illusion of embroidery.
The point is, us girls are suffering a staggering lack of pocketry in our clothing. Have you ever wondered why girls carry around such huge purses? It’s because we don’t have a hundred different pockets of our person to put useful things like our phones, or credit cards, or a bit of cash. Our only option is the carry it in our hands or in a tote. The point is, there’s no pockets to put those little small things in so we need to lug around on a daily basis.
Seriously, pockets are such a rarity in women’s fashion that when one of us finds a dress or skirt that has pockets to put stuff in, it is a huge deal. We jump up and down and squeal in delight and remark how amazing it is because having a pocket is awesome. When one’s dress has a pocket in it, we don’t need to drag around a huge, unwieldily purse just so we have a cell phone with us. When we have pockets, we can have a single place to put our car keys so that we don’t have to spent half an hour digging through a veritable black whole to find them again. Pockets are frankly awesome, and I think it is a travesty of utilitarianism that girls around the world are denied such a simple luxury as a folded piece of fabric sewn into clothes to put stuff in.
We must fight for pocket equality! Death to fake pockets!