look at these pictures of my cats

if it's true that the engine of technological progress is porn, it's equally true that feline fixations bring up the caboose. either way, you can't get on the web without being inundated with pussy.

and so, in lieu of getting a little too friendly with ed's digital camera, i present pictures of our new(ish) kittens, peas and tilde. peas is peas's full (and birth) name, given by his foster mommy. his sisters, carrots and potatoes, made their home with a man who probably didn't stick with their original names. but peas can never be anything else. after considering some unfortunate names for sugar, his adoptive companion (ranging from 'poops' to 'Qs'), we settled on tilde (formally: mrs. tilde [~] peabody). her feisty pursuit of anything that moves—feet, for instance, but more often string attached to something jingly—is often punctuated by desperate cartwheels and three-foot-high leaps, and so she has quickly earned the nickname tilderator.

	peas is the stripey one. he has lots of riblike stripes on the skin of his belly, giving him the appearance of wearing one of those skeleton-torso shirts, but on his whole underside. tilde has patches on her skin that line up exactly with the patches on her fur. the black over her eyes extends in a V-shape down the back of her head, mullet style. shown here keeping some sort of mafia secret.
	this candid shot reveals peas's softer side, thanks to ed's ruthless paw-parazzi pursuit.
	tail-er trash?
	tilde wows with her catlike ninja skills, while peas exhibits his catlike...skills.
	also it snowed here. this is the basketball hoop in our downstairs neighbor's backyard.

penises change the world

today in slate, kent sepkowitz contends that debates over how best to measure wangs will train us to be more critical of studies' methodology, thus making way for a less dupable populace when it comes to studies that actually matter.

bra size, for instance.

really? reminds me of that n+1 article on reality tv, in which mark greif argues that by working ourselves up over who's getting voted off the island, constituents are better prepared to participate in democratic government. what are we still doing with c-span, then? that money belongs to murdoch.

so it turns out size does matter. but for a better-informed democracy, not sex.

happy valentine's day, all you patriots out there.