www.jeffthefish.com

Check it out!

I gott say, I think it was actually my sister who noticed this sign.  And my name is Jason, not Jeff.  Jeff was an actual fish I once had.  He now lives on in the masthead.  But I don’t really care, because, come on!  I’m on GrammarBlog!

I should warn you. These pictures might be considered gross, graphic, or delicious.

Yesterday I decided to cook the last two of the balut, but I accidentally dropped one egg too hard into the pan, and a piece of shell broke off. I didn’t realize this until the water turned white and started to froth. Since the egg was pretty much ruined for eating, I decided to examine its contents.

Click any photo to enlarge.

When I removed the shell, I was actually shocked to see what came out:

The baby duck was a lot more developed than I had expected! Before I was only seeing its back. I realized that what I originally thought was its eye could not have been.

This raised some very important questions. I started to wonder just how aware of its environment this embryo was. Does it have a developed nervous system that will allow it to feel the pain of being boiled alive? Does refrigeration humanely euthanize the embryo?

There is only one way I can think of to find the answer to this question: open a fresh, unrefrigerated, unboiled balut. Or look it up. Or ask an expert. Whatever.

The following quotes, collected from real live Creationists, pretty much speak for themselves. Some might be funnier in their original context, so just click the source link following each quote. If you need help understanding why they’re funny, let me know. And I’m not doing this specifically to ridicule anyone or be mean. I just want to point out how these people are giving Christianity a bad name and making the world a worse place.

I have also read the technical literature. Huge leaps and assumptions are made by people who interpret the data. Are you telling me that in your own research you have made cats out of the genetic DNA for dogs or something similar to this? Because that is the whole theory. [Source]

I’m certainly not against intellectual reason. But to try and reason scientifically with someone who discounts the Bible is FUTILE! [Source]

To all the atheists that continue to try to dazzle everyone with your big fancy words…Blah, Blah, Blah!! [Source]

if what ya’ll say is true, then everything is related to oranges. this spontaneous boom of everything without a creator… pretty stupid. let me ask something… if God can’t always have existed, then neither could energy. [Source]

Think about this, Paul (and all you other atheists): eggs are the only way that chickens reproduce. Tell me: how many chickens would you have to have at first in order to make enough mistakes figuring out how to get to eggs–not to mention eggs that work–in order for the species to survive? And how did they get there? [Source]

Of all the atheists I’ve debated with, they’ve always given me reasons not to believe in God, but never once have I been given a valid reason to not believe in God. I’m *still* waiting for a logical answer to the question “which came first, the chicken or the egg?”. I know that’s an age old question but I’ve not yet received an answer that makes sense and that doesn’t in some way misdirect or try to avoid the question. [Source]

So until recently we haven’t been able to figure out why bees fly you guys claim to know how life came it’s current state over the last 4.6 billion years. [Source]

Our friends, the evolutionists can’t identify this reptile/fish thing they say they’ve found. It’s probably one or the other or something like the platypus God designed to help our fleshbound scientists make fools of themselves. [Source]

God is not mocked; the Tiktaalik rosea doesn’t surprise Him. Only a very few thousand years ago, He created the thing some scientists date at three-hundred and seventy-five million years. What a nice ballpark number, rounded to the nearest five million years! [Source]

Don’t forget to check out the other editions of Hilarious Creationist Quotes:

Hilarious Creationist Quotes
Hilarious Creationist Quotes Part II
Hilarious Creationist Quotes Part III
Hilarious Creationist Quotes: The Movie

On Sunday I went to Dragon Fish & Pets in White Center and traded in this guy:

For this guy:

Yes, you heard me correctly.  I traded my electric catfish, Malepterurus electricus, for a South American lungfish, Lepidosiren paradoxa.  When I bought him I actually thought he was an African lungfish.  L. paradoxa grows to four feet, which I didn’t realize until the next day.

I’ve named him Steven, and I love him very much. One of the cool things about lungfish is that they are more closely related to humans than to most other fish! Both humans and lungfish share a common ancestor with the animal whose lineage gave rise to tetrapods, and that common ancestor is more recent than the lungfish’s common ancestor with ray-finned fishes. When they were first discovered, it was unclear whether they were a fish or a reptile!

Look, the point is, I love Steven, and so do you!

Yup, there it is.  This orca lives in Sea World in Orlando, FL!!

Behold. An elephant in his habitat at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, LA.

It was amazing. One of the Asian grocery stores in my beloved White Center sells balut!! For those not in the know, balut is a Filipino delicacy consisting of a boiled duck egg with a real baby duck inside. I have wanted to try this ever since I first heard about it from my wife’s family almost ten years ago. At first I pictured it like the Cardassian Taspar egg from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Chain of Command, Part II”.

The chicks in those eggs were fully formed and moving. You ate them alive! That’s what I pictured when I first heard of balut.

Well, real balut is not that extreme. The chick is still developing, and it’s cooked. Here is what mine looked like after boiling it for 25 minutes:

 I apologize for the poor picture quality.  The yellow part is the yolk, and the brown part is the baby duck.  In the first picture, the light spot on the bottom left might be the eye.  I was more concerned with getting myself to eat it than with examining its anatomy.  That will come later.

Well, I might as well tell you how it tasted.  OMG IT WAS DELICIOUS!! It didn’t feel like I was eating a whole duck.  No bones or feathers.  There was one part which felt kind of fibrous, which I’m guessing was the beak.  It was only a very tiny part and didn’t really take away from the flavor.  I’m not really sure, though, if balut would taste much difference than a regular old hard boiled duck egg, since the predominant flavor is the yolk, which is WAY WAY WAY better than in a hard boiled chicken egg.  I can’t even eat those things.

End Conclusion:  Balut = delicious.  Anyone should know that.

Hello.

When I was in college I would go to class in the morning and go to work in the afternoon. I would always program a couple of hours in between so I could eat lunch and read or whatever.

WELL. One day I got lunch from Taco Bell’s drive-through and sat in my car in the Taco Bell parking lot, eating lunch and then studying. After a few minutes of studying I began to get sleepy and decided to sleep, right there in my car in Taco Bell’s parking lot.  But I was a dumb kid, and paranoid of police.  I had a dream that police came and told me that I was loitering in Taco Bell’s parking lot and that I had to leave.  RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of this dream, a car pulled into a spot near me, which woke me up.  IT WAS A POLICE CAR!!!  Still in a muddled sleepytime place, I made some kind of motion to them asking if they wanted me to leave.  I’m so stupid.

Naturally they came up to me and wanted to know what the hell was wrong with me.  The lady cop thought my car smelled like marijuana.  I told her that I had never had marijuana.  That was that.  They went inside, and I think I left.

Long story short:  Later that day I told my boss all about it, and we had a good laugh! I forgot to wear pants to work today!

I’ve decided not to pursue this further. The Ambra Grisia didn’t work, although the homeopath says that these things usually take between one and five months to work. Honestly, I’m just not that interested anymore. Sorry for being so anti-climatic, but well…we all knew it would end this way.

To help offset the shock of all this, here’s what an ant hill looks like if you fill it with plaster and have a business professional stand next to it: