I can't let an article about wombats go by without mentioning the very excellent web comic Digger.

http://www.diggercomic.com/

I also started Ulysses a couple times, and the only other Joyce book I've tried to read was Finnegan's Wake, so yeah, not a real fan here. I occasionally believe the literati give a great deal of credit to authors if they make their work nearly incomprehensible to the less erudite.

Coincidentally just finished Grapes of Wrath. Very depressing of course, but I did enjoy it and had a hard time putting it down. I have a bad habit of picking up the dialect of whatever I am watching/reading, so for a while I was drawling and droppin' the en's offa words an' such.

I'm always looking for the right whale, but settling for the right now whale.

I was very disappointed to find out that Raptors were about the size of a turkey. I think I could take one given a nice bat or something.

That effort behind that exhaustive photo gallery is more interesting as a testament to compulsion than the subject is.

Hmm, hot troll on troll action.

That is full of awesome. Halloween costume idea?

Well then, by your logic, I should want more of the open carry guys around so that they soak up the lead in the inevitable hail of bullets that you suggest.

Hey! This isn't neat. It's awesome!

I've wasted my thoughts on digging for deeper meaning in cartoons as well, I thought that was just me.

Does this mean the pomegranate is the work of the devil?

Certainly some environmental influence is present, however, I think alot more is innate at a young age than whatever parents can do.

Anecdotally, one of my good friends is a bit of a tomboy, and did NOT want her daughter to be a "girly girl". She tried to engage her in more "boyish" activities and dressed her in jeans and t-shirts. However right from the start it failed. THe daughter wanted to play with dolls, wear dresses and have tea parties. Now obviously she must have learned about all that from her peers, but still she has the desire to be a "girly girl" with absolutely no influence from her parents. (I suppose you could argue that that is a form of rebellion, but that seems weak)

As a parent, I see that my own child has a definite personality, ands tend to like certain things without any input from me except for me to introduce them. He either takes to them or he doesn't. He loves math and reading, and doesn't like coloring and playing with blocks nearly as much. He doesn't play with the firehouse with fireman dolls we got him, but he does play with a calculator. He's 4, go figure.

Danielle's thought was the prevailing one in the 60s and 70s and so quite a few studies to "correct" the environmental impacts that caused one to act male or female. I don't have any specifics, as this was in a text I'd read that I don't own any more (school book), but I do remember very specifically the case of one boy that was accidentally castrated while very young. The parents and doctor conspired to reshape the boy and turn him into a girl.

They dressed him as a girl and treated him as a girl, and due to his adolescence, his classmates couldn't see any difference and so they did as well.

However, he was still male, despite hormone injections, and being raised as a girl, he began to walk like a man, was attracted to girls, liked rough sports etc.

I had hoped that having pretty definitive proof would kill the whole "Males and females are all the same" fallacy, but I guess not. I can't site anything, you can just not believe me, I won't mind. :)

Actually, and this shows my age, Flanders and Swann put out a song "Alliance" about a love affair between the clockwise spinning honeysuckle and the anti-clockwise spinning bindweed. It was a doomed relationship.

Hey so what if that's not why she woke up, what's your point?

Where can I apply for a job as a fake zebra or fake tranquilizer sniper?