Over at Torque Control, Niall Harrison is doing a Short Story Club, hosting discussions of SF short fiction. As I always vaguely regret not reading enough short fiction to make sensible nominations for the Hugos, this seemed like a good opportunity to read a selection of stories that a smart person with pretty good taste thought were worth discussing. As a bonus, these all appear to be available online for free, so it doesn't require me to buy, let alone subscribe to, one of the big magazines.

We're trying not to let SteelyKid watch a whole lot of tv, but we've taken to showing her YouTube videos of old Sesame Street and Muppet Show skits as a way to wind her down before bedtime. this, of course, has let to her demanding to watch videos any time one of us is anywhere near a computer.

One of her current favorites is this clip of Viking pigs from the Muppet Show:

I've been horribly earwormed with this for days, now, and since misery has bosonic character, I thought I'd share it with you all.

I am planning to buy a telephoto lens for my camera. From time to time, I want to take pictures of the various critters Emmy chases in the back yard, and that would be a whole lot easier if I didn't need to get so close to them. And, of course, I strongly suspect there will be outdoor sports in SteelyKid's future, which will demand some zooming for action shots.

Welcome to the weekly linkfest, August 28 edition.

Science
Brian Switek writes about one of the fastest mammals on earth, the pronghorn, and the complex ecology it lives in. Of Pronghorns and Predators. It's an interesting look into the predator-prey relationships between wolves, coyotes, and pronghorns.

A classic tool used in public relations is a news release. Companies and other organizations craft these statements to announce new products, activities or accomplishments. Well-written news releases offer the what, where, when, who and why, and are often used "as-is" in trade publications and other print media. A collection of an organization's news release might also reveal its state-of-mind, its priorities and focus. In a sense, a historical record of the issues the organization's leaders believed were deserving of (or needing) public attention.

Same deal as the last game: Each of the following pairs of words is taken from a pop song, where they are set up to rhyme (many of the phrases don't really rhyme, but they're treated as if they do). Your job is to guess the song based on the rhyming pair.

So there's an article that a fair number of people have gotten all het up about in The Scientist which criticizes peer reivew. I'll state for the record that I agree with the article in that the review process needs to be much faster, and more people need to be reviewing (the burden is too great for some people). But I'm puzzled by this (italics mine):

My temporary home for the last week has been a hotel just off of I-64 at Exit 44 in Beckley, West Virginia. The immediate exit-ramp neighborhood consists of a Hooters, Dairy Queen, IHOP, McDonalds, and several gas stations. When I'm on the road, I try to keep up my daily walking routine, but the sidewalk that hugs this busy thoroughfare is particularly unappealing. Rather than resigning myself to laps around the hotel parking lot, I decided to take my exercise routine in a new direction: the driveways inside the Sunset Memorial Cemetery.

This one's pretty self-explanatory:

Classes for the new academic year start a week from Monday.survey software

You only get to pick one because that's the way it is. If you need me, I'll be over here scrambling frantically.

I'm unaccountably sleepy today, and I have work to do, which is keeping me from deep, insightful blogging. So I'm going to punt, and throw this open to you all:

Leave me a comment telling me something I don't already know.

Well, OK, since I can't reasonably expect you to be mind-readers, that should be "tell me something that you think I won't be likely to know already," but you get the idea.