My brain has conked out for the holidays. I’ll be back in Jan, I swear, even if I have to feed electrodes up my nose and JOLT the porridge-like grey matter into life to do it (again ;p) Mean time, here are some FESTIVE MONSTERS.

First up, by way of the ever-brilliant Boing Boing, check out this Siphonophore. It’s “an eerily fantastic creature that appears to be a single, large organism, but which is actually a colony of numerous individual jellyfish-like animals that behave and function together as a single entity.”

Isn’t that amazing?? I do my best to make up decent monsters, but… wow! Put this/these dude/dudes in a book, someone, please!

Next, in case you haven’t seen it already, here’s some recently released footage of an extremely rare elbowed Magnapinna squid who recently paid a visit to a deep sea drilling site….

As Ryan North of Dinsoaur Comics says in his inimitable style, “So octopods are terrifying and we all know that but […] oh hey, looks like they’ve DEVELOPED ELBOWS AND INSANELY LONG ARMS AND LOVE TO STARE UNBLINKING AT THE CAMERA. holy crap you guys.” Quite.

Third, here’s something that I’m secretly a bit pleased with. In one of my other lives I get to play with some truly excellent musicians in a band called Sour Mash Daddy And His Sixty Wives: I don’t normally mention our activities here, partly because we appear in public about as often as… well… the elbowed Magnapinna squid! But on Dec 6th we did play a gig, and some film footage of this rare occurrence has survived (thanks, Laura). I should explain that singing duties are normally taken care of by members of the band who actually, like, know how to sing. But…

Heh (blushes) Hope you get a kick out of it! ;p

My thanks, and a HUGELY HAPPY FESTIVE WOSSNAME, to everyone who happens to be reading this. Here’s to 2009, and whatever new adventures we have in it!

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