A squirrel eating a giant nut…. or maybe getting ready to throw a strike.
When you think of nuts, you usually think of small, brown colored, hard shelled clumps that go just as good in your grandma’s favorite baking recipe as they would inside of a squirrel’s stomach. And when you think of walnuts, you definitely don’t think of a large, heavy orb that looks more like a tennis ball than something you’d stick in a nutcracker’s mouth. But that big green ball you see the squirrel holding up there…. yep, that’s a walnut! Or at least, what a walnut looks like late in its development stage….
One of my favorite Saturday Squirrel photos I’ve ever taken featured a sciurine hauling one of these massive payloads up a tree using just its mouth! It was also in that post that I first learned from Jenn’s Big Guy just what those big green things at the park were. Since the squirrel who was chomping on the oversized snack in today’s post wound up dropping (or maybe throwing in my direction) the walnut in his haste to get away from my dangerous camera by climbing the nearest tree, I was able to get a nice photo of this half-eaten, unripened delicacy…
Anyone want sloppy seconds?
The big green husk is why we don’t associate this image with what we think of as a walnut. The more commonly seen shelled nut forms inside of this green cocoon. And since squirrels generally only like what’s inside of the nut itself (which is why they are such messy eaters), the bite marks you see are undoubtedly there with the intent to remove the nasty covering in order to get at the good stuff buried inside. It seems like a lot of trouble to go through for such a small critter to get something to eat… but then again, it gives them something tough to file down their ever-growing front teeth on so they don’t end up looking like Scrat…
So crack open a big green walnut to share with your favorite Saturday Squirrel, and have a great weekend everyone!
One of my goals for this week-plus I now have off is to take care of bloggy business, and the main part of that is to finally get my current comics caught up to date. Then, hopefully after that, to get back in the habit of actually getting the comic posted on Thursdays rather than Fridays, which I got stuck in while all the stuff was going on with my Dad. Bad habits are so hard to shake for me, but I want to get Fridays clear again for some new Shelf Critter Theatre stories. And that also means I’ll probably be posting the retro comics on Sundays once (and IF) that actually happens….
Y is for Yesterday, as in the day this was supposed to be posted. But y’all know what a slacker I can be, so you’ll have to do with this day-late edition of my Photography A to Z challenge! I have a feeling Y is going to be a sneaky hard letter to find good photos for, so while I try to find a few ways to cheat on this one, Y don’t you read the challenge’s now-famous rules yet again, yo?
Only photos I took myself will be used.
All photos used will have been taken without any thought given to this challenge.
Well, let’s get this show on the road before yesterday becomes next year….
Let’s start with this YELLOW car…. a Camaro, I think.
YOGA PANTS! Women love to wear them. Men love to look at women wearing them. Yoga pants will bring the people together…
Ponies watching a YOUTUBE video, which was part of a prompt post I did last year that made sense to maybe two people in the world…
A squirrel in the Y of a tree. Am I really gonna count this one? Fuck yeah I am…
Three members of my shelf critter gang who were all made out of YARN by talented crocheters who once followed me!
I don’t think this is actually a YAK, but it’s close enough for my challenge. He’s kinda cute, whatever he is…
“Look at YOU!” Don’t you look awesome in this mirror? Why not take a selfie with a hitchhiking butterfly?
The YOUTH of America learning about how to get an icebox full of roaches like the zoo has. This will be a great home science experiment for these YOUNG lads…
What, are you tired already? OK, for making it through this post that had you asking “Y Me?” you can bask in the frightening glory that is Ody YAWNING while keeping my fresh laundry warm.
Come back next Tuesday for my series finale, and I promise you can get some Z’s….
Does the weather have you at your wits end, ready to find Mother Nature and cut a bitch? Well, we can’t do anything about the Atlantic Ocean temperature…. but it is Monday, so allow us to pour you a hurricane before you go insane. That means it’s time for us to forecast another lost tune by venturing straight into the eye of that cyber cyclone we like to call the Dusty Vinyl Archive! DJ Scratchy ain’t a weatherpony, but she knows which way the muzak blows. And so do the Sponkies who are desperately trying to hold on to their semaphore flags next to Jim Cantore. This category 4 earworm promises to give you a tropical depression…
The rich history of popular music is littered with songs that seem to have little redeeming value other than their quirky nature and fuckedupability. The adjective “novelty” generally gets added on to these unique earworms… and while many serious music fans may painfully grimace at the fact that these offbeat tunes can worm their way into the same paragraph as more serious artists like the Beatles and William Shatner, they nevertheless can end up on actual radio station playlists and even earn a spot on the prestigious Billboard chart. Flash trivia question! Who are the only two artists to have had at least one Top 40 hit in each of the past four calendar decades?
Correct! And? And………………?????
Yep. No joke…
Some novelty songs can become popular enough to get a pretty cushy spot on the pop charts… a lofty position that will help boost the longevity that these musical unicorns generally lack. If I was to tell you that today’s song made it all the way up to #13 on the Billboard Hot 100, how long would you guess it stayed on that weekly chart containing what are allegedly the one hundred most popular songs in the country at that time? Surely at least three or four months, right? Heck, it can take weeks for a good song to even climb that high in the countdown, let alone the time a song logs while its airplay is on the wane…
It took 9 weeks for “Jacob’s Ladder” to reach #1… and 30 years for me to realize that it actually did reach #1.
How about just eight weeks? Can a song really go from being played constantly on pop radio stations to being an afterthought in less time than your kids spent out of school this summer? Yes, apparently it can…. and it happened sixteen years ago in the Summer of 2001.
The artist’s name is Afroman. Really, what would you expect from a novelty act? The song is the utterly silly, fucked up, and yet totally earwormy “Because I Got High.”
NSFW WARNING: While this is the censored version, there’s still a crude reference or three in this song. Parental guidance is suggested!
In late August of 2001, this song entered the playlist of the horrible radio station we had no choice but to listen to from the Electronics department at work, and I swear they played it twice an hour. I admit, it was good for a giggle or two, and was pretty catchy after the sixty-ninth time you heard it in one night. But this song became The Shit, and that’s reflected in its meteoric rise up the charts. “High” debuted at #67 on the August 18, 2001 Hot 100 chart, and just three weeks later on September 8th, it was knocking on the door of the Top 10 at #13. And given that it was still getting played to death at that time, it seemed to have a date with destiny at #1…..
But a not so funny thing happened on the way to the Forum………
All of a sudden, the music consuming public wasn’t in much of a mood to listen to a lighthearted, lyrical dirty joke about some putz’s first world problems that came about because he smoked too much reefer. “Because I Got High” did an abrupt about face on the charts and was last seen hanging out at the lowly spot of #61 on October 6th… seven weeks after it first seemed like an unstoppable force. The song literally fell off the face of radio after September 11th. When I pulled up the YouTube video for this post, it was, I swear to Dog, the first time I’d heard the song since the TSA performed its first cavity search.
I was gonna take that bomb out of my rectum, but I got high.
Too bad, Afroman, because that was a shitty case of bad timing. Maybe if we had been exposed to your lyrical whine for just a little bit longer, “High” would have become part of the fabric of the 00’s like it should have… and with its formulaic signature line, might have even survived to become a running internet meme in our Twitbook culture.
Well, I’ll be damned. The memeverse knows no limits…
I’ll be back with a better earworm next week, if I don’t get high….
Grey squirrels, by their nature, live in trees. Oftentimes very high up in trees. That’s a great idea when you’re considered to be a tasty morsel and want to avoid as many predators as possible. But there are times when it’s pretty darn inconvenient to live so far off the ground…. like when you have to lug the groceries up 100 feet of tree bark.
This squirrel found a nice, fat, juicy nut that it would like to take home to share with its family. He’s got a long way to climb to make it to his doorstep without managing to drop his delicious dinner… and you can tell by the look in his eye that he’s second guessing the decision to build so far up. Next time, he should probably consider living in a tree that has an elevator. But for now, he looks so cute as a road weary Saturday Squirrel just trying to get to his deluxe apartment in the sky…
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stomach. And when you think of walnuts, you definitely don’t think of a large, heavy orb that looks more like a tennis ball than something you’d stick in a nutcracker’s mouth. But that big green ball you see the squirrel holding up there…. yep, that’s a walnut! Or at least, what a walnut looks like late in its development stage….
