"Birds Appear to 'Self-Medicate' With Our Cigarette Butts."

Headline at The Atlantic. What birds are actually doing, apparently, is using the butts in nest-building, and nicotine works as an arthropo...

Tarantula with fungus "antlers."

Afflicted, fascinatingly.

"Do you have a Google alert on 'detachable penis'?"

Question asked by me after Meade forwarded me this story : After leaving its detachable penis to finish inseminating the female, the male or...

"Thousands of spiders were fleeing the rising waters, many of them trailing behind massive amounts of dragline silk."

"The webs tangled over weeds, trees, fences, and fields, creating a surreal and eerie landscape crawling with arachnids. Residents repo...

"Spiders might soon give you goosebumps in a good way."

"Strands of spider silk have been used to make violin strings that have a unique and thrilling sound, thanks perhaps to the way the str...

At the Tomato Spider Café...

... you can lurk here until dawn.

Spider sex moves...

... are very intense. The spideress makes a strong implicit argument for relentless passivity.

Taking refuge from the floods in Pakistan, spiders are shrouding the trees with webs.

Astonishing photos , via Metafilter , which is infested with skittish comments like "Never going to click on those links. I never wante...

"Great Expectations, the Miss Havisham Cake" — banned from the Melbourne Cake Show.

In bad taste? But it's literary! A reading, from Charles Dickens: The most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on...

I'm back in Madison and Silvio has a gleam in his eye.

This morning, I checked out of the glitzy Pfister Hotel.... ... and rolled the dust of Milwaukee off Silvio's wheels. Amazing how many m...

Milwaukee frenchtoastscape.

So here I am at the Pfister Hotel, waiting for it to be time for the 7th Circuit Judicial Conference to begin, thinking about all the judges...

Please blot that image from my head with something very mellow.

Don't think about the chicken-eating spider. Think about the kindly jellyfish.

The chicken-eating spider.

Oh, no!!

Another lazy afternoon in an Austin café.

I follow Chris into the Spider House : It's a pretty unusual café, built out of an old house that -- I guess -- had a lot of spiders in ...

Misdrawn.

I love misdrawn, misplaced iconic characters, like this one, found on the side of a Madison food cart: I'm not saying I love every pictu...

Audible Althouse #51.

A fresh, new podcast . Stream it here . Subscribe: I talk about comics, especially Popeye: There's some stuff about the "Masters o...

The return of Eggagog.

I'm feeling uninspired this morning. Maybe I shouldn't have used up my Winfrey/lose Frey and Kerry phoning in material yesterday. Ho...

Verdict reached in the Michael Jackson case.

The commentators on the news channels are going wild, anticipating the announcement at 4:30 ET. On Fox News, they're speculating about h...

Hot dog eating inspiration.

At the Nathan's hot dog eating contest--on ESPN today--the winner, Takeru Kobayashi, set a new world record, eating 53 hot dogs in 12 mi...