HSU IT Department

Dear arcanetrivia, this is for you :)

Just returned from a week visiting family back in the Great Flat Midwest. Lots of catching up to do tomorrow, but in the meanwhile:

Dare Wright's The Lonely Doll and Taylor Swift -- is it just me, or is there an eerie resemblance there?

Our local zoo does occasional special fund-raising events focused on a particular animal. You pays your money and you get to come to the zoo in the evening, have drinks and hors d'oeuvres, the keepers give a little talk about the species (both in general and specifically about the ones at our zoo), and then you get to do some kind of special behind-the-scenes activity. We've done several of them: for the lions, we got to get up close near their cage (you could feel them eying you, thinking "Hm, they look tasty..."), for the primates we got to watch a training session, etc. So Mr Psmith and I went to one on Thursday about penguins and the special thing was...we got to actually pet a baby penguin!!! It was so amazing, so soft and warm since it still had all its downy grey baby feathers. Very sweet.

The zoo is also doing major construction work, and as we were leaving we saw they had posted this on the chain-link fence surrounding the construction area, which we giggled over and thought rawther clever esp. the bit about "loud vocalizations lol :)