"I think Dawn's heart stopped for a moment."

That was my reaction when I saw that American Science & Surplus was selling authentic looking plastic coyote skulls. Now I've got one on top of my monitor. Alas, its jaws don't open, or I'd arrange to put a Precious Moments figurine between them.

I suspect there's quite a cultural gulf between Dawn and I.

Teresa, the reverse paranoid. She suspects that people everywhere are plotting to make her happy.

Uh, sorry, moody sort of day. Glad to see that the Good Conspirators are at work. Hmm, the workbench could use dusting off. . . .

Teresa, remember: even metanoids have friends.

This would almost certainly save a lot of marriages.

MKK

(Jordin collects odd stuffed animals; this has got to be the oddest.)

I'm sorry I looked at the Precious Moments stuff.
I feel rather ill.
I can do cute as well as the next artist, but even I have limits.

Jeremy, I believe it is my duty in life to entertain the universe whenever I can, to feed straight lines when I can't spot the punchlines, and at all times to be an appreciative audience.

Does that mean Jordin already has the plush Cthulu? And a Beeblebear? (Beanie Baby Beeblebears are even rarer -- I think I've only made three...)

Favorite *rilly weird* custom stuffies: the talking Cerberus made by combining three Taco Bell Chihuahuas; the various deeply disturbing bunny mods done by a Seattle goth artist. The one-eared cyclops bunny was perhaps the most disturbing.

And you must remind me to show Jordin my Dis-mem-bear the next time you're over...

--Ulrika

I don't have a plush Cthulu or Beeblebear. I do have a dismembear ("Hug it and cuddle it and rip its little head off"). My collection runs more to real (if odd) animals. Among others: warthog, platypus, giant earthworm, crab, shrimp, mosquito, ant (no, I don't specialize in invertebrates, they just accumulated), two mooses (meese?), dodo, vulture (the tag claims it's a California condor, but I say it's a vulture and I say the hell with it), bat, and guitar. And now, viruses.

http://shop.store.yahoo.com/explo/giantmicrobes.html

Dunno if these are the initial ones referenced -- in the crummy photo, they look more like vat-dyed hamsters with advanced-stage Walterkeanemia than what I think of as photomicrographed virii.

Hmm. An acrylic-crystal T4 would be neat, as would a plush one (with a little pocket in the body containing a nucleic-acid bead string). It probably ought to have sharp chrome legs, but it wouldn't be safe to play with then.

This? http://www.morbidtendencies.com/gallery/bunnies.html

I thought you might be referring to the carrion bag, which is really rather sick. http://www.morbidtendencies.com/gallery/carrionbag.html A coworker of mine had one. or maybe it, it appears that there may only be the one.

It giggles.

Two moose. As with 'sheep', the lexon [PLURAL] is realized as zero in the morphology (below the diamonds, I should think, but I haven't examined this too closely).

(Edited from a version that started "Like sheep..." - but then I got a visual of a whole herd of moose singing the chorus "All We Like Sheep" from Handel's Messiah, so I changed it. Bad brain! Bad!)

That would be (Duke University CS Dept. Artist-in-Residence) Kelly Heaton's Live Pelt. She also made a wall of Furby eyes that follow viewers around the room. Neat stuff.

Ooo, and I see they have tuberculosis on sale right now.

I have lots of relatives in the Philippines, and they all look at PM stuff as an undiluted blessing - the factory employs lots of people who need the work, and they make such lovely, godly things! I'm happy about the former, but try not to think about the latter, even though I worked in a Hallmark for a time.

MKK

Kip, a giggling fur coat made of Elmo hides is just wicked. If it appeared in a genre short story, I'd know that by the end, the owner would infallibly have been tickled to death by their coat.

...only now I've looked at the link that Thomas posted to it, and it is cool, in a creepy kind of way. This woman ought to come to Minicon for the Furby Dance.

Xopher: One moose, two moose, just so. And do you ever find yourself imagining Rick Santorum singing "All We Like Sheep"?

For my money, the truly weird English singular/plural is trousers. It's plural in form when it's singular; but when you pluralize it, each of those unitary items turns into a pair of trousers -- though trousers are of course neither worn nor sold in pairs.

It has a certain bizarre logic; you pluralize an already plural form by doubling it. I'm not sure that's how it happened, but it's amusing to speculate. Come to think of it, scissors does the same thing: Hand me those scissors, but There are two pairs of scissors in that drawer.

And here's another odd thought: The original scissors were shaped like trousers. Before they invented two-piece scissors that open into an X-shape, scissors were made in a U-shape of a single resilient piece of metal, which you used by squeezing the blades together.

There are plenty of nouns where the plural is singular (sheep, moose), but trousers and scissors are the only ones I can think of where the singular is plural. It would be fun to collect some more, if they exist, and examine their topology.

Christina, that puts me over the edge. I'm going to have to do an additional installment.

Genevieve, I can only intone one of my favorite mantras: When people say they like something, they're always right. And if Hallmark didn't exist, the market for its products would nevertheless still exist, and would be served.