Q: What's over 100 million years old and is still cool?

A: Yeah, dinosaurs.

Some people think that being a paleontologist is easy, and all you have to be is a total pussy, like Ross Gellar - but in fact, paleontologists are tough bad-asses like Indiana Jones (except they don't fight Nazis, Stalinists and Aliens). Although a paleontologist could probably take out the Red Army if he had to. They're always out in the 'Stans digging stuff up - so they're like international spies crossing dangerous borders in intense areas around the world. They see more commie action than the average man, that's for sure. More than Ross Gellar, anyhow.

[Not a paleontologist.]

Do you think finding dinosaur bones is safe? Well, it's not, and you could go to jail for it, like Nathan Murphy, who made headlines around the world in 2001 after he excavated a 77 million-year-old mummified duckbill dinosaur - later named Leonardo - that turned out to be one of the best-preserved fossils found. Apparently he's being charged with stealing fossils (which means he excavated a fossil on property that he didn't have permission to excavate from).

The fossil in question has been nicnamed Sid Vicious. That's how real paleontologists think - Gellar would have named the fossil Bette Midler, like an idiot.

When I was in Chicago, IL I saw a presentation by the former curator of the Royal Ontario Museum about his trip to Kazakhstan, where they last entire months in the badlands of the middle-east (or Asia, or whatever continent Kazakhstan is in - it's kinda in the middle of everything, isn't it?).

Months with rationed water, food rations, intense weather conditions, and the laborous task of smashing through rocks to excavate shattered fossils and teeth - all so that you can take them back (via muthufucking helecopters, yo!) so you can study these bones for years and years, trying to figure out what the hell they mean.

[Triceracopter - People who design helicopters wish they were paleontologists.]

Ross Gellar can't even decide what the colour of his f-ing shirt is (and it was pink) let alone decipher the complex clues that dinosaur bones and fossils leave behind. If a paleontologist wears pink (which they sometimes do) at least they've got monstrously awesome beards, sunglasses and a plaid pair of socks to compensate.

That shirt might be pink, but it doesn't matter - this paleontologist is bad-ass! He's like a lumberjack / witch doctor. Awesome.

That is Robert Bakker - bad-ass paleontolgist. He climbs rock cliffs and uses TNT every year to blow the shit out of whatever stands between him and fossils (namely, rock - but he could probably blow up a Soviet spy, right?)

Jack Horner sticks in his thumb and pulls out a ... whatever the hell he's looking for. This guy read through a few books and realized that all predators these days are like hamsters compared to dinosaurs - so he flipped the biosphere the bird and started studying the greatest predators and carnivors the world has ever created. That's awesome.

When paleontologists, like Jack Horner, finish with these holes, they can drop in elopers who interfere with their bizness and backfill that shit. That's right, you don't tresspass on a paleontologist, because they just don't give a fuck about anything but dinosaurs. If you haven't been dead for over 70 millions years, they haven't got the time of day for you. Conversely, if you asked Ross Gellar what time it was, he'd stutter the exact time to you, and then ask if there was anything else he could do for you! That's not what paleontologists do!

Paleontologists tell the time of day from the position of the sun! And there are only two times of day to a paleontologists - daytime or night time. They work while the sun is up, then they rest, waiting for daybreak, when they start working again. Gregarious, unlike Gellar. Ross would be late for work, like a dick.

In conclusion, if I were to guess whether Michael Bay was a paleontologist or a Ross Gellar, I'd have to go with a Ross Gellar; why? Because he's decided that his Tranformers 2 movie doesn't need the Dinobots! WTF? The reasoning is: “We couldn’t quite figure out how to justify a robot that would pretend to be a dinosaur.”

EVERYONE would pretend to be a dinosaur if they could pull it off! Transformers just don't know about them yet, or else they'd be disguising themselves as tyrannosaurs, stegosaurs, ceratopsians, pteradactyls, and sauropods in no time. Guaranteed, a transformer would have his mind blown if he saw a dinosaurs. It'd be awesome.

Zombie stegosaurus

So, now that I've done some photoshopping on the bad-boy, I can present the finished Stegosaurus Zombie for your consideration:

I also managed to layout the storyboards for the next few chapters of the Choose your own adventure, although I don't know when I'll get that done. It's already 111 pages, or something like that, which is pretty big considering I'm only halfway through the story. I guess when you're writing all those alternative choices, that's when things start to get much longer. This could be quite the long project.

I hope you like the image - it was a long time coming. 

Nanowrimo Winner

Here it is, suckas! Strolling in a day early for the 50,000 word verification - I am a winner of the 2008 Nanowrimo Challenge.

I win access to this little .jpg as well as a certificate. I printed and framed my certificate from last year. The Choose Your Own Adventure novel is coming along nicely, and it certainly has had its challenges. I honestly didn't think I was going to make it this year, but the story pushes along nicely and works really well. Plus, there's a lot of fun writing the 'endings' every now and again.

No doubt, if I'm going to have a reader go through five or six pages just to have the protagonist die, then I'm going to reward them with something cool - like the flamethrower I was mentioning earlier. It was recommended that I have someone die at the hands of a lion at the zoo - and I think I know a way to make that work (although I don't think the zoo really fits into the story very well).

So - a good day for me. It's a bit awkward for me to post this novel up online, because part of the novelty of a CYOA is turning to pages and checking where the story goes - which is not quite the same with a .pdf document. I admit, you'll have to wait for this one to be printed out (and finished) before you get access to it.

Unless I post it up with the blog and have links to the appropriate pages. I don't know if I want to do that just yet - I mean, perhaps I'll post the first part of the book like that, but ... I'm not certain I want to do that just yet.

Now I can get back to updating the Maple Leafs Challenge, which I haven't touched in almost two weeks. The participants must be getting edgey about it. Sorry.

See y'all around.

Here's a great obituary for Michael Crichton that came to my attention today.

One of the items that has me wondering was what his next book was going to be like. HarperCollins, his publisher, had scheduled for his next book to be released in December, but his illness postponed its release indefinitely. 

The private illness Crichton's family kept out of the media doesn't tell us much regarding how long he was ill. We can't really be sure how much of the novel was complete before his sickness postponed his efforts. Either way, we also don't know whether or not his final work will be finished or published posthumously. 

I can't even find any clues as to what it was about, but it should be available next May. So we'll get a glimpse of it.

Wikipedia has an excellent article on Crichton, if anyone was interested in more of his thoughts.