Infiltrating the Old Boy's Club

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the Old Boy's Club (OBC) is comprised of the old (and typically white) men who dominate the top tiers of many industries. This phenomenon is pretty apparent in most fields, but especially so in academia where female presence at high levels caps out at 35% at most. 

Now, we could shout about that endlessly in bitter, bitchy terms, but we’ve taken a dose of the considerate pills today (V.T. South’s roomie made pumpkin cake, V.T. North has a job again, all is awesome in the world) and decided to give the benefit of the doubt to members of the OBC: maybe they just don’t know about ladies’ struggles! Also, they probably don’t know about all the awesome ladies they could be hiring, because OBC members don’t network with ladies, they network with dudes.

Awesome Dead Shit: Macrauchenia

We were going to call this "Awesome Dead Thing of the Month,"  but let's be real: creating a "monthly" event is just going to end in disappointment for all. So here we are instead, scrounging for titles and trying not to commit to a temporally-set re-occurrence (DON'T BOX US IN), and the first one we're going to talk about is Macrauchenia.

You might be saying, WTF guys, way to not start out strong, what is this animal that looks vaguely like the word macaroni? Well, that's actually a pretty good comparison: this is an animal that had a body sort of like a llama (hence the "chenia" in the name, which is a reference to the old genus name for that group), with a face very much like a macaroni noodle. Observe:

Yeah, it sorta looks like Dumbo got teased one-too-many times about the size of his ears and went to visit Michael Jackson's all-natural-plastics doctor, or perhaps a llama got too invested in sniffing at a tube sock. But of course, as is ALWAYS THE CASE IN PALEONTOLOGY, Macrauchenia was related to neither of these.

The Shutdown: A Poem

On the 1st Amy woke without work
Because Congress is being a jerk

Deemed "nonessential"

By those influential

She must keep from going berserk.