#37415: — 08/25  at  08:39 AM
Y'know...an awful lot of those covers are involving scantily clad people, who often appear to be losing their clothing... Trying to up your "tentacle sex" ranking again? ;)

#37418: — 08/25  at  08:42 AM
I love the one that proclaims "The Gods Hate Kansas"!

#37419: Michael — 08/25  at  08:42 AM
Aww, c'mon, PZ. Academic drag is kinda fun. Though I've no idea how someone could ever eat in a master's gown, what with those tippet sleeves. You'd be dragging them in the soup (or whatever) every time you reached for something.

#37424: notheory — 08/25  at  08:53 AM
PZed's hidden agenda surfaces! Pharyngula is just a front for a secret society of octopods bent on destroying Intelligent Design Creationism! They must be stopped!

#37425: PZ Myers — 08/25  at  08:54 AM
They may be a problem for soup, but who wants to settle for soup anyway? You can tuck a loaf of bread and a couple of porkchops in those babies.

#37426: — 08/25  at  09:03 AM
Hey.... Have you noticed the titles for some of the stories?

The Gods Hate Kansas

The Feathered Octopus (Hmmm...the TRUE evolutionary origin of birds? They DO have beaks...and large appetites...)

The Incredible Harem of Doctor Heeber (Dang, no wonder people work so hard for their Doctorates...)

#37427: — 08/25  at  09:04 AM
Or octopods..

#37428: — 08/25  at  09:07 AM
I meant that comment for Professor Myers. Whoops.

#37429: notheory — 08/25  at  09:14 AM
::sighs:: if only the etymology tentacular was a contraction of tentacle and spectacular.

#37437: — 08/25  at  10:46 AM
Poor PZ, wrapped up by all these tentacled beings!

The Starfarers depicts a squidmoth (octo and insect crossbreed analog; how many legs one wonders) so perhaps you are only half concerned there.

#37438: Raven — 08/25  at  10:52 AM
"(octo and insect crossbreed analog; how many legs one wonders)"

Seven?

#37444: paperwight — 08/25  at  11:15 AM
My personal favorite octopus fiction link so far:

http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/

#37446: notheory — 08/25  at  11:18 AM
"(octo and insect crossbreed analog; how many legs one wonders)"

Seven?

Pshaw! Mendel must be rolling in his grave to hear you say that ;)

#37448: Redshift — 08/25  at  11:21 AM
Well, it's not cephalopods, but I thought the biology crowd here might enjoy this, too. (Go here for more Doctor Fun, since the individual cartoons don't have any navigation links.)

#37449: — 08/25  at  11:22 AM
PZ,

I hope you don't mind, I made the nice people at tonmo.com (The Octopus News Magazine Online) aware of these great links. Knowing them though, the links are already old hat... I never manage to surprise them.

#37459: — 08/25  at  12:05 PM
What are you talking about PZ, you were in the PNW, you know those are UW colours. Go Huskies! (when they're not fighting drug scandals, assualt charges, etc...)

#37460: PZ Myers — 08/25  at  12:12 PM
Well, yeah...and I'm a UW alum. But now I'm a dedicated member of the UMM team.

Fortunately, they aren't anywhere near the same conference, so I don't have to face the dilemma of a UW-UMM matchup (which would be very scary, and require teams of EMTs in support).

#37476: — 08/25  at  01:45 PM
Finally I understand the attraction of studying octopi--they get all the hot chicks.

#37477: The Chemist — 08/25  at  02:15 PM
I think it's octopuses, not octopi.

Anyway, the real reason I'm posting is to share a video of an octopus eating what I think is a whitetip reef shark.

It seemed to fit with this post, and it's pretty cool!

#37512: Geoffrey Brent — 08/25  at  03:59 PM
http://www.livejournal.com/community/_octopus_ and http://www.livejournal.com/community/molluscious are good for Fun Octopus Pics, too. Warning: Some of the pictures on the former can be *decidedly* on the pornographic side - 'Dream of the Fisherman's Wife' and so forth - but it also gets a lot of more respectable tentacleage.

#37541: — 08/25  at  06:20 PM
I prefer "octopodes", but that's just pedanticism. I can back it up, though:
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/hosted_sites/tcp/faq.html
And Chemist, I think the shark is a spiny dogfish. The tank in the film, the Underwater Dome at the Seattle Aquarium, is a cold-water Pacific Coast environment, no reef sharks. Lots of dogfish. Still very cool.
The adult giant pacific octopus currently on display (they tend to release them when they get older and start feeding up another little guy) now lives in an acrylic tank with some wolf-eels, and apparently they all get along okay. They briefly had a much larger "under the dock" tank for the big octopus, but they've remodeled.

The Tree Octopus page is fantastic. All of the linked Cascadia pages continue to make me green with envy that I didn't think of that first. The author is clearly brilliant.

But none of this has anything to do with what is clearly the most important question: Why doesn't LiveSquidInABox.com want us to have Live Squid In A Box t-shirts??

#37564: madbard — 08/25  at  10:21 PM
(Wait a minute…that octopus emblem has 12 arms. Heretic!)

no no no, what you can't see is the other half an octopus being EATEN, like the Jebus fish eating the Darwin fish fashion.... it is revealing the Almighty Power of the Octo-Gods!

#37568: — 08/26  at  01:23 AM
"Seven?"

No no, if you crossbreed two bilaterals you get a quadrilateral, so its 14. You get 7 is if you parallelbreed them and keep the cute half.

That would be the octo for PZ; so now he has a breeding experiment to try when he meets those aliens.

#37576: arensb — 08/26  at  05:39 AM

(Wait a minute…that octopus emblem has 12 arms. Heretic!)

The man's obviously a high priest of some kind. Do you also complain when Kali is represented on pulp covers with four more arms than normal people?