A sound plan.

Angelo Kelly ain’t gonna pee pee his bed tonight.

I’m not sure, but I think God may be one of his backup singers. BTW, the entire bizarre Kelly Family idea is pretty hiliarious: American dude decamps to Spain, has a mess of kids, homeschools them all, and takes up busking as a weird, ersatz Von Trapp thing that — because, things are different in Europe — actually takes off.

They were, of course, HUGE in Germany.

It’s that time again

The 2011 Name of the Year bracket is simply breathtaking. It’s hard to pick a favorite from such a field, but I think “Atticus Disney” probably earned his #1 seed, and that “Quadrophenia Taylor” may well be underseeded.

Remember: all of these people really have these names. No kidding. Hat tip to Rob. You may also wish to peruse the Names of the Year from past years, which includes the 2003 king, Houston attorney Jew Don Boney.

Your Daily Naturalist Link

The NYT on the New Zealand tuatara:

[T]he animal that may well be New Zealand’s most bizarrely instructive species at first glance looks surprisingly humdrum: the tuatara. A reptile about 16 inches long with bumpy, khaki-colored skin and a lizardly profile, the tuatara could easily be mistaken for an iguana. Appearances in this case are wildly deceptive. The tuatara — whose name comes from the Maori language and means “peaks on the back” — is not an iguana, is not a lizard, is not like any other reptile alive today.

In fact, as a series of recent studies suggest, it is not like any other vertebrate alive today. The tuatara, scientists have learned, is in some ways a so-called living fossil, its basic skeletal layout and skull shape almost identical to that of tuatara fossils dating back hundreds of millions of years, to before the rise of the dinosaurs. Certain tuatara organs and traits also display the hallmarks of being, if not quite primitive, at least closer to evolutionary baseline than comparable structures in other animals.

The article goes on to state that the tuatara can live in excess of 100 years. More at Wikipedia.

No. Just no.

We do not approve of this whisky:

James Gilpin is a designer and researcher who works on the implementation of new biomedical technologies. He’s also got type 1 diabetes, where his body doesn’t produce enough insulin to regulate blood sugar levels.

So he’s started a project called Gilpin Family Whisky, which turns the sugar-rich urine of elderly diabetics into a high-end single malt whisky, suitable for export.