photo credit: dancing_triss

Why make a bathing suit in 1940s style if it wont hold 1940s style breasts? Where is a girl with ….curves…to find bad-ass retro swimwear?

- Sent From Portland

What are 40′s style breasts?

I stole this chart from Ester Williams and My Baby Jo (who make younger hipper versions of Ester Williams designs). Ester Williams was an Olympic swimmer in the 40′s, so, I suspect she retains some of that aesthetic in her designs. If I am right than I think you problem is that your retro swimwear really is for 40′s style breasts. Seriously, I could barely squeeze into a size 12 on top, but the extra room in the hips would leave me enough room for a pillow. So ample room for junk in the trunk, just not much room for junk in the front.

The most frequent frustration I hear from the woman in my life is that curvy is not the same thing as plus sized. In fact, looking through some web sites, many plus sized women aren’t particularly curvy, they just pick a width and stay there. So what is a girl with a variety of sizes to do?

So since you didn’t send pictures or measurements I have to make some assumptions:

1. You have an ample bosom
2. You want something that is 1 piece, or 2 piece covering your stomach. I assume this because you are looking for 40′s swimwear — even though the modern bikini appeared in 1945 it wasn’t popular until about a decade later.
3. You are not plus sized.

The answer is probably Eris, they start at 32D and go up from there, or Fig Leaves, they have a wider range of sizes and styles. I don’t know much about pricing, but you may want to find someone to make you something custom, because Eris is like $100 a suit.

I have been hearing this question forever:

How do astronauts go to the bathroom?

On earth they follow the same procedure everyone else does, drink a cup of coffee, strip down naked, take care of business, then take a shower. But in space they have to take some special measure; including restraints and vacuum hoses — like when old people have sex.

I don’t know if I can explain the above toilet better than this guy:

One thing he neglects to mention is what they do with liquid waste. On the MIR they distill it into water. of course the astronauts are squeamish about drinking recycled urine so they put it in a machine called an Electron. And guess what the Electron does… it separates the hydrogen and oxygen in the recycled urine, then it vents the hydrogen into space and joins the oxygen with the ship supply. So, because they complained about drinking the stuff, they have to breathe recycled pee.

Think about that for a moment. Which seems worse to you? Drinking your recycled waste, or breathing it? Personally I don’t want to know where my sustenance comes from, but , theoretically, every breathe you take used to be part of someone else. Have a nice weekend.

Editors Note: Astronauts sometimes wear diapers.

photo credit: ben pollard

Jessica from Seattle asked me an oddly subversive question:

So, in the cartoons, cats and mice hate each other but they both love cheese. Oh, and dogs hate cats in the cartoons, what’s with that?

Well, I have been told that in every lie there is a seed of truth, cartoons largely being lies (convenient lies meant to lull children into a sense of false comfort that life offers something more than disappointment), and this particular TV meme offers a seed of truth. The truth is that cats hate mice in real life. They hate them so much that they will actually torment a mouse to death and then leave the severed halves on my pillow for when I get home. Also, mice do like cheese (but not as much as cookies) that is a second seed of truth, so the cat mouse lie is like a grape — it has two seeds. No, but wait… there is more a third seed of truth in your cartoon web of lies — if you fill a cat with cheese it will die. However, if you fill a mouse with cheese it will just get fat. And that Jessica is how mice and cats are like rock, paper, scissors — mouse beats cheese, cat beats mouse and cheese causes congestive heart failure.

Also since you are probably referencing Tom and Jerry I should point out that it is an elaborate allegory for the cold war era chest-beating, and the dog represents the dormant beast of China sleeping in the backyard. Tom & Jerry is just pseudo-patriotism thinly white washed with a veneer of childish violence to indoctrinate kids into being ruthless cat beaters and consumers of sugary cereals, and some junk.

photo credit: Helico

When does it stop being partly cloudy and start being partly sunny?
-Overheard

This is a topic of great philosophical debate. It spans all the way back to 383 BC when Meteorocotes posed the Doppleranus.

If there is being such a free state in that a thing could be both in sun enough to be described so and in cloud yet enough to also be described so; how then would one know which to describe oneself in partly so?

and it is believed that Doppleranus responded like this:

It is rightly considered that one has moved from partly one to partly the other if, and when, the smaller of two weather condition does surpass a description of one of three parts of observable condition in the described day.

But in Seattle, in particular, it is partly sunny from July 14th to July 20th and the rest of the year it is partly cloudy to rainy.

photo credit: zimpenfish

Seriously, Carlos, why does your dog insist on eating her poop?

-Krystal

Well, ever since I moved into the new house she has been eating a lot of grass. A very large quantity of grass, like she’s a cow. She even looks like a cow, frankly. Supposedly dogs eat grass when they have some variety of stomach issue.

It isn’t like she doesn’t eat enough. She eats dog food, several ounces of paper, as much string as she can find, occasional balls of fluff, leaves, grass, and this afternoon I caught her licking the cabinets in the bathroom. So I don’t think she is hungry.

She is pretty sneaky and will actually pretend that she is eating grass until she gets right next to a poo. Then, suddenly, she strikes (like some coprophagic jungle cat).

At first I thought she was trying to clean up after herself, but now I clean the backyard every couple of days, so that probably isn’t it. I am left with one of two conclusions: either she likes the taste OR she is dumb.

photo credit: bovinity

Oatmeal (@ – W): @inflatemouse why don’t panda bears have more sex? nature is bullshit

Well, Oatmeal, you make me think that I should start a series called “Animals Doing It.” So far I have covered how birds, porcupines and now panda bears.

So I have a couple of theories:

One – Panda bears are bored easily.

I don’t mean bored by their surroundings, I mean bored with each other. Apparently zookeepers have tried showing pandas porn, but it didn’t work. I think Chuang Chaung was thinking “How do i get with the hot piece in this video?”

Two – Pandas are very picky.

It turns out that Chuang Chaung is overweight very overweight – he is 70 pounds (32kg) heavier than the largest wild pandas. Can you blame Lin Hui for not wanting to be smooshed under a stinky obese ball of hair that watches porn all day? Then again Lin Hui is like 30 pounds (14kg) overweight herself so she should be happy that there is a team of Thai zookeepers spending their morning trying to arouse her man for her. Seriously if Lin Hui really wanted it she would just get on top.

Three – Panda Bears are not getting proper nutrition.

So apparently pandas have the digestive tracts of carnivores and the eating habits of herbivores. Let me tell you that 1.) When I was a vegetarian I didn’t have much time for things that didn’t involve eating 2.) Since pandas are eating large quantities of cellulose, which they don’t digest, they are probably gassy. But, then again, if they aren’t aroused because their partners are fat maybe we need to malnourish them to get them back in the mood for love, or strap some food to Lin Hui head and hope that her fat suitor follows her long enough for her to give up.

Four – Bear with me on this one

I think that maybe panda bears are similar to platypi, in that they are atypical mammals. Specifically I think that they secretly breed in the mountains via asexual-budding and they don’t want us to know about it. Because, come on, they all look the same.

photo credit: gogogadgetscott

Today is a special day in the del Rio house. Dita Lily “Pickle” del Rio turns two today. As my gift to her, and you, I am allowing her to answer a question I overheard at the Sasquatch Festival.

How the f*ck was cheese invented?

-Overheard

When asked Dita responds like this:

So like 10,000 years ago someone looked at a cow [ed. note: more likely a goat or sheep] and said “Self, we should squeeze this creature and drink what comes out.” So this is step one in the process and probably disgusting until they figured out which part of the cow to squeeze. I like the pink bits of the cow. [ed note: the pink bits? Ha!]

She continues:

Back in the olden times they didn’t have plastic containers so they had to store their cow squeezings in other things, like bamboo or animal bellies. One day some person forgot they had cow squeezings and left it for a really long time. When they came back they smelled the chunky stuff in the animal belly and said “This smells horrible, I’m going to put some in my mouth,” and cheese was discovered.

Seriously, cheese smells disgusting. You heard it here first, cheese was the unholy intersection of someone who liked squeezing livestock, someone with a bad memory, and, finally, someone who was willing to stick a chunky substance that smells like feet in their mouth.

Obviously the world is better for cheese, but I can only imagine that the traits that allowed for its discovery also lead to the participants dieing in writhing painful ways (e.g. poisoning or being kicked in the head by a proto-sheep)

I have been preoccupied lately. Mainly reading through and listening to the commentary about the overdose of Alex Lluch.

So I am running a special $5 (significantly lower than usual) for any questions you have, about anything, and 100% of these proceeds will be donated to a drug counseling facility in Portland. I don’t know which one yet, so, if you have suggestions please leave them in the comments.

What is your questions?