impossible_animals raze "if a skunk and a rabbit had a baby," he said, "would you call it a runk? or a skabbit?" i'm partial to skabbit, myself. 231004 ... raze i'm beginning to think i am one. 250704 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Heard once on a science program: a movie with giant marauding ants has a realism problem - ants couldn't get that large and keep the same proportions. Their legs would be too thin and light to hold them up, at least in Earth's gravity. 250704 ... ovenbird On a camping trip in 2001 my mother, brother, and I had our marshmallows stolen by a creature we barely caught a glimpse of. We couldn’t be sure if it was a raccoon or a skunk and we began calling it a “rakunk.” For the rest of the trip we had a running joke about rakunks. The forest was rife with them. So you can imagine my surprise when, two years later, I found that margaret_atwood had stolen this idea and used it in her extremely popular (and legitimately excellent) book Oryx and Crake. She must have telepathic idea extraction skills. It’s the only explanation. In any event, rakunks were not an original idea. My family thought of it first. 250705 what's it to you? who go blather from