Gneiss. Marmot.

Global warming is making monster marmots:

(via Alan)

“skinny, yellow, toothless, bald-headed, rat-eyed”

Mark Twain via Andrew Delbanco in the NYRB:

A reviewer who panned The Gilded Age is a “reptile.” A publisher who refused Twain’s terms is an “animal,” and, more particularly, a “skinny, yellow, toothless, bald-headed, rat-eyed” animal.

Well, probably not toothless, but "absence of evidence..."

Estoatropia

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Estoatropia

Stoats of exhaustion

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A moving story

The weasel used all its might to move its companion's body:

China Smack via the Rumpus via Jenny Davidson

The story begins rather dramatically with the motiveless murder of a weasel -- which I suspect is Engrish for "roadkill."

"Ferret-faced"

A.A. Gill, the dyspeptic ranter best known (per Wikipedia) for calling the Welsh "loquacious dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls," came within the scope of this blog for his remarks on Albanians:

The Sunday Times faces the threat of legal action for inciting racial hatred after a piece by AA Gill branded Albanians "short and ferret-faced".
The feature, headlined "The Land That Time Forgot", was published in the Sunday Times Magazine on 23 July, and detailed Gill's visit to the Balkan state.
He described the country as "a Ruritania of brigands and vendettas" and the people as "short and ferretfaced, with the unisex stumpy, slightly bowed legs of Shetland ponies".
Gill also described the Albanian language as "a ready-made code for criminals", adding: "There are four million Albanian citizens… three million of them live at home, the fourth quarter work abroad, and what they do is mostly illegal."

Stoata Bene

Apparently Levitt and Dubner's sequel to Freakonomics contains a bunch of howlers re global warming. I don't fully trust any of the people who've been going on about this -- Ezra Klein is a hack; Krugman is being snide and dismissive -- but here are a couple of blogposts that seem to be by relatively disinterested parties, who agree that Levitt and Dubner don't know what they're talking about. One of them is from Stoat, which was formerly at mustelid.blogspot.com (hence the location of this post); the other is at Nature's climate change blog.

PS Joe Romm's remarks on solar panels (and the email he quotes) are also worth reading even if the rest of his post is a little intemperate.