I bought it at Target for $14. Speaking of nightmares, how about those pants. C-bear told me that in the last pic I look like I have gargantuan saddle-bags. Earlier, Lady C scolded me for not ironing these deep navy pleated khaki’s. Clearly, I am going to have to work harder for truly fabulous Saturday fashions.

For the past twenty four to thirty six hours I have been immersed in learning about science. Sometimes these free-form research jags come on and for a couple of days I am super-intense about looking up certain subjects. Most recent on my mind have been octopodes, (otherwise known as octopi, or octopods) because I read that their third arms are the ones they used to fertilize with. They call these arms the hectocotylus.

Octopus, it turns out, are interesting beyond their sexual association with the name of my blog. These cephalopods have big brains, too. In fact, a certain kind, the “Mimic Octopus,” orients its body and tentacles, and changes the color and texture of its skin, in order to pretend that its actually a plant or different kind of fish or even a poisonous sea snake. Its not playing, however. The ability to hide from predators in this fashion is life or death for the octopus.

The sifting for nuggets of octopi knowledge lead me towards several documentary channels: BBC and PBS. On the BBC, people talked with British accents about how remarkable it was that an octopus put into an aquarium tank with a shark, killed and ate the shark. PBS was a bit tougher to use in my quest, but overnight I was able to bittorrent an HD episode of Nova called, “Cuttlefish, the Kings of Camouflage.” These little creatures are just like their cousins, squid and octopus, except a little bit weirder.

For example, in the Nova documentary the fact gets mentioned that some cuttlefish in Australia are able to cross-dress their way to procreation. While the big males fight it out by wrestling with their tentacles, the smaller male cuttlefish curl their tentacles up under themselves and pretend to be females. The crossdressing cuttlefish swims right by the aggressive males unnoticed and fertilize the females. The females will mate with many male cuttlefish and will store deposits of different daddies’ sperm up under their arms, then they actually get to choose which packet to fertilize themselves with. Paternity results revealed the fathers were crossdressing cuttlefish 70% of the time!

Maybe thats the best way for me to have kids someday. First I can start cross-dressing, then I will have to use my dress and skirt wearing to fertilize a female? No… the fertilize the female part is a deal breaker. But the dresses and skorts and heels sound fun! (Well, maybe not heels…) Beyond the science, the other big news for me is that a couple of my closest friends, E and C, have moved back to the ‘Bridge! These are the folks who have given me this forum, my blog, the third of my eight tentacles, to spread my seed on the internet, to whom I will always be grateful and for whom I have much love and respect. Welcome back!

Please feel free to give me advice or criticism in your Comments, dearies.

Here is a rough synopsis of my journey from the raw neons I began with to the rough n’ ready header that is finally up at the East Coast Grill website… 5 hours!

And I realized that maybe the best gift I could give to the Lord was some tears of his own. So to each regular customer I pointed out that the menu that day included the word, “Last.” When they inevitably asked why the Lord was leaving I deferred a straight answer and instead instructed them to make a pilgrimage to see the Lord themselves. Most understood that they’d been “seeing” the Lord regularly with the eyes of their stomach, every time they ate brunch at the East Coast Grill, and now took the opportunity and approached him with the simple but profound words… “Thank you.”

And so it was, as grateful patrons young and old each gave back those two words, in exchange for almost a decade of long hours and little sleep, that one of the most feared and respected and loved chefs in the city, discovered that his own eyes also leak.

This week I have cried twice. Not just a tear running down the cheek either; full-blown affairs. The first time was the day before the election, when Eliot sent me a message saying that Obama’s grandmother passed away. Just the thought of her holding onto life, with all her might, through all the pain, in order to not mess up her grandson’s historic campaign, and then to expire with just one day left… it was too much for me and I started crying.

The crying was good, I’m here to report. For the first time in what felt like years (note the “felt like,” I’m well aware that a snarky comment is forthcoming about how I cry on a dime) I didn’t try and stop myself and just let it out. It wasn’t just Obama’s grandmother I was thinking of; I was also thinking of my own, and how much she has done for me.

The second time I cried was listening to Colin Powell on CNN, after Obama won, talking about the inclusiveness of Obama’s campaign and how America’s acceptance of him as the first black president was part and parcel of that. Its hard to put into words, but Michelle Obama’s comment about, “for the first time in my adult life… really feeling proud of my country,” come to mind. I’m proud of myself for getting my shit together, and I’m proud of America for doing the same.

I had some friends in the basement for election night:

One more day and the long election of 2008 is over and done. As the sun comes up over the continent of North America the winner will also be illuminated. Planning to use my 3rd arm to reach out through the mystic fibers of the internet tomorrow, I will be hosting friends at my home for a Clintonian-style (circa 1992) War Room. It has been decided, somewhat reluctantly, I will play the role of Paul Begala, the Future will be James Carville, and Koh will be George Stephanopoulis.

Originally Koh and I were going to be the married couple of James Carville and Mary Matalin, but at brunch yesterday a customer screamed, “Cunt!” in full earshot of families and kids when I brought up the idea of Mary Matalin. I like Mary Matalin, but none of my friends would be safe playing her in my recreation of the War Room sixteen years after 1992. The negativity towards anyone and anything resembling Republicanism has hit an all time high here in Cambridge.

This afternoon I participated in a discussion over at the Washington Post’s website, and actually got a questioned answered by the legendary political columnist, David S. Broder. This happened quite accidentally. Last night (Sunday) I fell asleep on my couch watching, “Meet the Press,” which was still playing over and over on my computer when I woke up fourteen hours later. It must have affected the soft tissue in my brainium that computes political queries and responses. Web surfing this afternoon, I noticed that David Broder was answering questions live, so I quickly opened the form and my mind spilled forth the formation of this question:

Cambridge, Mass.: What is the strategy behind having a campaign’s affiliates go on Sunday morning shows to talk up the idea that their party is going to win in a big swing state like Pennsylvania? It seems to me that doing so would only have the effect of keeping (lazier) potential supporters at home, because they assume that their side will win the swing state.

Surprisingly, five minutes later when I turned my attention away from the Top Ten Best Hip Hop Albums of 1996 or whatever else I was surfing through, back to the Washington Post’s live discussion, David S. Broder and the moderators had chosen my question and he had answered with this:

David S. Broder: My guess is that the Republicans’ goal in talking about their hopes for Pennsylvania was to motivate voters there and elsewhere to believe that John McCain is very much in the race for president. When people believe a candidate is sure to lose, there’s not much motivation to vote.

He’s right everybody. Please continue to check in on 3rdarm.biz over the next twenty four hours as myself and a team of crack talking heads continue with updates through the crucial last day of the Presidential Election. Go vote for Obama and buy me a gourmet turkey sandwich as long as you’re leaving the computer anyway!

Substituting the words, “A Dream,” for “Hope,” is a conscious nod to the fulfillment of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Had A Dream” speech. Growing up, my birthday would often coincide with MLK Jr. day. Perhaps one of the greatest gifts I ever received was the hope that America will continue changing, my optimism. In 2009 my birthday again falls on Martin Luther King Jr. day. The day after that, January 20, is Inauguration Day. I am wishin’ and a-hopin’, hopin’ and a-dreamin’ that America elects a President Barack Obama.

Continuing with my idea of gluing the head of the Statue of Liberty as depicted on coins onto the bodies of angels… This time its the Statue of Liberty’s golden coin head atop the modern British statue, “Angel of the North.” “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Using my time consuming Gimp photoshopping abilities, I have finally created a new banner for my blog. Thanks to my sister for sailing through the choppy torrents at Pirate Bay and finding the Gotham font. I have wanted to show my support for Barack Obama on the banner for some time now but was waiting for the right idea at the right time. Waking from a nap earlier, I realized that I could use the already-altered images of me with the Obama cake, and that it should be titled, “Strange that we need,” as the earlier version, “Strange We Can Believe In.”

In the image I am wearing my purple and white striped Coogi zip-up sweater with lime green trim, my yellow and green wristband, and underneath I have on the East Coast L33t teeshirt. Arielle got that made for my birthday a couple years ago and I love it. If you save this photo and use Gimp to reverse the colors, the flag overlaying the third image of me turns red white and blue. Because I still felt the need to continue imaging for hours after the banner’s creation, I also have the image in this post.

The green sweatshirt is promotional apparel for Cambridge’s last independent donut shop, Verna’s. That place has sweet donuts, and I usually buy a dozen of them as well as sugar cookies every Sunday. The brunch team needs sugars in the blood at that hour. My sister actually protested the purchase of this pretty sweatshirt on the grounds that it was frivolous. I don’t call people out as wrong casually, but in this case she clearly ain’t right. Local businesses need support so that they can survive in this rough economy, as does Barack Obama in the telephone booth knife fight that is the last two weeks of a Presidential campaign.

To all right-leaning conservatives reading my blog… donut get fooled again. Barack Obama is the hope of a new America.