"Larry Wallach’s Long Island–based sloth business, Sloth Encounters, charges interested parties $50 per half-hour to encounter his sloths."

"'Feeding them, petting them, and even holding our sloth babies!' The company’s website claims its two-room storefront across from Carvel in Hauppauge is a very close environmental approximation to 'the jungles of Costa Rica' and notes that should you wish to buy a sloth, your admission fee will go toward your purchase.... 'This isn’t a zoological park... It’s literally an old pool store that he blacked out the windows and put some fake plants inside.'"

From "Sloths Are Tearing Apart Suffolk County" (NY Magazine).

"I've been rethinking my spirit animal. I'm not sure how souls are transpositioned when we pass over to the great beyond."

"Perhaps because of my primate heritage I've always been partial to tree dwelling animals. Bonobos look like they have a pretty good deal, but they're a little too hyper for me. Althouse in a previous blog post really blew the lid ofd squirrels. Nothing much to recommend their manic, futile lives...... Of all tree dwelling creatures I'm most enamored of the sloth. They show an economy of effort in their struggles with existence, and their sad eyes demonstrate a zen awareness of the underlying futility of those struggles. I don't know how much say you're given in your choice for the next manifestation, but I would be comfortable with reincarnation as a sloth. Why wait? The way that that Kafka guy became a cockroach, I have evolved into a sloth. I don't cling to a tree branch, but I spend a lot of time on my posturpedic mattress. You can changer the position of the bed without ever leaving it. In some ways it's slothier than a tree branch."

Wrote William in last night's café. What I said about squirrels — in the first post of the day yesterday — was:

Squirrels don't have the brainpower to think of committing suicide. They don't even have the wits to think of not bothering to get food and just to waste away because what is the point of all this skittering around collecting nuts? They don't even think of scampering to another spot on the globe to see if the nuts taste different somewhere out there. And they don't think of throwing themselves off a high limb and ending it all. I have seen from my window squirrels falling from high in a tree. They hit the ground and immediately get up and run. Run run run. Get get get. It never stops until death snatches them. They don't go hurling themselves into the arms of death. It's just not a squirrel concept. I know. I read their mind from my vantage point here at the computer in front of the big window looking out on the trees.

The post had been about how to use all the mesclun from the garden, the potential to make a smoothie, the related need for a frozen banana "squirreled... away in the freezer," and a video of an squirrel — a Viennese squirrel — getting fed a banana. I only brought up suicide in the comments because Loren W Laurent, dragging in the demise of Anthony Bourdain, said:

The squirrel doesn't need to travel the world, compulsively looking for new tastes to satiate the hole in the self of wanting more.

Respect the squirrel....

For the squirrel survival is enough.

The kindness of a banana is magic.

Appreciate magic; don't expect it.

Don't become addicted to it.

Failed junkie.

#StonerSloth.

The trouble with anti-drug ads — it's always been this way — is however you do it, whatever you say, it encouraged drug use. Here's the current effort from Australia:

A stoned sloth is the face of a new campaign from the NSW Government aimed at deterring teenagers from smoking cannabis with the tagline "You're worse on weed". The #StonerSloth campaign, jointly released with St Vincent's Alcohol and Drug Information Service, has garnered significant reaction on social media, with #StonerSloth trending at number one on Twitter Australia on Saturday.

Garnered? Who writes this stuff? Jeb Bush?

AND: Here's "Top 10 Worst Anti-Drug Commercials," by Mojo, which ends by asking what we think is the #1 worst anti-drug commercial. I said: "The egg. Nothing beats the egg."

"MOTH: Sloth? This is Moth./SLOTH: Hello, Moth."

I wasn't going to link to this, because we already talked about the sloth-moth article in the NYT, but in last night's "Retriever Café," roger wondered "when are we going to get back to discussion of sloth shit............" Yeah, those are roger's dots, and I wanted to help.

This blog is about helping people, you know. For example, I also helped the person who said that "Daily Show" embedded video was autoplaying. I edited in a page break so you'd have to click "more" to get to it, even though another commenter (rh) had already given some tech advice about how to prevent autoplay — which is something, I guess, that's built into Safari, because it wasn't autoplaying for me, but I don't want it autoplaying for anybody.

And Kevin asked (about the photo at the Café): "Was that imac back in the corner bad? Is that why you gave it a 'time-out'?" So I'm helping Kevin by answering: That computer is bad, but it took its own time out, and the time out that it chose was forever. If only mild, maternal chastisement would restore its goodness, but it was good for a long time, and I'd love to give it a nice send-off, but it's hellishly hard to rid oneself of an old computer. Even though I have tech people to help me, I have 25 years of expired Macintoshes in corners of my various rooms, all unburied.

Quaestor drops down out of his tree to poop on iMacs:

All iMacs are bad and should be relegated to the darkest corner of the unsold merchandise warehouse. With a lot of swoopy plastic style to wow the yokels, and a lot more instant obsolescence built in (not a bug, but a feature)....

Not a bug, but a moth......... Hey, Quaestor, my last 4 iMacs are metal and they're no more "swoopy" than an iPhone, which wowed people — those whom you call "yokels" — with the simplest possible design, in glass and metal, back when they were used to plastic phones with the kind of linear ridges about which carmakers are sometimes delusional.

Why does the 3-toed sloth, unlike the 2-toed sloth, descend from its tree to defecate?

Why take the risk? The risk is only taken maybe once a week, but still: "The sloth is highly vulnerable on the ground and an easy prey for jaguars in the forest and for coyotes and feral dogs in the chocolate-producing cacao tree plantations that it has learned to colonize." The 2-toed sloth defecates from the tree, so why does the 3-toed sloth descend?

University of Wisconsin biologists find the key — which involves moths and algae — to this mystery.

"My entire life had been waiting for this moment where I would get to interact — I'm serious! — with a sloth."

AND: Kristin explains the intensity of her emotions:



It's about baby sloths.