Delay of service

Sorry about the delay in posting yesterday's Daily Zoo Animal; I had a technical problem.

In related news, someone should sue Apple for their incredibly shitty MacBook power cords. I just bought my second replacement cord (60w MagSafe Power Adapter), you know--the thing that you plug into the wall? Eighty bucks. We bought the first replacement cord 8 months ago. Of course this nifty doodad connects to the computer with a magnet, so if someone trips on it or yanks it, it pops off without throwing your laptop across the room. Unfortunately the cable itself is a super thin (eighth of an inch or so) and normal use will cause it to bend and break. This thing is also patented, so you can't go to Best Buy or Target or something and buy a cheap knock-off, you have to find the one Apple store within 50 miles (or 100 miles or more, God help you people out there) and talk to one of their "geniuses" (that's what it says on their uniforms) who will explain that there is no warranty on the new one you are buying, so you buy it with the sick feeling in the pit of your stomach that you will have to go back to that wretched mall within a year and drop another 80 bucks on the damn thing. I think if we do that, we'll have spent enough that we could have bought a Dell laptop for the price of the crApple power cords.

Think different.

Daily Zoo Animal: #5, Costa Rican Zebra Tarantula

Costa Rican Zebra Tarantula Aphonopelma seemani

This strikingly beautiful arachnid lives in burrows in the Central American rainforest (or perhaps humid grasslands--there was some confusion about this in online sources). It's a quick hunter, known among tarantula hobbyists as "skittish" and possessing "a liberal dose of Houdini genes." Males have a bluish cast to the hairs on their legs, and are reputed to be very aggressive, sometimes biting their owners. Scientific information on this species was hard to come by although I did find a journal abstract which promised to explain that this animal's venom "induces necrosis of skeletal muscle in mice."

This individual (a female, I believe) lives in the Bird's World exhibit.

On this day in 365 Urban Species: Banana slug, one of my all-time most popular posts (60 comments and counting).