Helping Neko Case help Best Friends help companion animals

Neko Case has a new album coming out, and she's making a song from it available for free download. And for every blog that posts the download, she and her label, ANTI-, will donate $5 to Best Friends Animal Society. And since I like *both* Neko Case and Best Friends, I'm happy to help out.

Click here to download "People Got a Lotta Nerve." To find out how you can post it to your blog and help out, too, go here (where you can also preview the song first, if you want, before you download). (And if you can figure out how to get the code for the imeem player to work, let me know.)

About Best Friends (from the ANTI- page on how to blog it): Founded in 1984, Best Friends advances nationwide animal welfare initiatives by working with shelter and rescue groups around the country. On any given day Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, the nation’s largest facility for abused, abandoned and special needs companion animals located in southwestern Utah, is home to approximately 2,000 dogs, cats, horses, rabbits, birds, and other animals. The society also publishes Best Friends magazine, the nation’s largest general interest, pet-related magazine with approximately 300,000 subscribers.

I personally learned about Best Friends from the Pastry Pirate, who has visited them in Utah and was very impressed with the work they do.

Zoo, zoo, zoo!

UPDATE: OMG!!!! Baby animals!!!! So cute!!! (Yes I am a Ph.D. and a grown up. Why do you ask?)

No, not Kalamazoo. Not this time (though I have one more post to write about the conference). Rather, my post title refers to what was once known as a zoological garden. (Side note for the language history geeks: look around at the web sites for all the zoos you can think of and you'll see that "zoo" has become the standard. When did that happen, I wonder? And I don't just mean in common parlance -- in which "zoo" has been the standard all my life, at least -- but in the official titles of the zoos, too. It's like Federal Express changing to FedEx and Kentucky Fried Chicken changing to KFC.)

Anywho, I'm all excited because this afternoon Bullock and I are going to the Zoo to see the special new babies who've just come on display. They're rare, they're cute, and there are three of them, all born as some suprise to the keepers. Two are twins and the third was born to another mother at about the same time as the twins. It's quite a rare treat and I'm sooooo excited! (I'd tell you what kind of animal, but that would make it way, way, WAY too easy to pinpoint exactly who I am. If you want to spend your day figuring out which midwestern zoo has had a boom in rare-in-captivity babies to the count of three, well, you've got too much time on your hands.)

Also at the zoo currently are an abundance of baby and toddler-age primates and some other very special young ones spread around the zoo. Yay baby animals!