Hey wait!!! I am *not* Hamtastic! I am Capyrific!

Posted by Ned (Toronto, Canada) on 21 December 2006 in Animal & Insect.

Mia took this picture.
This a cool looking capybara who lives at the Metro Toronto Zoo. I don't know much about these guys aside from they are the hugest rodent there is. No idea if it is male or female either.

It was a nice day and these guys were relaxing. You can see that there is water in their habitat and that is because capybaras like to swim around. If you want to see one you'll have to look it up yourself, but their swimming style makes them look like furry hippos.

I am not able to say that capybaras are the ONLY rodents who can swim but mostly rodents don't like being in the water much. I have seen swimming mice and swimming rats but I'm not sure that they were too thrilled about having to do it. And wetting a hamster could kill it(!) because they are very prone to lung infections and temperature changes (like being wet) mess with them badly, so if you get them wet they often get hamonia.

I have offered both of the employees here at Hamtastic dust to try to bathe in because I have read and heard about hams enjoying this practice, but they both thought I was being pretty stupid and looked at me like I was an idiot (I have the photographic proof of this, see 2006-11-25). It was worth a try (though I did feel a little out of sorts paying almost $5.00 for a kilogram of dust), and if anyone in the Toronto area would like a mostly full bag of chinchilla dust you're welcome to take it off my hands (seriously!, I don't need to keep the stuff, but I'm not about to toss out such valuable dust).

Stupid media review:
Ike! Inachû takkyû-bu
The Ping-Pong Club
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0309163/

This is an anime series about a boys after school ping-pong club and them clowning around. There are lots of crude sexual and fart type jokes, I like that sort of thing. I have heard that it is "the japanese south park" this might be true, but I think "South Park" is terrible garbage (the only good part of SP is that it is produced so quickly that it can actually be relevantly topical, staying on the heels of current events, otherwise the gimmick of foul mouthed kids is fairly lame and corny) and "Ping-Pong Club" is hilareous fun (I believe the SP and PPC comparison can be made only in that they both employ crude humor and both are animated, any similarities end there for me).

(special warning: I watched this series {it is available both sub-titled and dubbed} with someone who spent some time growing up in Japan and speaks the language and there are lots of Japanese cultural jokes and references which I would not have been able to have find the humor in otherwise)

I have also watched some of the episodes dubbed in english myself just to see what it was like, aside from not being used to the voices the jokes were still hilareous.

This series is not well known and is very hard to find, it is sold on incredibly chintzy 2-episode dvd's (which would force you to pay 50 bucks to see this series, it may be good but I wouldn't pay 50 bucks to watch a series that I had only heard about and never seen, and is relatively poorly animated) so don't buy them.

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