I know that a lot of people are pissed off because I haven't covered the walking panda story yet. What you have to understand is that I am battling a number of firmly entrenched financial interests in my ongoing crusade to expose the panda porn once and for all, and while nothing escapes my notice, it doesn't necessarily get written up right away, because there is a strategy at work here. I don't have the kind of resources that the panda sex industry does. In all honesty, I did mean to cover this last week, but then I got side-tracked with the Oregon Trail thing. I'm here now, though, and here it is:

TOKYO (AFP) A lesser panda is proving a hit at a zoo near Tokyo as it can stand on two legs like a human being for about 10 seconds, an unusual feat for the species, zoo officials said. The two-year-old male panda named Futa stands up several times a day when "it sees something interesting", said Hiroyuki Asano, an official of Chiba Zoological Park, southeast of the capital. "We have kept lesser pandas for nearly 20 years at this zoo, but I have not seen one like Futa, which can stand for such a long time," Asano said. "Futa is like an idol to his fans."

I remain doubtful that even a panda can make walking upright "cool", but if these fans really are driven to imitate their idol, it can't be a bad thing. Seriously, though, what does a lesser panda have to do to stop being lesser? The poor bastard is walking upright for ten whole seconds and has legions of devoted fans, and he's still a lesser panda. At some point, Futa has to begin to wonder why he even bothers.

The furry, seven-kilogramme (15 pound) animal, whose natural habitat are the mountains of China and the Himalayas, was born in another zoo in central Japan. Unlike the black-and-white giant panda, the lesser panda has brown fur with a stripe on its tail. Futa, fed fruits and bamboo every day, has a female mate, and the zoo hopes they will have a baby panda in the near future.

A PANDA'S LAMENT

FUTA: Look! I'm walking!
ZOOKEEPER: That's great. We hope you will walk over to the female panda's vagina.
FUTA: But see how the crowds enjoy my walking!
ZOOKEEPER: You know what they would really enjoy? Two pandas fucking.
FUTA: But this is nearly unprecedented among my species!
ZOOKEEPER: We must have more panda babies. All else is irrelevant.

Apparently - and I'm not making this up - Futa has a grandfather named Ron who is also good at walking upright. Way to go, Ron. But nothing in the world matters less than a panda who's too old to make more babies.

Every once in a while, I feel a responsibility to put something on here that absolutely nobody other than myself is going to find amusing. This photo gallery is fairly old - it's from my second day in Russia, when I was scraping the bottom of the barrel for things to do by myself in Vladivostok on a rainy day. There was a museum built in mounds overlooking the bay with decommissioned chain guns and missiles sitting around, and I don't even know if I was supposed to be walking around up there, and I guess technically I don't even know if any of them were actually decommissioned, but eventually I wandered into a cave-like museum dedicated to the Russians who had, throughout history, kept Asians out of this particular area. And, as it so often does, a certain madness set in, and I started trying to photograph the little army men in the museum's many dioramas in dramatic ways. The lighting was very bad (I believe there were proles on treadmills at the power station), but I did my best, and I really do think the last few are nice. I could make this one available as a print. It's even more pleasant at three times the size.

I still haven't found a satisfactory program for making simple, unobtrusive photo albums. I had wrangled Picasa to behave more or less as I wanted it to, but installing the otherwise excellent Picasa 2 replaced my modifications with the butt-ugly defaults. Jesus! I bore even myself with this technical discourse. My love affair with Gmail ended abruptly today when I received a "Lockdown in Sector 4!" message that kept me out of my email all day, which I found stressful. (Fuck your sci-fi whimsy! I could be missing important messages from Nigerian bank executives! The Nigerians prize me for my turn-around time.) Admittedly, I got a lot of work done, but it's not an experience I'd like to repeat. Access to my account was restored, unannounced, a few hours later. A cursory web search revealed a variety of factors that cause Gmail accounts to get locked down, but I don't know which one did me in. If someone tried to send me a monkey, please let me know and I will give you an alternate email address. Apparently it's against the Terms of Use to send live animals as attachments. Who reads those things?