We sneer at pictures of cute little kitties looking up adoringly at the camera.
We guffaw at warm and fuzzy tales of puppy love and doggy loyalty.
Bird stories make us chirp with amusement, while hamsters, mice, and gerbils just spin our wheels.
We are cephalopod groupies, and not even Cute Overload can overcome a devotion for all things cold, wet, tentacled, and, above all, flexible.
Today's first story comes from Australia: What would a beer commercial be like without an octopus stylist?:
The octopus stylist was blonde, pretty in a chirpy sort of way, with the same confident pointy chin as the film actress Reese Witherspoon. I'd never met an octopus stylist before. I realised immediately that for the rest of my life whenever the subject of octopus-styling came up I would think of her.
On a more serious note–no, really!–a British yachting racer tells of his encounter with a giant squid:
Meanwhile Mike Golding, the leading Brit in the race, was also in a good mood this morning despite an incident with a giant squid, which has covered his hull and the lower part of his sails in ink. Mike Golding commented: "The decks and even the foot of the head sail were covered in what looks like squid ink and there's an awful lot of it. It looks like it was shot from ahead. Whatever it was, it was pretty big, but I'm not worried - I'm bigger!"
