Just in time for Christmas. I don't know what your Advent traditions are, gentle readers. With my family the activity I remember most vividly is the frosting of cookies cut into the shapes of various Christmas-y items: stars; bells; camels; and that one Christmas tree that got further and further bent until it was either a lightning bolt or a paramecium. We used a simple sugar frosting dyed a bright, toxic yellow, blue, red, or green with food coloring.

After I made a reindeer entirely covered in Red Hots and hundreds and thousands (which term may be just obscure enough to warrant a randomly Googled link), which no one else would touch, the obvious conclusion was drawn. If one could create a cookie so foully decorated that only oneself could enjoy it, one was sure to get that cookie, and never mind a just division of the spoils. Soon, cookies which appeared to have been dipped into powerful chemicals, as Batman's nemesis the Joker was, were all we produced. This arms race ended with my sister's development of the Ultimate Weapon: the Pooping Santa. After that we made less colorful but rather more tasteful designs.

Anyhoo. All this lead-in is for a site about with which I spent a happy time mucking. OBIS, the Ocean Biogeographic Information System, lets you search for oceanic life by "date, depth, custom region, genus, species", common name, or by clicking on a large map of the world they have thoughtfully provided. It's a lovely toy, and gave me an idea for a really excellent Advent Calendar. Go on, see if you can find some carnivorous sponges.