archy

Alright, I'll do it
Every Friday, Steve at The Modulator runs a series he calls the Ark, a sort of carnival of Friday pet/animal blogging. Cats still hold a place of honor in Friday pet/animal blogging, though a number of other species are now carving out their own niches.

Last week, PZ Meyers noted a certain other imbalance in the Friday blogging and in the way Steve reports it.

He has several categories: Cats, Dogs, Birds, Other Vertebrates, Invertebrates, and Didn't Make It.

Take a look at that list: 6 categories, and 4 of them are dedicated to a single, not remarkably successful subphylum. There are roughly 30 metazoan phyla, and 29 of them are lumped into that solitary catch-all, "Invertebrates". I mean, Steve could have at least singled out the usual top-of-the-charts phyla—Porifera, Cnidaria, Platyhelminthes, Nematoda, Mollusca, Annelida, Arthropoda, Echinodermata, and Chordata—but he didn't even do that, carrying prejudice to an extreme and relegating everything without a backbone to the invertebrate ghetto, and worse, giving favored status to a minor class, the Mammalia.

He follows this with a blood-stirring battle-cry, "Liberate the Friday Ark from the shackles of mammalocentric oppression!"

As the proprietor of the only blog I know of that is named after a cockroach, I suppose I have a certain responsibility to answer that call. Starting this Friday and continuing irregularly until I get tired of it, archy will feature Friday Cockroach (and Cat) Blogging^TM. As a special treat for those who can’t wait for two days, I give you Sean Carroll, the best physics blogger on the internets and a fine judge of cockroach poetry.