StinkFight.com

Every band that starts out thinks “We’re gonna be bigger than the Beatles.” They’re usually wrong. Well, StinkFight.com IS gonna be bigger than the Beatles. Or at least as big as BoingBoing. (Part of the reason I started this site is I submit a lot of stuff to BoingBoing, and they post about 2% of it. Fair enough, they’re busy people, and I dig them and dig what they do. But I figured I’d cut out the middleman and make my own bloggie empire.)

FAQ: What is a “Stink Fight”?

(image by Kathleen McKeehen. Used with permission.)

A. Long-tailed lemurs stink fight.

“Males engage in a social display behavior called ’stink fighting,’ which involves impregnating their tails with secretions from the antebrachial and brachial glands, and then waving the scented tail at male rivals. Males will also occasionally wave their scented tails at females as a form of sexual overture; this usually results in the female cuffing or biting the male” (from Wikipedia)

I think that sums up a lot of Internet dating. (Hopefully, someday, someone will say, “We met on Stink Fight. We’ve been happy together ever since!”)

“Male ringtails have little glands near their wrists that make stinky scent. They use this scent in “stink fights” – little battles over females! Nobody gets hurt in a stink fight. The males simply rub the nasty odor on their long tails and wave their tails around in the air to make their opponents go away. Humans can’t smell the stinky odor, because we have poor senses of smell. But the lemurs think we can! I once visited an adult male ringtail in a zoo. He spent most of the day rubbing his tail and waving it at the people who came to see him, threatening every one of them. But the people didn’t understand the threat; they thought he was being cute. So he tried and tried to make the people go away. He had almost no fur left on the tip of his tail because he had rubbed it so much. ” (from http://bcrc.bio.umass.edu/ummnh/kids.htm)

And I really think stink fighting sums up a lot of Internet arguments. People anonymously say crap on the Web and in e-mail that they’d never say in a bar or on the street, because they’d get their ass stomped.

But we’ll say anything, AND sign our real names to it. Welcome to StinkFight! Well wave our smelly tails in your face, and you’ll love it!

Not that I’m really looking for a fight. The world is going to hell, my dear, and I wish to step out of its way. I really just like the idea of a lemur stink fight because one of our cats, Fuzzbucket McFluffernutter, who is part Maine Coon, looks a lot like a lemur, and when he play fights with his brother, Peanut “The Bold” McFluffernutter, it looks like a stink fight.

Anyway, as my wife Debra Jean Dean says, “StinkFight.com is the central clearinghouse and distribution center for all of Daddy’s majestic bullshit.”

–Michael W. Dean.