Oh, hey, it's that second cousin who tries to talk to you about sports stats and can't read that you don't care.

Alli Ward, here with another episode of Oligies.

Woo, what a week, my friends.

What a week. I'm recording this after a few days of being glued to live streams of government hearings, and I'm just hoping everyone's taking care of themselves.

Maybe going out to take a breather, talking to a frog, letting yourself by the fancy salad dressing at the store, because sometimes you just got an unwind.

So this episode hopefully will help. It's so amazing. I think you will find it equivalent to like a bag of jelly beans that you've selected out of the bulk bins, where there's not a single bean in a flavor you don't enjoy.

It's just pure delight. And some of the best long form storytelling I have ever heard.

I just, I set up the mics. I forced a world respectedologist to talk into them, and I interjected occasionally with some gasps.

She's amazing. Before we get to that feast, let's do some formalities. Let's tuck our napkins into our collar, if you will.

Thank you to all the folks who have logged into patreon.com slash Oligies to donate a buck or more a month to support the show.

And that helps me pay a wonderful editor. Hi, Steven. And let's me continue doing this, which it's my favorite thing to do. So thank you for that.

Thank you to everyone who gets merch at Oligiesmerch.com. There's some really great ball college sweatshirts, backpacks are up, bird patterned mugs, just a whole mess of awesome.

Thank you also to the amazing producers at Linton Entertainment, who make not one, but two of the science shows I work on. And this Saturday, I'm just going to plug it. I'm going to plug it right now.

October 6, my very own solo science show premieres on the CW. It's called Did I Mention Invention with Ali Ward. And I don't know how to celebrate other than just like squealing into a jar and then running a top of mountain to release it like your somebody Sam.

If you're hearing this before noon on Tuesday, October 2nd, I'm doing a Reddit AMA at noon Pacific time. So just putting those things out there to celebrate this new show.

All right, thank you to listeners who rate and subscribe. You guys keep allergies in the front of new eyeballs and earholes growing this kind of curious cult of all of sites.

And especially thank you to the ones who take a minute to review because I am nothing if not creepy. And you know I read them all. And then I present you with a still moist one such as this review from VSK Stark, who says this podcast is amazing in so many ways.

And then they say some nice stuff about me that I'm too embarrassed to read aloud and then also say the editing is genius and the content I would say is juicy spicy learning.

It brings a smile to my day when I commute. I highly recommend it.

I think we might need a sweatshirt. This is juicy spicy learning. Am I right? Well, we're got it. Okay, on to theology functional morphology. That's a lot of syllables. One in a Sam hell does it mean? Well, it pretty much means the study of form and function.

So the anatomy of an organism and then what the hell that anatomy does. So like, why do we have eyelashes? What's up with the little head stool things on top of a giraffe face? Why do some animals get to have so many stomachs and butts? Why?

I originally heard of thisologist and I thought, okay, whale scientist, her bio on Twitter says whale scientist. She is the foremost expert on carving up sometimes explosively decomposing whales on beaches worldwide.

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