It's one of those days when the slightest breeze causes a torrent of leaves. Some trees are just looking for any excuse.

PROTEST! Any parent whose kids went through a Pokemon phase knows the truth - the sick, sick truth - at the heart of the entire subculture. It's cockfighting. The creatures are kept in small dark cold balls, then released into the world only to find themselves in desperate combat.

PETA agrees.

The game encourages you to stun and electrify your trainer, which is okay because he's a person, and people are disposable in almost any form. What really counts are helpless creatures into which we can project almost anything, our own moral vanity included. Heck, especially that!

The full game - slow, dull, pedantic - is here. Warning: because the site was coded by chimps rescued from a research facility, the game autoplays, and there's music.

VIDEO Because there's a curse word at the end, I'm not embedding this. But it's the popular video of the moment: The rootin' tootin' rainstorm with the big ka-bang conclusion.

It's 45 seconds long, which makes it rather epic-length for these things. There might be additional footage of the tree after the explosion, or the delayed reaction of the dog, but they probably held that back for the Extended Edition, or a sequel.

Here's a video without any swearing, just screaming and a cow. It was the 34th more popular viral video of 2006.

FACT OF THE DAY This Digg link says: Underpaid Genius - 10% of all photos ever taken were shot in 2011. Wow: that's an interesting statistic. I believe I will incorporate that into my toolbox of facts and figures casually inserted into a conversation with a certain authority. If anyone asks the source, I'll just cock an eyebrow and look amused and change the subject to the number of cellphones with cameras, which makes the truth of the statistic self-evident.

But this is tumblrland, which means it's going to be a breadcrumb trails of vias and liked and reblogged. Underpaidgeniusgoes to this tumblr, which says he got it from here, and that's where the stat is displayed with a source - Fortune magazine - but NO LINK, because he got the quote from the print edition.

Google the phrase, and you'll gets 16 pages of returns. (Over 16 million results, but the phrase peters out after 16 pages.) Fortune magazine online is no help, because it's folded into money.cnn.com. So we have to take the OPs word for the quote's veracity - and assume the article is correct. Other than that, wow! 10% of all photos ever take were shot in 2011. FACT. I guess.

EWWW If you've ever wondered "hey, if I win a python in a roach-eating contest, and I die from eating roaches, is the python considered part of my estate, and thereby something my heirs can claim?" The answer is yes.