At a maximum 30 cm (1 ft) in total length, the vampire squid is no threat to humans. Its 15 cm (6 inch) gelatinous body varies in color between velvety jet-black and pale reddish, depending on location and lighting conditions. A webbing of skin connects its eight arms, each lined with rows of fleshy spines or cirri; the inside of this "cloak" is black. Only the distal half (farthest from the body) of the arms have suckers. Its limpid, globular eyes; which appear red or blue, also depending on lighting; are proportionately the largest in the animal kingdom at 2.5 cm (1 inch) in diameter.
Mature adults have a pair of ear-like fins projecting from the lateral sides of the mantle. These fins serve as the adult's primary means of propulsion: vampire squid "fly" through the water by flapping their fins. Their powerful beak-like jaws are as white as ivory. Within the webbing are two pouches wherein the tactile velar filaments are concealed. The filaments are analogous to a true squid's tentacles, extending well past the arms; however, they are a different arm pair than the squid's tentacles. Instead, the filaments are the same pair that were lost by the ancestral octopuses.
The Vampire Squid is almost entirely covered in light-producing organs called photophores. The animal has great control over the organs, capable of producing disorienting flashes of light for fractions of a second to several minutes in duration. The intensity and size of the photophores can also be modulated. Appearing as small white discs, the photophores are larger and more complex at the tips of the arms and at the base of the two fins, but are absent from the underside of the caped arms. Two larger white areas on top of the head were initially believed to also be photophores, but have turned out to be photoreceptors.
The chromatophores (pigment organs) common to most cephalopods are poorly developed in Vampire Squid. While this means the animal is not capable of changing its skin colour in the dramatic fashion of shallow-dwelling cephalopods, such trickery is not needed at the pitch-black depths where it lives.
Undressed by Buzzards | A Princess from the Ayodhya Region | Arboreal Locomotion
Once a naval battle was underway, for the men involved, there were numerous ways for them to meet their end. Drowning was perhaps the most common way for a crew member to perish. Once a trireme had been rammed, the ensuing panic that engulfed the men trapped below deck no doubt extended the amount of time it took the men to escape. Inclement weather would greatly decrease the crew's odds of survival, leading to a situation like that off Cape Athos in 411 (12 of 10,000 men were saved).An estimated 40 000 Persians died in the Battle of Salamis. In the Peloponnesian War, at the Battle of Arginusae six Athenian generals were executed for failing to rescue several hundred of their men clinging to wreckage in the water.
If the men did not meet a watery grave, they might be taken prisoner by the enemy. In the Peloponnesian War, "Sometimes captured crews were brought ashore and either cut down or maimed - often grotesquely, by cutting off the right hand or thumb to guarantee that they could never row again." The image found on an early-fifth-century black-figure, depicting prisoners bound and thrown into the sea being pushed and prodded under water with poles and spears, shows that enemy treatment of captured sailors in the Peloponnesian War was often quite brutal. The idea of troops being speared amid the wreckage of destroyed ships seems the most common way of dealing with enemy sailors in the Peloponnesian War.
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Sea hares are herbivore/herbivorous, and are typically found on seaweed in shallow water. It seems to be the case that some young sea hares are capable of burrowing in soft sediment leaving only their rhinophores and mantle opening showing. Sea hares have an extremely good sense of smell. They can follow even the faintest scent using their rhinophores, which are extremely sensitive chemoreceptors.
Their color corresponds with the color of the seaweed they eat: red sea hares have been feeding on red seaweed. This camouflages them from predators. When disturbed, a sea hare can release ink from its ink glands, providing a potent deterrent to predators. This release acts as a smoke screen, while at the same time, adversely affecting the smell sensors of their predators. In a small environment, this ink could be toxic to the inhabitants. The color of the ink is white, purple or reddish, depending on the color of the pigments in their seaweed food source. Their skin contains a similar toxin that renders sea hares largely inedible to many predators.
Some sea hares can employ jet propulsion as a locomotory method, although without the sophisticated cognitive machinery of the cephalopods their motion is somewhat erratic.
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In philosophy, an aporia is a philosophical puzzle or a seemingly insoluble impasse in an inquiry, often arising as a result of equally plausible yet inconsistent premises. It can also denote the state of being perplexed, or at a loss, at such a puzzle or impasse. The notion of an aporia is principally found in Greek philosophy, but it also plays a role in post-structuralist philosophy, as in the writings of Derrida and Irigaray, and it has also served as an instrument of investigation in analytic philosophy.
Plato's early dialogues are often called his 'aporetic' dialogues because they typically end in aporia. In such a dialogue, Socrates questions his interlocutor about the nature or definition of a concept, for example virtue or courage. Socrates then, through elenctic testing, shows his interlocutor that his answer is unsatisfactory. After a number of such failed attempts, the intelocutor admits he is in aporia about the examined concept, concluding that he does not know what it is. In Plato's Meno (84a-c), Socrates describes the purgative effect of reducing someone to aporia: it shows someone who merely thought he knew something that he does not in fact know it and instills in him a desire to investigate it.
"The question, then, is why novelists have ceded their ground to science. And from the writer’s perspective, if not from the reader’s, an allegorical interpretation of the neuronovel does seem possible. Is the interest in neurological anomaly not symptomatic of an anxiety about the role of novelists in this new medical-materialist world, which happens also to be a world of giant publishing conglomerates and falling reading rates? Are novelists now, in their own eyes and others’, only special cases, without specialized and credentialed knowledge, who may at best dispense accurate if secondhand medical (or historical or sociological) information in the form of an entertaining fictional narrative? And is the impulse to write not an inexplicable compulsion, a category of disorder outside the range of normal? Do writers need special institutions that recognize and treat their mental peculiarities, without granting these any special visionary status? (Such institutions are known as MFA programs.) Perhaps the writer also needs an understanding spouse who will not leave him when he creates her double, or a family that tries to accommodate his strange habits. Most novelists also have grounds for fearing that Ian McEwan, tribune of the healthy brain, will defeat them in the combat over readers and their money. To put all this more simply, the neuronovel tends to become a variety of meta-novel, allegorizing the novelist’s fear of his isolation and meaninglessness, and the alleged capacity of science to explain him better than he can explain himself."
Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire | Variance | Ahamkara
Unholy momonga, everybody's so mellow today. It must be the cold weather wearing away at us. Although it is 5am I suppose. And yet I'm listening to dubstep and reading about Pliny the Elder. The site where I buy all my books has all 5 volumes of his Natural History. Tempting, very tempting, you naughty bookstore.
Compiling so much information didn't leave much time for fact checking, and Pliny verified little of what he wrote. Among the marvels he described were monstrous races in far-off places: evil-eyed Illyrians, one-legged Monocoli and animal-human hybrids. Monsters particularly congregated, he suspected, in places like India and Ethiopia. He also described a boy who rode to and from school on a dolphin's back, and the gigantic skeletal remains of the mythical hunter Orion. He described a battle between an elephant and a dragon, whose blood combined, to account for the origin of cinnabar. He wrote of elephants walking to a river for a purification ritual at the new moon then carrying their young in a procession afterwards. He wrote a touching account of an slow-witted pachyderm who was found practicing his assigned tasks at night so as not to get beaten for a clumsy performance the next day. Pliny described petrified shark teeth as glossopetrae (tongue stones), and wrote of the octopus, "No animal is more savage in causing the death of a man in the water." He recommended treating a scorpion's bite by consuming the animal's ashes in a glass of wine. He wrote that bear cubs are born as shapeless lumps of white flesh that must be gradually licked into shape by their mothers. He wrote about "king bees."
en·tro·py n. pl. en·tro·pies
1. SymbolS For a closed thermodynamic system, a quantitative measure of the amount of thermal energy not available to do work.
2. A measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.
3. A measure of the loss of information in a transmitted message.
4. The tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity.
5. Inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society.
Entropy is the only quantity in the physical sciences that seems to imply a particular direction for time, sometimes called an arrow of time. As we go "forward" in time, the second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system tends to increase or remain the same; it will not decrease. Hence, from one perspective, entropy measurement is thought of as a kind of clock.
The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.
- Sidney Coleman & F. de Luccia, Gravitational effects on and of vacuum decay
Telephos and Auge | You Entered the Room Slowly | Cathartic Knowledge
I really have nothing to say, but posting in here has become a serious habit lately. Hmm. Well. You know I never can tell if life is getting better or worse for me. It isn't staying the same but it's like all the changes don't mean a lot to me, they don't significantly alter my way of life. Other people appear to me this way too, although in their case I always feel like I'm a step behind the herd, not straggling but not catching up either. When I talk to them it's hard to say focussed on what they're saying because I start thinking about what they meant when they said such and such a thing while they keep talking. If they paused between sentences for a minute I think it would be quite good for me. A kind of slow, meditative way of conversing, like between two complete idiots, but with each intensely scrutinizing the other's dialectics. But then I would probably wind up getting lost in the landscape of their face, studying them as an aesthetic object while the blips and noises they make with their mouths become the ambient soundtrack to the show. Shadowy impressions, clusters of flowering freckles, titulary moles that have been around from birth and stand like ground-down forts in strategic places, the flat fields of yesterday slowly being plowed, and the evening of their eyes. This happens to me a lot as well, I'm the worst conversationalist in the world. It's like talking to a mule or a seagull, probably; a mule who looks interested more in the carrots you're holding, and a seagull that keeps hopping around and flapping its wings as if its about to take off. Sometimes I'll even just drift off completely and start thinking about other things, or I'll be reminded of a book or a film by something I see or hear, or music will play that I recognize and like, or I'll just see something more interesting, somebody doing or wearing something unusual, or an assembly of trees dropping notes on the pavement for the ants to carry away and read. I try to make up for my general uselessness by being nice or by being full of myself to a ridiculous degree. I don't keep track of the things I say but I think that they're mostly inconsequential and evasive and foolishly opinionated all at once, and the knowledge I'm so proud of is mostly general and made-up on the spot. I feel ashamed that I don't take people more seriously, ashamed of my neglect, but then since I'm this way isn't it better to talk less? Or not at all? I used to be able to do the latter all the time, or rather I was usually too shy but slowly I changed my attitude to one of deliberate silence. Now when I don't talk it's like I'm holding up a stop sign for traffic, but sometimes a van load of words will run the light, swerve, hit the curb, and roll onto another persons' lawn.
A lot of people in my family, both living and ghosts, have emotional problems that make communication difficult. My mothers' mothers' mother had frequent stays in a sanitorium of some kind. She used to just pack her bags and say she was going on a trip, and her children - four girls and a boy - assumed it was normal for their mother to go away for months at a time. I don't know what they thought she was doing, but they accepted her absence. I feel like I could easily do the same at some point in the future. I say that without melodrama, without any sense of horror - actually I'm looking forward to it. If I don't then it will because I've decided to join a Buddhist monastery or had my brains blown out in some pointless duel.
If the weather would just stay warm I think I wouldn't need such consolations.
In the window of a shop that I pass by every day there's a notice that reads "Never do anything important with your shoes on". I have always thought of it as more of a warning than a homily and even today I go barefoot whenever I can in case something I'm doing turns out to have a significance I'm unaware of.
The paper that the notice is written on is a yellowish grey, like the sad stones that lead up to Koschei's house on the hill where I walk to once a week with his gifts. Feeling how much of a burden my visit is to him I always walk slowly, shortening my steps as I get closer. It would be easy to duck behind a tree and drop the fruit on the ground, but somebody might walk by one day and notice the smell of their fermenting mixed with that of the wet pine needles and bird dung. Unlikely, since nobody but me comes to see Koschei, and in any case it's not like I don't want to see him, and if he thinks I'm a nuisance it's only because he associates me with the bothersome villagers who insist on sending him this tribute. The weather on our island is much warmer than it used to be seven years ago and there's never any lack of grapes and apples to bring to Koschei. They used to reserve their best to put in my rucksack, but like the unexceptional fruit they pick out now without much thought, that was all fed to his birds - by me, since he seemed to like to see me do it.
The first time I was so scared that I couldn't help myself - I turned into a chair. Not a particularly nice chair, but a simple one made of red pine, like you might find in the classroom of a small school. Instead of gasping or running away in shock he suddenly grew very interested. At first he circled around me, humming and ahh-ing, looking me up and down. Then he touched my back and my legs, delicately and modestly, as if he couldn't decide whether I was still a person or not, or if I had been a chair to begin with. Then he sat down on me, and leaned back. I couldn't see his face but by his relaxed posture he must have found me quite comfortable.
When he stood up again it was like he had transferred his calmness to me, and I changed back. My body seemed to remember the pressure of his body on my knees and chest and I felt a foolish impulse to ask him if he wouldn't like to rest on me for a while longer. I didn't want to make a worse impression than I already had though. And also I dimly recalled that my parents had instructed me not to be too familiar with this man who was really a stranger to everyone, no matter that he was all they talked about at the time. Since I couldn't say what was on my mind I mutely followed him out back to his verandah where he sat and drank small thimbles of potent liquor while I fed the fruit to his birds, who hearing him whistle to them came fluttering out of the treetops. Like the faded old sign there is something about this scene which I have been a part of so many times that makes me uneasy and puts me on my guard for hidden meanings, but if there is anything behind it all I've yet to figure it out.
If only it stood in opposition to something I might be able to place it. Like my friend who everyone calls Misty because shes cries so much. It's easy to understand her because she's sentimental and and takes even abstract things to heart, whereas I'm insensitive and and unresponsive, even at funerals and birthday parties. How she contrasts with me is how I know her. But the scene with Koschei is too many things all at once, it contradicts itself. The birds and Koschei, the house and the trees, what I go there to do and what I end up doing - it's all opposites with no center.
I was at my Great Aunts' today, diagnosing her internets, and noticing a couple of books she had. One was The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th century guide to contemplative prayer, author unknown, published by penguin, lying open on her coffee table. The other was on a shelf in her hall, titled I think The Veil of Loneliness. I only noticed the title and can't find it with google, but I found two possibilities. One is that the book is actually The Well of Loneliness, and my Aunt is a closet lesbian (as well as a 60-year old virgin). And the other is that it's a collection of poetry by Khalil Gibran, but not one listed in Wikipedia. I only suspect this because I came across a quotation of his in the search results about loneliness, and I sort of almost remember reading his name on the spine of the book. Anyway my research led me to these nearly symmetrically opposite quotations:
"And so I urge you, go after experience rather than knowledge. On account of pride, knowledge may often deceive you, but this gentle, loving affection will not deceive you. Knowledge tends to breed conceit, but love builds. Knowledge is full of labor, but love, full of rest." (The Cloud of Unknowing)
“A man’s merit lies in his knowledge and in his deeds, not in his color, faith, or descent. For remember, my friend, the son of a shepherd who possesses knowledge is of greater worth to a nation than the heir to a throne, if he be ignorant. Knowledge is your true patent of nobility, no matter who your father or what your race may be.” (A Second Treasury of Kahlil Gibran)
Now my Aunts' dog, her name is Lucy, a fat black Labrador. She's very good-natured except for on two points: she growls threateningly if she wants the food you're eating, and barks at pedestrians who wear hooded sweaters, scarves, or carry umbrellas.
My Aunt herself has a friend who is 85 years old. Nearly fifty years ago my Aunt, working as a nurses' aide in a small town hospital (now defunct, converted into a retirement home), delivered this womans' seventh child, because the other hospital staff were busy extracting other children when she went into labor. They've been close ever since.
All this is very well and nice. Too nice really. The lady I spoke to on the phone, from the ISP, her name was Lisa and she was utterly nice as well. I feel like saying something horrible just to balance my day out a little.
My allergies are playing up today. And in other bad news this thread is going to sound like one of those magazines full of sentimental human-interest stories for a little while longer.
Four years ago my grandmother was diagnosed with emphysema. Thinking she was going to die, she planted white hollyhocks around the cottage for my grandfather to remember her by. No, I lie, it was around their motor home which they holiday in. They were parked out at the beach for the whitebaiting season. (Whitebait are young fish; in Europe the term applies to young herring, but in other parts of the world it is used for similar fish of other species. Whitebait are tender and edible. The entire fish is eaten including head, fins and gut but typically each 'bait' is only 25-50 mm in length and about 3 mm in cross section.)
(Whitebaiting is the activity of catching whitebait.)
They taste like nothing. People pay a premium for them and then fry them in a kind of omelette so that they taste like eggs and salt and cooking oil.
They were parked out at Colac Bay and I can't see rationality in planting flowers on the beach. She has more poetry than sense. Four seasons later and it's my grandfather who is closer to crossing over. He has angina, prostate troubles, and a few weeks ago was diagnosed with leukemia. It is the slow, chronic leukemia. He's in pretty good spirits, but he does get very tired for no reason (no reason besides having cancer, I mean). He falls asleep on the sand instead of trying to garden it, and spends a lot of his time, as he puts it, listening to the silence.
The ocean makes a kind of silence I should point out. A sound that is not a sound. At least that is my understanding of the situation.
My Nana told me how she recently went into a church and it was for her like walking into a strange temple in Asia, and compared hearing the devotions to the incomprehensible mantras that Buddhists chant. She and her sisters were all raised catholic, and for the most part they resisted it. They used to try to rush through their rosaries so that they could get to basketball practice, and their father would deliberately speak slower and slower. My Nana still curses him for that bit of obstruction. She is a petty one, like me. But her eyes glow with her hatred, it is charming to see her like that.
The founder of the hospital I mentioned in my last post - he was one Doctor T. He lived in the largest house in town with his two children, a son and a daughter, whose heads were not quite sound. The daughter was known to the community as Poppy, because they only saw her once a year on Anzac day, when she came out to sell poppies for fundraising. Or under the pretext of fundraising. Who knows what it actually meant to her.
Up until a short while ago the men in my family tree had for the most part been cruel drunkards and rogues. They married saintly women who all died at 43 of heart-attacks. My grandparents ended that amusing tradition.
Logocentrism | A Snub-Nosed Man Who Sneezes When It Rains | Beyond Ivory Labyrinths
chippy
(ˈtʃɪpɪ)
1. Of, or composed of, chips.
2. Full of chaps; chapped.
3. Resembling a chip; as dry as a chip.
4. Vulgarly applied to the physical sensations experienced after alcoholic dissipation. Also gen. ‘off colour’, seedy, unwell.
5. Given to chipping, ready to chip. Also fig., cross, irritable.
6. Lively, brisk.
metathesis
(mɛˈtæθɪsɪs)
1. The transposition of words (obs.). b.1.b Gram. The interchange of position between sounds or letters in a word; the result of such a transposition. Also, quantitative metathesis, metathesis of quantity, a change of sequence long vowel + short vowel to short vowel + long vowel.
2. The transposition of a solid morbific substance (that cannot be evacuated) from one part to another where it will be less injurious.
3. gen. Change or reversal of condition.
umbilicary
Lying in the region of the navel.
sphygmic
1. The study of the pulse.
2. Pertaining to the pulse, or to the knowledge or doctrine of the pulse
houseless
(ˈhaʊslɪs)
1. Not having or dwelling in a house; having no shelter or place of refuge; homeless.
2. Destitute of houses and the shelter they yield.
3. Inhospitable.
mutish
(ˈmjuːtɪʃ)
Somewhat like a mute.
salvatrice
1. A female saviour.
2. Old name for one of the coats (tunicæ) of the eye; in full tunicle salvatrice (= L. tunica salvatrix).
Swimming in the bay are four hungry black whales. They are so hungry that they've been eating driftwood. They have eaten their own faces. Eight empty eye sockets follow longingly the gulls who perch at night on the supermarket roof, huddled together in twos and threes to ward off the damp foggy air.
Touching my face I feel that my eye sockets are empty too. I put my hands in but they touch nothing but air, and I have to push my arms in all the way up to the elbows before finding something. I run my fingers across it. It has a texture like corrugated cardboard, with patches here and there that are as smooth as a polished opal. I can't make out the shape, although it is small enough that I can almost hold it entirely with both hands, about the size of a basket ball I guess. It doesn't seem to be attached to anything, so I try to pull it out, but it wont budge. I try to tear it up but in this I fail too. I want to be rid of it, even if I don't know what it is, or what will happen when I am.
I pull my hands out and put them in my pockets. They are colder than if they had been out in the night air and I can feel them through my jeans pressing numbly against my thighs like two lumps of ice. In the meantime the fog has lifted and the gulls are no longer pretending to sleep. Supermarket trolleys and old tin fences are rattling, but here is no wind that I can feel and the sounds are distant, like a percussion orchestra is playing loudly in another part of the city. The sounds accompany me on my walk home and I am occupied for some time with thoughts of ghosts and things that make noise even when they aren't being visibly disturbed. If it wasn't spirits then something inside the metal itself must have made the trolleys and fences clatter.
The walk home takes me along the shore. The smell here is repulsive because of all the rotting seaweed that washed up in a heavy tide a fortnight ago. I trudge carelessly through it, slipping all the time and standing on hidden rocks and shells that dig in throught the soles of my shoes. Moonlight reflects off the wet brown seaweed and the silent surace of the sea but it is like seeing an old car that is tidy on the outside, but whose engine and axles are rusted through.
Lying amidst the debris is one of the whales' faces. Like the seaweed it is half-rotten. It must have been regurgitated. The eyes are intact and it stares up at me with a sad, self-pitying look. Where its' mouth used to be is a raw and bloody hole. The gulls are circling above me, waiting for me to leave so that they can peck the eyes apart and either eat them themselves or feed them to their chicks if they have any.
I don't know if I will make it home tonight. The way seems longer than usual. There are rushes up along the sandy banks of the shore, and flax, and if I am lucky I will find a dry and soft surface to sleep on beneath them.
There is a distant rumbling now, mixed in with the echoes of the clattering streets and the shrieks of the gulls. The ocean, a plane, an army on the march - an angry sound full of hatred for life, for living. I identify with the sound and find it soothing, it isn't heartless or restless like the birds and the metals, or hollow and vast like the song of the whales. It is rich and deep like the drone of a church organ, resonating an unwavering contempt for the ephemeral wasteland it passes though. For a long time I stand unmoving, totally absorbed. . .
My mother came today to bring me a bottle of red wine as a late Easter gift, and took away with her the Kafka that was sitting on my desk. I shouldn't have let her take it since I was part way through it myself, but I was curious as to why it had caught her attention and whether she would enjoy it or not. The last book I loaned her was Pride & Prejudice, and generally she reads the maudlin Irish novels that everyone in my family (bar cynical old me) seems to enjoy.
More interestingly, my Grandfather was out walking along the beach a few days ago and passed what looked like a pair of shoes and a shirt that somebody had left behind high up on the shore. He didn't investigate, just carried on, and about an hour later, making his way home, he noticed they were still there. Later in the day he was driving around and, having given the matter a little thought, he decided to go to the police about it. Somebody else had reported it to them already. Along with the clothing there was a framed photograph of a man, his wife, and their two kids. It seems that the man in the photo had left them there before deciding to go for a long walk, destination unknown, through the Pacific. Not wanting to get his clothes wet he'd folded them up neatly, along with his shoes, and set off down the ocean road.
I'm supposed to be going to work shortly but I don't think I will. Every part of me feels tired and worn just thinking about it. At least I don't actually feel any psychosomatic sickness for once, and I'm not even particularly gloomy. I feel good actually because don't have a wife and children or a pressing need to die in a melodramatic fashion, but all the same I don't think that I'll go to work because if I do then those things might occur to me as a consequence of feeling weak in such a social environment. More likely I will sit in my comfy chair, start in on this wine, and read Kawabata's Palm-of-the-Hand Stories until I fall either asleep or feel the need to do something useful and productive.
My mother also mentioned, after reading the date August, 1913 on the back of one of my books, that I seemed to her like somebody from that time. In my mothers' mind people from 1913 spent a lot more time reading, were generally peaceful, humane creatures, and were nearly constantly falling asleep because of all the classical music they listened to. I said "so I was old before I had even been born", and she agreed, saying maybe that was why she'd "never had any trouble with me", by which I guess she means that I was generally quiet and well-behaved.
There's a slight possibility that I'll get fired for not turning up tonight. At the very least I'll have to sit through a dreary meeting with my supervisor and the plant manager and make an unhearted attempt to defend my non-actions. Losing my job would be nice, but it's unrealistic for me to hope so.
Ah. And it occurs to me that there is far too much talk of beaches in this thread. I hate the beach, really, although it allows me to eep an eye on the treacherous ocean that is always trying to kill me in my dreams. Shortly after the disaster this in Japan I started having nightmares that had been inspired to new heights by the videos I'd seen of the tsunami. Walls of water hundreds of meters high swept across the world while people ran around me screaming insensibly. I headed for the hills as usual. Even a small hill is better than none in these situations. I like hills since I'm so sensitive to their use as a sanctuary when tall black waves that look like swans are chasing me up the shore. Hills are benevolent, they hate the ocean as much as I do I think, and want to protect me from it, so from now on there will be no more talk of beaches, shores, bays, seas, capes or headlands in here, only mountains, prominences, hummocks, cliffs, ridges, summits, mounds, inclinations, stacks, and protuberances, all of which are henceforth to be considered holy places.
Today I discovered Chopins' Nocturne No. 18 - Opus 62 in E, which I have heard a hundred times before. I think it's something about the contrast between tedium and chaos in it that caught my attention. I took half a tab of acid in the weekend, to which I accredit nothing, the cause was tedium, my subconscious desire was for chaos, but all I got was a momentary addiction to De La Souls' "It Ain't All Good". (that's the truth | things ain't goin' like you think they should | it's all on you). All week though it's felt like I'm finally making an effort to change my patterns and habits in a serious way. My methods aren't that unconventional - drinking a lot of red wine and skivving off work coupled with a dangerous amount of reading, both of fiction and meta-fiction, and long intense sessions of meditative thought and brooding anger.... A few weeks ago I decided that I'd had enough of pretending that video games and my crummy job were enough to satisfy me. I need stimulation that is meaningful to me. So either the acid was a trigger or a symptom of my desire for change, a passage from the tediousness of an ordinary life to the chaos of inspiration and experimentation, to put it as pretentiously as possible. I want what DF wants, a different life, a life different from the one I've worked so hard (mostly) to accommodate (I was going to say adopt. Subtle difference! I must be intelligent still!). If that means getting fired from my job or even quitting if they don't have the chutzpah to fire such a skilful and hardworking bastard, then so be it. I never wanted to work there in the first place, it was all because of perceived necessity and pressure from my family. I had to take care of myself, they seemed too incompetent to manage it while I lived like a tortured monk.
Today I went so far as to hate the stars. What's next? Neurons and atoms? Why am I so full of rage, and yet so indifferent to so many things? Why would I single out the absurd size and complexity of the known universe as something worth hating? Why am I drinking so much and thinking so much at the same time? Don't people usually drink to avoid thinking?
"Damselfly nymphs breathe through external gills on the abdomen, while dragonfly nymphs respire through an organ in their rectum."
"Orthopterans are the only insects considered kosher in Judaism. The list of dietary laws in the book of Leviticus forbids all flying insects that walk, but makes an exception for the locust. The Torah states the only kosher flying insects with four walking legs have knees that extend above their feet so that they hop. This suggests that non-jumping orthoptera such as mole crickets are not kosher."
"Potential victims can be detected from up to four centimetres away and are investigated by the gentle application of the antennae. If they are judged to be a suitable size, slime is ejected to immobilise the prey item. The velvet worm then bites into the prey and injects saliva, which further reduces motion and may initiate digestion of the prey item's innards. Ninety percent of the time involved in eating a specimen is spent ingesting it; re-ingestion of the slime used to trap the insect is performed whilst the velvet worm locates a suitable place to puncture the prey, and this phase accounts for around 8% of the feeding time, with the remaining time evenly split between examining, squirting and injecting the prey."
"It often happens that all the mayflies in a population mature at once (a hatch), and for a day or two in the spring or fall, mayflies will be everywhere, dancing around each other in large groups, or resting on every available surface. The species Polingenia longicauda hatches in mid-June on the Maros River and the Tisza River in Serbia and Hungary. It is called the tiszavirág in Hungarian and tiski cvet in Serbian. Both names mean "Tisza flower", and the phenomenon is called Tisza blooming. In regions of New Guinea and Africa, mayflies are eaten when they emerge en masse."
Subimago - The stage of development in an insect in which the insect is winged and capable of flight but not yet sexually mature. Occurs only in Mayflies (Ephemeroptera). With sexual maturity, the insect becomes an imago.
"The shell and soft parts of living Lobatus gigas serve as a home to several different kinds of commensal animals, including slipper snails, porcelain crabs and cardinal fish."
"In India, lone golden jackals expelled from their pack have been known to form commensal relationships with tigers. These solitary jackals, known as kol-bahl, will attach themselves to a particular tiger, trailing it at a safe distance in order to feed on the big cat's kills. A kol-bahl will even alert a tiger to a kill with a loud pheal. Tigers have been known to tolerate these jackals: one report describes how a jackal confidently walked in and out between three tigers walking together a few feet away from each other. Tigers will however kill jackals on occasion: the now extinct tigers of the Amu Darya region were known to eat jackals frequently"
"Jackals will feed on fruits such as pears, hawthorn, dogwood and the cones of Common Medlars. In Spring, they will dig out bulbs and the roots of wild sugar cane."
Inquilinism - Using a second organism for housing. Examples are epiphytic plants (such as many orchids) that grow on trees, or birds that live in holes in trees.
Freeloaders of the Deep
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