stuff of varying weight

[capri0mni]

1) So -- I'm writing a poem / vocal reading thingie about the twenty-first anniversary of my mother's death (for a Disability Blog Carnival event on October 23), and I realized, this evening that this is the first attempt I've made to write directly about that subject in all those years... That may explain why it's hard for me to get handles on feelings and the images to go with them.

2) So -- my TV Antenna died early this year, which means I've been watching all my TV on the computer instead. This means that I'm basically limiting myself to CBS, ABC, and PBS -- 'Cause NBC's and Fox's video players are horrid, and try even my considerable patience. Anyhow:

I was really prepared for Doctor Mallard to die. I mean, he was given this whole secondary arc where he's writing his will, and talking about how his life is drawing to a close ... So when he collapsed from a heart attack in the final scene... yeah... Seemed an obvious conclusion, to me. But it turns out he'll be perfectly okay. How much you want to bet the whole cast had contract renegotiation over the summer?

Matter of fact, as much as I love the characters on this show, and I really am glad that none of them died, this episode felt emotionally cheap to me. We were told, repeatedly, how NCIS people died in the explosion, and how that meant that the Villain had to die, and Gibbs was totally justified in stabbing him in the gut...

But none of the characters we're emotionally invested in got seriously hurt, so it's a totally happy ending, and that's okay. At the end, when they zoomed in on the memorial to the victims that had been erected on the site, I was at least expecting some names for the victims -- even if they were names we'd not encountered before. But instead, all we got was an inscription vowing never to forget... Never forget whom?

Anyway, I still love the show, but color me disappointed with how it handled the moral implications of violence.

3) A spider has started to build a web between the uprights of that broken antenna. It's adorkable...

4) This video made me laugh so hard my stomach hurt -- the good kind of hurt "Emmet Otter's Jug-band Christmas" Outtakes (Frank Oz and Jerry Nelson ad-libbing to save their sanity).

5) I don't like lists that stop at four, but none of the ideas waiting to be uttered want to be on this list. So I will ask a riddle that has no answer:

"How does a dragon eat an ice cream cone?"

Comments

[smw]

2) I don't watch NCIS usually, but I did catch a scene or two from that arc. Learning that Mallard lived is really wonky from even an outsider position, given the show was giving all the usual signs of "one of ours is dead, and now shit is going to go down in a serious way". Hrm.

3) I <3 spiders so much. There's a species on campus that builds these incredible webs, the main part three or four feet across, and sometimes suspended between supports that are eight, even twelve feet away from each other. This doesn't make much sense to me, but it is really cool.

5) Carefully.

[capri0mni]

I think the dragon with ice-cream cone can go down one of three ways: Carefully, Sadly, or With a bowl and a straw...

Spiders have many ways, I think, to get their silk to cross wide spans; one way I've read about is that they make a little spoon-shaped sail at the end of a strand of silk, and let the wind carry it a certain distance until the sticky end lands on a support. Then, they walk out to the middle of that strand, and start their building. I think some spiders have glands that produce up to eight different kinds of silk, depending on what they need it for. ... I'm not sure, but I think all spiders, even those that don't build webs, use one kind of silk all the time as a safety line when they're climbing high places, so if they lose their footing, they can climb back up...

I'm almost as fascinated by the widespread fear of spiders as I am by the spiders themselves. I have some notions (can't call them hypotheses, 'cause I don't know if they can be tested) that it's because spiders' movements look just enough like finger/hand movements that when we catch glimpses of them out of the corner of our eyes, our brains can't instant;y categorize them, and that causes anxiety. ...And then, each time we anticipate the anxiety, and try to avoid it, it gets magnified into full-blown fear...

[smw]

Phobias are interesting. IIRC, there are certain critters that humans (and other species?) have a biologically imbued fear of, which is or isn't triggered in a particular individual based on, ah. That's where my knowledge on the subject peters out, I'm afraid.

[capri0mni]

ISTR that fear of snakes is pretty much universal among primates, and the hypothesis goes that it's because a common ancestor of all living primates evolved in trees, in the tropics, where snakes camouflaged themselves as tree branches and fed primarily on said primates.

So that kinda makes sense that fear of snakes is something that most people have to work to overcome.

But Spiders? Most of them have no interest at all in mammals, and even among the rare few worldwide whose venom would even have any effect on us at all (mostly, it's toxic only to insects) are those we rarely cross paths with.

So that leads me to wonder if fear of spiders is more cultural than biological...

[pedanther]

5) Carefully.

I was going to say "Quickly". ("Without draggin' it out"?)

Or, depending on how one parses the question, "Resentfully, because he only gets a cone and all the cooler animals get to have ice cream in theirs".

[capri0mni]

^_^

he only gets a cone, and all the cooler animals get to have ice cream in theirs.

Okay, now I have a vision of a children's picture book, about a dragon who sees other animals as special, and him/herself as ordinary...

I like these riddles without answers... maybe I'll do more of them.