poem

Found on picsart.com

once done with our world
leaving it bombed out used up
will man melt the moon

for Photo Challenge #280

The beauty in nature

 

“All right, boys, have you got your binoculars and reptile guides at the ready?”

“Yessir.”

“You are about to be treated to the sighting of a lifetime, something few nature enthusiasts, even experienced testudinologists, have ever seen on this coast: the Croxley Softshell freshwater turtle. Have you got your cameras?”

“Yessir.”

“Then let’s move quietly to the crest and shelter behind that Alnus serrulata as we peek over. The Croxley is a shy beast. Make no sound…

“Rise up slowly, binoculars ready… Steady on…”

“Wow. Is that…?”

“Yes, Alex. Those are Croxleys, sure enough.”

“No. Matt, do you see? On the blanket to the left of the pond.”

“It can’t be. Scarlett Johansson and Jessica Alba…?”

“What?…Boys, keep it down. Stop squealing. The turtles are restless.”

“Jeez, they’re beautiful. Getting the full tan, they are.”

“My camera’s got a telephoto lens. Look at these shots!”

“I’ll look later. Jessica’s eating grapes.”

“Crikey. Now you’ve done it, lads. The Croxleys have fled.”

“Sir, we’re going down to get autographs, if you don’t mind.”

 

Image © Deborah Whittam
For Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie

vacation

 

the resort will be rebuilt

higher up this time

condolences

 

P hoto by Jeremy Bishop via Unsplash
For Three Line Tales

ice waves

 

around a sun much older than ours

moves a planet much larger than ours

wrapped in a single ocean frozen

ice waves without number

mountains

made motionless before life here began

 

For  Pic and a Word Challenge

warmup haiku

high sun presses sand
beneath the rock moist soil still
cool with busy life

vault of sky above
no spirits move in empty
air thinning higher

lion on zebra
struggle in the proper way
acting not thinking

City moves up date it could run out of water (ABC, KTIC)

Hello. As your mayor I am responsible for the management of this crisis.

Please contact Andrea Paddle, Director of Public Works, for more information.  She has provided me with the following list and will be responsible for the management of this crisis:

1. As of 8 am this morning, stop washing your cars (Uber, Lyft excepted).
2. As of noon today, stop washing your hands.
3. As of 3 pm this afternoon, it will be against the law to use or think the word “wash.”

What about drinking? Contact Amne Chukwuemeka, Director of Sanitary Health, for information. Amne will be responsible for the management of this crisis. According to Amne:

1. All age limits on drinking of alcohol have been completely lifted.
2. Mixed drinks: Blacks, Whites, and Coloreds can drink together.
3. Slurp to sieve mud through the teeth.

What about the future? Contact Imani Onwuatuegwu, Director of Elections, for information. Imani will be responsible for the management of this crisis. According to Imani:

1. This crisis is not the mayor’s fault.
2. This crisis is not my (Imani’s) fault.
3. 71% of Earth is covered with water. The human body is 57% water.

Blind long snapper wants to become starting QB (CNN)

A Post for Anglers

If you love fishing like I do, then you’re well familiar with the long snapper, that redoubtable piscine gladiator who will fight you to the finish once hooked.

But perhaps you have never encountered the Mbisi version of this snapper (Lutjanus Bwanobu). Living in the dark rivers that flow through the limestone caverns beneath Mount Mbumibiawnabu, caverns carved out over the eons, the Mbisi snapper is the opposite of a fighter. It is easily frightened and once in that state, wants to be QB (EATEN) or LB (at least CHEWED) (emphasis theirs).

The Mbisi fishermen squat on the banks of those stygian courses underground and clap their hands loudly when they hear a passing snapper. The startled fish flops out of the water at their feet, ready to be taken home and fried in a pan.

The tribesmen charge only a modest fee to act as your guide in the caverns. The only difficulty you will encounter in hiring them is the thousand-mile journey on foot through steaming jungles rife with the tsetse fly and swarming QBQ (EAT YOU) short snappers in the swamps.

Our Changing Planet

Lichens are composite organisms that contain algae, fungi,  cyanobacteria, and other microorganisms, all performing functions as partners in a self-contained miniature ecosystem.

Wow. These disparate life forms have learned to live together in ways and places where none of them alone could survive. They cooperate to cope with an evolving planet.

Can humans come to terms with their tribal DNA in ways that will allow them to also benefit from such cooperation with others – others who seem strange and possibly dangerous to us at first exposure – because they don’t look like us or behave exactly as we do?

Of course I am talking about our relationship with demodex folliculorum, otherwise known as the bugs living in your eyebrows. You aren’t  born with them, but you acquire them, or vice versa. Little guys with white pin-like mouths used for eating skin cells and sebum. They’re not picky about where they live, if you know what I mean.

Steps to keep up with a changing planet

1. Stop fighting your infestation. You aren’t suffering from delusional parasitosis (the feeling of bugs crawling on or under your skin). They’re really there. Get over it.
2. Stop taking so many showers. Don’t drown your bugs. If, for example, you move to a hot and humid rain forest, you’ll need those bugs to eat the other bugs that come to visit you under your netting.
3. Share your bugs. Some lichens have lost the ability to reproduce in the usual ways, but bugs don’t have that problem. What is more synergistic than your bugs mating with your mate’s bugs at the same time that you mate with your mate?
4. Consider a threesome. The more shared DNA, the more chances for evolution and an increased likelyhood that you can, for example, learn to live in a world that has grown, say, one thousand degrees hotter.

Cooking Snake Eggs

Warning: Never cook a snake egg if “Spawn” appears on the side of its container, or on the egg itself.

Most snake eggs are non-poisonous. Poisonous varieties have no specific identifying features.

Most snake eggs are emetic by nature. Failure to prepare them properly will cause them to come up quicker than they went down.

Never mix snake eggs with the eggs of frogs, toads, lizards, or rodents.

When cooking snake eggs, stir the bubbling mass with a monkwood spatula.

Use a lot of food coloring.

Cook until done. Keep cooking.

Not recommended for birthday parties for the young.

Confirm that the “snake” was not a worm.

Turn down flame if a hissing sound is heard.

Snakes do not got legs. Discard anything below the hips.

In the context of snake-egg cookery, “snake eyes” is not a good thing.

“Cultured” snake eggs aren’t really.

Marital tip: When arguing with your husband, shout “Snake!” and plop down a plate of snake eggs in front of him at the breakfast table.

The Random Walk of Evolution

My special friend Greer was born with four eyes.

The second set of these orbs is situated directly behind the first in her head, so that when you stare into the front pair (gray/blue), they seem twice as deep as normal. This lends Greer a quality, an aura, of ineffable wisdom. Her azure pools seem in fact of the bottomless type.

However, that second optical set of vision-givers inhabits the skull space typically allocated to a portion of the brain that reaches conclusions. Thus, the wise Greer, appearing to ever ruminate deeply, never delivers, can never deliver, a coherent response to any observer’s query.

Understanding this, Greer has learned to look back into, not out of, her skull, training those duplicate peepers on the incomplete circuits in her brain that try in futile fashion to close the loop on whatever conundrum she is dealing with, without success. These days, she can halt her ineffective reasoning process at will, creating a brain-state snapshot, and then issue a reasonable response to her current conversational correspondent’s questions.

No solutions to Delphic riddles ever emerge from this, and so her aura dissipates. Her extra eyes prove of no use. The genetic accident that gave rise to them represents just another of Nature’s prolixity of dead ends.

Meantime, her first son was born with five eyes, not four. The placement of that fifth instrument of vision, a veritable punchline in the joke of Life, proves without doubt that Nature is blind, with no specific goal in sight or mind, or behind.