A couple of videos for Saturday night
~ Snail, the best I could find to explain how they move so as to deposit a line of blobs of slime:
In fact I think I've got to add this next one too, which doesn't show the slime thing quite as well but just for the really cool millipede that keeps trying to get into shot:
~ And while we're about how creatures do things we'd never thought about in ways we didn't expect, here's one forwarded to me by the rather good company, Canine Concepts, who supplied dear Mol's waterproof coat ( a useful creator god in the shape of interfering dog-genetic buggering human breeders having failed to do so). This is how dogs drink.
Well, who'd have thought?
~
Finally, just caught a bit of a Radio 4 tribute to Robert Robinson, who died lately. A quote from him:
There's no such thing as a good listener, just someone waiting for their chance to talk.
As I remember it. I don't think it's necessarily true, but it doesn't do one any harm to think on it.
10 comments:
And mutts are lovely,
http://www.arkinspace.com/2011/08/in-praise-of-mutt.html
I've had occasion recently to reflect on my childhood in the Episcopal church. My siblings and I would stare at the sanctuary for an hour each Sunday as onto a stage exhibiting a very slow play. I think it caused me to enjoy mountain views with summer clouds, short stories, and other platforms on which only a few things happen. These videos, for instance . . .
[Spoiler alert!] Both snail videos were very soothing. By the end of the first video, I found my eyes moving rapidly between the snail's tail and the end of the video's slider to see if the snail would clear the brick by the video's end. I was delighted when it cleared the brick and, surprisingly, the mortar, too, with a quick and timely lift of the tail!
The second video interested me for a different reason. Some of the early noises sounded like gears grinding as if to account for the snail's slowness. The slow waving of the snail's sides coincided with a lot of construction noise I thought I heard in the background. The sound made the snail's trip seem like a grand undertaking.
Given Barrett Bonden's origins, a tribute to Robert Robinson is probably going to sound like self-interest. But Stop the Week, on early Saturday evening back in the seventies, was an absolute must. Quite simply it proved why conversation can be the most delicate, the most rewarding and the most accessible of all the arts. Critics sneered at it as elitist, I prefer meritocratic. And it has just occurred to me, at this very minute in the beneficent atmosphere of Box Elder, that StW is my other sub-conscious companion when I sit down to lunch at the BR. Gosh, that sounds horribly self-serving, smug and egregious but I don't care; I realise I have been under RR's ultimately improving spell for over thirty years and that when I pass the baton to Plutarch or he passes it to me, I am imagining myself chaired most rigorously by that most sly, most proper, most provocative of chairmen who is presently being interviewed for the task of overseeing the Heavenly Future Developments Committee.
Thanks for the opportunity Mme. Chairman.
What a cool post! Thank you.
As for the quote, in AA that very observation is one signal of real alcoholic recovery, that a person actually begins to really listen instead of waiting for the chance to talk and thinking hard on what to say when that chance comes. Of course not everyone is actually in that game but the number of people who are that kind of arrogant is a significant number. They are not all newcomers either. Nor is it true that long timers cannot fall back from genuine listening even though they listen as a rule. Sometimes when the next thing to say arrives it is very powerful.
the dog drinking is mesmerisingly lovely
WV gangbab
hurray! the snail dots are real!
In James Thurber's selfp portrai, reproduced on my Penguin edition of The Thurber Carnival he anticipates Robert Robinson with "...He never listens when anybody else is talking, preferring to keep his mind a blank until they get through so he can talk...."
Lucy, I've come back to this post several times now, watched the videos with childlike delight and read the comments that have been given. A memory from childhood has been trying to get out ... it involves a snail, a bridge, and a dirt road. I know exactly where I am in the world. But it's still fuzzy and I'm trying to recall more. Snails and listening. Lots for me to ponder this week.
Never a dull moment over here! Sorry I've been gone for a good bit since my niece's accident. We had seen an explanation video about dogs drinking a while back and still look at ours in amazement when they drink, trying to see it as you can see it when slowed down. Amazing!
I too enjoyed the tribute to Bob, but what made me laugh most was at the beginning of the show they played one of his intros to "stop the week" in which he used a parsec as a unit of time not measurement of distance. Not really that clever then?
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