Monday, December 3, 2007

I trained the Howitzers upon the murderous creature.

Saw several of these today:


Hooded Mergansers, Lophodytes cucullatus.

They are some of my favorite ducks! I saw them on a little neighborhood marsh lake, which I pass on the way to Sarah's house. I pulled over to get a look at them, but, as they were about 30 yards away, I couldn't get that good a look at them. I was lamenting to the heavens the fact that I don't have a pair of binoculars, when the lead duck flew right over toward me, and brought his little flock with him, males and females. The picture, above, is not a picture I took today, either. But, that's what they look like, those mergansers, on a marshy lake in Georgia in winter.

I tried to see if I was getting any better at searching on the internet. I had forgotten the name of the Hooded Merganser—I even thought it was a grebe! How silly!—so I decided to try to locate my bird on the tubes, using homespun backwards reference. It didn't work. Fortunately, I have some books, made of paper, that are devoted to the subject of bird identification, and I found it in about 5 seconds. During the time when I was searching the 'net (i.e., the time when I was eating my meatball sandwich—yum) and checking Wikipedia for info, I came across a bunch of dinosaurs that I thought were pretty great-looking. Bird-dinosaurs, of course. I wonder why, with all the cloning, etc., scientits can't just bring back some of these awesome dinosaurs and extinct non-dinosaurs, to live among us? Like, where's my ground sloth? There was talk of there surviving one in Argentinia, perhaps, near Patagucci, but I think it was revealed that the fossil was actually the chassis of a 1962 Rover 100, which is weird, because that's pretty far away from England. But maybe it was from those weird slave-owning South Americans or whatever. Still, for me, the giant prehistoric ground sloth is the new ivory-billed.
Scary. Yet cool. Herbivore.

I had forgotten what a Plesiosaur is/was, so I clicked on it and remembered, "oh yeah, the Loch Ness Monster. Duh." There was a little comment on the page which referred to a "bizarre short story" from 1899 called "The Monster of Lake LaMetrie," in which a man's brain is transplanted into the body of a plesiosaur for the purposes of scientific experimentation and criminal punishment. I downloaded it (for free, you can, too).

I wish it was still 1899. God, that would be great.

This is me, today, the Monstera of Slough Saint Simons:



Hahaha. I look like a monster, but am actually an herbivore! (So I will lead you to believe.)