112220

 

Ancalagon

the brown slowly turns its head 

dipteran bane

032118b

Arachnophobial Blues

House flies jam on silken strands,

Bringing the blues home,

Webs are mostly space, like atoms

Connected by invisible strands of force,

Electrons, coming in too close, may stick.

Here the analogy snaps, the fly, tumbling,

Wings glue-stuck and trembling,

Plummeting through space,

To the glad microbial arms,

Of its vasty final home.

020118

Hamster Down

The blimpster was coming in, its four stubby limbs fully extended. Jo noticed the ship wasn't level. She called the tower.

"Hammie's tilted a good 5º to starboard, and I think she's nose down as well!" The pilot must be asleep or goofing off. This was what came of trusting a monkey to do a chimp's job. She ran towards the hospital (really just a converted barn), tripped on a tussock of grass, and her phone went flying.

"Rabbit pellets!" She scrambled back and forth through the field, found the phone, jammed it to her ear.

"... not answering either. Why do I bother?"

"Lost my phone," she panted. "No answer from the brainpan? Better evacuate the terminal." She looked back over her shoulder. "Too late." The lighter-than-air rodent wasn't very dense, but it was big, and had a lot of mass. The right foreleg clipped the tower, taking it out, despite a shattered tibia she could hear 1000 yards away. The chin hit the ground, followed by the belly, and the airship was immediately obscured by a fountain of dust and debris. Jo thought the wreck might miss the terminal after all, but a moment later she could hear it: shattering glass and lath, and then the belly of the beast slammed into the generator. The methane-filled intestines must have torn open and all it took was a spark.

Jo hit the dirt moments before the fireball engulfed the airport. She felt the shockwave race across her back, followed by a hail of metal, wood, and bone. She staggered back to her feet and turned around. Nothing was left. Shreds of this and that fluttered down. A few small fires burned; otherwise, nothing moved. She sniffed: blood. Her back was bleeding and, she peered over her shoulder, furless. She didn't yet feel the burn.

--

Charnel threw the manuscript in the recycling bin."Waste!" he snarled, pointing a gnarled claw at the hapless young writer. "Air 'craft'? Talking primates? Cordless 'phones'? Away with you." He looked down at his desk, whiskers quivering with anger, and pulled a folder out of the "to do" basket.

Bucktooth was dismissed. She trudged away, tail dragging. Would she EVER get out of the sewer?

121417

Raise your hand if you just became a vegan

A well-constructed young woman barged into my office Monday morning, breathing hard after running up two flights of stairs. When she regained her composure she told me her great aunt had “drifted away from her moorings.” Some time Sunday morning the old lady had started devouring livestock, not just raw, but still living. Before the day was out she was dead.

“Exactly what do you want me to do, Miss Clarendon?”

“Oh, Mr. Deadbolt,” she replied, “I want you to find out why she ate those critters. The great aunt Sylvia I knew would never do such a thing. She might have been murdered. Maybe by a hypnotist.”

*

“I'm sure you know why I have gathered you together,” I began. “You are the relatives of the late Sylvia Clarendon. One of you asked me to investigate whether foul play was involved in her death. I've checked into all of you carefully, as well as anyone who had business or social dealings with the deceased. I turned up nothing. Ms. Clarendon was universally liked, and she didn't have much money or property.

“I did partially solve the mystery. She really did take a double dose of several powerful prescription drugs last Friday night as she went to bed. Sunday morning she swallowed a common housefly, and then a spider in hopes that it would trap the fly. Because of the limited opportunities for web construction within her digestive tract, she chose a jumping spider, but of a perfectly respectable species. When the spider failed to return, Ms. Clarendon swallowed a small bird. Its mission was to retrieve the spider, but by 0900 hrs it had failed to do so. Her choice of a house sparrow, a well-known seed eating specialist, may have been part of the problem. There followed in rapid succession the following commandos: a rat, a cat, and a dog, all with rather obvious goals. Her motives of the afternoon are less certain. About 1320 she swallowed a goat, which might have been a bad choice considering the size of the dog it was supposed to subdue. Be that as it may, around 1500 hrs a cow followed the goat. This was a highly reliable operative named Bessie who had successfully completed similar missions in the past. At 1545 a cleaner named Dobbins was sent in, with what tragic results you all know.

“I have, as I said, worked out most of the details of the weekend's tragedy. However, one thing still puzzles me about the whole affair. I don't know why she swallowed the fly.”

Reference

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Was_an_Old_Lady_Who_Swallowed_a_Fly

Reprinted from Nursery Rhyme Noir -- https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/42875

Footprints in Stone

I have been given an unbound pre-publication, copy of Footprints in Stone, the book I co-authored with Ron Buta about the Minkin footprint site in Walker County, Alabama. The cover looks really wonderful, and so do the interior illustrations. The publisher expects the book to be available at the end of May, which is sooner than they originally told us. You can preorder the book from Amazon right now:

http://www.amazon.com/Footprints-Stone-Fossil-Coal-Age-Tetrapods/dp/0817358447/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1460989262&sr=1-1&keywords=%22footprints+in+stone%22

The trace-fossil fauna at the Minkin site is more diverse than at most Pennsylvanian sites. Vertebrates: 6 spp made by tetrapods & fish. Insects: at least 4 spp. Other arthropods: at least 4 spp. Other critters: at least 2 spp. There are also arthropod body fossils and diverse plant fossils.

The Minkin site is the best trace fossil site of its age in the world. It is one of the few world-class sites that you can visit, accompanied by knowledgeable guides from the Alabama Paleontological Society, and keep most of the specimens you find. If you find anything unusual it will have to be donated to a Museum, but so many specimens have been collected (well over 5000 so far) it is pretty rare to find something you can't keep.

Talk to me if you want to arrange a visit to the site.

Video about "Footprints in Stone"

Here is the link to a 16-minute video about trace fossils. In particular, about 300 million-year-old footprints from North Alabama. Prof. Ron Buta and I wrote a book called Footprints in Stone. It is about the discovery of the site by amateur fossil collectors, their successful efforts to get it preserved by the state of Alabama, and thousands upon thousands of tracks and trails made by reptiles, amphibians, horseshoe crabs, and many other creatures on a mud flat so long ago.

http://vimeo.com/114215060