I've had definite problems with the computer and this site recently, so that I had to rewrite lost sections of the last entry twice, but I never know whom to blame, which is the technological loophole now. Nobody seems to know what goes on in our magic circuitry. We need those World War II gremlins back to blame--or perhaps they never left. Last fall, when I seemed to disappear from here in October, I couldn't get anything done for nearly a week after having started a very deep scan. When I couldn't even pull up e-mail, I knew that ominously signalled a greater depression, as matters piled up like the chairs in a Cirque du Soleil balancing act. At the time Cox Cable was sending letters apologizing for any service disruption while I was unable to get several favorite channels--and still can't get the National Geographic channel--yet paying for them and not getting an answer to my written complaint, as the front page of the newspaper daily kept a running tale of typical political shenenigans about a proposed new baseball stadium affecting our College World Series contract, each day another revelation of what we hadn't been and weren't being told. The mayor apparently learned something from the Bush administration. Biblically, in such trying times one girds his loins, but I'm not even sure what that means, and it sounds entirely too obscene for a cold winter night. Something of the same sort of technological mystery occurred weekend before last when the spirit of the computer started wandering around the ether like a wayward child, so I played too much Cradle of Rome and other games, wasting what little is left of my life while supposedly preventing Alzheimer's and paranoia. I've decided I need to simply slog through and add some color to the winter landscape.
Other aquarium delights make one wonder about colors and why they are what they are, the fascination of natural design and camouflage, including the deceptive eye spot at the rear.
And here is the unanimous winner of the Father of the Year award, one of my favorites. I knew the male seahorse was the one who got pregnant and took care of his babies, though I hadn't known he flaunts his pouch to attract the egg-bearing female. (No relation to the kangaroo and other marsupials: the seahorse is a 40-million-year-old fish, albeit a strangely beautiful one that looks anything but a fish.) Anyway, after a three-week pregnancy and 72-hour labor, he can birth as many as 200, and so it's no wonder he exhausts himself into a washed-out whiteness. And then turns around and repeats it all over again. Here is the usual version of Hippocampus. Right, the biological name is the same as our part of the brain dealing with long-term memory and spatial navigation, named for the Greek "curved horse."
And here is an evolutionary beauty I find utterly stunning. The leafy sea dragon is a seahorse cousin, headed downward in this view. The female lays her eggs on his tail instead of in a pouch, so the male doesn't have the fine fatherhood capabilities of the seahorse. But he's certainly spectacular in good looks.
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