Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted
~ Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963
You can say anything you want, yessir, but it's the words that sing, they soar and descend...I bow to them...I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down...I love words so much...The unexpected ones...The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly they drop...
~Pablo Neruda
I hope some animal never bores a hole in my head and lays its eggs in my brain, because later you might think you're having a good idea but it's just eggs hatching
A revealing interview by author Ian McEwan (Atonement):
“I don't feel
confident at all. No I don't. Sometimes I pick up some work I finished
fifteen years ago and think, am I as good as that now? Could I do that
again? No, I think you'll find most writers are not confident they can
just turn out books...There's a great difference between that all that
public world of prizes and interviews and public readings and the
private world of the closed door, and the hiss of silence--and here we
are again, and what can you make come out of this of silence. And you
can't relax about it, you can't be certain that you can do it again."
So, fellow nerds, what's with this video circulating on Facebook and Youtube?
First of all, these are not spiders. They are harvestmen or daddy-longlegs. For those of you who remember the ol' mnemonic device for taxonomy, King Philip Can Order Fresh Green Salad (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species), these critters, like spiders, scorpions and ticks, are in the class Arachnida. However, harvestmen belong to their own order, Opiliones.
So what's the difference?
Harvestmen have a single cephalothorax and a single pair of eyes. True spiders have a narrow "waist" that creates two segments, the cephalothorax and abdomen.
Harvestmen have a single pair of eyes. True spiders most commonly have eight eyes, however they can have no eyes, or as many as 12 eyes.
Harvestmen are nonvenomous.
Harvestmen have no spinnerets, so they do not spin webs.
Harvestmen are older than spiders--the oldest fossil, from Scotland, is at least 400 million years old. True spiders are about 300 million years old.
Harvestmen are omnivores--they eat dead stuff, bird droppings, fungus and small arthropods and slugs.
Finally, the question every one is asking. WHY DO THEY DO THIS? They mass for defensive purposes, and to keep themselves warm. Harvestmen possess a pair of stinky glands called ozopores; when they mass, the combined smell can be quite disturbing. Swarming also makes them appear larger. When disturbed, the entire throng will sometimes bob and sway--a truly unsettling effect.
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