Department Of Where Is Samuel L. Jackson When You Need Him?
Girls and boys, can you say, “Dinoflagellate Bioluminescence?” I knew you could.
“One of the most spectacular forms of marine bioluminescence (often incorrectly called ‘marine phosphorescence’) is produced by dinoflagellates. In the sea, light emission by these unicellular organisms is mostly seen when cells are mechanically stimulated, at the surface of waves, in breakers, by swimming animals or humans or by vessels.”
(Bioluminescence in Dinoflagellates, Tree of Life web project)
Whether or not you can correctly pronounce it, we saw it, on an evening (approx. 8:30 – 10:30p) kayak tour last Sunday, in the waters around the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge . To my knowledge, no one in our group took pictures of the phenomenon itself, as we’d been told cameras are “fairly useless to capture bioluminescence,” which was fine by me. How often can one participate in an outing these days without someone pulling out their smartass phones every five minutes for that all-important documentation? [1]
One form of the bioluminescence we saw (but did not photograph).
It would have been amusing to have watched someone attempt a selfie with the mullets, a plethora of which inhabited the waters just below our kayaks. It seems they had been misinformed as to our intentions. Perhaps they confused our boats with their predators, the local bottleneck dolphins, which, like many of my WT ancestors, [2] travel in packs and use cooperative hunting to get themselves a tasty mullet meal.
“Y’all wanna eat my what ?!”
No, not that kind of mullet.
I suppose, to a mullet, 13 kayaks might look like a school of dolphins. Anyway, it was dark; we were not interested in them and would have had no idea there were so many beneath the surface, but whenever we neared a school of mullets they tried to escape from our path by jumping out of/seemingly flying across the water’s surface. Both K and I were slapped in the hands/arms several times by the fleeing flying fishies, and, occasionally, one would land in a kayak. Our guide ended up with at least two mullets joining him in his kayak’s cockpit.
They looked like this…only it was dark and we could barely see them.
One exception to the fine by me nobody took pictures sentiment: – it would have been excellent to have gotten a picture of the snake that MH’s cousin NB and his daughter CB discovered in their (tandem) kayak. We were on our way back, about 8/10 of the way through the trip, when a snake slithered across NB’s lap and then went under his kayak’s seat. [3] . The guide confirmed NB’s claim (i.e. he saw the snake in NB’s kayak when the boat was in the water), but neither the guide nor NB got a good enough look at the snake to confirm whether it might be a round head, yay/whew! (e.g. a harmless rat snake) or a diamond head , YIKES ! (e.g. a cottonmouth, which is venomous.)
There was a distinct improvement of the pace of CB’s paddling as she and her father, as per the guide’s recommendation, hauled ass made a hasty but dignified return to the launch area, so as to dislodge their inadvertent hitchhiker. After hauling ashore We Who Enjoy Such Things ® (read: the guide, Belle, NB and a few others who are reptile-friendly) carefully checked out NB’s kayak, and espied a hole beneath the seat where the snake could have be hiding, but none of us could not see it or get it to come out.
Had we had more time, we would have taken the Snakes On A Kayak! theme to more extremes (some of us immediately began throwing out ideas for a screenplay), but the night was old and Florida’s state birds (read: mosquitos) were out in force.
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Department Of Reasons For Moiself To Go To Central Florida
“Oh, there’s so much to see and do there – Sea World, Universal Studios Dinosaur World, Legoland, Busch Gardens the new Harry Potter thing....
It was hard not to laugh at the Well-Meaning Person ® speculating as to the reasons for my trip to central Florida last week. Don’t think for a moment that visiting any kind of amusement park – especially one whose name rhymes with Whiz-pee-sand – would be reason enough to get me there.
Family matters. That’s it.
We (MH, son K and daughter Belle and I) did the Family Trip Thing ®, joining MH’s mother and his sister (who respectively live near/in Orlando), and his cousin and her family, to do the final disposition [4] of the ashes of MH’s father. [5]
Florida. From what I’ve seen of it over the years…well, I am not…a fan. IMHO, Florida would be tolerable sans Floridians, who have constructed lives where they scurry from one air-conditioned cubicle to another (car to house to car to shopping mall to car to work to church and church and church and … [6]) to escape the living-in-an-oven-between-sinkholes they’ve decided to call home. The way humans have to modify/assault the environment to make it acceptable to them, sometimes I think the bipeds should just leave en mass [7] and let the panthers and gators and other wildlife recover/take over.
Fine by me, as long as I can continue to get poolside beverage service.
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Department Of Sisyphus In The Suburbs
The likelihood of the gentle summer breeze changing direction and gusting toward an open garage, filling it with the neighborhood detritus, is directly proportional to moiself just having finished sweeping out said garage and attempting to shut the garage door.
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Department Of The Circle Of Life, Backyard Edition
I found this beauty yesterday morning when I was picking berries. She was stretched out underneath one of our blueberry bushes, and looked so peaceful I thought she was resting, or napping. [8] I brought her inside to show MH and K, and now I don’t know what to do with her, other than return her to Nature ®, with a nod to her simple elegance and a hope that she had a good life (however that would be defined for a butterfly).
* * *
May your Sisyphean tasks at least provide amusement for those around you;
May you have your shae of mullets-in-the-cockpit adventures;
May you be having a good life, however you define that for your species;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
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[1] “If there’s no picture of it, it didn’t really happen,” seems to be some folks’ motto.
[2] Sorry…couldn’t resist a chance to tweak my heritage. It won’t happen again. Oh, what am I saying – of course it will.
[3] The guide’s guess was the snake had been in the kayak all along, but we civilians liked the idea of it jumping, with the mullets, and landing in their boat.
[4] Not sure what to call it, as it was partway between a scattering and an internment.
[5] Who died from complications of Parkinson’s disease, two and a half years ago.
[6] You can’t spit – and I have tried – without hitting a church in Florida. Which would be great, if only spit could do some real damage….
[7] As long as they go anyplace but Oregon.
[8] I don’t know if butterflies, in their brief existence, take time to nap, or if they even have the inclination to do so.
