But venom, first.
So I have a bad habit of leaving the TV on when I do...anything, really. I'm not going to go on about screens--that isn't my issue now. But when there isn't anything good on, I leave it on Animal Planet. And when there isn't anything good on Animal Planet, it seems like reruns of Wild Recon are always on.
There's a cheetah in that picture, but he mostly plays with snakes and monitors and spiders--poisonous stuff. And every one of them has to pay for it's tv spotlight: the snakes and monitors are milked for their venom, and blood samples are taken from the cheetahs and hyenas (and snakes as well, actually). While he's pinning heads and pulling needles, he's always mentioning what these valuable secretions will be used for--antivenom, sometimes, but more often than I would expect, both blood and venom go toward research in human diseases (neurotoxins especially).
I did a lot of interwebbing today, and a lot of reading--the TV on, watching, the whole time. So I saw a good deal of Wild Recon today. Emus, mambo snakes, monitors, gazelle, vipers, hyenas, kangaroo, water snakes...that's all I can remember off the top of my head that was parasited today. Antivenom is another thing, I feel--you fuck with me, and I'll fuck with you to fix it. But after awhile, all this blood snatching, venom milking, seemed almost comical--watching one animal drop after the other, every snake get caught. It seemed silly. Like watching someone get mugged.
But less scary, more whimsy--adjust those dials, Frank. There we go: moar fox.
More
clever--more sneaky; heck, the drugs the even use to knock 'em out have an amnesic effect. It doesn't get much sneakier than erasing your footprints from your victim (host?)'s mind. So after a certain point, I couldn't see the human benefit aspect--I forget how all of these secretions are being divvied up and sent off to research on curing tons of human diseases. Instead, it just becomes a very silly, almost mouse and cat (and I mean it to be in that order) game of pulling a fast one on various animals.
You can tell by that sneaky little stance: a mugging's afoot. When the cat's away, the mice will play; when the cat's asleep, the mice will STEAL YA' SHIT LULZ. Well, at least he's sharing (two mice)--though, I don't yet know if that's better or worse.
Anywho, it's interesting how many animals have stuff in them that could keep us from dying someday. Like it's meant to be there. Broken pieces and whatnot. Babbling towers.
But on to opacity.
I started working on my FAFSA today (blargh), and had to upgrade my Mozilla browser to get it to work. And I like it. You can add skins to the browser, but that's not quite why I like it--not the personalization factor. I have it set to "Fox Bubbles" (stay with me, here--I promise this will all get terribly interesting. Someday.)
Here it is--try it on.
Nice, mm? My desktop background is black with a planet on it; my browser is black with these charming, slightly translucent bubbles. And look! My tabs (all five of them) are see through, too. Oh, and the rim of my browser, more opaque than the rest, still shows through to my desktop.
This is, for some reason, endlessly pleasing to me. It is not because it is nothing--rather, it is because it is not; and just barely. There is something delightful about seeing something stretched thin; being able to see it, and through it. What is it?
My finger is not yet on it. But I feel it is hiding in this very long quote from Snow Country, in which Shimamura slyly watches the play between the scenery and the reflection of a woman's face in the window of a train:
Will let yoo kno wen I find.
This is, for some reason, endlessly pleasing to me. It is not because it is nothing--rather, it is because it is not; and just barely. There is something delightful about seeing something stretched thin; being able to see it, and through it. What is it?
My finger is not yet on it. But I feel it is hiding in this very long quote from Snow Country, in which Shimamura slyly watches the play between the scenery and the reflection of a woman's face in the window of a train:
In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted together into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mounts shone in the center of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressibly beauty of it.
...the girl's face was floating over [the monotonous mountain landscape]. Cut off by the face, the evening landscape moved steadily by around its outlines. The face too seemed transparent--but was it really transparent? Shimamura had the illusion that the evening landscape was actually passing over the face, and the flow did not stop to let him be sure it was not.
...Shimamura came to forget that it was a mirror he was looking at. The girl's face seemed to be out in the flow of the evening mountains.
It was then that a light shone in the face....As it sent its small ray through the pupil of the girl's eye, as the eye and the light were superimposed one on the other, the eye became a weirdly beautiful bit of phosphorescence on the sea of evening mountains. (Kawabata 9-10)
What I'm looking for is 10% cat: a slender, feline bend ghosting over the shine of a bright and clear water dish.
Will let yoo kno wen I find.
That was remarkably enjoyable. I wasn't reading about serres and his arrows and parasiting in between, I was reading about opacity and venom and drawing connections for my own (over) analytic pleasure. Thank heavens.
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