Spider’s
still there. Last night it had
appeared that he/she had gone off to the relative safety of pine tree by the
side. Perhaps he/she was
reinforcing one of the critical tethers that hold the web in place. Sitting in the middle of the web like
he/she is now doing, presumably provides easiest access to anything that should be
come trapped in the net. If you’re
all the way down on some supporting line the hapless insect might have time to wiggle
free. Perhaps this is the proper
perch to sit in when you’re really hungry, 喝西北风[1].
But it is also would seem to have two important
disadvantages, the first of which only something as fundamental as hunger might
overwhelm. Sitting in the center
of what, at a quick glance is otherwise just air makes you a rather no-brainer
target for birds that would eat you.
I don’t know enough about how birds see and maybe this sort of optical
illusion actually proves a tricky way to avoid detection. But sitting where I am, you’d have to be blind as a bat to
not see this large black dot. And
thinking on that, bat's sonar may be what he/she’s avoiding in the
nighttime. That or he/she’s so
close to the house that the bat can’t risk flapping into the wall.
The other glaring defect to sitting in the center of your
web is that potential pray can discern that you are at the center of something
that isn’t empty space at all.
Again, it may be a matter of vision. But I thought insects had a whole jewels coating of eyes
bringing in stimuli from every angle.
So you sit there, hungry and you wonder if anything is going to come
your way at all, hour after hour, and you wonder if one of those enormous birds
chirping out there in the trees has spied you, and you wonder if it might not
be more intelligent to duck out of sight for a while. Likely you don’t think at all. No one taught you to build the web and no one, taught you to
sit in the middle of it. These are
things you know. That, or the
anthropomorphic projection that he/she is vexed, sitting there, but that he/she
is rather proud of his/her web and it is cool to sort of hang in the middle of
it as it's the best place to absorb the wind and swing.
There is that verb.
I’ve got on now the jazz collection that crashed trying to populate on
the way to the gym yesterday morning. This is
entitled “A Collection of Progressive & Independent Spiritual Jazz 45s,
1968-75” which is certainly a rather attractive title. The first track “Uhuru Sasa” is by a
guy who has been popping up on one cats album or another many times here on Dusty Brine. He has a few discs on Rdio but somehow
(and I just checked) I’ve never gotten around to writing about James Spaulding,
the alto player and flautist born in Indianapolis Indiana in 1937. Hadn’t realized he’d played in Sun Ra’s
Arkestra, though it makes perfect sense.
He was also a member of the illustrious World Saxophone Quartet and in
as much as that’s true, I may just have seen him once or twice. Glad to be acquainted. Had a look and for those of you who
don’t speak Swahili, uhuru sasa means
“freedom now.”
Yesterday we all headed out for another weekend in Chang Ping. Once again we took the
Jing Cheng highway up to the Sixth Ring Road over towards the mountains. We stopped one place, a bit late, and
then went about in a number of green houses, picking vegetables. The tomato vines were already pretty
well picked but corn was not. We
grabbed a bunch of mao dou, “hairy
beans” which are known to most Americans, I figure, by their Japanese name, edamame. This, and a generous pulling of peanuts out of the earth were both first time farming adventures for me at least. But not carrots.
Those are carrot leaves. But when I pulled a few up the man yelled at me
and said they weren’t part of the package. The most visually appealing may have been the cabbage which
prompted a debate with my step son about whether they were growing out from the
center, broadening, flattening successively which was my position, or somehow
pulling inward to form a tight core, which defied my imagination.
Later we sped off to an apple orchard that doubled as a boutique hotel
where you could pick apples and stay in deluxe accommodations, beneath the mountains. China is diversifying. We were all sort of tagging along my
wife’s ride on this, as it was an invite from her friend. We filled half a basked of apples, and
were told upon exit that we needed to weigh and pay. I must have been day dreaming for a bit because I had to do
a triple take when, after receiving confirmation that they had taken a bit off for the bag, the
lady explained it would be 150 kuai or
nearly thirty bucks for this half a bag of ours. Huh? Why are your apples more expensive than
apples in Tokyo?” I queried.
Laughing I vamped on the absurdity of going to the country to pick my
own apples and pay a premium on them for a while. "Why, if I wanted to do that I could . . . " and then the Mrs. emerged from the orchard, tossed me a “we’re guests” dagger
stare and I gave ground on the premium picking. We kids went off to use the new slow motion video feature in my stepsons iPhone.
Later that night it turned into a bit of a gala affair for
which we, sold on a farmer green jeans outing, were increasingly and woefully
underdressed for. But there were
lots of interesting people and a few old friends and we had all three of our little chicks there with us at one event so it settled into a lovely evening, all together once
again there beneath the dramatic peaks in Chang Ping. (Which some how don't look particularly "dramatic" in the one photo I had of them, but there, beneath them, they loom.)
Quick look at the news and you have another young gentleman
beheaded by these gore-mongers in the Levant. Who can read about these things an not imagine yourself
there, confronting having to read these forced statements and consider the
meaning of your fast approaching death.
Ironically Mr. Henning was from Perth Scotland, and its unclear if his
forced denunciation of David Cameron and the latter’s obligatory and, to my
eyes a bit stiff, Tory-seeming rebuttal that “It’s a desperately difficult situation, . . . We don’t pay
ransoms to terrorists when they kidnap our citizens” was intended to or will
add any fuel to the Scottish independence vote set for next Thursday.
Selfishly,
I think I can legitimately add another country to the list of those I’ve
visited if the “yes” vote has the day.
Aesthetically it is interesting to consider the end of the Union Jack,
forever more an anachronism. Ian
Paisley just passed away or he might be able to comment on the irony of a free
and independent Scotland from the “inviolable” British soil in Belfast. We’ll have to see just how it is the
Chinese press handles one group of citizenry independently voting to remove
themselves from the greater nation.
Zhongnanhai’s favorite war from U.S. history is of course, the Civil
War, where the Union definitively defeated the separatists.
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