* all credit to Alice B. Reckless.
Author Archives: dr.hypercube
Donald Richie 1924-2013
Donald Richie died last Tuesday. I was already planning to go to the Music Hall Tuesday night for their presentation of Ran; it seemed an excellent way to honor Mr. Richie’s memory, and so I raised a glass to him on my way to the theater. I learned of Mr. Richie’s work very recently – at a dinner at a brilliant friend’s place, I started talking Kurosawa with another brilliant friend (I’d just watched The Seven Samurai again and was full of enthusiasm). She pointed me at Richie’s book on the director as well as a bio of Kurosawa and Mifune by Stuart Galbraith IV and a fantastic novel, The Last Samurai, that uses The Seven Samurai as both an element in the characters lives and as an organizing theme.
Caterina Caselli – Sono Bugiarda
Amazing. Is this a rework of the Prefab Four’s hit? Did this come 1st? And check the peloton. Wool shorts. Toe clips, leather shoes and cleats. Bare heads. Back when doping was a handful of amphetamines. I’m hoping she’s perched pillion on a Vespa.
Decoy spider
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on,
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.*
Not an exact verse match, because these greater spiders are not spiders at all – they are decoys made by a Cyclosa? spider.
From afar, it appears to be a medium sized spider about an inch across, possibly dead and dried out, hanging in the center of a spider web along the side of the trail. Nothing too out of the ordinary for the Amazon. As you approach, the spider starts to wobble quickly forward and back, letting you know this spider is, in fact, alive.Step in even closer and things start to get weird- that spider form you were looking at is actually made up of tiny bits of leaf, debris, and dead insects. The confusion sets in. How can something be constructed to look like a spider, how is it moving, and what kind of creature made this!?It turns out the master designer behind this somewhat creepy form is in fact a tiny spider, only about 5mm in body length, that is hiding behind or above that false, bigger spider made up of debris. After discussing with several spider experts, we’ve determined it is quite probable that this spider is a never-before-seen species in the genus Cyclosa. This genus is known for having spiders that put debris in their webs to either attract prey or, as in this case, confuse anything trying to eat them.*
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Images by Jeff Cremer and Phil Torres
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