I learned to swim 'cause he said you could fly

[sovay]

spatch has been sending me various cheering links, like a coconut octopus being offered a new home, Peter Falk's self-portraits as Columbo, and Potter Puppet Pals' "The Mysterious Ticking Noise." I appreciate all of these things.

a_reasonable_man went to hear Anaïs Mitchell and came back with the self-named debut single of her new folk group, "Bonny Light Horseman." It's having to share space right now with the rest of the new music, but it's on rotation.

I feel everyone on my friendlist should know that Conjunctions is now reading for Grendel's Kin: The Monsters Issue.

I don't understand how I missed the existence of anything called "the New Thalassology."

Comments

[sovay]

"Bonny Light Horseman" is beautiful; thank you for that.

You're welcome. I thought it was a good version.

And that little octopus is so expressive with its arms, testing, rejecting, testing, rejecting, until at last it commits.

So I am right now reading Richard O. Prum's The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017) and there is a jaw-dropping passage in which he describes how the early twentieth-century ornithologist William Beebe, after a week of camping in the forest of Borneo, finally had the transcendent experience of witnessing the courtship display of a great argus pheasant in the wild—after which he promptly decided that aesthetic considerations obviously played no part in the propagation of the species, because the female for which the male had put on all this luminous, shivering, thousand-eyed entrancing display did not look all that impressed with it. Prum, of course, points out that the entire purpose of a courtship display is to permit the female to evaluate the male and that she is under no obligation to leap into his arms just because he's successfully made it through the performance; that particular bird might have blown Beebe away but rated only about a B+ in argus pheasant terms. I related this account to spatch who promptly shouted to the long-dead ghost of William Beebe, "Well, why didn't you mate with him?!" Anyway, I thought of it while watching the octopus carefully select its home.

[asakiyume]

Hah! That's hilarious. I'm imagining a cartoon now where Beebe and the pheasant are getting married (and yes, I can see how you'd think of it in this situation)