Glug.
I disconnected all the equipment, pumped it dry, took it out and hosed it out.
Talk about a job postponed for 10 years. It should make maintenance easier.
What I dumped stopped the utility sink, and fool I, I reached in to unclog the drain—which involved a bristleworm, which has my fingers swollen—been stung way too often in my years of marine tank keeping. You don’t feel it at the time, but a few hours later, ow, ow, and it’ll be that way for a couple of days. Silly me. You don’t do tank work without gloves. Not even when it’s tank residue.
I’d have rescued the worm, if I could, because, well, I don’t like to demise things, but he was down the drain, and not in great shape. They arrive on rock and such and multiply in the tank, some as long as a foot. But—well, it’s running again, it doesn’t leak, and I think the tank will be happier.
Not even an alien planet, and we get some very weird critters here on Earth, in that primitive invertebrate level especially.
I think it was a Discovery Channel special on Pre_Cambrian or Cambrian earliest life, which had some truly strange lifeforms which didn’t survive to our times, things with neither bilateral nor radial symmetry, really odd. Wish I knew which special it was, to see it again. Severeal years ago.
Your description of that worm in the drain sounds like some starship or starbase crewmember’s bad day at work just waiting to happen. Maybe not on the order of Alien hatchery bad, but potentially pretty frazzling. Starman 3rd Class Brown really would want a shower (from a different system!) and a good stout drink after that! — Ectoplasmic residue — I’ve been slimed! 😀
Irritating bristles, nettles, eh? Eek.
Look up eunicid worm. Some startled hobbyists have taken apart pipes to find this creature grown to alarming proportions, a yard long, and they’re fast and nippy to boot.
Then there’s the mantis shrimp, which has a punch so hard and fast some articles talk about it creating a plasma in the area of impact.
And clams have a kind of driveshaft, which moves impossibly fast…
It’s weird out there in the deep blue.
Ye gods, ‘we have wormsign’. A fellow named oregonreef has many tales of these critters; some of his stories and pictures are nightmare inducing, although I do like the story of the octopus who got away. Didn’t even leave any legs behind! FWIW, a yard long is par for the course; he was talking about 7 foot worms!
Oh, dear. Do watch those hands, CJ, or else you’ll end up having to write using the Barbara Cartland method (reclining on your chez longue dictating to your secretary . . . )(or dictate to a tape recorder and have it transcribed — I have 27 years of experience as a transcriptionist, just FYI. . . !)
Am sending you and Jane something special, a kind of anniversary present (belated or early, pick one). You will see how appropriate it is when you receive it, hopefully intact (I’m sending it “partial” post.) It will go out either today or tomorrow.
In the throes of moving, SO much to do and I’m not really wanting to do anything but sit and read. Am going to try to move without having a major health crisis (last time I had emergency appendectomy 23 days before I was supposed to move!) although that jaw tooth (maxillary) is acting up again. Packers are coming bright and early tomorrow to pack up breakables. Movers are coming Thursday. Moving to a nice duplex where I will not have a 4-year-old boy living upstairs, and party people living across the way, and (touch wood!) won’t have all the plumbing issues. I will have a small yard and large flower bed, so I can have irises again. There is a good pet hotel here and the fat(cat)boy will be going there bright and early Thurs. He’s been there several times before and they know him. He’s very friendly and loves being petted, and the minders there spoil him.
Well, once more into the breach . . . .
Clams have a sort of spinning drive shaft? Wow!
I’m reminded of tales from Appalachian old-timers. Seems, among other things, they claimed there was such a thing as a “hoop snake,” which would (of course!) get away by taking its tail in its mouth and ~rolling~ like a wheel. Upon reflection, y’know, this sounds a bit like the Ouroboros myth-snake. But mostly, I think it sounds like old-time folks pulling each other’s legs, or for the benefit of the hapless city-folk or the “outlandish,” the “foreignors,” not from the Colonies or later, the States. That’s not the only odd tale. They also claim there’s a type of snake that can “fall apart” or be chopped into pieces, then pull itself back together into the whole animal again. While that’s probably folklore from how snakes can have motor reflexes after their heads are severed, well, again, it seems like folktales, exaggerations for the benefit of the not-so-bright or the hapless tourist / outsider. — I think I got those from the Foxfire series, but I may have heard them also from my dad’s family joking about some of the things people would say or believe, like tales of “haints” (haunts, ghosts, supernatural creatures). The curious thing is, a lot of that was carried forward by very early colonists from English and Scottish and German, Dutch, and French folklore, then elaborated on by people living there in the mountains in the Colonies, mostly (but certainly not all) lacking in much formal education. There were always a few better-educated or very well-educated folks in the area too. So a lot of interesting things got preserved there, including dialectal things from very far back in English speech, plus a marked tendency to hang onto King James Version Biblical English.
(It’s odd. As a kid, I was *so* *embarrassed* by my dad’s poor English and accent, and how my grandma on that side spoke (even deeper accent and poorer grammar, further back in dialectal holdovers). (I can remember her saying “hit” and “hits” for it and its, for instance, before I knew why she said them that way.) Yet once I grew to late high school and early college, with the start of a real love and background for languages, I grew to appreciate what that speech style was, living history, that’s these days being lost very fast, with outside mass media available and better, but mostly outside-imported education.)
Wow, I tangented from worms to snakes to Appalachian dialectics…. Er, veering back on course, ma’am.
OT, but proving “Humans make mistakes, but to really **** things up takes a computer.” From OPB’s online broadcast schedule (at the moment–I phoned it in!):
Nixon: American Experience
Part Two
The life and legacy of the iconic filmmaker are explored from his early days creating Mickey Mouse.
program information
Also OT, but worth it?
“ALS Ice Bucket Challenge Donations Lead to Significant Gene Discovery
“Largest-ever study of inherited ALS identifies new ALS gene, NEK1
“Washington, D.C. (July 25, 2016) — According to a paper published today in Nature Genetics, researchers part of Project MinE’s global gene sequencing effort, funded by The ALS Association through ALS Ice Bucket Challenge donations, have identified a new ALS gene, NEK1, which now ranks among the most common genes that contribute to the disease, providing scientists with another potential target for therapy development. This was the largest-ever study of familial (inherited) ALS, involved contributions from over 80 researchers in 11 countries, and was led by John Landers, Ph.D., of University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Mass. and Jan Veldink, Ph.D., of University Medical Center Utrecht, in The Netherlands.
…
“NEK1 was discovered through a genome-wide search for ALS risk genes in over 1,000 ALS families, and was independently found through different means in an isolated population in The Netherlands. Further analysis in over 13,000 sporadic ALS individuals compared to controls again revealed an overrepresentation of variants in the same gene. The variations discovered in the gene sequence are predicted to lead to gene loss of function. NEK1 is known to have multiple roles in neurons, including maintenance of the cytoskeleton that gives the neuron its shape and promotes transport within the neuron. In addition, NEK1 has roles in regulating the membrane of the mitochondrion, which supplies energy to neurons and in repairing DNA. Disruption of each of these cellular functions through other means has been linked to increased risk of ALS.”
http://www.alsa.org/news/media/press-releases/significant-gene-discovery-072516.html
Yay, Crowd Funding and Science!
As I was looking through the dictionary section, I found this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chub_(gay_slang)
and other sounds of delight and dismay.