Mark

Glad to see there were limits to your de-evolution, Mark.

I’m smiling to see Queensland mentioned, too. I spent many happy moments in Kyogle, near the Queensland/New South Wales border, as the guest of an Oxford-trained dissectionist who retired to a life of (dissectionists are good with their hands) planting hedge mazes and tending a massive bonsai garden. As I’m sure Mark knows, wondrous eccentricity isn’t especially unusual in rural Australia.

I’m no Welles expert (and film isn’t even one of my favorite art forms), but I burn when I think of the might-have-beens if he’d just been given a little more money or trust at various points in his life. He was even a competent artist (see LES BRAVADES).

Bullying is a fraught topic. I’m proud of the fact that I was never beaten up nor even successfully bullied, but there’s more to say here that deserves a full post at some point after work or on the weekend.

Re: monkey revenge story: will tell it today when I do a new post..

The Maggots: They scare the crap out of me too because they are common, MANY of my friends have had them, and it’s like a low rent version of ALIEN. Field researchers in Central America get them a lot. It’s the larvae of some fly, like a Bot Fly, and before you know it, this inch long spiny maggot is twisting under a huge buboe on your skin. It is gross AND painful. Some friends popped them like some horrific zit (easily infected) and saved the bodies in baby food jars of alchohol. The macho/insane thing to do was to wait till it matured. I have friends (and a cousin) who did that. I will spare you the description of that process. There are also what I think are apocryphal stories of doctors laying pieces of bacon next to the buboe and having the maggot crawl out. I cannot believe I never came down with them. But I did get numerous onslaughts of terrestrial leeches in Queensland. Not at all painful, just bloody grotesque.

Catherine: tell the story, PLEASE. Like Welle’s film THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, it is a classic tale of “comeuppance”

Mark

CLH: I was waiting for this Giant Wood Rail. They (the Capuchins) wanted to cross the path right where I was. At first it was sort of funny. Then REALLY interesting. Then really intense. I followed their lead and was interested to see if I aped them (including facial expressions) if they would eventually back down cuz I was bigger (though there was more of them). They did not back down and I de-evolved for a few moments and then gave them back their piece of the forest. They started throwing small twigs and leaves they were breaking off and screaming. So I thought I would break off a small branch and toss it at them (not hard). Well, holy moly! (see Captain Marvel) And yes, the poop did fly, but not from me. I have to draw the line somewhere. To be honest, I was entranced. Sure I had seen plenty of captive monkeys and monkeys in labs, but there was something about INTERACTING, not just scaring off, a group of animals that look at you in the face. They won. They likely had seen other folks on the trail before and knew the score. I did see the Giant Wood Rail a bit further down the road, which though an amazingly cool bird, paled in comparison to seeing the monkeys. My most sublime monkey sighting was in Costa Rica. I had just found the tiny nest of a Tufted Flycatcher and was laying against a tree looking up when I notixced beyond the nest, higher up in the lower canopy in the same tree I was leaning against, and over my head, was a family/troop of Howlers. I sat and watched them for 45 minutes or more. The morning/evening growling bellows of the alpha males are just incredible.

Mark, whatever prompted you to throw something at a troop of monkeys? You didn’t think they (who excel at throwing poop against zoo windows) wouldn’t respond in kind?