Saturday, March 09, 2002
My story for The Spook is coming along. It's good to do short stories between chapters, but, after a bit, I begin to get antsy about the characters in the book, and what they might be up to in my absence, and suspect it's time to get back to them.
But most of today was spent (after a night of exceptional insomnia) at a local museum where I'm volunteering Fridays, curating and conserving an enormous photographic collection, mostly slides of paleontological excavations and exhibits. I started back in January and there are literally thousands of these slides. I took on the job because I have the requisite paleo' knowledge, but I'm having to learn all the photo conservation stuff as I go (such as - slides should not ever be stored in sleeves made from polyvinyl chloride).
Tonight, hoping to cheer myself up a bit, I read a Dr. Suess book, which usually does the trick. Actually, two Dr. Seuss books - McElligot's Pool and On Beyond Zebra!, my favorites. Anyway, I found myself pondering one of the Seussian creatures, the Umbus, a sort of bovine millipede. Seuss tells us that "She has ninety-eight faucets that give milk quite nicely. Perhaps ninety-nine. I forget just precisely." But he draws the Umbus as an extraordinarily long creature, which would seem to have far more than "ninety-nine faucets," if "faucet" corresponds to "nipple." Each Umbus udder appears to have six nipples, and, based on his illustration, which snakes its way from one page to the next, I come up with a very conservative estimate of 360 nipples, almost four times the Seussian number! However, if he in fact meant "faucet" to refer to the entire udder, not each nipple, then we cut the number down to 60+, well under that given in his description (but, as part of the beast is hidden behind an inconeveniently placed hillock, the number would probably actually approach 100+). So, perhaps "faucet" means "udder" after all, and not nipple. It's things like this that give me indigestion.
And Ohio creationists don't help, either.
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