what's the buzz

2002.08.28
This thought occured to me the other week: I can totally see why people used to believe in spontaneous generation for stuff like fruit flies. You hardly ever see just one, flying around looking for fruit...but leave some old banana out and boom, a hoard has descended. Plus, fruit flies are so tiny and simple seeming... That whole Francesco Redi cheesecloth experiment that "proved" spontaneous generation didn't happen? Who knows, maybe the cheesecloth screwed up the air flow that was needed to bring the fly bits to life!


Quote of the Moment
Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
Jackson Brown.
Sometimes incorrectly attributed to the Dalai Lama along with 17 other "instructions for life"


Link of the Moment
The true-life article that inspired the movie "Blue Crush". What a lifestyle. To explain to the surfer girls why she herslef had never surfed, the author "explained I'd grown up in Ohio, where there is no surf, but that didn't satisfy them; what I didn't say was that I'm not sure that at 15 I had the abandon or the indomitable sense of myself that you seem to need in order to look at this wild water and think, I will glide on top of those waves." Not sure if I would've been much better. I'd still like to bungee jump one of these days though.