fasciation-fascination

[fasciation-fascination]

You want me to use anti-ageing products? The thing that killed Dorian Gray?

[fasciation-fascination]

Forgot to post these simple little chicken hacky sacks/heat packs i made for my siblings for christmas. 100% cotton and filled with sunflower seeds (the chickens did NOT appreciate me borrowing from their stash but i was out of rice) so they can be heated up for hand warmers or to ease aches and pains

(or for balancing it on your head i guess)

[fasciation-fascination]

Catherine Hyde (British, b. Dartford, Kent, England, based Helston, Cornwall, England) - The Soft Night Descending, Paintings: Acrylics, Gold Leaf on Canvas

[fasciation-fascination]

[fasciation-fascination]

[fasciation-fascination]

Im fucking sobbing looking at the new black footed cat at Utah's Hogle zoo

Shes just a fucking baby

Baby with a 60% successful kill rate

[fasciation-fascination]

Your Pigeon Omens is pretty good however you got one thing wrong about Aziraphale… **White fantail pigeon**.

WHY ARE YOU SO RIGHT?

I swear I looked them up when I saw this and immediately thought of that one scene with aziraphale as a magician and his feather boa and I couldn't resist.

[fasciation-fascination]

[fasciation-fascination]

everyone agreeing with this tweet is so lucky because cell phones have absolutely been in my dreams, specifically DREAMS ABOUT TUMBLR DISCOURSE. I literally had a dream my mutuals made a callout for me i'm not fucking joking helppp

#one time I had a dream I got trapped in a building called “twitter but in real life” and this feels related

[fasciation-fascination]

one might imagine sisyphus learning by playing, winning by learning, and begin by beginning

[fasciation-fascination]

Just a tiny bit bitter that someone (jokingly) reblogged that post about plants and bugs to call me a spotted lantern fly when the post was originally because I was trying to look up wood violets and getting a bunch of pages about how to kill these lovely native wildflowers because they. . . look "bad" in the desolate wastelands that Americans call "yards."

I am fully in favor of culling invasive species (in a way that is quick and minimizes their suffering), but can we not just think about the implications with regards to how much of our world is seen as a pest to remove and destroy. Please. For me.

[fasciation-fascination]

[fasciation-fascination]

I think I stumbled upon some kind of ichthyological forbidden knowledge. Opened up a book of names that were never meant to be read.

You've probably heard of "can-opener smoothdream", right? It's practically a meme by now.

But the thing is, it's a deep-sea fish. And deep-sea fish have historically not had English names because nobody drops them into the conversation over a hot cuppa. Sure, there's generic stuff like hatchetfish and barreleye, but when you want to refer to the actual fish you're probably saying such euphonious phrases as Diretmus argenteus, Sternoptyx diaphana, or maybe even Opisthoproctus soleatus.

So whence "can-opener smoothdream"? Certainly no non-ichthyologist has ever used that name. It's not even a direct translation of the scientific name Chaenophryne longiceps - that would be "long-headed gape-toad". Which to me is even cooler than "can-opener smoothdream".

But I digress. The "dream" bit comes from the anglerfish family Oneirodidae, from oneiros, "dream", because those marvelous fishes look like they came out of a dream (Pietsch, 2009).

Note that Pietsch (2009), more or less the anglerfish bible, uses English names at the genus level only. So Chaenophryne is the smoothhead dreamers genus but no mention is made of "can-opener smoothdreams". So no luck there.

Wikipedia, root cause of a lot of misinformation, has this to say.

"Longhead dreamer" is a far more accurate name. And in fact, despite Wikipedia prioritizing "can-opener smoothdream" (because it's funny?), the links listed use "longhead dreamer" and "smoothhead dreamer" as the name and "can-opener smoothdream" as an alternative.

So. Again. Where did "can-opener smoothdream" come from?

The answer, as it turns out, lies with McAllister (1990).

In the book A List of the Fishes of Canada, ichthyologist D. E. McAllister sought out to list every single fish known to Canadian waters, providing both an English and a French name.

And when there wasn't an English name, like for most deep-sea fishes, he arbitrarily gave them a name. And his names "differ in many instances from the widely accepted names" (Holm, 1998)

This had varying results. This is his name for one of the netdevil anglerfishes.

The humpback anglerfish or blackdevil anglerfish becomes a werewolf (????).

This one is just confusing.

The white-spotted lanternfish or Rafinesque's lanternfish instead becomes...

And most embarrassingly, the Mediterranean spiderfish gets saddled with something that "violates the tenet of good taste" (Holm, 1998).

This then is the original source of "can-opener smoothdream". It was invented by an ichthyologist in 1990, and has seen little to no use outside of how bizarre the name is.

Maybe McAllister's goofier names will catch on. Who knows? They certainly aren't very popular in the scientific community though.

References

Holm, E. (1998) Encyclopedia of Canadian Fishes (review). The Canadian Field-Naturalist, 112, p. 174-175.

McAllister, D. E. (1990) A List of the Fishes of Canada. National Museum of Natural Sciences, Ottawa.

Pietsch, T. W. (2009) Oceanic Anglerfishes: Extraordinary Diversity in the Deep Sea. University of California Press, Berkeley.

[fasciation-fascination]

gazing in wonder at the wikipedia page for meander

Out of all the terminological categories in the English language, geological terminology is the most intensely poetic; who could fail to be moved by metamorphism and orogenesis? There is something awesome and mythic about it.

Anyway as I was reading this article I recalled a dim, possibly inaccurate memory of Chinese mythology where four dragons transformed themselves into the four rivers that flow through China.

I've been taking walks beside the creek. The creek has "an erosion problem" as it was once described to me. I notice on one bank the creek cuts underneath the roots of the trees and threatens to collapse the bank, and on another it deposits a low, broad beach of broken stones and mud.

The recent history of humankind would mislead us to think that erosion is a linear process of degradation, but the article for meander tells me that rivers move, the loops in their channels steadily rolling along the river's length, like the slithering of a snake over a time scale of thousands of years...

A river is a kind of dragon.

[fasciation-fascination]

🐟🐡🦈🐠🦐🪼🦞🦀🐳🐋🐬🦭

MARINE BIOLOGY BLAST

[fasciation-fascination]

[fasciation-fascination]

Herb Robert

One of the small but bright pink flowers of Herb Robert geranium, in the garden.