Evening musings

     I gotta take a break here from picking apart the mats in the dog's fur; MiddleChild tells me I look like a chimp picking nits off another chimp.  So I will write. 
     Or maybe just pick other people's creativity off of them.  I checked into Dave Barry's blog....his posts about the TV show 24 (which I have never watched) are so perfect that in just a few words I get the whole gist of the show and everything that is right and wrong with it, such that I neither need to or want to watch the show but am immeasurably enriched anyway.........sigh............ see http://blogs.herald.com/dave_barrys_blog/2010/02/01/ followed by http://blogs.herald.com/dave_barrys_blog/2010/02/24-1.html and you too can be enriched and relieved forever that you aren't missing anything by not watching 24.
     I like this little quote from Philippe Janvier, a paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. "It may have been easier for some fish to come out of the water and eat their prey peacefully by the shore where they wouldn't get hassled."  Nice little image that I wouldn't have thought of, illustrating evolving to avoid competition, that basic tenet of evolutionary pressure. (an interruption:  Oh POOH, David Letterman's top ten list tonight is about the SuperBowl, not Sarah Palin's tea party crib notes!)   Anyway I came across the quote in an article at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/biology_evolution/article6978486.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=3392178  announcing that critters moved from sea to land much earlier than scientists had postulated, based on new evidence.  Apparently the sea of the Middle Devonian age housed fish, scorpions and crabs, and perhaps was getting crowded.  Meanwhile, the land was still sort of barren and maybe critters could have a more leisurely picnic there.  And begin obsessively picking nits off each other.