It’s been a day » « Emerson McMullen and the non-existence of history

I guess it’s a Blood, Sweat, and Tears kind of day

I’m not talking about the mountain of grading waiting for me.

The bad news: I fear Jenny By-The-Front-Door may have died. It’s cold and windy out there! No sign of a body, either — if she’d fallen out, I’m pretty sure the corpse would have blown away. I poked into her nest fairly thoroughly, and …

There’s an egg sac deep in the middle! With the multiple hatched-out egg sacs around her, she clearly had a fecund life. I may have to bring her nest into the lab and examine it more closely.

Speaking of the lab, I got in this morning and found that one of the egg sacs there had hatched. Baby spiders galore! I quickly did a partial separation into groups and gave them a lot of flies to gnaw on, so they wouldn’t gnaw on each other. I’ll come in this weekend and move as many as I can into individual containers. There’ll be some attrition — about a half dozen escaped and ballooned off into the corners of the lab, or the atrium, or the crawl space, or other people’s labs, where I hope they prosper.

Jerry Fisher ought to change the lyrics a little.

And when I die, and when I’m gone
There’ll be one child five hundred children born
In this world to carry on, to carry on

Dang, that doesn’t fit. Well, Jerry Fisher is still alive, I’ll trust him to do a better job on the lyrics.

It’s been a day » « Emerson McMullen and the non-existence of history

Comments

  1. PaulBC says

    There’s an egg sac deep in the middle! With the multiple hatched-out egg sacs around her, she clearly had a fecund life. I may have to bring her nest into the lab and examine it more closely.

    Well, you know what they say. “What goes up must come down/Spinnin’ wheel got to go ’round”

    Hmm… Spinning Wheel? Weaving? Arachne? Maybe Blood, Sweat, and Tears were singing about spiders the whole time.

  2. missouribuckeye says

    Just to be pedantic, “And When I Die” was written by the late, great, and tragically relatively unknown signer-songwriter Laura Nyro.
    In a just world, she would have been as famous as Carole King.

  3. says

    Thanks Missouri, I was about to point that out. I’m not sure she’s so unknown, however. FWIW she also wrote many of the 5th Dimension songs, and several of her albums sold very well, including New York Tendaberry, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, and Christmas and the Beads of Sweat. Sadly, she died of cancer at age 49.

  7. dangerousbeans says

    You should get a student to study the wild spider population in the buildings, see what effect escapees from your lab have