I assume that Millie ate something disagreeable for her at the July 1st party as she hasn't felt well the last two nights. She had to go outside in the middle of the night, and I stood on the porch watching her. An amazing firefly was out - it was making streaks in the night - like a tiny shooting star. I'd never seen streaking fireflies before. It got me considering how our summer is so active.
It is bug time. There are great bugs, ok bugs, irritating bugs and terrible ones - that would be ticks. And that's just a human view. Plants must have a more extreme reaction to the bugs that take care of them vs the bugs that eat them.
I was watching the fly on the kitchen counter and there's all that foot rubbing that they do. House flies taste with their feet, which are millions of times more sensitive to sugar than the human tongue. House flies also generally stay within one mile of where they were born. Darn! They keep coming back into the house.
But house flies are small things, just irritants. I was thinking about all the bugs that are in cottage country. That brought up dock spiders. There is a video of a gigantic dock spider being hand fed. The spider's name is Larry. It isn't "hand feeding" actually, but a stick is used to feed it a grasshopper, and then a fly on a stick, and then another. And so on. Larry likes to eat and it is bigger than the signal reflectors on the dock. Here it is in its own video.
One becomes aware of how many bugs there are in cottage country. There seem to be more of more varieties - horse flies (the biggest), deer flies, moose flies, mosquitoes everywhere. Itchy! That's one of the cottage country experiences.
So it seems to me that we are lucky in Niagara to have some insects and not a lot. I'll take the Monarch butterfly in the front garden yesterday. It was flying around the Milkweed plants. If we had a true Carolinian climate here, there would be many more bugs and mosquitoes. I read that the early settlers did a lot of clearing of the land to get rid of all the bugs. It worked.
I saw dill pickle cucumbers at one of the vegetable and fruit stands on the weekend. We mostly pickle vegetables - and really, cucumbers for dill and sweet pickles in North America. But there is a long list of fruits and vegetables that are pickled in every country. I decided, though, that most people don't have my fascination for pickles, chutneys, relishes and salsas.
What did I decide we are all interested in? The recent story of the lobster diver in Cape Cod having a Jonah experience - that is compelling. I find out that a Jonah experience is considered only possible with a sperm whale as it is the only whale that can possibly swallow a human. The Cape Cod story involved a humpback whale, which cannot swallow a human. The only other story of this sort was that of James Bartley (1870-1909) being swallowed by a whale near the Falklands - and was in its stomach for 3 days. However, while this story has been much repeated, it was never proven. Moreover, the wife of the ship's captain who travelled on the ship at that time said it was false.
Our recent story was verified by Michael Packard's partner:
"A commercial lobster diver says he escaped relatively unscathed after nearly being swallowed by a humpback whale, in a biblical-sounding encounter that whale experts describe as rare but plausible.
Michael Packard, 56, said in local interviews and on social media that he was diving off the coast of Provincetown, Mass., on Friday morning when the whale suddenly scooped him up.
"I was in his closed mouth for about 30 to 40 seconds before he rose to the surface and spit me out," Packard later wrote on Facebook. "I am very bruised up but have no broken bones."
More about the story HERE. And if whales don't swallow people, and people don't survive being swallowed by whales, what is the Biblical story of Jonah, really? Check out the Wikipedia entry - everyone weighed in on Jonah and the symbolism of his 'giant fish' adventure.
A Daylily flower is particularly beautiful because of its little slippers. They are bluish-brown so I"ve given them some colour treatment to make them such a shiny blue colour.
My family told me to stop telling Thanksgiving jokes ...
... but I told them I couldn't quit "cold turkey.”
Did you know? "The country Turkey holds 80 Guinness World Records spanning from historically producing the first coin, the oldest bridge, the first female pilot and even being the first pirates. Now, Turkey continues to top the list with the tallest man, the largest nose and of course, being the largest bread consumers".
One of its records is floating the largest peace symbol in the Marmara Sea - made of people. What about building the world's largest animated mobile phone mosaic with 504 phones creating the world's largest mosaic wall - 3.6 meters wide and 1.9 meters long. The tallest man alive is 8 feet 2.81 inches and from Turkey. They also have the tallest female teenage at 7 feet 0.09 inches. They have the records for the largest serving of pastry, for the largest full breakfast where 51,793 participants were involved. They hold the record for the world's largest zebeck dance and largest pilates demonstration/class. And on and on. See more on their records HERE.
Since we are on the topic of Turkey the country, here are some bizarre facts about it:
It has one of the world's oldest and biggest malls
You might find chicken in your dessert
Santa Claus is from Turkey
You can cross continents underground
Oil wrestling is a national sport
Our pictures today are close-ups of day lilies, with a little photoshop magic applied to the stamens.
