And I edited this!

It also reminds me that rana is the word in Spanish for frog. Sapo being a toad. For some reason, as I lose all my Spanish vocabulary from disuse, I remember the distinction.

Down and Out was good. But my favorite book of his was Coming Up for Air, which strikes me as more prophetic than either Animal Farm or 1984 because it takes such a hard look at our relationship with the natural world.

“Plugins” as I was using the term refers specifically to optional WordPress code added on to the core functionality, which is lean by design. But if you’re using Firefox there are all kinds of extensions and user-side scripts that you can add – maybe some people call them plugins, I don’t know. I don’t know about other browsers because I don’t use them, except when making sure that a site I’m tweaking displays properly.

Plug-ins are a big mystery to me, but I’m interested in them because of what they can apparently accomplish. I’d like to be able to make my browser frame disappear and I hear there’s one that can do that. As well I’d like to reverse my scroll orientation, and if I’ve understood correctly there’s one that can do that as well. I’ve been doing a lot of finger pad scrolling on my laptop (an equivalent to right click mouse scrolling perhaps ?) and I’ve just come to notice that when I move my fingers down the screen goes the up, in the opposite direction that I’m moving my fingers and it’s really messing me up! That needs to get straightened out! I want the sense of having the page under my fingers and being able to move it that way and not have to fly up over it like a hawk over field as it passes under me. Maybe that’s not the best way to explain it: I’d like to have the page move the direction my fingers, or mouse, is moving. I think you have a PC, does your screen move with you?

In the case of the ventifacts I actually had prior independent knowledge of them. I had a bit of difficulty with the Simic metaphor, so I was happy to clunk around with such ready to hand literal objects. I always am. Nothing like stuff! There was some 80’s pop song that had the line…there’s a hole in my heart where the wind blows through… was it Pere Ubu? No… But I like wind shaped holes. Meteorites are somewhere else you can find them, though it’s not exactly a case of wind erosion, and it’s really cool when they give the feel of a wind shaped liquid, as though they were molten, even though they probably weren’t, though I wouldn’t know. Libyan desert glass, sand vitrified by a meteor impact then left to weather millennia of sandstorms is another neat kind of ventifact.

Are they fossils? Probably not, but that one geologist did call them that so I went with it!

Sorry to go on so discursively. I’ve been away, as I was being a jerk, so thanks for having me back. I’ll try to be good and to stay sober.

Thanks for the Orwell link. I recently enjoyed very much reading “Down and Out” at an Orwell-on-line site, especially since I managed to come across pages not of white, with too high contrast, but a very reasonable grey.

Still, it’s better than no editing ability at all, I hope.

In regards to “fossils of the wind,” thanks for doing what I should’ve and looking for literal applications! It’s maybe a slight stretch to call them fossils, though, I suppose – is a footprint in stone referred to as a fossil? Still, very cool. And your description of the herpetarium was very lyrical, if sad.

Hope you weren’t too frustrated looking for that essay; it was actually toads rather than frogs (biologically, there’s no difference). Here ’tis: Some Thoughts on the Common Toad

Interesting too, that nearer to you, Long Island has them as well.

One of my keystone images of this late winter derives from a visit to a deserted herpetarium during a downpour, which fell upon a skylight in, as Miguel wrote, a soothing din. All the commonplace sadness and ironies of a zoo were in place, as the soft energy of rain fell on the hard glass which roofed over a dry central garden, around which were walls containing electrically light exhibits of near extinct and extinct frogs, and lizards whose rain forests have gone missing. In one desert scape a leak in the roof let water pour in. It was darkened as workmen swore and converged upon it.

I’m off to see about Mr. Orwell’s frogs!