Lobster Thoughts

Remember how back on my February 25^th posting I got a kick out of a newspaper running the wrong photo of a new fossil mammal? By mistake the newspaper attached a photo of a buxom young lady to their article about the new mammal.

To me that was hilarious.

Yesterday another thing happened in the same vein:

Yesterday at work Ginny saw a newspaper article about yet another previously unknown animal which marine biologists recently discovered near a volcanic vent off Easter Island.

When she came home she told me about the new animal, a blind lobster-like creature which appears covered with blond fur. I had not heard of the discovery so I immediately did a Google search.

If you wish to read about it, BBC News carries an excellent article found at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4785482.stm

Here is a photo of the new —to us — creature:

A rare find indeed. A creature of exotic beauty. A living creature previously unknown to science…. But what struck me as funny is that my Google search not only turned up this photo of the Kiwa Hirsuta, but Google also enhanced my search with targeted ads geared to appeal to the specific taste of a searcher.

The ads on my screen were for the Red Lobster chain of seafood restaurants!

Well, maybe you had to be there to see how funny that is.

Anyhow, I think that each new discovery of creatures nobody has noticed before reminds us of how little we really know about the wonders of the creation around us. A family of beautiful flying squirrels lives in the tree in my neighbor’s back yard. He’d lived in that house for over 30 years and never knew of their existence until I pointed them out to him last summer

Who know? A unicorn really may graze in those woods by the Interstate. Angels may hover above us. Trolls may hide beneath the bridge. Seahorses may be real — and mermaids ride their backs.

Perhaps my novel Glog is not as far-fetched as it seems.

A line from an old prayer book says something like, “Lord, open our eyes to behold the wonders of Thy creation.”

. On a sad note, the same Google news that tells about the blond-haired lobster, also tells about another scientist accused of fraud in his research. That’s becoming commonplace. Almost daily the news tells about a scientist who falsifies research findings to enhance his reputation or to get more grant money. Such things just indicate that even the best and brightest among us are human sinners needing a Savior.

However, that’s nothing for me to dwell on. It behooves me to think little about the sins of other men and more about my own.

For instance, recently I’ve been wrestling with a problem in intellectual honesty involving my manuscript on the history of firefighting in my hometown.

Usually, my books run in the neighborhood of 300 pages; to qualify for a Library of Congress pre-publication catalogue number, a manuscript should run to at least 200 pages. At the moment, this fire history of mine comes to only 109 pages.

I am tempted to pad.

I’ve been adding a lot of historic photos. That’s legitimate. But I’ve been enlarging them to cover a whole page. That’s unnecessary.

I’ve also tried to insert three chapters from another local history book I wrote. This increases the page count but these chapters dilute the focus of the fire history book.

I want to give the readers who buy my books good value for their money and to pad the manuscript with extraneous crap is just wrong.

But in my vanity I want to say I wrote a BOOK not a pamphlet!

I’m not sure if writers face more temptations than say exotic dancers or scientists or Enron executives or housewives or politicians but I know that my own heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.

Ain’t nobody nowhere needs a Savior more than John Cowart.

Enough.

Such thinking wearies me.

Ginny is taking a couple of days off work to tend our garden over this long weekend. I plan to take her out for dinner tonight.

For some reason I’m thinking about seafood.

I wonder if she’d like to go out to Red Lobster?