Dancing, Strange Deaths

1. Is it really true that "Aeschylus the Greek dramatist, died in 456 BC when a vulture, mistaking his bald head for a stone, dropped a tortoise on it?"
2. It is really true that "Isadora Duncan wore scarves which trailed behind her, and this caused her death in a freak accident in Nice, France. She was killed when her scarf caught in the wheel of her friend Ivan Falchetto's Bugatti automobile. As the driver sped off, the long cloth wrapped around the vehicle's axle. Ms. Duncan was yanked violently from the car and dragged for several yards before the driver realized what had happened. She died almost instantly from a broken neck."

I've just returned from a modern dance class that was a bit too advanced for me. I can tell I'm out of shape because not only am I stiff, weak, and slow, but I have a deteriorated sense of balance. I was doing a combination and I kept on getting stuck at this one point where literally all I had to do was shift my weight from my left foot to my right foot in order to go into a turn and it took me two or three times to get it right

If anyone can clear up the issue of Aeschylus and the tortoise, I'd appreciate it. I can work on balance and wearing short scarves on my own.

Shark and Sharks

There is a shark of the coast of Massachusetts:



State will Seal off Shark from Boaters

Sharks don't end up in shallow cold waters off the coast of Massachusetts unless "things" are going badly. In Florida, children and pets get eaten by aligators every so often. When said aligators have the contents of their stomachs' checked--which means I suppose that game wardens or plain ol' wardens come and kill 'em--they are often quite empty (apart from the child or pet).

Some recent alligator stories:

Alligator Causes FGCU to Shut Down Main Waterfront

According to the article above, although there is no sure way to tell how much interaction with humans an alligator has had, "There are indicators. If an alligator approaches a human, then it most likely has lost its fear of humans." Moreover, "the vibrations of a lawn mower can attract alligators because it stimulates them, as can feeding them."

Also, you can read about a woman in Miami who found a dead and chopped-up aligator in her yard.

In Florida, the Fish and Wildlife service will not trap and kill an alligator unless it is deemed to be a "nuisance alligator"--an alligator that is not affraid of humans. This implies that most alligators are afraid of us, or at least will not approach us. Most of the gators I've seen just sit in the mud in the sun. But they were Singaporian gators.

I worry about sharks and alligators that are out of place.

Penis Blimp

Yesterday there was a small white blimp in the sky that looked like a small white penis. It was floating just above the tops of the buildings on Massachusets avenue, near Dupont Circle. So there was a small white penis-blimp floating against the grey-white clouds and I just stood on the corner and looked up at it. People looked at me looking up but no one else looked up. What was it doing there?

Someone else obviously noticed, because a news-google search for "Washington DC Blimp" yeilded the following results:

Army Blimp Paraded Over DC
Security Blimp Hovers over US Capitol

Apparantly floating blimps in the sky is a technique which "harks back to the 19th century, when military forces would track enemy movement from balloons above the battlefield" (see 2nd article).

A test post

bpNichol wrote for Fraggle Rock in the 1980s!--or, as The bpNichol project notes, he "became a sucessful writer for the children's television show Fraggle Rock." This is exciting news for me as I read The Martyrology 1 & 2.