Midnight Musings

I found these old pics while I was looking for...actually, these are what I was looking for. The pumpkin the child is sitting on is not the same one with which my cat, Spot, posed so appropriately. Either the child would have had to be Tiny Tim or Spot would have had to be entirely too overgrown. Neither of those scenarios is desirable. Not that I have anything against small people. I'm on the small side, myself. But as much as I loved Spot, there is what is known as too much of a good thing. Sixty pounds of cuddly cat would definitely fall into that category. And the noise she would have made at that size would likely have the police at my house on a regular basis. She was part Siamese and had a horrible yowl. Fortunately, she was very good-natured and only cried when she was upset.

'night.

It occurs to me that it's been an inordinately long time since I learned and posted a new vocabulary word. Well, here's one: velleity. I should write the definition here but I just don't feel like it. There have been others but I'm just too tired to recall them. I need to look on Webster's Word of the Day archives to find some interesting entries. I was reading an incredibly boring book recently (my boss recommended it and he's so sweet that I had to at least make a concerted effort) and learned the word guerdon simply because the author wrote in such flowery language that it took me by surprise. What a shame that it was so mind-numbingly dull and heretically liberal. (No, I'm not going to divulge the title. It would be too much like spreading bad news.)

So, now I've started reading what a friend of mine dubbed "possibly the best book Bill and I have ever read" (and we both have confidence in Bill's assessment) and I *will* share that title: Safely Home by Randy Alcorn. If anyone out there has read it, please share your thoughts.

'night.

AP Aaron Balick expected to find a tiny mouse rustling behind the TV in his apartment. Instead, he found a venomous giant centipede that somehow hitched a ride from South America to Britain.

"Thinking it was a mouse, I went to investigate the sound. The sound was coming from under some papers which I lifted, expecting to see the mouse scamper away," the 32-year-old psychotherapist said Wednesday. "Instead, when I lifted the papers, I saw this prehistoric looking animal skitter away behind a stack of books."

He trapped the 9-inch-long creature between a stack of books and put it in a plastic container.

The next day he took it to Britain's Natural History Museum, which identified the insect as a Scolopendra gigantea — the world's biggest species of centipede.

Stuart Hine, an entomologist at the museum, said it was likely the centipede hitched a ride aboard a freighter, likely with a shipment of fruit.

"Dealing with over 4,000 public and commercial inquiries every year, we have come to expect the unexpected. However, when Aaron produced this beast from his bag I was staggered," Hine said. "Not even I expected to be presented with this."

The Scolopendra gigantea has front claws that are adapted to deliver venom when it stings, which can lead to a blistering rash, nausea and fever. The sting is rarely life-threatening, but painful.

Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

ewwwwww

'night.