cheryl santa maria

Will and I encountered a slime mold in Algonquin Park last September (or something very similar to a slime mold – the ones we saw were rather large, maybe 5 inches.  True slime molds are itty bitty, I think) .   There was two of them and they looked like waxy, white flowers shooting out of the ground.  We’d never seen anything like that.

Until today. 

Thanks interwebs!!

From Wikipedia:

Slime Mold is a broad term that refers to fungi-like amoeboid (i.e. like an amoeba) organisms. Their common name refers to part of their life cycle in which their appearance can be gelatinous (hence the name slime).

There is a man in Russia and he has an impressive zoom lens.  He likes taking pictures of slime molds.  Click here to see them.

My first article for Quiet Color is up!

Click here to read it.

Going forward, I’ll be posting on QC 2-3 times/week.

It seems like everyone has a cousin, or a friend, or a friend-of-a-friend’s-wife’s-cousin that is a freelance writer - and they’re all doing better I am.   I don’t mind being at the bottom of the totem pole but I get irked when I hear stories about  successful self-employed writers.  I’m happy for them but they also represent my competition, and when I consider my limited portfolio and lack of technical skill I get a little … tense …

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Professor Steve Jones, a leading geneticist at the University College London, says that humans have reached the end of the evolutionary road. This means that a million years from now, people will closely resemble the people of today. I’m assuming he’s only speaking about physical appearance. If he means that our brains have also finished evolving, well then …

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[this article is rerpint - I wrote it in December, 2007].

Meet Uwamohoza. Today she is twelve years old. She was five when she told her story to filmmakers at the SOS Centre in Kigali, an orphanage for children of the Rwandan genocide.

Uwamuhoza is Tutsi and as an infant she witnessed the brutal murder of her parents at the hands of Hutu soldiers. She was attacked with a machete, leaving three gashes on her head and face. Left to die, Uwamuhoza was found lying next to the bodies of her parents.

“We were hiding” she tells her interviewers. “My dad, my mom, and myself. And they came and killed us. They cut me with a machete and they killed me. I was running with my mother and my dad. They saw us and they came and killed us…they did it for nothing” (1).

Uwamuhoza is beautiful; she has a perfect button nose and chubby little cheeks. Her round chestnut eyes, however, are empty. On the top of Uwamuhoza’s head, right after the hairline, is a scar from one of the machete blows she suffered. It will be with her forever; a constant, painful reminder of the day her childhood was stolen.

I could go on.

Uwamuhoza’s story is not unique; from April 6 through to mid-July in 1994, between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people were murdered In Rwanda and many, many, of them were children. All over the world, millions of children have witnessed their loved ones being subjected to horrible, horrible things.

The Rwandan genocide is a dark part of human history, but we must not forget the children in Afghanistan, Africa, Bosnia, Columbia, Iraq, Israel, and Northern Ireland, to name but a few, that have also suffered at the hand of war.

An estimated twenty million children have been forced to leave their homes due to war and in the past decade, more than two million children have been hunted, abused, and ultimately murdered by war (2).

I do not know what we are fighting for.

Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.

- John F. Kennedy

***

1. Raymond, Allan and Raymond, Susan. Children in War. (New York: TV Books, 2000) Pg. 109.
2. http://www.unicef.org/protection/index_ armedconflict.html

Paper clips and fax machines don’t make life worth living.

Hours hunched over someone else’s desk, straining under unnatural light, does not inspire creativity.

Incomprehensive emails that are bogged down with officespeak and acronyms can make a person forget that they are much, much more than an arbitrary title.
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As a lizard lover, I find this story particularly horrifying.  Yesterday, a sick little boy in Australia broke into his local zoo and systematically tortured and killed over a dozen reptiles.

When reviewing the security cameras, officials described the 7-year old child as “expressionless”.

Textbook sociopath, right?

This article is all over the web.  I first came across it on Digg. Read the comments that follow it.  Many people are calling for blood, saying this child is better off dead.

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It seems to have flown out the window.

Last year, I had some money. But this year …

Well, this year is a whole other story.

See kids, there’s this nifty little thing. It’s called inflation. Right now, everyone is (rightfully) up in arms about the mortgage crisis going on south of the border and this, among other things, is causing inflation to soar.
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