Gotta love parasites

Newest jottings in the notebooks mentioned 2 posts back: moths and parasites. Ah, you gotta love parasites, nasty little hooligans. I mean: totally amazing. I read that there is at least one parasite specially adapted to every single non-parasitic organism on the planet, not to mention the many parasites on parasites. Urk? There's one that lives only in the left ear of a single species of moth. What? Who makes that stuff up? And there's a parasite that actually effectively replaces an organ on a living creature with itself. It kills a fish's tongue and then it becomes the fish's tongue, nabbing nourishment for its greedy self when the fish eats.
WOW.
You may expect to see some parasitic qualities in some characters in my next book. {Mwah-ha-ha.}

And moths? Did you know that silk moths don't have mouths and don't ever ever eat and only live a week? Can't resist the urge to anthropomorphize a little and imagine squirming out of the cocoon to discover -- oh joy! wings! -- and then realizing -- oh crap! no mouth! They live only for sex. Truly. That fact will not be making an appearance in my book. (That google search did, however, unexpectedly yield this poetry blog that I quite like.)

The critter world is truly stranger than fiction, which brings me to this: Have you seen Stranger than Fiction? Loved it. Really loved it. A whimsical, sweet, original movie, and I can't get the song out of my head, which is unusual for me since I have a brain that music just slides through unnoticed. The song is a cover of one by The Monkees called (Go the) Whole Wide World. If I was the sort to put music on my myspace I would put that, but I kind of hate it when people put music on their myspace so I won't.

Other things that are stuck in my head besides Monkees songs: Calamity Jane's voice from Deadwood, which Jim and I are Netflixxing. If you've seen the show, you probably know just what I mean when I say there's a particular word she says with a particular emphatic slur and darn it if it just isn't fun to say! It is an entirely unacceptable word, though, so I'm fighting the urge, most of the time. My dad says cowboys didn't really talk like that, but I wonder. Did that word exist then? What did Calamity Jane call people?