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Hemimastigophora

Halifax. New branch of life. Hairy-pistachio-nut microbes named after a terrifying hairy ogre from Mi’kmaq folklore. The awkward scurrying. I could not love this more.

“It looks kind of like a pistachio nut with little hairs coming from between the shells,” said Eglit. “And it scurries around kind of awkwardly and it eats other complex single celled organisms.”

. . . the tradition in naming species is to give them Greek or Latin names, but the researchers wanted to honour the fact the dirt sample was found on the traditional territory of the Mi’kmaq people in Nova Scotia.

As a result, one of the species has been named “Hemimastix kukwesjijk.” Kukwes is a hairy man-eating ogre from Mi’kmaq folklore.

“It just happens to be they have an ogre-like creature who is also hairy and terrifying and eats other creatures and it seems to match what this organism was . . .”

via Microbe reveals ‘major new branch’ of evolutionary tree, Halifax researchers say – The Globe and Mail

At Nature: Hemimastigophora is a novel supra-kingdom-level lineage of eukaryotes

Quote

Or hiking boots, or combat boots

The muse in charge of fantasy wears good, sensible shoes. No foam-born Aphrodite, she vaguely resembles my old piano teacher, who was keen on metronomes. She does not carry a soothing lyre for inspiration, but is more likely to shake you roughly awake at four in the morning and rattle a sheaf of subtle, sneaky questions under your nose. And you had better answer them. The Muse will stand for no nonsense (that is, non-sense). Her geometries are no more Euclidean than Einstein’s, but they are equally rigorous.

—Lloyd Alexander, “The Flat-Heeled Muse,” Horn Book, April 1, 1965

Aside

This is not the post it once was

Update: The ARMA and Krav pictures have been moved to the Scrapbook. Thank you, person who hit the Like button while they were here! I’m still reorganizing the site, and have decided that either the art should have its own WordPress or I should get active at deviantART again…which makes room in the menu here for some keepsake images.

 

Undevoidifying

Since I built my first website in the 1990s at (the now very sadly departed) SFF Net, I’ve seemed to follow a five-to-seven-year cycle of ever grander construction and ever deeper neglect. My SFF Net people page was followed by the Eiden Myr domain (and a ghostly, pretty site for the haunted-schooner book Moontide, both still saved on my local machine for uploading somewhere again someday), which was followed by a self-hosted WordPress site called The Nine Winds. That was a darn nice site, and I’m sad that I didn’t export it before I canceled the renewal outright, but I’d reached the “the heck with this” stage of frustration with the site’s functionality (ratio of me:host fault could skew either way), and figured I’d make a fresh start elsewhere when time permitted.

Time doesn’t really permit at the moment, but I’m feeling the lack of a website to direct people to for basic information, and here’s this handy little WordPress, itself sadly neglected but game and ready. So I’m working toward a bare-bones assemblage here, finger bone by toe bone by vertebra. Hello yet again, world!