animals i imagine st. francis fighting back vomit to accept as creatures of our god and king
weather: 🌦️ drip drip drop little april shower
critters: ducks
"all creatures of our god and king" is one of my favorite christian hymns, but many's the time i've heard it and thought about the weirder, grosser critters that god cooked up in his extradimensional angel lab. (we are weird and gross by ape standards--elongated, hairless, slimegreased baby-people.) then i thought about st. francis, the credited author of the hymn, having to steel himself to acknowledge their inherent motes of divinity.
i will not be embedding any pictures here because some of these give me a few heebie-jeebies. links go to wikipedia articles.
star-nosed mole. let's just get a classic out of the way first because it looks like the graphically realistic aftermath of a cartoon bomb going off in something's face. i do like that it's been the subject of so many scientific studies--zoologists will see a weird creature and immediately want to know how it serves the creature to be so weird. i think st. francis would find this commendable, right after swallowing a mouthful of surprised wine-bile.
tailless whip scorpion. i know these are not dangerous to humans. their defense mechanism is shooting vinegar at you and they're too afraid of you to even deploy that most of the time. some people keep them as pets! however, gross.
jerusalem cricket. even has the adorable nickname "child of the earth." it's, like, almost cute. there's a pic on its wiki article of a specimen hanging out at the mouth of its little tunnel home. S compared it to a tonka toy or some of the more kawaii crustaceans, and i can almost see it. but "almost" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. again, gross.
slender snipe eel. this thing is also almost cute, but there's something uncanny about deep sea pressure and the way it distorts its inhabitants. i do like eels that look like they would honk if they were land serpents. (the much cuter ribbon eel falls into this category.)
bathypelagic bumberchute. oops, i meant gulper eel. another bizarre deep sea mutation i think st. francis would accept, but hesitantly.
salp. it seems they are bearers of bad environmental news. the fact that they stack onto each other feels alien--or like it could've been a type of coral on a different evolutionary path, but it declined to accept the gift of calcium. their loss.
aye-aye. nothing reminds me of our tree rodent heritage quite like this thing. it's like a tarsier going through a series of compounding personal struggles. st. francis would ask it if there were anyone he could call.
marabou stork. how many scavenging birds are just ugly? and baby marabou storks look like rubber props from the dark crystal. i'm sorry i keep calling them ugly. i know they can't help it and they serve an important ecological function. and they so don't care what i think of them.
the 8' eurypterid. to quote a great demolitionist, "with something like that, i would have white wine, i think."