We fell in love with Spring this morning: the green pastures, the warm temperatures, the flowers blooming, the farmer’s market, sitting in the sun, reading a book, digging some holes, watering some plants, and feeling much love.
There isn’t much to say about spring that hasn’t been said, but I need to feel it. I planted some things in my garden bed this morning. It’s too lovely, but I’ll watch on the weather and cover them with a blanket when the night-time temperature falls below 42. Impatience is my enemy.
I watched the octopus documentary on Hulu last night with Maria.
We enjoyed it very much…but there were buts.
It was beautiful and fascinating, but I didn’t love it as much as I expected to. There was too much drama, commercial hope, and image juggling. It was too slick for me.
The music was inappropriate and trivialized the filming and the message; the scientists all looked like Olympic athletes and movie stars. The images were enough and didn’t need musical reinforcement. I had a whiff of the same emotionalizing researchers and animal lovers put on dogs, turning them into humans and brilliant children.
They made some fantastic claims about octopuses, and some of the clips were remarkable, but they went over the top regarding objective evidence. No researcher ever lost money by discovering that animals aren’t just humans in different bodies and think like us.
Watching the news, I am beginning to understand that almost all the animals left in the world are more intelligent than us; they don’t destroy their environments.
The claims were there, but the proof was thin for me.
The best biologists try to draw a line between instinct and human-like intelligence. It often looks the same. And people love to accept what they claim they are finding for the first time in history. They played the same scary shark clips about a dozen times.
There were a few epic conclusions, but they didn’t fill in the blanks.
I love everything about octopuses; they are brilliant and remarkable creatures, but I don’t yet accept that they think just like us or have our cognitive clips. Neither do dogs, despite their grotesque emotionalizing.
What they actually do is enough to amaze me; we don’t need to make them superhuman or geniuses.
It’s just not been proven, and it wasn’t last night, at least not to me. Actual research can make the point without chintzy elevator music. That’s why commercial research and corporate producers do.
I know this is unpopular, but I was entertained, not blown away. I’d rather watch their incredible shape-shifting and survival skills without all the gushing and somewhat unproven assertions. I know many people loved it.
Like dogs, octopuses are ocean dwellers, no matter how much we want to turn them into our sons and daughters. They are not just like us. Many octopuses find ways to save themselves from predators, but many don’t. We have yet to hear much about that.
If the octopuses were this brilliant, they might figure out how to live longer without being eaten so frequently.
I speak only for myself, but I am often at odds with much of the world. Your opinion is just as good as mine.
The blossoms on the apple tree are blooming.
Maria started work on her garden. I love seeing how happy she is out there.
Zip loves the cold much more than the heat. As often happens, the animal rights police got it backward. We should put a fan in the barn rather than a cat-heated house. He has no problems with cold or snow in the winter, but he likes to stay out of the sun. That black coat sucks up the heat. And no, the house would not be cooler in the summer.
