Shark Attack!!!
Toothy leviathan explores its world, is maligned as a monster.
We project the foul darkness within us onto innocent ocean-dwellers.
The poodle and the dachshund are more prolific oral aggressors than these gentle, fast-healing giants.
The Great White shark is on the prowl. In the chilly northern California waters above its massive, streamlined head, near the surface of the Pacific by North Salmon Creek in Sonoma County, the toothy leviathan spots a gliding form. It seems to be that of a sea lion or seal, the Great White’s favored prey along this stretch of rocky coast. But the shark is uncertain about what it’s glimpsed. Great Whites are color blind, it’s thought, and the waters in which they choose to hunt are often murky, all the better to conceal their lurking presence. The shark’s only way to determine the identity of the tantalizing silhouette is to use its most trustworthy sense organ, its mouth.
And so, like a blind person tapping with a cane, the shark closes in on the moving mystery object and gently — in Great White shark terms — nips its side. The result is confusing. This doesn’t taste like seal flesh. It doesn’t …
The Year of Dying
Only 2% of Americans are officially designated as farmers. The reality is worse.
A kite or hawk swooped down and sunk its claws deep into Fudge Pie’s skull, breaking her neck.
It takes concentration and effort to leave this world.
This past year seemed to have taken up dying as its prevailing theme, at least here at our house. The business I launched eight years ago and grew to employ six writers at our peak is slowly dying. A company is not a person. But a small, family business, as ours was, has a life of its own, and when the people who made it what it is are let go, the death is palpable. We wrote dialogue for video-game characters for a living. Our voice actors gave each character speech. The laughter we shared on table reads, the spirit we breathed into tiny screen images — those had an energy, and that energy has now gone cold and dark. Dormant, like the earth in winter.
The business of dying, too, is serious. My cousin Joel was dying of cancer. He and his wife kept birds, and in the final weeks of his life he requested the birds be homed elsewhere so that he could die in quiet. It takes concentration and effort to …
Agricultural Digest
As we noted in the last edition of the Digest, American soybean farmers are struggling big-time, especially in light of the trade war with China (our largest export market for soybeans) and the increasing productivity of farmers in Argentina and Brazil. But, the Soybean Innovation Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently published a series of articles in Successful Farming that provide a possible alternative for the future: Africa.
Africa is becoming more like, well, us. As prosperity increases, and the world also shrinks, demand for imported food is growing. From 2010 to the present, food imports rose 32 percent relative to food production, and that trend looks likely to continue. When it comes to soybeans, in particular, the future looks bright. While the dominant imported oil of choice in Africa is still palm oil (and by a significant margin), these agro-economists …
