"Chrysanthemum" comes from the Greek for "gold" and "flower."  

You know these flowers: big tidy pots of blooms that last for ages. They show up for sale in the front of high-end grocery stores and at the big hardware warehouse stores. Mums, as we call them in English. Mums at Halloween, autumn colors for Thanksgiving. In Australia, mums are the traditional flower for Mother's day. 

In China, they are the symbol of autumn and purity. The chrysanthemum is the official flower of Chicago. Who knew? 

In India, a girl wearing chrysanthemums in her hair is said to bring happiness to her family. And in Japan, they represent longevity. The royal family sits on the chrysanthemum throne. But also –– so I understand after reading one of the Sano Ichiru mysteries by Laura Joh Rowland –– it's a symbol of homosexuality in samurai times. Yeah, don't think about it.

But in France, they are the flower for tombstones. People put them in the graveyard on All Saints.

For years, I have mistakenly believed that Charles Baudelaire's famous book of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal –– a chunk of which I translated in college, for pity's sake –– was both "the flowers of evil" (a metaphor) and also an actual flower: chrysanthemums.

Whenever I saw the cheerful round faces of chrysanthemums, my busy brain would supply the subtitle, "Les fleurs du mal!"

But nope. Baudelaire anyhow wasn't referencing these particular flowers in his poems about the pursuit of novelty and erotic decadence. 

How odd: such an infinitesimal and utterly trivial prejudice against an innocent flower, but I have held it for decades. Of course, it's worth remembering that one might also translate the title of that book (which I don't recommend, btw, as fun reading) as "the flowers from evil, or from suffering."  Or something.

Anyhow. They are long-suffering and colorful blossoms, no matter what I've mistakenly held against them. 

Along comes the big bad. Slithering. Licking the air with a forked tongue for the scent of mousey love. Perhaps the big bad has developed a taste for these tender morsels in their nuptial bower. Or wants to.

In a moment comes a squeaking in the humid dark. A thump perhaps, and a scrabble...A fierce little battle that no diminutive St. George can hope to win.

A final squeak and silence fills Base Camp.

The big bad curls around a full tummy and snoozes for a day or a week, and wakes to the delightfully  stretchy feeling of impending shed. The nuptial bower now a spa room. Exfoliation and microderm abrasion. Buffed. Polished.

​And then vamoosed.

Leaving the mess for the maid.

That. Ain't. No. Bird.  

Enter your amusing name for this creature, or a caption, or something  –– in the comments area below and I will pluck a lucky winner from the crowd and award him or her a prize.

​Such as, perhaps, a bar of homemade almond-oatmeal soap –– or an actual physical book. Or maybe lunch. As the whim takes me. Thanks for stopping by, and thanks in advance for playing!

I spent my first years as an adult in Manhattan. This meant putting aside my hayseed discomfort with seething masses of humanity and suppressing a powerful native impulse to avoid conflict.

And –– the more important bit of immigrating to the Big City –– transforming my near-constant uneasiness (oh, call it fear!) into bravado and a solid grasp of the island's geography. The zeal of the new convert in action gave me a passionate opinion about Katz's deli, the Old Town vs. the Cedar Taverns, street dogs, knishes, the best route to the softball fields at the East River, and every other New York City thing.

I was a broke young creature with a super-cool job, and I knew that NYC was probably the best metropolis in the universe. I mean -- Korean salad bars open at 3 am? The Met? Central Park? Subways and monasteries and amazing retail? 

But then I went a little farther afield. Bella Roma!   

At seven in the morning, at least on this day, the Fountain of Trevi gets cleaned.  City of Rome workers sporting the ubiquitous Romulus-and-Remus-suckling-from-a-wolf logo drain the water, sweep the coins into buckets. (It goes to charity), and scrub away the algae. The square is empty, the gelatarias shuttered, just the one tourist in attendance.

New York has a sewer museum. New York has Broadway and a eye-popping number of celebrities-per-square yard of sidewalk.

But it lacks enormous classical statuary being scrubbed –– with typical Roman aplomb and nonchalance  (Tota va bene!) –– by a team of rubber-booted workers on a regular basis. 

Boom! Advantage Rome.

Pariediolia is the name for the native human tendency to construct faces out of random patterns. Like Arcimaboldo's work, but by chance rather than art.

The word comes from the Greek for something like "wrong image."   Spotting the face of St. Lucia on your flatbread pizza  –– mental illness notwithstanding –– is bonus in our evolutionary heritage of pattern recognition.

It's related to the way that when confronted with a paper plate decorated with bull's eyes, a wee bitty baby serves up the same charming goo-goo eyes for the plate as he gives to actual human faces. Survival of the most charming.  

Which tells me that the point of imagination is to actually and genuinely save your life.
​
But what's it called when you spot horses everywhere?

References
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/reality-check/201111/11-11-11-apophenia-and-the-meaning-life

​http://www.slate.com/blogs/how_babies_work/2013/04/03/babies_and_the_new_science_of_facial_recognition.html

Ah, mackerel season. Say you are a sailor. Naturally, you are sailing on a Thursday evening, enjoying a beverage as the sun sinks below the skyline of Tampa.

Then, zing!

A meaty torpedo of fishiness flies out of the water. Then another! And another! 

​It seems impossible that no one is brained by the piscatorial hailstorm.

It seems impossible that the near victims often don't even notice it. (Ah, the power of enjoyable beverages and picturesque sunsets on a Thursday evening on Tampa Bay!)

The Spanish mackerel, scientific name Scomberomorus maculates, which does –– seriously –– translate as "silly spotted mackerel," is back in town.  Sharply pointed and oily, iridescently dotted and foolish enough to sometimes bite the hand (or toe) that tries to unhook it. 

​I don't even need to write fiction.   

I looked up the word "simulacrum" a while back for a story I was writing, and I keep wanting to put it into wider circulation. It's defined as a copy or an imperfect image of a thing.  Likewise the word "brace" means a pair. I'd thought it was more, as in "a brace of partridge," which seems like a small bag for a day's work.

Anyhow, for your viewing pleasure, a brace of angular angler simulacra.

Speculative fiction (what some longtime readers might think of as "SciFi") can be described as the fiction of ideas.

​Even more than other fiction, SF often examines the consequences of one idea across a whole society.  For instance, what if robots became so beautifully built that they could pass for human? What if you could outsource your own memories? What if Hitler had won the war?*

So with SF on my mind, today's writing warm-up exercise:

Story 1
The eclipse was less dramatic than she'd expected. Not that she was in the cone of totality, but still, she'd never witnessed a solar eclipse before. Never mind a double.
Still, she'd taken the afternoon off, and though the cheap protective glasses had broken –– she'd forgotten them in the seat of her vehicle and then sat on the damn things when she'd slid into the seat in the cool darkness of the parking bay.
Still there it was: her first double-lunar eclipse. She watched two penumbral cones shaving the sun into a puny lozenge of light. An unseasonable breeze sprang up. She shivered and wished there was someone next to her. She hadn't considered herself in any way sentimental, but she longed now for something communal, a human companion.
The sight of the sun, even as small and cold as it was from this distance, turning just that much smaller and colder –– well, she felt for a moment that she understood primitive superstition.
And then, as quick as the remembered snap of a plastic tiddley-wink, the moons parted and the sun shone round and bright again. 

Story 2
He kept watch on the mirror-calm surface of the water, barely breathing.
He was comfortable –– or anyway about as as comfortable as anyone zipped into a breather suit and strapped bodily against the pot-bellied ventral surface of a drone hopper could expect to be. He refused to consider the blurring of the features of shore, blocked out thoughts of the hopper's speed (only a quarter-sonic, almost survivable without the suit), kept his attention on the glassy reflection of the sky.

The handful of beta-blockers he'd swallowed at the start of his shift was working to keep his blood-pressure low. He shrugged his shoulders against the petal-soft lining of the suit. He stretched the webbing between first his left and then his right hand.

Eyes open, he told himself. He was going to need to be very quick and very lucky or he was going to end up very dead. And he wouldn't be the only one. 

The third time, I realized quoting the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English was a painful dating stratagem of people in my chosen field of study. The idea being, perhaps, to stupefy and render the object unconscious.  

Still, April is a time when folk DO long to hit the road.

Springtime itchy feet.

​Questing for sunny beaches or the last few downhill runs, going for the peak cherry blossoms or those first bulbs poking heads out of the mud. 

Each trip worth a Tale.

P-p-pa-poetry? Here, this won'd hurt much:

The Caterpillar by Ogden Nash
​
I find among the poems of Schiller
No mention of the caterpillar
Nor can I find one anywhere
In Petrarch or in Baudelaire
So here I sit in extra session
To give my personal impression.
The caterpillar, as it's called,
Is often hairy, seldom bald;
It looks as if it never shaves;
When it walks, it walks in waves.
And from the cradle to the chrysalis
It's utterly speechless, songless, whistless. 
​