darcy doesn’t sing a single note even during conversations where everyone else is singing at him that is until the argument following his first attempt at proposing to lizzy where you can see his restraint fall away
his first big solo is the letter he writes her
gelsey bell is mary and the unofficial narrator and she sits down at her piano to describe whats going on but before she can ever reveal her feelings on the matter, starting with that gelsey bell scream, mr bennet comes over and does the whole ‘that’s nice dear but give someone else a turn’
mr wickham has this huge ballad about how darcy ruined his life and its super melodramatic and touching
mr collins proposal to lizzy is an absolute bop that he gets so into he forgets for a moment what he’s doing he’s just owning the stage
wickham has a song where he’s trying to seduce lydia but she’s not even listening she’s just monologuing about how excited she is to get laid
during darcy’s second proposal he keeps hesitating waiting for lizzy to interrupt him like she has done every time before but she doesn’t say anything until he’s finished
at the end mary sits down at the piano and right where she’d usually be interrupted, kitty joins her and harmonises
jane and bingley have the adorable upbeat romantic duet which is just them being super polite like ‘oh so nice to have you here’ ‘so nice to be here’ interspersed with their inner monologue which is just them being like fucking jesus I’m so in love
the bingley sisters probably have a really cool mean solo
lady catherine has this terrifying disney villain song in the garden
Bohemian Rhapsody. We Will Rock You. Somebody To Love. All hit singles, and all the direct product of a band that was formed when an astrophysicist and a dentistry major found a new friend in an art college, who then went on to recruit a fourth member from the electronics school. Based on this alliance I propose the rift in society between Arts and STEM students was fabricated to keep us separated so as to dilute our true power – and fabricated by who, you may ask? The business major, the only member of society who reaps no reward from art and science and thus must weaken us so as to stay ahead. In this essay I will
How did you know when you were in love with your husband? I remember calling my sisters and telling them about Paul and I couldn’t – I remember feeling like,
“I can’t stop talking about him,” like I was talking about him all the time. But I wasn’t aware,
really,
of how I was feeling yet. I just knew I was like,
compulsively talking about this guy. One of my sisters was like, “Who is this person?” But yeah. I don’t know if it was a definitive moment. It was just so easy. There was nothing hard about it.
That’s the thing about falling in love,
too. Sometimes one person falls really hard,
like I felt like [Paul] fell really hard earlier. You fell really hard and I was like, “Whoa. He’s really going there.” And I felt it too,
but I wasn’t quite ready to vocalize it. And then like 6 months later,
I was PANICKED in love. Like,
panicked and fraught with “I can’t even deal with these feelings.” But he had already been like “We’re together and that’s great! There are no problems here.” That’s our love story.
Leslie Jones is getting a lot of racist hate on twitter. If you have time to make something or send her a nice note, it might serve to make the world a marginally happier place for her.
Green leaf beetles (Trirhabda flavolimbata) at the Carpinteria Salt Marsh
I mentioned previously that I’m a volunteer docent at the Carpinteria salt marsh. I started off being mostly into birds, but in the spring of 2009 I started obsessing about bugs, and it was these beetles that started that. I was looking for invertebrates to photograph for Circus of the Spineless, when I discovered that there were large numbers of shiny green “caterpillars” (I thought) feeding on the coyote brush (Baccharis pilularis) at the marsh. I estimated that there were more than 500 of them in a single medium-sized bush.
It turns out they were actually beetle larvae. Over the next several weeks I watched as they turned into adult beetles and kept munching. By the end of the outbreak, in late May, much of the coyote brush along Ash Avenue had been completely defoliated. The first two shots above are from that 2009 outbreak; they show the larvae (left) and an adult beetle (right).
By the next year the coyote brush had bounced back. There were only a few leaf beetles at the marsh each of the next three springs, but this year they’re back in a big way. Once again, a lot of the marsh shrubbery has been eaten down to bare twigs.
I was out there yesterday and today gathering data as part of a citizen science project that I’ll write up in another post, and while I was there I took some photos.
The second row above shows the effect the beetles have on the coyote brush. On the left is a plant that still has leaves (and beetles). On the right is one that’s already been eaten.
Finally, there’s a shot I took with the macro lens attachment I bought recently for my iPhone. It’s just a little dingus that slips over the end of the phone. I’m pretty impressed with how well it works, though I need to work on my focus skills. There isn’t much depth of field to work with.
Isn’t that beetle adorable?
I tried taking some video, too, which I’m in the process of uploading to YouTube. I’ll post a link to that when it’s ready, so you can see beetles in motion. (Update: As promised: shaky beetle video.)
