For decades, paleontologists have puzzled over a fossil collection of nine Triassic icthyosaurs (Shonisaurus popularis) discovered in Nevada’s Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. Researchers initially thought that this strange grouping of 45-foot-long marine reptiles had either died en masse from a poisonous plankton bloom or had become stranded in shallow water.
Before getting married, Ryan Bailey had to survive the wild west world of dating. In this week’s Talking Marriage, he shows Sean and Mary Kate Wiles (The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Squaresville, Kissing in the Rain) how to get the girl by being a great talk show host.
Now if you had asked me the odds of Bill Watterson ever saying that line to me, I’d say it had about the same likelihood as Jimi Hendrix telling me he had a new guitar riff. And yes, I’m aware Hendrix is dead.
So I wrote back to Bill.
“Dear Bill,
I will do whatever you want, including setting my hair on fire.”
SAME, Stephan Pastis. SAME.
Also: “I could do better if I had more space.” HA. I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE.
The wizardly way to deal with this is to chat with spiders until they no longer frighten you. :)
They are not the world’s most voluble conversationalists. Mostly what they have to say is “Hungry”, “gotta make a web”, “gotta hang out in the web”, “OH WOW I CAUGHT SOMETHING YAY!”, “Sorry, can’t talk, gotta wrap up what I caught”, “Mmmmm” (at dinnertime), “gotta take the web down and conserve my resources”, and (seasonally) “HEY PRETTY LADY / PRETTY GUY, LET’S DANCE / FUCK”.
But if you can get them past that — usually by persistence: wizards who specialize in insects learn persistence pretty early on — you will also hear “Whoops, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you, you looked kinda like a tree from that angle”, “Oh come on, the wind blew me into your hair, do you think I wanted to be here? You are not remotely edible”, “You wouldn’t have a caterpillar on you, would you? I missed lunch”, “How do you get by with so few legs? I am so sorry for you”, “I am so not ready for sex yet”, and “Would you turn off that damn light?”, or alternately “Thank you for leaving the porch light on last night, best meal I’ve had in ages, I asked all my mates round and everybody made out like bandits.”
…Wizards aside, I once had a conversation rather like this with a driveway full of tarantulas (they would come out and bask on cool mornings because the driveway would store the sun’s heat overnight). The brown tarantula, early in the morning before things warm up enough for them to get active, is the most docile and sociable of creatures. They sit there and look at you with all their little eyes. You look at them with your two. Peaceful coexistence, until they start quietly creeping away to hide in the bushes.
(I also had a long talk some years ago with the giant Malaysian hissing cockroach up at the Museum of Natural History in NY, but I can’t discuss that because it was mostly about sex.)
