BETTER THAN A PHONE CALL

Like almost everybody, this blogger has had an abiding fascination with slime-molds since early youth. Well, fairly recently. This week. Since yesterday, in fact. They are fascinating animals. Creatures. Plants. Organisms of some kind.

With fruiting bodies. Often on stalks.
Inhabiting damp places.

Sort of fungi.


One of the most thrilling polysyllabic aggragates has to be "non-amoebozoan slime molds". That is one heck of a word. I can't wait to casually drop that into a conversation.


Yesterday I saw a picture of cribraria (a genus of slime mold first described by Christiaan Hendrik Persoon in 1794) which struck me as beautiful. So I looked up other images, and drew one. It looks space-alien-like.

Amoebozoa - Mycetozoa - Myxogastria - Liceida - Cribrariaceae - Cribraria.
Specifically, in this case, cribraria vulgaris.

This was far more interesting than the final benefits spam calls I received while drawing, from recorded entities variously named Hannah, Doris, Dorothy, and other nice white appellations, female, and sounding reassuringly Anglo American. To all of which I responded venomously in Cantonese before either they or I hung up cursing. An esteemed colleague, who is quite aware that I only receive garbage calls ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of the time, encourages me to carry my cellphone wherever I go. She may simply be as fascinated by foul language in Cantonese as I am by slime molds.

In Cantonese, slime molds are 篩黏菌屬 ('sai nim kwan suk'). In Dutch: slijmzwammen. The latter is probably easier to drop into one's daily speech, assuming one is conversing with Dutch speakers, than "sai nim kwan suk", which may not make any sense at all to the average Cantonese speaker.

One of the phone calls was from Louisiana. Should have called her a sai nim kwan suk and told her to inhabit a damp place (去住潮濕嘅地方啦！'heui jyu chiu sap ge dei fong laa ').
Oh wait. Louisiana. Probably filled with slime molds.



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