Speaking Of Mule Deer -- Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Yes, it's a slow news day. At least for the moment.

From Quora:

Generally, a group of deer is called a herd. However, certain species, like the members of the Odocoileus genus like the whitetail, blacktail and mule deer and the European Capreolus species, they live in smaller groupings than say certain large bovines, but more like familial groups. 

Mostly, a group of whitetail deer, for example, consist of an older doe, her younger offspring and maybe some cousins or 'friends' of hers, and any female who starts a ruckus or disobeys will be dealt with by the lead doe. Boxing and foreleg-grabbing are examples of dominance among these deer species.

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The Book Page

I mentioned this book the other day. It arrived in the mail yesterday, from Dotcom Liquidators in Ft Worth, TX, ordered through Amazon.

Lessons From the Lobster: Eve Marder's Work in Neuroscience, Charlotte Nassim, c. 2018, MIT Press, a book with gravitas, and more expensive than most.

I paged through the book at Barnes and Noble, got the gist of the story, so I will begin with Chapter 3: Lobster Lore.

Researchers in the United States habitually work on stomatogastric ganglia from the Pacific spiny lobster Panulirus interruptus, the Maine lobster Homarus americanus, and two crab species, the Jonah crab, Cancer borealis, and the rock crab, C. irroratus.

Elsewhere, comparable work is done on related species found locally.

When Marder opened her own lab, she initially preferred to work on the Pacific spiny lobster she had started with in San Diego. Soon, she began to use crabs to train students because they were cheaper and because "they have nice muscles."

As the lab gained experience with them, crabs became increasingly a full alternative to the lobster. As her lab stacked up interesting results with crabs, other researchers started to adopt them too. Nowadays her lab uses mainly the Jonah crab; the rock crabs are no longer seen in Boston fish markets, possibly because the warming waters have driven them north. But in the 1980s, the lab was routinely carrying both of these crabs as well as the spiny lobster. 

Eve Marder began

Forty years ago ‘Rock Lobster’ launched the career of the B-52s — and revived John Lennon’s -- from The Washington Post.

By 1978, with the Beatles eight years in his rearview mirror, John Lennon had stopped making music — and found himself vacationing apart from his wife and muse, Yoko Ono. That same year, a group of eclectic misfits from Athens, Ga., who called themselves the B-52s released their first single, “Rock Lobster.”

The song was released 40 years ago this week on a small, now defunct label called DB Records. It was later rerecorded and rereleased as part of the band’s 1979 eponymous debut album on Warner Bros.

It’s a bizarre tune containing nonsensical lyrics and circuslike surf music, but it would prove deeply important to the B-52s (it launched them into stardom) and Lennon (it inspired him to team up with Ono and record the last songs of his life).

The B-52s were a new wave band before new wave was an official genre, and “Rock Lobster” hit the masses like a ton of psychedelic bricks. Delirious sounds pumping out of a Farfisa organ flutter and spin around a droning backbeat. Vocalists Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson sing “ohh” and “ahh” in their best imitation of fish during the song’s nearly seven-minute run. At the end, Wilson shrieks like a dolphin. There’s more than a little cowbell.

The song launched the outlandish band into the mainstream, becoming its first to hit the Billboard top 100. It didn’t peak until 1980, however, after the B-52s played the song on “Saturday Night Live.”

“Rock Lobster” also revived a career that had stalled. Lennon’s well of post-Beatles inspiration had dried by 1975. Though he often cited Ono as his muse, the two had never put out an entirely collaborative album. That changed when he heard “Rock Lobster” for the first time while on a vacation without Ono.

See the rest of the story at the link. 

Again, a huge "thank you" to the muse that drives me to blog. 

From mule deer to rock lobsters. 

With Yoko Ono