Meme: Excerpt from a book on my desk
Kivi Leroux Miller over at Non-profit Marketing Guide tagged me with a meme today and totally caught me reading about GIANT SQUID.
Everyone else has these profound books in their memes, Social Butterfly has one on "What I know now: letters to my younger self" and Kivi is reading the Metaphors Dictionary, which sounds so cool I'm going to have to order one from Amazon as soon as I finish this post.
Me? I'm reading about Architeuthis (pronounced Ark-i-tooth-is) in a book called "The Search for the Giant Squid: The Biology and Mythology of the World's Most Elusive Sea Creature" by Richard Ellis. I know what you're thinking -- and yes, it's true. I have serious Jules Verne issues and once dragged my poor husband past thousands of cool things in Monaco just to get to the Oceanographic Museum & Aquarium so I could see the taxidermied-looking mold of a giant squid carcass.
This is what I am supposed to do:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.
On page 123, this is what you get: (Ellis quoting famed Giant Squid researcher Frederick Aldrich)
"The classical report on speed of architeuthid swimming is that of Gronningsaeter (1946)...he clocked an architeuthid's speed at 20-25 kn. If this observation is valid, and I believe it is, then the morphological apparatus with which the squid has been provided is clearly capable of speed sufficient to evade whales." (Sperm whales are capable of speeds of ten to twelve knots."
What's not to love about the phrase "morphological apparatus?" Use it to impress your friends. And if that's not enough, people who specialize in squid are called "teuthologists."
And teuthologist geek bonus: You can read about and see the dissection of a Colossal Squid (Mesonychoteuthis).
Like Kivi, I'm going to tag some of the people I enjoy on Twitter:
Jason Robertshaw at Cephalopodcast (because how could I resist?)
What are you reading? Have anything you can recommend because, as you see, I have (ahem) wide-ranging interests.
