Evolutionary Path From Ornithomimus Dinosaurs to Birds: Image of Dinosaur With Feathers

A paleontologist's discovery of the fossil of an ostrich-like dinosaur with tail feathers and skin in the legs is stirring up excitement in the scientific world, in case you hadn't noticed. Other discoveries pointing toward that evolutionary path have been made before -- in China, for example, as I remember. However, this new one adds importantly to the accumulating mass of related finds, from which it also benefits, I think, in terms of the internet chatter we're witnessing.

READ/SEE: Dinosaur With Feathers

Next time you eat chicken -- or ingokho to many Kenyans -- just remember it's a living dinosaur. Give it the respect it deserves.

Rush-hour Call

In the din of the evening
Rush hour,
You can still hear them birds call.

They have learnt to sing louder
Than words, if I remember.

So they can hear the singing
As we do, fading away.

As we pass them the emptying
Iborian downtown.

Solar Egglips Ober Kenya

Nairobi (8.00 am): The birds seem puzzled that sunset should come so soon after daybreak. But they sing as though nonetheless.

These matters are sung through, then, duty done n fun had, and only then, p'raps, queried.

No one is to be stopped by the cold-calculating morning breeze that blows in every direction I turn, turning every which way as I do do.

Searching for where the compromised sun might quietly be, behind an unyielding cloud cover.

"It was in de programme dat we should sing dus & mirthfully. Who were we dere to do it anoder way, anyways, if you please?" Sayz de one who leads de sinin widout bein obiously de one who sins dus.

Chikka's visitors are in the mountain!

Furahiday!

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Solar Eclipse: 1. Read More
2. Read Yet More

A Mid-Season's Day: Haiku

A cold, austere morn.
Petal, spent, on polished floor.
Birds. Of a sometime.

Birds of a Feather

Birds of a feather, so the saying goes, flock together. Humans do flock together, but their feathers are merely a figure of speech.

Clothing, style and fashion are humankind's answer to the bling in birds; birds which, however colorful, have no change of clothing, or one at most in a whole year! And no chance in hell to compete.

And yet:
How many years of a Civilizational (not financial or economic) Meltdown, would it take humankind to return to the cowhide and sheepskin of yesteryear, with bemused birds watching all the while?
So, who's smarter now?

A decade and a half ago, Cecil Helman suggested, in his book titled Culture, Health and Illness, that humans have a set of "symbolic skins" which, enveloped within a series of concentric circles or "bubbles" of space and distance, help to construct, and reconstruct, the boundaries of the biological body of any one individual. There were five such skins, he indicated: Clothing, houses, cars, urban or suburban outer limits, and nation-state boundaries. And there were four circles of space and distance: Intimate, personal, social and public distance.

The main point I want to make here in regard to Helman's idea of clothing as skin, though, is that to equate clothing with skin is to mix oranges and apples, and to fumble the insight (which is both in our possession and stares us in the face) loaded in the age-old phrase: "birds of a feather".

Remember, birds have both skin and feather. Humans have skin and a relative paucity of hair, feather's cousin. Clothing, even in the form of cowhide and sheepskin, plus anything else besides, is more feather than skin -- indeed, simply feather rather than skin. So, arising from all the foregoing, the only other and final point I want to make, and which was obvious from the very start, is that clothing is humankind's pale imitation of, and answer to, birds' feathers. Our only advantage, while summer and tropical weather last and spinning wheels spin, we can all adorn our bodies with garb and pigment, as Africa for so long has, any which way we want -- as Fisher's pictures have demonstrated to such great effect (click here for more images).