Difficulty's Technical

“Find your voice. If this is your voice, find another one.” – Anon/advice to a novice writer

My old friend and high school team mate Smitty came up from Myrtle with his girlfriend Michal for the UR/UVA Lacrosse game yesterday. I’m a Terps fan, but UR is my Alma; they formed the Spiders’ first club Lacrosse team when I was an undergrad in the mid-’80s, so I am bound by loyalty to support the program however I can, even if all that means is placing a one-dollar bet on them against Smitty’s Cavs. In all honesty, though, having watched UR play Duke earlier in the season, I was looking forward to seeing them play again, and I even anticipated a Spider win. They were new and improved, fortified with 20% more focus and chutzpah, and, most importantly, they seemed to have stretched beyond that fear of the cage that had become such an Albatross for them in ‘16. In the end, I lost my dollar to the Spiders’ exper-tease, which is not to be confused with expertise. Exper-tease happens when you execute a series of moves so elegant, so graceful that they seem to defy the very laws of physics, only to then choke it all away on a bad pass or a missed ground ball. Exper-tease is finesse without follow through; exper-tease is a sudden abandonment of fundamentals caused by a unique mix of physical and mental retardation that occurs without fail whenever a high level of skill collides with either hubris or fear . . or shitty music.

My wife Melinda joined us for the match, too. It was her first live Lacrosse game, and maybe her third game ever. We arrived two hours early and posted up in the front row on the UVA side to watch the teams run through their pre-game warm-up drills. At some point, Melinda turned to us and said, “I might be out of line here, but I would feel kind of demoralized having to warm up to this music.”

She was right. I can’t tell you what music they had playing. In fact, if I am ever able to identify it by name, please dispatch someone right away to burn me alive. This was the sort of music you might expect to hear were you out running Sunday-morning shopping errands with Pharrell or One Direction. (We actually spotted One Direction in the stands. It was so weird; for some reason, they were all wearing Deep Run HS t-shirts.) In other words, this was not motivational music. The makers of this majestic game called it The Little Brother of War. What we heard was not war music, not unless your definition of war includes a pedicure, a Bellini, and the latest copy of Cosmopolitan. In all honesty, I could have gotten more keyed up listening to Air Supply or Barely Manenough. In fact, I awoke this morning from a freakishly real-seeming nightmare in which players were warming up for the NCAA finals; they were running man/ball drills, listening to Toto …

“. . I love the rain down in Aaaaafricaaaaa . . “

One point loss. Call it fundamentals if it makes you feel better. If I were UR, I would sack the DJ as soon as possible and ban him or her from coming within a quarter mile of the stadium. Then, I’d send someone to consult with whoever runs the music for the baseball program. As it happened, we drove past by the diamond on our way out of X Lot after the game. The baseball team had taken the field to work through its own set of pregame rituals and drills. They were listening to vintage AC/DC.

Why I don’t kill spiders.

Spiders eat astronomical numbers of insects: an estimated 400 to 800 million tons of insects and other pests annually

A new study reveals some stunning estimates about just how much the world’s spiders eat annually: between 400 and 800 million tons of insects, springtails, and other invertebrates. In the process, these eight-legged carnivores play an important role to keep countless insect pests, especially in forests and grassland areas, in check. This is according to the findings of Martin Nyffeler of the University of Basel in Switzerland and Klaus Birkhofer of Lund University in Sweden and the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg in Germany, published in Springer’s journal The Science of Nature.

Using data from 65 previous studies, Nyffeler and Birkhofer first estimated how many spiders are currently to be found in seven biomes on the planet. Their conclusion: altogether there are about 25 million metric tons’ worth of them around. Most spiders are found in forests, grasslands and shrublands, followed by croplands, deserts, urban areas and tundra areas.

Martin Nyffeler, Klaus Birkhofer. An estimated 400–800 million tons of prey are annually killed by the global spider community. The Science of Nature, 2017; 104 (3-4) DOI: 10.1007/s00114-017-1440-1

Rainbow Jumping Spider, Maratus robinsoni.