Wow, I have so far only followed your tip of Stevens, I love! I just read Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, how many different ways of interpreting are there?! Crazy! A couple of them made me laugh but I didn't know why! Will have to read again. Thank you!

It can fail to be perceived as work related when colleagues live in little boxes surrounded by construction terminology and football chit chat.

Is that Mr. Nabokov?

I think it is the aim, which makes me switch off. Though my sister says that about some of my haiku . Can you name some of the difficult poets? I'd love to know more about poetry, just in general.

Hmm will look up some Shel Silverstein! Yeah Spike was a bit of a British institution...good old fashioned word play, like Tommy Cooper - though he's slightly hit and miss, I think. Shh, don't tell anyone I said that.

I am having trouble writing to you and making it seem like I'm doing something work-related lol.

thanks, it was more shocking than anything else, I was nowhere near it! *sigh* oh well...

happy 4th!

As for why it's a climber claw, that just comes from a general consensus about claws with similar functionality in other species along with (at the time) the fledgling ideas that were going on about flying pre-avians. The stress test showed that the claw is indeed highly suitable as a climbing claw.

Basically a general observation based on my (poor) understanding of physiological structures. Essentially, it's all about mechanical advantage, and the dromeosaurid claws have none. For the claw to be a slashing claw (as it's often referred to), you've got the power coming from the kick (thighs) and then you have this claw that's opposed to the other claws. Any additional slashing force must thus come from the muscles in that toe... or else the force of the kick would be applied directly to the muscles in that toe. And I was never terribly convinced that that made sense. I even think that the fact that the toe is held opposed disadvantages that. Essentially, if the claw was a slashing claw, it would have been better off being just an enlarged version of the claws around it, so that the dinosaur could apply the full kick's force to it. It also goes against pretty much every other predator out there, which invariably use their bite and maybe forelimbs for destructive force.

is alabama where you are from? i know absolutely zilch about any of the deep south! but Texans do eat a LOT of enchiladas.

yeah, time and time again. the rhymes could have been written by a child and i wouldn't know any different. don't feel like there's any depth. and yeah, the poems on the Tube are a classic for the garbled syntax, most of them don't even make any sense, and it almost seems like that's the aim!

I'm afraid I'm not really a poetry connoisseur despite any picture i may have painted lol, and the ones that I do like are long gone...I like Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Blake, oh and Spike Milligan lol, and my favourite as a child was The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. That's another one where the rhyme and rhythm somehow added to the atmosphere.

(bloody 1000 character limit)

As for feathers, there's a lot of more evidence around the older species of dromeosaurids (the early cretaceous ones). The general consensus at the moment seems to be; if their ancestors were fully feathered, then the default assumption is that their decendants were too. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mi...i_holotype.png. The pennaceous feathers (shaped feathers that lead to flight feathers) are inferred all the way back to the parave/non avian split. Which implies that all troodontids and dromeosaurs had pennaceous feathers. Non pennaceous feathers (plumaceous) go even further back the therapod tree.

But the biggest issue at the moment is that there's a hole in the fossil record between the late jurassic paraves and the early cretaceous dromeosaurids & troodontids. http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/554...ight_size2.jpg

Yeah, I knew about the toothy chicken. I read a really interesting book by jack horner about it and the whole process recently http://www.amazon.com/How-Build-Dino.../dp/0525951040. It looks at the genetic side of things between birds and dinosaurs, basically taking chicken DNA and flicking on the various switches to bring back the old body plan (including teeth and a long tail).

Dromeosaurids (and related, + paraves) are a hobby of mine. To keep you interested, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/317/5845/1721.pdf & http://mapress.com/zootaxa/2010/f/z02403p009f.pdf. Saw that last one just an hour or so ago looking up the other stuff. Love the preserved skeleton they've found.

Maybe not velociraptors in trees, but velociraptor ancestors in trees? likely. Some of the late jurassic dromeosaurids (and troodontids) that they're finding are really interesting.

I know! Doesn't it look amazing at night? We went up the Rockefeller at night, and the Empire State in the day. Really lovely.

I haven't heard of that, I'm looking on the map and that is proper Eastern Texas isn't it, much higher and further over than any of the places I know. Texas is so huge.

I know!! I actually was one of those people myself, but there is nothing contrived or false about his rhyming, nothing that suggests he just chucked in a word that doesn't make sense in the context just because it fits...genius. Plus in Harrow on the Hill he mentions Kenton, which is where I'm from :D.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/c...8578/HTMLSTART is where that image comes from. There are other similar papers around too.

Oh the easy navigation is ace, and the ARCHITECTURE. I love art deco. Haha exactly, there were arguments going on all over the place, at any time of day or night. An interesting study in pschology, I guess!

I am now in love with Betjeman - A Subaltern's Love Song! I'm smiling just thinking about it!

Where in East Texas? My family are in Conroe near Houston, but the wedding was in Austin, second time I've been there, what an amazing city.

Haha, I do find your avid enjoyment of words endearing. My trip was a good one. New York and then Texas. Your fellow Americans behaved in ways pertinent to their areas...Texans were super affable, New Yorkers were super impatient and pushy!

oh thanks very much owen! haha yeah had to slip it in there. i just got back from america, jet lag is a beast, been back almost a week and am just getting back on track!

	Originally Posted by OwenF
	Clams are less orange, and even more delicious. ...in Barcelona.

well that's odd, because I thought mussels were usually black, so how are clams "less orange"? but I agree, clams are yum!

ooh, Spain is *so* on my list!

Owen, how the devil are you?

Thanks very much for that link, Owen. I watched it and now I just want to watch more highlights from it!

I've got to look that game up on the Net; I only heard a report on the radio this morning. I want to see video footage of some of it. It's incredible.