Bitter perspectives branching from the same pages as Peter's story: orangutangs are being thrown into retreat by illegal logging opertations in the Indonesia forests, the first primate to vanish since the 1860s is being given up for lost, and the brightest and best of British minds are putting their latest brilliant invention on display -- a cellular phone that fits inside a single human tooth. You hear it through bone vibratory conductance. Makes life _so_ much easier, doncherknow!

On the brighter side of things, we were just missed by a space-wandering rock the size of a football field, which came close enough on its way by to be INSIDE the orbit of the moon, and our brightest and best didn't even see it coming until it was past and on its way out into the endless realms out past the Milky Way's thinner edge.

The question at the bottom of this is the old Gaiean paradigm -- if the planet is a single huge organism, after a fashion, then we, presumably anyway, are it's thinking part (since we boss all other organisms around) -- its brain cells. And I am terribly worried about this, because I don't think we're qualified.

On the other hand, maybe brain cells don't have to be individually smart as long as you hook enough of them together, and the cell-phone-in-your-tooth is just the trick, huh?

I wish I coudl be more confident about that hypothesis!! LOL!

Actually we didn't think the genet had gone away -- we were never positive it ever existed, since all we had to go on was one 70-year-old pelt. My great-aunt, she of the bristly white moustache, had the same basis for asserting that she was real, and I never quite bought that, either...but I was much younger then. :>)

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