Searching for the King of the Sea Monsters

Kids are great. Mostly. Well...mine are great.

I've found that since I stopped being a dick, my relationship with my boy has blossomed. He's no longer a dick; he's nicer to his sister; I don't have to yell at him anymore...it's amazing how powerful adjusting my own attitude has been.

Maybe I'm being too hard on myself.

In any case, the other day we were checking out a cool dinosaur-and-other-prehistoric-beast book (that uses a spindly sans-serif fonts for blocks of text they occasionally print over photos of OCEAN SURFACE) and we came across a picture of dunkleosteus:

Coming into its position as apex predator nearly 350 million years ago during the Devonian Period, this placoderm---er, armored fish and an early jawed critter---swam around taking bites out of whatever it felt like, even fellow dunkleosteus. It didn't have teeth, rather that bony-jaw-armor was actually sharp bitey-bone, and its jaw would snap shut like a paper cutter so fast the biteforce was nearly the same the T-rex. At 30 feet long (!!), this thing only feared other specimens of it's own species, and a proliferation of harmful algal blooms that would eventually choke off its oxygen supply and hasten its extinction.

In an odd twist, as a lobe-finned fish, the descendants of its tetrapod cousins would become us, and not the ray-finned fish that are the vast majority of fish in today's oceans.

My son was immediately obsessed with this sea monster. It had to be the coolest, toughest, and BEST sea monster ever. NOTHING could ever challenge its primacy as far as sea monsters are concerned.

Well, I challenged him, what about the mosasaur we watched the program about a while back? That was a pretty badass sea monster, too, right? A glint in his eye: recognition. The mosasaur...he said, his voice trailing as he tried to imagine the two meeting.

A few pages later in the very same book we found the spread about the mosasaur. It grew to it's status as apex predator and all-around badasss sea monster about 300 million years later, around 50 million years ago, after the non-avian dinosaurs had all vanished. The largest of which ticked the measuring stick around 50 feet (!!), meaning it was even bigger than dunkleosteus.

This bothered my son, as he clung to his feelings that dunkleosteus had to be the best. I mean, he doesn't even have teeth, rather sharp bone-blades that she snaps down as hard as T-rex, man! Also, I think he loved saying dunkleosteus, which is amusing, because he liked saying mosasaur also.

We concluded the mosasaur portion of the search with, "Well, it may have come down to whomever got the first bite it, because ol' dunkster could probably do plenty of damage with that chomper." 

This was satisfying until I reminded him an even older obsession of his in these matters: megalodon:

No glint in his eye this time, rather a full-on sparkle. Megalodon! That would show that mosasaur! A proper fish and all, megalodon roamed the seas around 25 million years ago, after the mosasaurs disappeared, and long after the end of the Devonian.

Clocking in at 65 feet long it was truly enormous. Would dunkleosteus just be a meal for this giant predator?

I tried to explain that this wasn't really a competition, since the disparate eras in which these beasts existed, and that it was okay to revere all of them. And that we should be excited that such cool monsters ever existed at all, and that we know about them.

AND, oddly enough, with dunkleosteus and mosasaur being nearly certain and mostly guessed for megalodon: it looks like all three gave live birth.

After this talk and realization, the day's activities went to his Hot Wheels experiments and which cars went however far through his rubber band-powered loop-de-loop.

I'll save xiphactinus and liopleurodon for next time. Turns out we watch our share (and many others, it sounds like) of ancient oceans and ancient earth science shows on Curiosity Stream.

That I can name five ancient sea monsters off the top of my head, along with basic facts like size and appearance (dunkleosteus, xiphactinus, mosasaur, liopleurodon, and megalodon) but couldn't tell you all of the Kardashian siblings names probably tells you how my screen time is spent...

Kindergarten Comes Once for us All

My son had his first day of kindergarten a few weeks ago, and while I saw many people posting pictures of their kids' first days of school, I refrained. Social media was flooded with those kinds of pics, and I felt like I needed to zig while everyone else zagged. Or some other cliché...

But, here I am, on my own thing, celebrating my awesome little dude, on his first day of kinder:

He had his hair shaved into the Travis Bickle for the mohawk effect, and does well by his masks. He's so big and tall, but you only really notice when he's around his friends, being nearly a head taller than most everyone at school.

His compassion is strong, and the violence against sister is mostly incidental and not by design. He's awesome and I love him more than just about every single thing in this universe. He's my favorite dude, and I hope that he starts to understand that we need him to infiltrate the patriarchy from the inside, as that's the only way we're going to bring it down.

We tell it to him all the time, so time will tell whether he's buying the message.

Keep loving books, Boy!

Random Writing Nonense

I was reading my Sunday paper this past Sunday and when I opened up to the book review section, a face was staring back at me:

The review was for Sally Rooney's newest book, but I am/was mostly unfamiliar with her work. The article writer mentioned that the galleys of Ms. Rooney's breakout work, Conversations with Friends, was well-worn when given to her, and it was suggested that as another young-millennial-lady, she'd likely enjoy it.

She did not at the time do so, and I was reminded of a Matt Groening "Life in Hell" comic strip about modern artistic types, with a category titled "How to Annoy Them" that I loved:

The one I usually think about is the Poet, and how to annoy a poet? Well:

Anyway, while reading this article, the idea of a 24 year old writer shooting to stardom caused mixed feelings in me: part envy, obviously, but then again I'd have to finish something worthy of attention, so...; and excitement, since non-genre writing can be a viable art-form for making a living (and maybe because it means people still read..?).

But I was looking at the picture of Ms. Sally Rooney, and I aid to myself: This girl isn't an American. I had a feeling, based on how she looked in the article's portrait, that I knew from which country she came. I made a guess, and then I looked it up.

And I was correct. She's from Ireland. Once that info hit me, whatever envy I had went away (for some reason) because to me that just made sense. I'm reading a novel right now written by an Irish lady, and Irish writers have figured prominently in English language literature for, eh, ever?

But I started to think back to this meme I sent my dad, in reference to a conversation we had once:

My dad and I talk about many things, but a few themes will usually emerge: the Simpsons; the Yankees; and literature. He had a contention one (and still may hold it) that if you were to rank countries or nationalities by how much they loved---or felt like they defined themselves through---their literature, that Russia would be in first place, while America would be whatever place last was.

The accuracy of that statement isn't the focus here, because, well, my dad is usually right about these kinds of thing and I haven't read enough Russian or French lit to make a sound judgement.

What I want to say is: where's the Irish literature joke in that meme? I mean, those aren't really jokes as much as generalizations, albeit silly ones. But like, it would be hard to discuss the Western canon of literature without the Irish contingent mentioned. (Also, is Russian really "Western canon" and not somehow an amalgam of Western and Eastern? Is that something inherently different about the content?) 

I even started to think about a bracket-type setup, but I didn't want to go into too many details.

But just going off the top of my head:

Irish:

• Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Beckett, Yeats, Flann O'Brian, Anna Burns

English:

• Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Orwell, Woolf, Jane freaking Austen, Shelley

French:

• Voltaire, Baudelaire, Hugo, Flaubert, Dumas, Sartre, Camus (he counts, right?)

American:

• Melville, Twain, Whitman, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Pynchon

Russian:

• Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn

One major problem here is that the list above is almost entirely cis-gendered white men. Yikes. Literature must do better. That's another reason I didn't want to dive too deep here: it shows off some flaws in the historical record of an artform I feel I'm umbrellaed under.

Now that I've typed this nonsense up, maybe I can go back to going about my day, able to see different writers names up under national identities, all the while asking myself, where do the Bronte sisters go? They're Irish by birth, but grew up in and wrote mainly about, England...