Friday, November 11, 2005

10 Things I Learned OUTside Kindergarten...

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Just a few things I learned all on my own, when I wasn't in school studying stupid stuff:

1. Birds are pretty smart critters (...and corollary, humans ain't as smart as they invariably think they are).
2. Birds know the outdoors and their own territories a whole lot better than humans do, or ever could.
3. Birds have appendages called "wings" that allow them to move swiftly, on a moment's notice, at will, in any direction, far away, to evade predators or detection.
4. Creatures that get shot at don't much like it, and over time learn to avoid the creatures doing the shooting.
5. Though the woods "are lovely dark and deep," they can also be vast, dense, inhospitable, poorly-accessible, and difficult to traverse without making lots and lots of noise.
6. Living things have a tremendous will/drive to live and reproduce, and adaptive individuals virtually always survive well past the time silly humans think they're all gone.
7. It can be difficult to make generalizations about species because individual members are so variable and dynamic.
8. Extinction is forever, and that's a LONG, LONG time -- one ought be mighty gosh darn positive before ever declarin' it, or you just might look like a fool.
9. The Universe is positively brimming with improbabilities.
10. Children's intuition (before it is extinguished) is right just about as often as grown-up science is.

....just a few late-night thoughts; think it's my naptime now.
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