I Think A Dryad Lives In This Tree

It was giving me the side-eye as I walked by.

I've Got No Room For Coffee

on my little coffee table, but I made room for a cicada in amber and two large cicada nymph shells.  One coming, one going.

And Today's Iridescence Pt. II

Related post:  And Today's Iridescence

Unusual Observation Today

Towards evening I took a short walk, dropped by the market and was coming back when I spotted more discarded cicada nymph shells.  I plucked them off the trees, placed them in the container I've started carrying expressly for the purpose.

I then spotted one more,

but as I went to pluck it it moved.  It was climbing the tree in preparation for the molt!

I'd never seen a live nymph before and I was fascinated.  I hoped it would begin molting soon, but it just kept on slowly, laboriously, climbing higher and higher.  At one point it missed its footing and almost fell off, and I cupped my hand under it, but it recovered and continued the climb.

I must have stood there watching for over an hour, then I noticed another nymph was climbing the tree as well.  I had been so rapt on the first one I hadn't noticed it coming up from behind.

This guy was a good deal faster than the first one and soon climbed past it and out of my reach.

8 PM.  It was growing dark, the second nymph was no longer even visible.

I considered going home to fetch a flashlight, but decided against it, in case the light disturbed the nymph (I looked it up later and it turned out that cicada nymphs usually come out at dusk and molt at night, for protection from predators in their most vulnerable moment).  And whaddayaknow, just as I was about to leave, the nymph did fall off!  I turned on the flashlight on the smartphone and looked for it, but alas, I could not find it.  What a pity!  I really hope the nymph was able to regroup and make another attempt, but it may have been too exhausted after that arduous first climb.  Can cicadas molt on the ground?  Or maybe it can make do with just a short re-climb the next time.  Good luck, my valiant little friend.

Dragonfly Flying Over The Sun

Letting the sun burn my eyeballs out -- again...

More Bug Fancy

[By all means do click to expand!]

Bad News For My Little Friends

Last year at about this time, I was taking home the cicada shells I'd found, and this old lady asked me if they were for making medicine.  That was funny, but this piece of news is not:  I just learned that Chinese residents in Busan are congregating in an ecological park every evening to sweep up all the cicada nymphs they see... to eat!

I know eating bugs is really not all that uncommon, but still, these guys are one of my favorite species of insect...  Is the torturous pleasure of listening to the deafening din of cicadas buzzing every summer in danger of disappearing from Korean cities?

Picking Up From Last Year...

I returned from my "walk" a little past five o'clock (actually, I was out exploring in an unfamiliar neighborhood an hour's ride away) I heard a loud chorus of cicadas and started looking for what I hoped would be there;  and yes, this time I wasn't disappointed -- the guards hadn't beaten me to it!  

Here is what twenty-two nymph shells look like in my palm:

And after I had them laid out to dry out from the rain:

One of the shells was clinging to a tree next to an adult cicada.  I tried to pick it up as well, and it flew up and grabbed onto me.  Cute, no?  Look at those plump little thighs -- reminds me of frog legs^^

Related posts:  What To Do, What To Do...;  What To Do, What To Do... Pt. 2;  Cicada x 2

Wet Leaf

The wet weather continues.  On my customary walk I came upon this rain-soaked stray leaf on the sidewalk.  How beautiful!

A Few More "Dreamlike" Images

 

The last one -- is it perhaps too horror movie-ish?  But we've all had creepy nightmares, and it actually kind of matches the feel, if not literally the look, of this hospital dream from 2013. 

My Most Recent Acquisitions

Tiger's eye spheres, a fidget toy, and a miniature icon. 

Another Rather Startling Sight

Related post:  A Butcher With A Sense Of Humor

Snagged

Related post:  Marooned In The Sky: A Tragicomic Yarn

On A Drizzly Afternoon

I saw a cat leap over a building in Jongno, Seoul.

A Menace To Aviation

 

Speaking Of Lucifer...

This sight made me think of the Shining One, God's favorite before his failed rebellion, attended by a host of lesser angels.

Related post:  The War In Heaven

So It Was An "Orb"?

Back in April, I wrote this post about an unusual image I accidentally captured back in 2018.  Although not very likely, it still might possibly have been:  #1. a lens flare;  #2. a droplet of water;  #3. or a mote of dust on or near the camera lens.  Here is a detail from the photo:

In the post I humorously compared it to the "Vitons", a fictional race of beings normally invisible to humans.  At the time no other possibility had occurred to me.  Then today I happened to be checking out some old photos, and among them was a series of shots of my old digs in Los Angeles.

Notice anything unusual abut the middle photo?  I don't know how it escaped my notice back then;  it's a textbook example of the so-called "(spirit) orbs", kissing cousin of the "spirit photograph" and a supposed indicator of the presence of ghosts or paranormal activity.  Here are a few of the orbs, close up (with heightened contrast).

Don't they look just like the "Viton" photograph?  But then, I belatedly looked up spirit orbs specifically -- and well, you could have knocked me over with a pinky.  These are identical to the orbs in my photos:

While I know absolutely nothing about the conditions under which these online images were taken, what makes my orbs unlikely to have been dust or reflections or whatever, is the fact that they are not visible in other shots taken just before and just after, even though they were taken under identical conditions and from the same part of the room.  However, if you were to ask me "But then, why are they not in the other shots?", well, I couldn't tell you.  Maybe the spirits are capricious, or maybe you have to be in just the right frame of mind.

So am I now a believer in the paranormal definition of the "orbs"?  Was my flat being haunted by ghosts?

Well...

Absurd Mirror (Or Column)

A mirror hung outside a guard shack.  That in itself is a little unusual, but that column!  It has to have been added after the mirror was placed there -- surely no one expects to wedge herself in and stand barely a foot in front of a full-length mirror to primp and preen!  But why, if a column was needed to bear the load of the roof, was it not included in the original plans?  And why was the now-useless mirror not taken away?  Surely it can be put to good use at some other location!

The War In Heaven

If it happened today.  If it was made into a movie.  A sci-fi movie about a power struggle among some advanced parahuman species who are mistaken for angels by ordinary mortals.  Starring Chris Hemsworth as the archangel Michael

with James McAvoy

or maybe Michael Fassbender

or even Keanu Reeves playing Lucifer.

And the War as seen from the ground might just look like this^.

 Related posts:  War In Heaven

Accidental Juxtaposition IV

In some cultures moths traditionally have been associated with death.  Perhaps because of their often ominously dark coloring and nocturnal ways, so different from their delightful diurnal counterparts the butterflies, or perhaps because of their fatal attraction to flames.  In any case, I know I found them repellent in an almost instinctive way when I was a child.  So, not so surprisingly, I found this moth resting by a clock to be a worthy focus of rumination on mortality.

Related post:  Vanitas

This Is Hilarious

And I'd had no idea!  It's been over five years now since I moved back to Korea, but since I quit smoking many years ago (except for the very very occasional puff on my favorite pipes, for memory's sake) I never paid much attention to the packets of cigarettes behind the counter at every convenience store.  Sure, I sometimes see discarded packs with gross photos of a ruined lung or some such prominently displayed, but never thought much of it.  After all, smoking is already pretty severely frowned upon as an evil habit here in Korea -- I just never realized how severely!  Today, for the very first time I happened to actually pay attention to the scary warnings on cigarette packs, and I just couldn't help but laugh.

#1.  How to have a stroke

#2.  How to acquire sexual dysfunction

#3.  How to have yellowed teeth (compared to the others this one doesn't seem nearly so bad^)

#4.  How to get lung cancer

#5.  How to get laryngeal cancer (on all the packs)

#6.  Nicotine addiction, exposure to carcinogens

#7.  How to go blind

#8.  How to acquire vascular disease

#9.  Lung cancer (just straight to the point)

#10. How to make other people sick (probably means little in China)

#11. Heart disease (again, direct to the point)