You’ve already heard the good news, if you’ve a sharp ear for the gasping terror and joy that is the sound of a new baby being born into the world. But I’ll make it official, because I like ceremony around here.

Sophia’s arrived. Safe and sound and, by all accounts, swift. Eager to pierce the veil and see what’s to be seen on this baubled earth of ours, which is a trifle muddied by those who came before her but still full of marvels. Marvels enough for a lifetime.

But shhh, don’t wake her. There’ll be time for that later. Right now let’s just enjoy looking at her while she’s sleeping. Sophia. Sweetheart. Whom I wanted to call Sophie, but whose mother, like so many before her, believes an extra syllable or two in a name will lend grace to its owner. Never mind; she’ll be Sophie to me, in quiet moments.

Sophie of wisdom and wonder. Sophie of sense. Sophie of knowledge. Sophie of questions and learning. Sophie of dreams. Sophie who is really Sophia but who could also have been Saffy; Sonja; Zosia.

She’ll carry that soft sigh at the end of her name well, I think. And when I see her I shall say Sophie! Ah… and wish her every good thing in the world.

I took these this morning while Ross was in the shower.

My sister is almost ready to give birth again! Woah!

So far this weekend we have seen two acts of a very bad play and made a batch of very good beignets. Tomorrow we are going to visit one baby and one grandma. I think we’re doing well on variety.

Michael and I went to the Cantab’s poetry open mike yesterday evening; he drove into town and invited me to join him because ex-Cantabrigian Jack McCarthy was featuring afterwards, and Jack (whom I’ve heard read just a few times before) is a tremendous performer — full of warmth and life and humor and openness. If you visit his site, click on “audio” and choose, say, Cartalk: A Love Poem. You’ll see why he’s such a pleasure to listen to. He’s like a fireside storyteller — hands speaking, eyes speaking, old stringy hair speaking, every word welling up as if it’s the first time he’s ever said it and his attention given equally to what he’s delivering and the people he’s delivering it to. It’s funny because some people seem to think his writing’s apparent lack of formal structure, and his ineffably charismatic style of delivery, make what he does somehow other than poetry — as if poetry doesn’t deserve the name unless it’s inscrutable. As if the distinction between poetry and prose exists to diminish, not to expand, the power of language.

Anyway, it was terrific. And if I had to sit through almost three hours of open mike poetry to get to Jack, some of which was utterly delightful and some of which was — well — open mike poetry — still, that was all to the good. Because it really takes a good four hours of poetry to really put a brain in the sort of pleasant crushed-fruit state mine was in by midnight last night.

First of all, they’re old. Older than the dinosaurs; older than the oldest mammal; older than corals; older than the continents as we have come to know them. Older, my friends, than bones.

The ancestral arthropods were skittering across the surface of the ocean floor about half a billion years ago, and already they were strange as sin, bodies hung together like exquisite corpses. Spiny things, the first knights — covered in a hard outer skeleton that all their descendants inherited and blessed with an abundance of identical limbs on either side that bent backward and forward like hinged oars and propelled them over the sand.

— from kevinzim - (?)

All arthropods have segmented bodies, and the segments — or tagma — of different subphyla of arthropods have the most fantastic names. Thorax, cephalon, cephalothorax. Pygidium, prosoma, opisthosoma. They are Lego-creatures, kings of specialized functions: each body part playing its part.

All arthropods have exoskeletons, made out of a substance called chitin that is soft and gelatinous when first secreted, and which then hardens to form a tough shell. Because they’re surrounded by this unyielding apparel, arthropods have to moult as they grow, shedding their carapaces and becoming, briefly, tender balloons of squishy vulnerability until their new skins solidify around them. Yes, even spiders do this. Last week I held a tarantula moult in my hand. It was thoroughly strange, and quite wonderfully complete.

All arthropods have many pairs of jointed limbs, which is where they get their name — from words with Greek roots that tell us they are the creatures whose feet fit together. Various evolutionary pressures have resulted in the basic arthropod jointed limb structure being modified into a thousand thousand different forms, from the crowbar-like claws of the coconut crab to the bounding knees of grasshoppers. Opposable thumbs be damned; no other phylum can claim such a glorious array of appendages.

So — older than bones, my friends. And still with us. Stay tuned for more.

We went to listen to some live music at the Regattabar last night, enjoyed the morning and early afternoon’s worth of utterly gorgeous, crisp, sunny fall weather we had today by taking lots of walks, and we’ve both been drinking lots of good coffee. Weekend verdict: good.

As for the idea I had, here it is — I’d like to try writing and posting a few arthropod articles here, for my own edification (I need to learn more about them to be helpful around the exhibit) and for anyone who might be interested. Which, hopefully, will be lots of you because they honestly are wildly interesting animals. I’m not sure whether I’ll finish the first one in time to post it today but I’m going to work on it right now. And since I’m also working on teaching myself xhtml and css so I can build more pages on this site, maybe someday there’ll be a page on Wordnerd just for science-related articles. I’d really like that.

Still wordless.