My Alternate Universe

Much to my mother's dismay, but taking strongly after my father, I'm a bit of an adrenaline junkie. Whether jumping off of bridges on Martha's Vineyard, cliffs in Hawaii, or hopefully someday jumping out of a plane, I love to push the limits of my fear. (That also explains my love for scary movies, although unfortunately most don't scare me anymore.) I started noticing my tendency to scare myself for fun when I was a kid: my favorite movies that I always begged my mom to rent at VideoPlus were Planet of the Apes and Edward Scissorhands.
I also had nightmares about the Ring Wraiths in the Lord of the Rings, but was still totally fascinated by them... because I was a cool kid and read those books in elementary school. Yeaah. Around this same time with the weird Sci-Fi and Fantasy movies and books (I think it was a period between 7 and 9 years old) I also really liked to look at books about spiders in the library, because I was really afraid of them. Most kids are scared of things and avoid them at all costs... I would flip open to the page of the meanest, biggest, hairiest spider in the book and stare at it. Then proceed to have nightmares. I'm really admitting to some weirdness here. Either way, I was totally fascinated by these weird, crazy, scary spiders! Now I'm not afraid of much... I'm really only afraid of things that are poisonous. Hence, some spiders still put the fear of God in me, though not the kind you find around the house. To get to the point, I was looking at National Geographic today at some of the new species that scientists have discovered in Papua New Guinea (where all the good beasties are) and I found this awesome jumping spider:
It's almost beautiful, isn't it? Its body sparkles and shimmers like it's been made out of plastic recycled from princess jewelry! So I was enjoying how innocuous this spidey seems to me, when I scrolled to the second jumping spider they found:
This one scares me! It stirs emotion deep in my bowels, even though it's a 2-dimensional picture on my computer screen. The spiders are probably both harmless, and come from the same family (because they're both jumping spiders, or something) but it still makes me nervous just to look at the picture. So which one do you think I'll be spending more time looking at tonight?

I personally am not good at keeping touch with the news, but I come from a family that's pretty well connected. The only thing I do with the newspaper is the crossword, and when I watch TV it's for the TLC reality shows or ABC dramas. Anyway, a few interesting articles have passed by me lately, and I thought I'd share two. One is for fun and fascination, and the other is for reflexion.
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"Weird Beastie" Shrimp Have Super-Vision"

National Geographic is getting some free advertising from me tonight!! So I saw this crazy freaking picture scrolling through on the homepage of the aforementioned equivalent of ecstasy, and I had to read on. This "weird beastie" is a crustacean called a Mantis Shrimp (it's not a shrimp though), and the cool thing about it is that it can see 12 or 13 primary colors! So we see 3: red, yellow, and blue. This freaking thing can see 4 times the amount of colors we can! Infrared, UV, different wavelengths and polarizations, etc. My favorite part about the article was the ending: "What the significance of that is... not clear." These brazen scientists spent all this money finding fancy colors that they can't even see, for fun! Well, at least they're honest about it.
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"Ex-USC student pleads no contest in dumping of newborn in trash bin"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that USC was a pretty good school, and that you had to have some degree of education and sense to get in. But of course, Miss Holly Ashcraft didn't have enough sense to snap on a condom! This 23 year-old woman has dumped 2 -count 'em 2- babies in her short life-time. And of course, she is serving no jail time after her court hearing today. Once when she was 19 and once when she was 21, this chica has dumped her newborn baby like a sac of rotten fruit. Can anyone explain that to me?
As horrifying as this is, the most interesting thing for me was a reflexion from my mother. She mentioned that people are horrified about a woman dumping a newborn, but most don't even blink at abortion. She was saying this in political neutrality, probably because she didn't want to start a fight with her most flaming liberal offspring, but really it was an interesting commentary on our society. What changes in the 6 months between an abortion and the murder of a born baby that makes us go from apathy to horror? Just something to think about.