PhotonQ-Darkness Falls

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PhotonQ-Darkness Falls

Image by PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE
A curious and beautiful being was exploring the door when I got home tonight. Spent some time looking at him and the incredible details and colours from his wings. Great visual way to start the night =)

About the title, he reminded me of the green insects in one episode of the X-Files (Darkness Falls)

MULDER: What do you know about insects, Scully?

SCULLY: Uh, just what I learned in my biology courses. That they're the foundation of our ecosystem. That there's lots of them, something like 200 million per person on this planet.

MULDER: And they've been around a long time, right?

SCULLY: Yeah, something like 600 million years, even before the dinosaurs. Why?

MULDER: And this tree is what, 5, 6, 700 years old?

MOORE: Yeah.

MULDER: And these rings represent a history of climatic changes, which means that in this year or season in the life of the tree, there was some kind of strange event that produced an abnormal ring.

SCULLY: Well, like what, exactly?

MULDER: A volcanic eruption. This whole chain of mountains running from Washington to Oregon is still extremely active. Remember Mt. St. Helens?

SCULLY: Yeah, but how does that explain the bugs?

MULDER: When Mt. St. Helens erupted, there was a large amount of radiation that was released from inside the earth. Strange things started to grow. There's actually this lake where they've discovered a kind of amoeba that can literally suck a man's brains out.

SCULLY: Oh, a brain-sucking amoeba.

SPINNEY: No, it's true. Spirit Lake. And there's documented cases of swimmers being infected.

SCULLY: But an amoeba is a single-celled organism. It can be mutated. An insect is a complex animal. It would take years and years to evolve.

MULDER: Well, then maybe what we're dealing with isn't a mutation at all. What if it's some kind of... extinct insect larvae in that ring, deposited during a period of volcanic activity, brought up through the tree's root system. Ancient insect eggs. Thousands, maybe millions of years old lying dormant until...

SPINNEY: Until those loggers cut down that tree. That would be rather poetic justice, don't you think? Unleashing the very thing that would end up killing them and your friend Humphreys?

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MULDER: Why did you say that darkness was our enemy?
SPINNEY: That's when they come.
SCULLY: When who comes?
SPINNEY: I don't know what it is. They come from the sky, take a man right off his feet and devour him alive. I saw it happen....

G is for Giraffe

Image by Hobo Matt
The Flushing Bay Promenade at the northern end of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park is lined with black granite panels depicting one animal and one plant for each letter of the alphabet. (It's a pretty safe bet that ol' Henry Stern had something to do with this.) The artist didn't shy away from extinct or mythological beasts, including both "Dinosaur" and "Unicorn" in the collection. As I approached the end of the alphabet, I tried in vain to come up with an "X" animal or plant. The official selections were cop-outs: "Oxen" and "Oxalis".