Mork & Mindy

some slime mould found at home

Content taken from: Biological Science: the web of life; third edition; Australian Academy of Science, Canberra A.C.T.

Slime moulds are also had to classify into a particular ‘kingdom’. As you may have discovered in the laboratory, a slime mould is a strange and truly remarkable organism. Its structure and behaviour have raised many questions, some of which are still unanswered.

For much of its life a typical slime mould is a creeping mass of living substance with the consistency of raw egg white. It may be orange, yellow, white or colourless. Some are microscopic; others are quite large. The movement of this living thing brings to mind a giant amoeba, for it sends out ‘arms’ which engulf and digest bacteria from rotting logs or leaves. This stage of the slime mould is called a plasmodium.

Most slime moulds live in moist places – in decaying logs, leaves, or other organic matter. A plasmodium can move over grass, creep up the sides of trees or go almost anywhere there is food or moisture.

If you look at a plasmodium through a microscope you will see that it contains many nuclei in a mass of living substance, the cytoplasm. It is not divided up into separate cells. If you watch an active plasmodium you will see the most spectacular exhibition of streaming you can find anywhere. As you watch, the cytoplasm flows rapidly in one direction. After about fifty seconds the flow slows down, stops, then reveres its direction. What causes this rhythmic back-and-forth flow of cytoplasm remains a mystery, despite considerable research.

When a plasmodium is fully grown and well fed, it crawls to a drier and more exposed position (on a dead log in the sunlight, for example) and slowly changes into one of several fruiting bodies, containing spores…

…Looking back at the description of a slime mould, you can see that they are most unusual organisms. Certainly they are not on the border of the living and non-living, like viruses. But they do not have a cellular structure. Nor is there a cell wall around the cytoplasm of a plasmodium, as there is in a bacterium. When it is feeding it looks rather like an animal, but it reproduces by spores like a fungus.

… yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like made and yes I said yes I will Yes.

With jubilation I finished reading the tome of that most famous Irish author, James Joyce. The book of course, is none other than Ulysses. It was certainly a fascinating read, most of the time I had no idea what was going on, but just passed over the words while my mind wandered (which also happened to me while reading Dubliners).

The novel started off normally enough, not very interesting, but certainly coherent. And it finished in a style most jarring, about 30 pages with no punctuation of any kind, a complete stream of consciousness. But this was actually not that unreadable. I approached it with a clean frame of mind and let Joyce take control of the random musing and tangents my mind moves to. It was the middle section that was actually the most torturous to read. Keeping track of who is speaking to whom in the long sections of dialogue was a task I wasn’t prepared to take.

Why did I decide to read Ulysses? Well, I had a long summer and thought that it would be good to educate myself with a seminal text. This book was chosen, as it was recommended by a tutor for a subject I enrolled in last year – Modern & Contemporary Literature. But it was not on the whole a book that is a pleasure to read, nor one that I would recommend to others, unless they were particularly interested in seeing what modernist literature is about.

A far more interesting yarn can be found in the (supposed) work of Homer’s Odyssey. It is an epic poem, both in length and content. I don’t want to ruin the story for you (which will already be done if you have seen the Simpson’s take on it, or read the Wikipedia link above :P). Since it is meant to be orally recited, it reads very easily. The text has a rhythm and repetition to it that makes it come alive. As Odysseus retells of his tales, you can feel the adventure, indeed, the odyssey of it :). Would make a good series of television or movies, far too much happens to be contained in any one film. (And let us not forget the horror that was Troy, based on the far less encompassing Iliad).

Bizarre weirdness indeed. It has only happened a few times, and is a most unnerving experience. I am fully awake, but don’t quite have control over my thoughts. They travel in directions and to places that I don’t want them to go. What is scary, is that I lose control of my own mind, my own self, so that only fragment of me is remaining in the back of your head, screaming at my mind to get in order. Thankfully, they are short-lived, and soon sanity returns…

♪ There is an area of the mind that could be called unsane, beyond sanity, and yet not insane. Think of a circle with a fine split in it. At one end there’s insanity. You go around the circle to sanity, and on the other end of the circle, close to insanity, but not insanity, is unsanity. ♪

Like many teenage boys, my room often resembles that of the living quarters of our porcine cousins (note, teenage girls’ rooms are not messy, I have been warned about the state of them before entering, only to find out that the ‘mess’ is just two papers that aren’t aligned perfectly). It was due time for me to clean up.

I find that the motivation to clean comes from one of two places. Either I want my room to be presentable for others, or, I am about to begin studying – either at the start of a school/uni term, or during exam preparation time. I find that in order to start learning effectively, I need to organise my physical surroundings, so that my mind can also organise thoughts more efficiently. Some say (look what I am doing here, qualifying my opinion without referencing a source, watch out when the media does it for contentious issues) that cleaning before studying is a form of procrastination, but I disagree. It makes the setting where I learn far more comfortable aesthetically, and also makes it easier to organise the many many notes and exercises I use.

The process of cleaning itself doesn’t take very long. The process went something like this for me:

• putting clean clothes in cupboard, dirty clothes in washing machine
• sorting out rubbish that accumulates, throwing it out
• changing sheets and doona covers
• tightening and nailing some of my bed (I will elaborate later)
• vacuuming floor
• wiping down surfaces that are dusty

Now, my bed. It was made for me by my brother, and due to lack of triangulation in its structure, begins to wobble quite significantly after a while. In order to remedy this, all the bolts need to be tightened. I also hammered (with a brick might I add, since our hammer is elsewhere) the support structure for the slats, since they have started to bend slightly. On a final note about my bed, it has yellow Christmas lights (from Egypt) underneath, that can be turned on with a flick of a switch by my bed head, for an effect like this:

That’s it, the whole process took just over an hour, and now I have a nice clean room that is a joy to be in (or so I would like to think).