Marmalade Daydreams

You know what was a freaky mutation? When dinosaurs started growing feathers. Weird. But don't think that I have anything against our flying friends. Even though I was visibly disturbed by a showing of Hitchcock's The Birds last weekend, I think I was more frightened at the realization of how deranged he was when he created the piece than by his "what if?" of nature conspiring against us. Is my implicit trust in nature's blindness over my trust in the psyche a personal whim or a mark of our era? Anyway, I think it's pretty obvious how freakishly cool feathers are -- made of a flexible form keratin, the same superstrong protein that helps make up our hair and nails, as well as rhino horns and fish scales -- feathers emerge from the skin as elongated hollow barbs. From each of these hollow stems grows plumage, a branching pattern of tubes so densely clustered that they fill a two dimensional space. It's like always wearing a lightweight streamlined waterproof down jacket (can we even make one of those?) Have I mentioned that each of these tubes is hollow, down to the micro level? That, though they can be generalized into two major groups, contour and downy, each feather is specialized and that a bird can turn by tilting only a few contour feathers? Amazing.