SubhanAllah(s) Plural (2)

Audio blogging is convenient. Too convenient. I can’t let myself fall into that habit. Besides, I would like to think (or futilely hope?) that I sound better in print. :p I’m a written-word man m’self. To me, no movie based on a book has ever, ever been better than the book, because no movie can do justice to what a writer can do with words. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I think the conversion rate may be off there.

We had an earthquake this evening. It felt like someone had given the house a back-hand, just to shake things up a little. It couldn’t have been longer than two seconds, but SubhanAllah, it was impressive. People, and by people I mean me, tend to become complacent and slip into the belief that the earth is solid or something. Hmmph. It’s just glorified crust on a ball of lava soup. The crusty bits slip and slide around in colossal slow-motion, and when two of the bits rub against, crash into, or push off of each other, we, the people of Liliput, feel the vibrations.

Today’s tremor was pretty minor, Alhamdulillah. We had all been sitting in the basement when the house quivered, so we turned off all the gas heaters and went upstairs and outside. End of story. I’m slightly worried that this may just have been the aftershock of a big earthquake that hit somewhere else, as was in the case in Karachi a few years ago when the massive earthquakes that killed hundreds of thousand of people in India were felt as far as our Uncle’s house. At the time we had no idea what the swinging ceiling fans meant, but we later learned. SubhanAllah. Almost the whole subcontinent got a shaking.

And now for something completely different. The golden mole of the Namib desert is, for all practical purposes, a furry little tennis ball with no distinct features that rolls under and through the sand of the sand dunes eating termites. It travels leaving a visible ridge of sand in its wake, kind of like Bugs Bunny on his way to Wala-Wala Washington. It’s completely blind and ‘sees’ by sensing vibrations with a highly sensitive inner ear. In addition to being able to zip through the desert like a cat-toy on the run, it also has the ability to make me laugh so hard my stomach aches. Everyone has to know about the golden mole. It’s too amazing to miss. SubhanAllah!




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