The leatherskin

Don Doggett · 19 Nov 2002, 06:57 · from urth-v0211.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Don Doggett" <harlekin at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) The leatherskin
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 22:57:03 -0800
Message-ID: <urth-v0211-2174 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0211/2174.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


----- Original Message -----
From: "William Ansley" <
> [1] Way back on October 18, 1999 I argued that the leatherskin has twelve
> legs and no one has bothered arguing with my conclusions yet.
>
> What I said then:
>
> >----------------
> >The leatherskin, one of the largest I have ever seen, stood with six
> >massive legs and half its weight on the starboard gunwale, over which
> >silver water cascaded. [OBW (hc), p. 62]
> >----------------
> >
> >If this creature has only six legs and all of them are on the starboard
> >gunwale (rather a tricky balancing act in the first place), then how can
> >the gunwale be only bearing half its weight?
>


 Then Blattid says:
"Actually, since first reading that scene, I've always envisioned
the leatherskin as some kind of lobster ... possibly one with a
slightly softer shell, possibly one that has molted recently;"

Sounds good to me.  Lobster anyone?  There's plenty for everybody.




--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net