Author Unknown, and Hamsters
I finished Author Unknown earlier this evening. I have an index card (5″ x 8″, not 5″ x 7″, as I mentioned before) with notes ready for my write-up:
(Granted, my handwriting is not so great in general. But in partial defense of its particular hideousness here, let me state for the record that most of these notes were scrawled without the assistance of desk, table, or any flat writing surface whatsoever.)
One of the hamsters bit me tonight. It was not an angry or scared bite, it was a simple “is this thing food?” bite. He was sniffing my hand, then reached up and grabbed my index finger, opened his mouth, and took a tiny chunk right off the front of it. Their teeth are amazingly sharp; the bite felt like the pinch one gets when exercising insufficient caution playing with small rare earth magnets.
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June 18th, 2003 at 6:14 pm
[…] Note added 18 Jun 2003: OK, I heard back from the author of the hamster post. Apparently she was saying the hamsters are ‘zielig’ — ‘miserable’ or ‘pitiful’. I think it is because there are several in the same cage. And she is right! But in my defense, shortly after the picture was taken I moved the hamsters to individual, much larger habitats. Chronologically, here are the posts about hamsters: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], and [7]. The last link is about the hamsters’ deaths. Note also that “eulogies for hamsters” was one of the searches in my Two Years of Google Searches. […]