As a child—already on the course to become a science fiction writing admirer of the natural world—I decided that Anton Van Leeuwenhoek was probably a more significant hero than any of the sports legends I was expected to admire without question. I was never athletic, and though I have no qualms with a good physical-exercise regimen, I never thought that people who play with balls and pucks for a living should be paid more than—say—teachers, scientists, doctors, or artists. After all, teaching, inventing, fixing wonky internal organs (or curing diseases) and actually creating something is a lot harder than putting a ball (or a puck) on the other side of a playing field full of guys running around in rather non-circular circles. Of course, sports figures who jump off of really high things and plunge in controlled trajectories toward the earth probably should get paid more than those who put balls in nets, in holes, or between two poles sticking up like utterly useless lightening rods…ah, but putting a ball between metallic goal-posts during an electrical storm might be a sport worth watching. I mean, there’s no guarantee that the athletic participants will survive to the end of the game, and admittedly, there’s a kind of giddy excitement in that. Needless to say, people aren’t interested in watching potentially-fatal sporting events, unless they involve bulls pitted against guys with swords and floppy red blankets. So this brings me to Anton Van Leeuwenhoek—interesting in that his name is so hard for an American to spell. He was one of those über-nerds who changed the world because of a few bits of ground glass, some screws, sunlight, and drops of water. Lucky for him, the water was a bit dirty. It had stuff in it. The lenses and screws were all parts of a contraption later recognized as a microscope, and the odd little bits he saw in the water were…well…squirmy things. As a kid, I was really interested in squirmy things—and not too interested in putting balls in nets, or chasing them to the other side of a “playing field” on a really hot day. Squirmy things were more interesting, and kinda cute. It was Anton Van Leeuwenhoek who’d first seen rotifers—little squirmy things. And centuries later, I saw them too, with a kid’s microscope purchased at Toys “Я” Us…a toy store chain that makes some grammatical sense in English, and quite a bit less sense in Russian, since that backwards “R” indicates a pronoun in Russian. As is my custom, I spent the weekend with Corey, taking pictures, and well…there isn’t much in Chicago that draws my attention any more. And so while Corey took pictures of things, I spun around taking pictures of light streaks. I was tired of reds and yellows and so I found mercury vapor parking lot lights, xenon vapor lights, and a few lights of a completely different wavelength than the ubiquitous sodium vapor variety. I spun, I snapped, I smoked a cigarette. Afterward, while reviewing my photographic catch, I decided to tweak a few of them. What struck me about this image as it emerged was how like a rotifer this thing looks: at least to me. It’s like a neon-rotifer, a rotifer from another planet. I didn’t expect to see a neon squirmy thing, but that’s the joy of tweaking light-streaks. You never know what you’re gonna get, and if it happens to look like the neon cousin of something Mister Van Leeuenhoek saw, then so much the better. Other people will invariably see something else. What you see is entirely up to you and the way your brain works, but if you happen to see a neon rotifer with its single anchor-foot stuck on a blade of some aquatic plant, then good! If you see something else, then good! At any rate, I hope you enjoy the gaudy sight. As always, thank you for viewing and reading and commenting, and I hope you’re on the verge of a great week.