Location, Location, Location and an Analogy Gone Mad

This gal is huge. She hangs on her web that she's stretched between the tomato plants and the house, and gathers in fly after stupid fly. The wind blows through that same opening and she and her web just rock gently back and forth like she's put a quarter in the barcalounger.

Location, location location...did everybody read this morning about the cache of 7th Century Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ornaments that an unemployed guy found in Britain, using a metal detector in a farmer's field, after searching randomly, and never finding anything, for 18 years? He'd never tried this particular field before, though, and now by British law he is entitled to half its value, certainly into the millions and on up. They are probably selling metal detectors like flies this morning.

The flies feast on the bird droppings on the deck railing. The spider pretends not to be watching. Then the fly jumps up and...oops.

The seventh century guy who buried that treasure probably got it in the first place by mugging some village parson during one of the endless wars they were having back then. He buried it in the ground, thinking he'd come back for it when the war was over.

But mugging is hard work and life expectancies were short. Maybe he jumped up and headed over to the nearest tavern...oops. He kind of never came back for his booty.

1700 years later some bozo with a metal detector -- the spider, see the logic here? -- gets rich and England gets to restore a treasure from its past.

One of these days Plotnik will get sick of the web and brush it down. That's the Battle of Britain. Then the spider will just methodically build it up again. That's Spitfires and D-Day. Then come bigger and badder spiders.

Sometimes it's us. Mel Brooks said it best: "It's good to be da spider."