Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Sloth?

Earlier this evening, a friend tagged me in her Facebook post:
Bad news, Jewesses (Rachel Shapiro, Eliza Merwin, JBlogger, JanetheWriter, Gail Brown, Nancy Silverman) -- it's another one of those nasty 7 sins.
From my perspective, this is indeed bad news.  Needless to say, I’m Jewish (yes, some people refer to us as Jewesses) and as my grandmother might say, “Nu?....  Who knows from these seven deadly sins?”

Certainly not I.  In fact, I only managed to make my way through the “gluttony” prompt thanks to my medical insurance provider.  But sloth?  To me, it's synonymous with Sid from Disney’s Ice Age--nothing more and nothing less.

So, like any good researcher, I Googled “sloth,” and Wikipedia provided me with these basics, among others:
  • Sloths are arboreal residents of the rainforests of Central and South America.
  • Names for the animals used by tribes in Ecuador include Ritto, Rit and Ridette, mostly forms of the word "sleep", "eat" and "dirty" from Tagaeri tribe of Huaorani.
  • As much as two-thirds of a well-fed sloth's body-weight consists of the contents of its stomach, and the digestive process can take a month or more to complete.
  • Sloths move only when necessary and even then very slowly: they have about a quarter as much muscle tissue as other animals of similar weight. They can move at a marginally higher speed if they are in immediate danger from a predator,…but they burn large amounts of energy doing so.
As far as sloth as sin, I’m with my grandmother…who knows from this?  Perhaps if it wasn’t so late and I wasn’t so tired, I’d Google that facet of the word, too, but not tonight, my friends, not tonight. 

In the meantime, go ahead, call me a sloth.



Red Writing Hood is the writing meme of The Red Dress Club.  The finished piece should be no more than 600 words of either fiction or non-fiction.  Thanks for reading...and feel free to offer thoughts, ideas and/or constructive criticism.  I appreciate hearing what you have to say.

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