It's the Elongated Middle Finger They Use to Dig Bugs from Trees and Logs

[tmcg]

Bug-Eyed Baby Aye-Aye Debuts

I love these guys. Nocturnal prosimians that flip you the bird.

When the second or third aye-aye was born in captivity in the U.S., at Duke University, there was an adorable picture in the Times. I cut it out and stuck in on my bulletin board at work. Maybe a year later, my eye fell on the photo's caption at just the moment when I was thinking There is no freaking way I can come up with a new twist for a deal-with-the-devil story. (I'd been invited to write one for an anthology, and of course said yes before I had any idea whether I could do it.) The baby aye-aye was called Blue Devil. I did some research, found out that Malagasy superstitions about aye-ayes suited the story perfectly, and have been fond of them ever since. And I still really, really want to go to Madagascar.

Comments

[akaspeedo.livejournal.com]

Wow, he looks like something out of a Star Wars flick. How cool.

[terrymcgarry.livejournal.com]

He totally does. I can't believe I still haven't seen one of these in real life. Gotta do something about that.

[particlemannyc.livejournal.com]

And here I thought a bug-eyed Aye-Aye was something you saw only in male porn set on a naval vessel. Learn something new every day.

[terrymcgarry.livejournal.com]

Pocket Books' Star Trek style sheet used to list "aye-aye" for what they later changed to "aye, aye." A Trek writer I know practically grabbed me by the collar at a social event to ask me why I'd changed all her "Aye, aye, Captain!"s to "Nocturnal lemur, Captain!" in the copyedit.