She was drawn to exotic, small, remote creatures -- mongooses, pangolins, jerboas -- whose precisely noted attributes had a way of crystalizing abruptly into something like moral apothegm.
"I thought it transformed the place into a much more realistic microcosm of society, because there were girls around you know, and they were these sort of strange, remote creatures, except for a Tuesday night when we had ballroom dancing lessons," says Diamond.
It's not an insult, not treachery to suggest that, for the monarch, even his own beloved Infanta is a remote and distant creature, frightened when he approaches as she stands there so formal, so conscious of the need to get things right, to please him.
It's one thing to pose for a portrait with a six-shooter on your hip; it's another thing to use the creatures of the remote past, creatures beyond the scale of human existence and human intentions, as crude existential prostheses.
His own dear, familiar home has been invaded by remote, uncommunicative winter creatures and even the Sun has disappeared.
As Xu Yaping, the patrol's chief, peers through the haze, and coal barges and dredgers churn the lake, the chance of encountering this ancient creature seems remote.
In the absence of humans willing to live in such a remote outpost, the hardy creatures would be the vanguard of a new push to solidify Japan's hold over the islets, which are also claimed by China and Taiwan (see map).Now the prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, has signalled a more serious involvement in the dispute, by suggesting on July 6th that he plans to nationalise the privately held chain.
For his current project, he chartered a boat to Antarctica to find a remote island and a mysterious creature: the albino penguin.
He met one of the most important thinkers of the remote future, a mammoth reptilian creature with an unpronounceable name, and took him back in time to meet Louis XIV, the so-called Sun King.
Gene Corman said another major inspiration was The Thing from Another World (1951), a Howard Hawks-directed science fiction film about a group of soldiers and scientists threatened by an alien creature in a remote Arctic research outpost.
