{"id":51,"date":"2004-05-14T18:43:01","date_gmt":"2004-05-15T02:43:01","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=51"},"modified":"2015-06-24T01:28:58","modified_gmt":"2015-06-24T08:28:58","slug":"stories-from-sony-part-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/archives\/2004\/05\/14\/stories-from-sony-part-7\/","title":{"rendered":"Stories from Sony (Part 7)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I thought I was out of stupid Sony stories, but my former coworker Kevin was surprised that I hadn&#8217;t mentioned anything about the spiders.<\/p>\n<p>What Japanese company wouldn&#8217;t have a special and conveniently accessible smoking area?  The Sony building in San Jos&eacute; has a fairly large atrium for such a purpose, complete with benches, trees, hedges, and a weird modern art sculpture.  It also was infested with grasshoppers.<\/p>\n<p>For some reason, birds within the atrium were rather rare.  Maybe they didn&#8217;t want to be boxed in; maybe they were afraid of the humans who were constantly loitering around there; maybe they just didn&#8217;t want to get lung cancer.  For whatever reason, birds ignored this plentiful food source, and the grasshoppers thrived.<\/p>\n<p>The atrium also had a population of garden spiders. (<!-- Some type of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.painetworks.com\/pages\/12\/120106.html\" class=\"unemphasized\">yellow-black argiope<\/a> -->A <a href=\"http:\/\/www.insectidentification.org\/insect-description.asp?identification=Western-Spotted-Orb-Weaver\" class=\"unemphasized\">western spotted orb weaver<\/a>, I think.) They were fairly large (not including their legs, they were about the size of a quarter), and they constructed gorgeous and expansive webs.<\/p>\n<p>Every summer, these spiders emerged, fully mature, seemingly from nowhere.  Every day of every summer, I tried to capture grasshoppers to place into the spiders&#8217; webs.<\/p>\n<p>Feeding the spiders was one of the few things that made my days at Sony enjoyable.  Every fall I was sad when the spiders disappeared.<\/p>\n<p>I guess I&#8217;m a sadist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I thought I was out of stupid Sony stories, but my former coworker Kevin was surprised that I hadn&#8217;t mentioned anything about the spiders. What Japanese company wouldn&#8217;t have a special and conveniently accessible smoking area? The Sony building in San Jos&eacute; has a fairly large atrium for such a purpose, complete with benches, trees, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[28],"class_list":["post-51","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","tag-sony"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slimjimmy.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}