So while sitting on the sofa, typing away at the Chinese iMac computer hooked to the behaving-again iBook, something grabbed on to the back of my right leg. I live alone, without pets. Most of us don't take being grabbed by mysterious entities well. I'm glad that while I yelped in surprise, I didn't make any personally humiliating noise. I'm sure even Charles Schulz or Charlemagne would yelp if something unknown grabbed their legs in the middle of the night.
It was a gecko, as I should have guessed. There's alwayssome of various size, in my apartment, working strictly on spec, coming and going as they like, I assume eating some unphotogenic insects. They're cute enough, and it's fun to walk into the bathroom (say) and find one on the mirror. One with impeccable timing dropped onto the keyboard once during a Monsters, Inc scene with Randall.
Still, much as I like finding them hanging around places, hanging on me without an invitation is more than I want. Sliding my leg back is futile in that case, since geckos can hold on against negative 25 gees; I shook my leg until it went flying, and landed among a tangle of computer device power cables. It didn't move, and I worried about its health and what I'd do with a gecko corpse, ideally without touching it. But it was just stunned, and needed a few minutes to get its bearings and run away, taking a toss of a half-dozen times its body length much better than I would.
Trivia: John Napier's (1550-1617) original definition of the logarithm set log( N*(1 - 1/N)k) = k, with N equal to 107. (The modern definitions would be log10(10k) = k or ln(ek) = k.) Source: Mathematics in Civilization, H L Resnikoff and R O Wells, Jr.
Currently Reading: Don't You Know There's A War On? The American Home Front 1941-1945, Richard Lingeman.