from the comments
Cindy, my little friends the birds were really quiet before the quake hit. I was out in the garden and wondered where they were. They’ve been hiding all week. I look for them everyday as I go around picking up the pots of Angel’s Trumpet that keep getting knocked over by aftershocks. Now the birds are up in the trees, invisible, but causing a ruckus. Hurricane Irene?
We are living in interesting times.
Just a Quick Postcard…
Danny has the most accepting, loving family in the world. (I’m convinced, prove me wrong.) We’re in Rockton, on the Wisconsin/Illinois border half-way between Chicago (East edge of Northern Illinois) and Galena (West edge. Sheila might lead you to believe Galena is a suburb of Chicago, and in many respects, it is, but it could be counted an outlier.)
I was born near here, in Rockford. Today there was a celebration of Holly’s birthday and Uncle Doug’s (Holly is Danny’s niece, a 29 year-old Danish beauty, Doug is Danny’s 60-year-old brother–with a beauty that can’t be matched in song.) Today while celebrating, Danny and I also got notice for our having been together 24 years, today.
Y’all I hope I’m not being too sappy. But I’m so happy I could bust. Y’all, this family Loves.
quote out of context
Swan says she didn’t smell anything odd when she dipped her hand into the substance.
from the comments
Today is my birthday and we are in Marfa! As it has every birthday of my life, it rained this morning. No matter where I am, it rains. Marfa is parched (recovering from 10 rainless months), so it is lovely to see everything getting a drink. I will refrain from taking the credit, but of course, we all know better. To quote Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, “I make the weather!”
‘Leopards are protected in India, though more are straying into villages for food’
Eleven people were injured in an attempt to drive a male leopard back into a wildlife sanctuary in India. The report is skimpy on details, but the incident didn’t end well. I make the post primarily out of respect for the animal.
from the comments
I once saw a rancher–straight and tall, weathered brown skin, piercing blue eyes under a straw cowboy hat–gazing at a Donald Judd outdoor sculpture. The experience of seeing him in that context was larger than anything Judd could have hoped to produce.
Tilapia and environmental issues
Dr. McCrary has spent the past decade studying how a small, short-lived tilapia farm degraded Lake Apoyo in Nicaragua. “One small cage screwed up the entire lake — the entire lake!” …
Waste from the cages polluted the pristine ecosystem, and some tilapia escaped.
I thought this was interesting, and also felt sorry for some of the lesser-used categories. Working on “tits” now. Just kidding.
Also, doesn’t fish farming like this (engineered to have small heads and tails, and large “loins”) sound remarkably close to lab-grown synthetic meats? Getting people to accept synthetic meats might be easier than I thought.
Everything is a Remix – Part 3
Part 3 of Kirby Ferguson’s amazing series Everything is a Remix is out. As far as I’m concerned, it’s even better than parts 1 and 2.
Message in a Dream
A neighbor asked me over last week to look at his American elm seeds. He is trying to grow new trees from a large healthy one that somehow has managed to escape Dutch elm disease. This is part of an effort to grow new American elms in our county in Virginia. But the neighbor has sprouted only a few seeds from dozens of attempts. And they don’t look so good.
My yard was very conservative when I moved in last summer. Within weeks it was bright and beautiful with exotic flowers that bloomed until December, then burst into life again a couple of months later. This earned me a bit of a witchy reputation. But my experience is limited to flowers, fruits and vegetables. I am not a tree person. But I told the neighbor I would see what I could find out. I started researching online. I found some information, but it was confusing. I was frustrated. Later in the week, I had a dream. I was walking with my father in the woods. He was the kind of person who could go straight to a stand of trees that had been declared extinct, or nearly. No big deal. It was like he could smell them out.
In the dream, my father bent down and started digging with his hands in the forest soil, pulling away the organic matter on top. He pushed deep into the packed earth and pulled that up in his fists. He held out the rich soil to me. I woke up thinking about the elms.
Yesterday, I told the neighbor I wanted some of the seeds. I mentioned the soil in the woods where I often roam near the trail near here (the Iowan sits on the bench and waits for me to get my fill). I did not mention the dead father and dream. But, I said, “I’m in.”
How Archivists Helped Video Game Designers Recreate the City’s Dark Side for ‘L.A. Noire’
Earlier this week, video game enthusiasts and fans of L.A. history cheered the release of Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noire, a police procedural game noted for its faithful reproduction of Los Angeles circa 1947. To recreate a city now hidden beneath 64 years of redevelopment projects and transformed by age and expansion, production designers with the game’s developer, Team Bondi, consulted several Los Angeles area archives.
Precession of the Equinoxes
The thing that caused everyone to freak out because their astrological signs had changed is one of the more fascinating stories in the history of intellectual evolution. That thing is called precession of the equinoxes, and precession is one of those phenomena that is simultaneously invisible and obvious, observable and hidden.
Let’s start with the technicalities and move to the history of it.
In astronomy, axial precession is a gravity-induced, slow and continuous change in the orientation of an astronomical body’s rotational axis. In particular, it refers to the gradual shift in the orientation of Earth’s axis of rotation, which, like a wobbling top, traces out a pair of cones joined at their apices in a cycle of approximately 26,000 years. The term “precession” typically refers only to this largest secular motion; other changes in the alignment of Earth’s axis — nutation and polar motion — are much smaller in magnitude.
So, precession is essentially the planetary equivalent of the wobble in a top as it spins.
If you carve the horizon into twelve roughly equivalent sections, each year, at the equinoxes, the sun will appear to rise in one and set in its opposite. Because of the wobble in the axis of the earth, the section of the sky the sun appears to rise and set in will shift very slowly over a period of roughly 2,160 years. This is the basis of astrology, as various civilizations applied meaning to the constellations they saw in each section. More interestingly, I think, our tracking of it appears to be the basis of astronomy.
To begin to notice that tracking takes time. To fully understand the cycle, and be able to project it forwards and backwards, to mark the passage of time in the relative movement of the stars, would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years — observation, measurement, notation. Once a culture had an awareness of that pattern, no matter on what scale, it could begin to find a place for itself, and make a story out of it, and because we are human, of course, that is what we did.
If you are interested in this subject, and are comfortable with an approach equal parts academic and poetic, you might enjoy Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechen’s Hamlet’s Mill. It shows glimpses of precession’s possible influence throughout the history of art, an astronomical code for our place in the universe embedded in language.
headline of the day
Olympic hopeful rescued on Miami beach after being buried in sand
dusk
Demolition rubble, an undemolished building, and sky.
Also, fish poop
Environmentalists argue that intensive and unregulated tilapia farming is damaging ecosystems in poor countries with practices generally prohibited in the United States — like breeding huge numbers of fish in cages in natural lakes, where fish waste pollutes the water.
Tweet of the Day
The precepts in this section—many of them written in a digressive, self-serious style that reads as if Ayn Rand and Deepak Chopra had collaborated on a line of fortune cookies—are never about making money, at least not openly
There is nothing to fear from truth.
When a pack of hyenas takes down a young wildebeest, is this good or bad?
Ask yourself whether you have earned the right to have an opinion.
The pursuit of billions of dollars through aphorisms and “radical transparency.”
(via the browser)
info graphic out of context
quote out of context
In India and Sri Lanka, where the struggle is most intense, more than 400 elephants and 250 humans are killed each year. Sharks, by contrast, kill fewer than half a dozen swimmers a year worldwide.
Unfinished London
The second video, about the London highway system, was just posted:
Read more
Okie Noodling
There is nothing like the thrill of catching a 60-pound catfish with your bare hands, and that’s just what Oklahoma fishermen have been doing for hundreds of years. Diving into creeks, rivers and lakes in search of bank-dwelling catfish, the tradition of “noodling” originated as a Native American hunting practice, but has survived as a rural sport with a unique and colorful subculture. ‘Okie Noodling’ is a one-hour documentary which catches the excitement and sense of community that has hooked three Oklahoma families on hand fishing.
I saw this on PBS the other night, and noticed it on Amazon streaming. Keep en eye out for the guy who’s fifty-five, and tell me how old you think he is. Now, if I can find the documentary I watched with the ferret named Oreo Speedwagon.
from the comments
No, the vet did not help him fart. He did, however, fart audibly in the exam room, then wanted to leave quickly.
I should mention that Bruce is a hypochondriac.
headline of the day, II
Temperature swings 100 degrees in one week in Okla. town
Dear Clusterflock – Recurring dreams, past and present?
Have you had them?
Have we discussed this before? If so, sorry!
I remember jack shit about dreams and then suddenly this week I remembered a recurring dream from the 80s and 90s. It was fairly simple, I was always a distance from home and I was always naked from the waist down and I was always trying to get home! I was running and although slightly put out by the situation I got on with it. That’s all I remember.
photo out of context
(via marginal revolution)
Image Out of Context
(via)
