DIY, Growing Food in Winter
These are lettuce and pea seeds I put in last week. They are growing in my back yard, in a plastic container that held spinach. Yes, it is cold. And it freezes and sleets and ices up, still. But this is winter gardening and people do it even in colder climates than northern Virginia.
You just wash a plastic container that has a lid, punch some holes in the top and bottom, put in some soil (I use a seeding mix) and sprinkle in seeds. Water, close the container, label it with a permanent marker. Place it outside in a sunny area. Now you have a greenhouse environment for your seeds to grow. I may need to transplant these into a larger container before it gets warm enough to plant in the garden.
I also have some flowers and pampas grass sprouting.
Your seeds really want to grow, even in harsh conditions. Like us, they are animated by the life force.
Owlet Caterpillars of Eastern North America
My same friend Susan who brought us the critically acclaimed Omega Institute in Your Pants, 2010 edition today supplied the following list, from the book Owlet Caterpillars of Eastern North America by David L. Wagner, Dale F. Schweitzer, J. Bolling Sullivan, and Richard C. Reardon:
Sordid Snout
The Herald
Feeble Grass Moth
Dead-wood Borer
The Betrothed
The Little Wife
Serene Underwing
The Consort
Dejected Underwing
Inconsolable Underwing
Tearful Underwing
Sad Underwing
The Penitent
Sappho Underwing
Youthful Underwing
Darling Underwing
Read more
Yosemite HD Time-Lapse
A gorgeous time-lapse video of Yosemite, by Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty. (via Bad Astronomy)
I need to go there.
Riding a motorcycle across the top of the world
Holy cow, I don’t know much about this video, or where this is, but some guy on a motocross dirt bike rides along the knife edge of a mountaintop.
recording a tree
Via BoingBoing:
This music — which sounds like a moody piano soundtrack for a existentialist movie about a rainy day — is made by slicing a tree in cross-section, sticking it on a turntable, and dropping a tone-arm with a PlayStation Eye Camera in the head, and processing its output through Ableton Live. It’s called Years, and it was created by Bartholomäus Traubeck.
Absolutely beautiful.
tweet of the day
With this weather, I’d consider Uggs.
— Chris Glass (@glass) January 14, 2012
Captain Beefheart’s Ten Commandments of Guitar Playing
4. Walk with the devil
Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the “devil box.” And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you’re bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.
(From WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. Via Brian Beatty.)
Whalers, Activists & Drones
Anti-whaling activists intercepted Japan’s harpoon fleet far north of Antarctic waters on Sunday, they said, with the help of a military-style drone.
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society spokesman Paul Watson said the unmanned long-range drone, launched from the anti-whaling ship the Steve Irwin, had located the Japanese fleet and relayed the coordinates back to the activists.
I know I should be shocked at what appears to be the ease of obtaining a long-range drone for non-military use, but really I’m just fascinated that the activists named their boat the Steve Irwin.
dear clusterflock
In what contexts, if any, are sanctity or the idea or possibility of sanctity valuable?
Damar, Mon Amour (out of context)
In context: Starlingo ii.
Damar torn from the flock.
What is Damar? Who is Damar? What is Damar?
some people told me not to walk into nature at all
According to BHMAC (the Mine Action Committee for Bosnia and Herzegovina), just over 3.5% of the land area of the country is still contaminated by landmines. Many of the deminers in the field believe roughly 10% of the country can still be deemed a landmine area. They also feel that nowhere in the countryside is safe, as they may clear one area but a torrential downpour may unearth landmines upstream or upriver; consequently, these unearthed landmines find their way into vicinities that were deemed safe weeks, months or even years ago.
(via BLDGBLOG)
What does it feel like to be alive?
Mich Kemeter on the Taft Point in Yosemite, CA is walking unprotected a 30m /99 feet long highline both ways.
(via ★slyoyster)
A History of the Sky
A time-lapse study of the sky for a year. By Ken Murphy.
A camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds for a year.
[A History of the Sky] is a mosaic of 360 time-lapse movies, each showing [a] single day. They are arranged chronologically, and are synchronized by time-of-day, beginning before sunrise.
(Thanks to Ju Ju Pongo.)
Snakes’ Feat May Inspire Heart Drugs
Pythons are known for their enormous appetites. In a single meal they can devour animals at least as big as they are — deer, alligators, pigs, household pets.
I’m meeting Sarah in Chicago for dinner Wednesday evening.
At the height of the Battle of Alcaniz on May 23, 1809, as he was about to give the order for a desperate charge by French troops into the center of the Spanish line, Col. P.F.M.A. Dejean happened to glance down.
The air around him was thick with gunpowder and blood, but on a flower beside a stream, he saw something unusual. A beetle. Species unknown. He immediately dismounted, collected it, and pinned the specimen to the cork he had glued inside his helmet.
The first lines of The Species Seekers by Richard Conniff, which came out yesterday.
from my voicemail
Uh, yes, my name is ————. My telephone number is ————. The purpose of my call is I’m listening to public radio, and, uh, they’re talking about, uh, viral, uh, strains of, uh, birds. Uhhh, I was parked at Walmart, and a woman was feeding birds, and I said, “Ma’am, don’t do that,” I says, “Ya know, they they they know how to live on their own.” And, uh, the guy from Walmart came out, the manager of the store, and says, “Oh, you’re gonna have to leave here because, uh, the, uh, asphalt’s too weak for an RV.” And he was, it was pouring rain out; he was really acting like an idiot. I did call for the Centers for Disease Control, and they don’t seem to care what one way or another that people feed birds. And I just can’t imagine why, since birds spread diseases more than anything else, uh, why, uh, these people just aren’t taking it seriously. But. I’m sixty-six years old; I’ll be dead in a few years. So what difference does it make to me, ya know? It just it irritates me how ignorant we are, ya know? Umm, just don’t feed the birds, ya know? It’s crazy. They can fend, they know how to forage for themselves. And I love birds. I learned how to fly. I’ve been a pilot all my life. And, uh, airlines and corporate. And, uh, but, uh, you just don’t feed birds. That’s that’s craziness. Ya know, and I, but, uh, if more people, if they, uh, really know about it, then, uh, maybe they might do something about it. But, uh, there’s the other people that’s just gonna say, “Oh, hooey, I’ll feed birds whenever I feel like. It’s my right to do whatever I want to do, so.” Well. I guess that’s the case, ya know? Anyways. Take care. Bye.
Also: The related episode of WHYY’s Fresh Air.
You’re built like a car (You got a hubcap diamond-star halo)
Europeans have all the fun: lower drinking ages, funner beaches, easier lifestyles and . . . dinosaur skeletons having sex in their museums. This exhibit, which clearly shows two T-Rexes “mating”, is located in the Jurassic Museum of Asturias in Spain.
Via @leatherarchives.
Elmore Leonard
has a sharp ear for dialogue and no mistake, but one of my favorite Leonard characters never utters a word.
The alligator, a ten-foot female weighing about five hundred pounds, opened her eyes and, after several minutes, moved her head from side to side, drowsy, disoriented, not knowing where she was, not catching the scent of anything familiar other than grass and dry soil. No water close by. She raised her head and hissed in the night, in the sound of insects. The wind rose and with it came a scent she recognized as something she liked that she had smelled before sometime in her life and had eaten. After several more minutes she began to move in a sluggish sort of way as though half asleep, not entirely upright on her legs, brushing the grass with her tail. The scent she liked became stronger as she moved and kept moving until her snout touched something she had never smelled before. She sniffed and air came through it into her nostrils, bringing a strong scent of the thing she liked. Now she pushed and whatever it was in front of her bent against her weight until it gave way and the alligator walked through it and felt the ground cold now, smooth and hard. The scent she liked was here, though not enough in one place that it would become the thing itself she could fasten her jaws on and tear or take into her mouth whole. She settled on the cool ground, feeling it become warm beneath her as she went to sleep.
Elmore Leonard. Maximum Bob. 1991.
Something I’m Working On…
I’ll say no more for the moment.
Little is known about the details . . .
(yeah, right), but for the past week I have been enraptured with your Octopoteuthis deletron.
These squid just don’t care about the sex of other squid they bump into.
Little is known about the details but it seems that the male ejaculates a packet of sperm at the mating partner, and the packet turns inside out, essentially shooting the sperm contained in a membrane into the flesh of the partner, where they stay embedded until the female (if the shooter has been lucky) is ready to fertilize its eggs. If males are the recipient of these rocket sperm, they are just stuck with them.
I was up late one night last week looking for video. I was over at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute site. Because who wouldn’t want to see “a tentacled invertebrate that shoots sperm into its mate’s flesh”? Sperm in a packet that turns inside out! That’s like something out of a Cronenberg film.
(Thanks to Ju Ju Pongo for this and for indirectly keeping me up all night.)
Flocking Robots
From an article in Wired, a group in Switzerland has developed small flying robots that are able to communicate with one another, and depending on the constraints, adopt various flocking patterns. Watch out for “incoherent flocking”. You know who you are.
headline of the day, II
Brooklyn’s Famed Vagina Tree Felled by Irene
headline of the day
Watch a Weather Man Get Covered in What’s Probably Raw Sewage
Irene
Our New York and East Coast friends, keep us posted.
tweet of the day
