Yellow Blog, Up High in Banana Tree

Last Friday at the volcano.

2005-07-21T14:58:00.000-07:00

I felt this odd compulsion to go to Mt. St. Helens, so I did.

Everyone else (Eemie, Rob, M, Beanie, and me) came along, too, despite the arduous three-hour drive there and three-hour drive back. We did it in one day! Beanie did great in the car, only asking, "Are we there yet?" when we'd arrived back in Seattle city limits.

I haven't been to Mt. St. Helens since 1989. (Hello, high-school-sweetheart! You know who you are --> *blows kiss*) The changes in the blast zone have been dramatic. Instead of a wasteland of trees knocked over like toothpicks and big chunks of pumice everywhere, the whole area around the volcano was like a wildflower garden: daisies, lupines, paintbrush, and dozens of other flowers I couldn't identify, up to my waist. Trees were coming back, most especially red alders (which is great, because they're nitrogen-fixers; they will enrich the soil for other plants) and noble firs.

I was a little disappointed that I couldn't easily find a chunk of feather-light pumice. It's fun to find a rock that can float! But no dice. I guess that stuff erodes away fast.

The volcano was actually steaming and extruding lava. Wow. It was awesome, and not just in that "Dude! Awesome!" kind of way. Really awe-inspiring.

But on to the fauna: I saw golden-mantled ground squirrels (which always take me back to my childhood visits to Lake Tahoe and Frenchman Lake). I also saw a single mule deer getting chased by bone-head park visitors (argh!). Mule deer look so attractive in their reddish summer coats, especially in a field of bright flowers.

I found some birds I was hoping to see: big, croaking ravens, a little male kestrel, and a savannah sparrow. No mountain bluebirds! Maybe next time.... On the drive down (around Centralia) I saw a circling flock of turkey vultures and a single soaring immature Swainson's hawk. Swainson's hawks are my old buddies from Montana; you don't see them around Puget Sound.

The real stars of the Mt. St. Helens trip were the bugs, though. There were so many ants, taking apart what stumps were left. Ants survived the 1980 blast by hiding underground. They've been working hard ever since, dismantling and dismantling.

I found a little blue beetle who knocked my socks off. I identified it later as a blue milkweed beetle (Chrysochus cobaltinus) with the help of the fine book "Bugs of Washington and Oregon" by John Acorn. As Mr. Acorn notes,

This insect is one of those insects that is so darn pretty you really can't walk past it without a second glance. It looks like a great big, carefully polished, shining, bright blue ladybug. Its body is round and plump, and its legs end in what might well be described as paws. In other words, it's a cute beetle and a gorgeous one as well.

We also found a long-faced carabid (Scaphinotus angusticollis), a handsome, giant beetle who favors eating snails and slugs.

And there were many little blue butterflies, painted ladies, swallowtails, and fritillaries. And ladybugs. And neon-blue damselflies. And huge dragonflies. And the biggest damn horsefly I've ever seen. It was an inch long; I'm not kidding.

Anyway, what a great day! I would have liked to do more hiking, but there's only so much of that you can do with a three-year-old in tow (although Bean can go a long way before tiring! He's a trooper.) M and I are planning another trip into the Cascades soon, sans Bean.

Birding with plain brown hair.

2005-06-30T19:06:00.000-07:00

I went birding for several hours at Spencer Island, just north of Everett. I had a great time, although I was silly and brought no water. My extreme thirst made the kung-fu part of my trek more unpleasant. I had to do some crazy stomping and kicking at blackberry vines on an overgrown trail while holding my arms in the air and turning sideways to avoid nettles and spider webs -- it was very Matrix-looking, I'm sure, but hot and tiring. After I pushed through all those vines and thorns and stinging nettles, I encountered a big sign that read, "BRIDGE OUT", so I had to turn around. I couldn't complete the loop around the island! Grrrrr. But really, I had fun! I just wished for a machete.

The nice thing about nettles (besides that they're good to eat in the early spring) is that they attract butterflies. There were many, many Painted Lady butterflies (whose caterpillars like to eat nettles), and several Red Admirals (who used to be called "Red Admirables", but people have lazy tongues).

I attracted mosquitoes as I crashed around, who, in turn, attracted huge blue dragonflies. I had several dragonfly escorts for the entire walk. Once in a while, one would swoop in and relieve me of a mosquito. Thank you, handsome dragonflies.

Last time I was at Spencer Island, an osprey was breaking off branches and putting them atop an electrical tower. It was the beginning of a new nest. Now that nest is complete, and an adult was standing in it (perhaps shading eggs or nestlings? Couldn't tell). Another adult flew directly over me while carrying a large wriggling fish. This looked pretty odd, since ospreys carry their fish facing into the wind (the most aerodynamic way to carry them, I guess). So the huge bird appeared to have a live fish swimming directly under her belly, like a remora under a shark. That, or the osprey was taking her pet fish for a fly in the sky. Strange, but cool-looking.

A quarter-mile away from the first nest, I saw another occupied osprey nest, apparently several years old, since it was much taller than the new one (ospreys add to their nests year after year). The fishing must be good at the mouth of the Snohomish River to support so many ospreys.

Do you know where ospreys go in the winter? Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you can guess SOUTH -- but do you know how far south? Argent-frickin'-tina! That's some long migration, huh? I love ospreys.

I saw an unusual bird today. Well, unusual for THIS area, common elsewhere: I surprised a single mourning dove in the path. You don't often see them this far north. They're a nice, soft brown, they have lovely long tails, and they have a beautiful call (which my brother, Luke, can do an awesome imitation of).

I had to sit very still for a long time to catch a glimpse of an elusive Swainson's thrush (though their etherial spirally song could be heard everywhere). Or maybe it was a gray-cheeked thrush. Hard to ID those thrush dudes, especially in think underbrush (which is the only place you're gonna see them).

I found a deer carcass that I suspect had been chewed on by a coyote. Coyote poop was right nearby. Is that evidence too circumstancial?

I saw lots of other cool stuff today, but my blogging is cut short at this moment by parental obligations.

But before I go -- I did something today for the first time: I dyed my hair in order to cover up all the gray I've been getting. I'm pleased with the results, I guess. My hair is sure a uniform brown, though. Should I get it highlighted or something, now? Huh.

More later.

Minus tide.

2005-05-29T23:31:00.000-07:00

I love to go tide-pooling. Last week, I had the chance to go to the beach at Golden Gardens Park twice. The tide was super-low both times, so I found some neat creatures I can't normally see. I had Beanie with me a lot of the time (though he also had fun sitting in the pounding surf and piling mountains of wet sand on his lap). Beanie is so gentle with sea creatures. He pets them very softly and lets them go.

In a big patch of surf grass, I met several crabs I've never seen before. I later found out that they're called kelp crabs. Some of them were, appropriately enough, eating kelp when I found them. These guys are cute in an spidery kind of way. (This photo of a kelp crab has a strange energy, a kind of longing in it that makes me wish I could write tasteful haikus. Can you see what I mean? That crab has a secret. She's looking into the distance wistfully, deep in thought.) The kelp crabs I found were an inch to three inches across, but I guess they can get much bigger. I like that their carapaces are pointed. They remind me of classic cars -- you know, like 50's T-birds with fins? I didn't say the association made sense....

I also saw several big ochre starfish, which, contrary to their name, can come in many colors: yellow, purple, brown, orange, and pink. They're slimy and soft on the colored surface, but they're also covered with tiny hard, white bumps. I enjoy petting them. If they're on sand (not rock -- you can hurt them if you peel them off rock!), I like to pick them up and watch their tiny suction-ended feet wiggle. I always try to put them back in the exact same place I found them.

There was a small sunflower starfish on a barnacle-encrusted rock. I touched its back a little (which felt soft, almost velvety), then let it be. What attractive starburst shapes they present!

I found a moon jellyfish -- a live one in the water! (Usually I find them washed up and dead.) I pointed it out to Beanie, who was cavorting in the waves with me. We both did a spontaneous jellyfish dance by pretending to be jet-propelled as we jumped over incoming waves. Beanie giggled and giggled!

Then we found a beautifully irridescent polychaete worm. Wow, it was pretty! This photo doesn't do it justice, but you can get a general idea of what it looks like. It's related to the earthworm, but lives in the sea and swims like an undulating snake.

And the seaweed is a fantastic lush garden of color, this time of year. Green, yellow, brown, turquoise, black, purple, and more green. I don't know all of the plants' names yet, but I saw my favorite seaweed: the attractively purple Turkish Towel. This nubby beauty is a useful crop to humans. Lookit:

The cells of Chondracanthus exasperatus [Turkish Towel] contain a seaweed gum called carrageenan. Carrageenan is an extremely useful emulsifier that is used in numerous food and industrial products. It is commonly used as a thickener in many tasty milk products, such as chocolate milk, cottage cheese, and ice cream, because it gels in the presence of calcium ions. Carrageenan is also found in pasta, pet food, pancake syrup, and toothpaste. Turkish towel blades are also used by humans as wash cloths to remove dead skin.

Yay for red algae! And while I'm busy cheering:

I love the ocean! It is alive! It seethes and crawls and swims and jumps and squirts and makes life from light! I love the taste of it, and the smell, and how my hair gets crisp with salt!

This is from Rachel Carson's 1955 book, "The Edge of the Sea":

Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.... What truth is expressed in the legions of the barnacles, whitening the rocks with their habitations, each small creature within finding the necessities of its existence in the sweep of the surf? ...This meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself.

Rachel Carson understood the ocean -- it has a message. It's like a love letter. You just have to go get it, see? I'm going back as soon as I can, when the tide is low. I don't care that my back is still sunburned from last time, either.

"It's snow, but it's not cold!"

2005-05-11T15:35:00.000-07:00

Beanie said that at Bothell Landing today.

The air was full of falling Black Cottonwood seeds. They floated down like snow, danced around in circles on the pavement, and piled into snowdrifts. When we grabbed big handfuls of the fluffy seeds, they even had a snow-like packability -- naturally, we had to throw some seed-balls at each other! Beanie ran through the drifts, then stopped to turn around and watch the seeds fly up and swirl around in little tornadoes. It was like being in a fairy tale.

The Sammamish river was also coated in cottony fluff. Mallards cleaned up the floating seeds, their heads swinging side to side like their bills were dustbusters. Easy pickin's for the ducks.

We also found another animal benefiting from the (literal) windfall: little black ants. They were walking in lines everywhere, each carrying a single cottonwood seed. They must have removed the fluffy part before carrying seeds back the their nests (a good thing to do, since a good gust of wind could carry the tiny ants off, otherwise). Beanie and I watched the little black ants for a long time. Beanie noted that the ants were going one direction with seeds, and the other direction without. We used this information to figure out the direction of the ants' house. Neat, huh?

What a beautiful day.

Birding his way through the war.

2005-05-09T00:10:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across this blog and found it incredibly moving in a subtle way.

There is something so bittersweet about seeing pictures of a soldier tenderly holding little lizards (and one big lizard!) while at war in Iraq. I loved this picture of a bedraggled-looking White Wagtail perched on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman. It looks so wet and tired. What a beautiful photo.

I wondered, as I read, what his fellow soldiers thought about this man's obsession with birding in a war zone. The author answers this for me in an early entry (March 16th, 2004):

Birding on base doesn't usually elicit any undo attention from the MPs. I think everyone thinks I'm doing security work when I'm looking into the distance with binoculars. I'm not sure what they think when I'm looking up in a tree.

Birding makes you look like you're extra concerned about security, of course! This man must appear especially alert to potential tree-and-shallow-pond threats.

His last entry from Iraq made me cry (January 7th, 2005):

I have been blessed with the opportunity to be here, doing a mission that I believe in. Because of my job and the places that I ended up I had, perhaps, more opportunity to see and appreciate Iraq's natural world than some. One day I hope to return, with binoculars but without a weapon.

"Without a weapon," he says. Is that ever going to be possible? I hope so, I hope so, I hope so.

Please, let there be peace, soon.

This soldier is back in the States with his family, now. That fills me with relief. I love that he's posting information from other naturalist/soldiers in Iraq (including a "Captain Kate"). Isn't that great? I adore this blog, even if it breaks my heart a little.

Octopus fanciers have a question for you.

2005-05-04T16:40:00.000-07:00

Is this not the geekiest poll ever?

I love the responses, but some people clearly didn't read the instructions. Only extinct marine invertebrates that you'd like to see resurrected! That means no Megalodon, and certainly no Liopleuridon, guys.

Opabinia or Hallucigenia, on the other hand, would be MY choices. I can't pick one; they're both fantastic.

In case you're unfamiliar with Opie and Hallie, this page can give you a quick intro to Cambrian sea critters. Here's two cute movies (a fast Opabina and a slow Opabinia) that kept Beanie occupied this morning while I did dishes. He listened to the Clash and watched the Opabinias groove.

Here's Ray Troll's interpretation of Opie and Hallie. Hallie is usually portrayed pointy-spines-up, these days. But looking at the picture, you can perhaps understand the confusion. Where is the head? What are the legs? Huh? Hallucinatory!

And here's Romeo A. Esparrago, Jr.'s version of Opie, Hallie, and the very intimidating Anomalocaris (Annie?). Most of the other Cambrian beasties were relatively small, but Annie grew to six feet long. Eep!

In closing, I think "Opabinia" would be a COOL baby girl's name! I'm totally alone in this, right?

The Clone Wars.

2005-05-03T09:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I took Beanie to Bothell Landing Park and watched the mini-Serengeti predator-prey drama going on in the rose bushes by the playground.

Lots of plant-eating bugs like to eat roses. There were a few hard-to-catch blue leafhoppers on these particular bushes, but aphids were by far the most common herbivores present.

I've always found aphids sort of gross -- I favor their other name, "plant lice". They hurt or kill many plants, little plant-sucking vampires that they are. All the same, they're fascinating little beasties. A fellow named Shawn Olson takes great photos of them; behold the aphid ballet! Olsen captures a grace and beauty that I never thought aphids had.

There's several neat things about aphids. First, there's their life cycle. After hatching from eggs in the spring, female aphids start prolifically giving live birth to baby clones. Not just baby clones, mind you, but baby clones who are already pregnant with more clones. You can see how quickly aphid populations can take off:

The French naturalist Reaumur during the late eighteenth century calculated that if all the descendants of a single aphid survived during the summer and were arranged into a French military formation, four abreast, their line would extend for 27,950 miles, which exceeds the circumference of the earth at the equator!

One week, you see a couple of innocuous little bugs here and there on your plants; come back in a week, and the stems are covered with them.

Another cool thing about aphids is their symbiotic relationship with ants. Many species of ants have a special arrangement with aphids: the ants protect the aphids and help distribute them on plants, and in return, the aphids secrete sweet, sticky poop for the ants to eat. The ants tickle the aphids in order to produce drops of this secretion, called "honeydew". (Though it is, in fact, aphid poop. It's very hard to get this nasty, sticky stuff off your car, as I discovered last summer when I parked under an aphid-infested tree). Their relationship with ants is why some people call aphids "ant cows".

A third cool thing about aphids is that lots of insects like to eat them, so you can watch all sorts of little dramas play out in the rose bushes. Beanie and I found a few aphids (more coming soon!) and their protective ants, but we also found two gorgeous varieties of ladybug, including one spotless dark red variety that looked for all the world like a tiny droplet of fresh blood against the bright green leaf. When I saw these blood-colored ladybugs, I wished that I could take photos like Forrest Cook or Shawn Olsen. Lots of ladybugs were preparing for the upcoming aphid explosion by having sex. I had to explain to Beanie why so many ladybugs were playing piggyback! ("That's how they make more ladybugs," was all I disclosed, for now.)

There were lots of other predators hanging out, too. We found jumping spiders and crab spiders, who both do not make webs, but instead actively hunt (or ambush) their prey. There were maggoty-looking wasp larvae present. I found a lacewing, too. (Cool close-up of lacewing here.)

But the most common predators were ladybugs. Beanie caught one in the act of eating an aphid. I've heard they can eat up to fifty aphids per day. That's not fast enough to keep up with aphid parthenogenesis, but it's pretty respectable. Hooray for ladybugs! I expect that the next time I look at those rosebushes, they'll be covered with little yellow ladybug eggs.

I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.

2005-05-01T18:12:00.000-07:00

It's the only way to be sure.

But seriously, I just learned about the USA's bizarre late-fifties plan to nuke the moon:

It was clear the main aim of the proposed detonation was a PR exercise and a show of one-upmanship. The Air Force wanted a mushroom cloud so large it would be visible on earth. The US was lagging behind in the space race.

Apparently, Carl Sagan was consulted regarding nuking our lovely moon. Sagan thought the bomb might be an effective way to detect potential lunar life (and decimate it: *BOOM* Go to hell, moon critters!)

Of course, the idea of nuking the moon is appalling, abhorrent -- but I can't help this, okay? The evil ten-year-old in me thinks that it'd be totally awesome to see a big-ass mushroom cloud on the moon....sorry.

Did you know that the US was also itchin' to nuke Alaska?

I'm not kidding! The operation was code-named "Project Chariot". The goal was to detonate a nuclear device 100 times stronger than the one used in Hiroshima to excavate a deep water port on the west coast of Alaska.

The project was never carried out, but preliminary studies were done, including the importation of irradiated soil from a Nevada nuclear test site (to measure radiation's effect on the local environment -- you know, to study water runoff patterns, to measure how brightly the flora and fauna were glowing, etc.). The soil sat at the Chariot site for over 30 years (!) until it was finally crated up and shipped back to Nevada to be "disposed of".

About 30 miles north of the site of this proposed idiocy was an inconveniently located Inupiat Eskimo village called Point Hope. The residents were not informed of the government's nefarious plan for several years, and when they were let in on the joke, they were given the following unsubstantiated (read: made-up) information to calm them down:

....the fish in and around the Pacific Proving Grounds were not made radioactive by nuclear weapons tests and [there would not be]... any danger to anyone if the fish were utilized; that the effects of nuclear weapons testing never injured any people, anywhere; that once the severely exposed Japanese people recovered from radiation sickness...there were no side effects; that the residents of Point Hope would not feel any seismic shock at all from Project Chariot....

The Atomic Energy Commision was full of shameless liars. I'm awfully glad they didn't play their silly games to completion and nuke the moon or Alaska. (Although, honestly, don't you think the moon explosion would've been spectacular?)

What was their next target going to be? Yellowstone park?

Michael Jackson and rapture.

2005-04-29T22:27:00.000-07:00

Beanie likes to hear Michael Jackson's album, Thriller. He loves the whole album, but the title song is his favorite -- he never tires of hearing it. I think he's memorizing the words. Today, he quoted Vincent Price's spoken word part to one of the other mommies at preschool, saying that a shark's teeth were as "sharp as the hounds of Hell". Nice, huh?

Anyway, that's not what I was going to write about. One of the other songs from Jacko's Thriller album, "Human Nature", sends me into a delightful reverie every time I hear it. I feel a bit of the original euphoria I experienced when I first heard the song:

I sat on a brick step outside our house in Linfen, Shanxi Province, China. It was late spring, I think, and I was twelve years old. The day was hot, but not uncomfortably so. I'd just finished feeding my beloved pigeons and offering them their daily bath in an enamelled basin. Some pigeons sat in the sun around me. They fanned out their wings and tails on the ground, basking after their baths, drying off, enjoying the heat.

I looked up. I was struck by the incredible deep blueness of the sky. "Human Nature" started to play, loudly, from our neighbor's house. Colored tiles on the towering temple next door glowed with color against that impossibly blue sky. Swifts nesting on the temple wheeled around in circles, seemingly to the music, to Jackson's piercingly sweet high notes, and I was overcome by joy. It felt like more than I could hold. I was flying with those birds. I almost cried.

The moment passed, of course; such moments always do. But I love that every time I hear that song, I'm still transported. I'm twelve again, and I can feel the music lifting me, see the birds looping around the temple, and enjoy the echo of that perfect happiness.

Elvis has left the building. No, wait, there he is!

2005-04-29T08:28:00.000-07:00

My darling husband, M, sent me this link, and it made my day.

I love how folks refer to the bird as a "feathered Elvis". I hope birders (especially life-listers) don't love this bird to death now that it's been rediscovered.

Now, all they've gotta do is find the Imperial Woodpecker and the Thylacine.

I'm not talking 'bout the linens....

2005-04-27T17:32:00.000-07:00

And I don't wanna change your life,
But there's a warm wind blowin' the stars around,
And I'd really like to see you tonight.

Ugh, that's the song in my head right now, courtesy of RiteAid Drugstore. I'm pretty sure the first line is actually "I'm not talking 'bout movin' in", but I like my version better.

What's on my mind today? Dinosaurs. And guts.

I'll admit (along with my pal, D'nah) that I enjoyed the movie "Jurassic Park". In fact, the dinosaur scenes reduced me to enraptured crying joy: "Whoa, dinosaurs, and they look real! Beautiful!" I experienced dorky slack-jawed wonder when the first brachiosaurus strolled across the screen.

Regrettably, there were humans running all over the place like bugs -- screaming, being cute, saying annoying things, getting sneezed on, being eaten, and so on. I remember wishing that I could simply watch a documentary about dinosaurs minus the twee children and luddite message.

Now it exists! The BBC series (also shown on the Discovery Channel) "Walking With Dinosaurs" is marvelous and has no humans. I tried to watch this series with Beanie, but nature being as red-in-tooth-and-claw as it is, we could only watch a little of it. The website is interesting and Beanie-friendly; if you have kids, you should show it to them:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dinosaurs/

I highly recommend browsing around in the "Fact Files" section; there are neat little movies (including clips from the series), made-up dinosaur sounds, and lots of cool information. Beanie's favorite dinosaur (actually a flying reptile) is Tapejara, with its big, bony crest.

While you're at the BBC website, you can take a gander at another fun place where Beanie and I spend a lot of time:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/

Try the interactive body games; they're fun and incredibly educational, even for grown-ups. Beanie likes to play them over and over (and over!) The "Organs" game is the easiest. Now Beanie and I know where a human spleen goes. I had no idea it was so large!

Speaking of body parts, check out the Colossal Colon! Our family went to see it last summer in downtown Seattle, and now my husband eats fiber cereal every day. I was the only one of us with the gumption to climb all the way through it. I think Beanie went halfway, but it was kind of dark in there.

"The Abduction of Psyche" by William Adolphe Bouguereau.

2005-04-26T16:02:00.000-07:00

Isn't this a fantastic painting? (You can click it to make it bigger.) Abduction abschmuction! Psyche is obviously having the time of her life. Look at her!

I love her delicate pink fingers, her pointed toes, her flowing hair, her head tipped back against Eros with her eyes closed, and the billowing, strategically-placed gauzy fabric everywhere.

Psyche glows with love. And Eros looks determined rather than lascivious. He has a kind, boyish face. He will take good care of her; you can just tell.

Is this stuff too heady for you? Then see Yuri at the Anti-Sexual Stronghold immediately:

http://www.ktk.ru/~cm/go.htm

Yuri will put you right. If you go to the "Information" section, you'll find an essay entitled "Prophylaxis and the Cure of Love". In case you're wondering, Yuri is dead serious. Love is disease. Check out this excerpt (imagining it in a thick Russian accent makes it read easier):

Weigh pros and contras [of falling in love] calmly and objectively. What can love give you? Even if everything goes successfully, the brief euphoria, which is in no way better than alcohol intoxication, will eventually fade out leaving behind controversy and conflicts. If even both you and your spouse behave honorably (and that you can never be sure of!), parting will be a very unpleasant experience nevertheless. To love means to lose. Including the loss of your freedom. Love is a voluntary, and therefore the worst, form of slavery; remember your dignity: do you really want to be a slave? Love will steal your time, nerves, energy, money; you may lose friends, job - and in exchange end up with some memories, and not always pleasant ones. Remember how many evil and crime was done because of love throughout the history; remember all the people whose insanity brought harm to themselves and to others. And this dangerous madness still appeals to you?

*sigh* What a killjoy. Sorry, Psyche.

"Almost nothing in nature is natural anymore."

2005-04-24T00:39:00.000-07:00

The above quote is from a fellow named Oyster. It's wonderful to encounter a person who has an obsession nearly identical to mine. Alas, the character is fictional, but it's fun to run into a kindred soul, even if he's a character from Chuck Palahniuk's novel, "Lullaby".

Oyster and I are thinking about invasive plants and animals all the time. My husband and wife can attest to this. I'm always grumbling about this plant and that plant....

For instance, while most people are thinking, "What pretty greenery!" I'm thinking, "Dammit, why the hell would anyone plant English Ivy as a groundcover! It's the most evil, choking bastard of a weed on the planet!" It has the audiacity to grow right outside this very apartment building, taunting me.

You see, English Ivy (Hedera helix, the lovely ivy famous for clamouring up expensive university buildings) is from central Asia, where the climate is dry and harsh. When you import this fierce, tenacious plant to the moist, temperate Pacific Northwest, it goes nuts. It's a green, fecund, monoculture nightmare. Ivy outcompetes everything on the ground, chokes shrubs, then climbs trees and chokes them, as well. Look at this article from last summer:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/178085_ivy16.html A quote:

"Seattle's forests would become an ivy desert" in 20 years, if nothing was done about it, said Pieter Bohen, stewardship director with the Cascade Land Conservancy.

Ivy leaves are poisonous (several children are ivy-poisoned every year!) and useless as a forage for many native animals. The berries are eaten by some birds, who then distribute the seeds far and wide in their poop so ivy can conquer all.

So, everybody, don't plant ivy outside, okay? For me, please, don't do it!

Then there's blackberries, especially the wicked Himalayan Blackberry (Rubus procerus). When I first moved to this area and was ignorant of their menace, I thought, "How nice, free berries everywhere to eat! And they're so tasty! Paradise." Little did I know that, while their fruit is undeniably yummy, blackberries take over acres and acres of native forest and grassland and turn it into a thorny monoculture wasteland hell.

Oh, I could go on and on. There's also Scotch Broom (Cytisus scoparius), a pretty yellow nightmare. And its close relative Gorse (Ulex europaeus), a not-so-pretty dingy white nightmare with vicious spines. Oh, and while I'm complaining....don't plant English Holly (Ilex aquifolium), either. These plants were all brought to the New World as ornamentals, which makes me wanna jump up and down, screaming.

I love to go to parks in and around Seattle; they're beautiful. But I always notice the extent to which they have been used, and used hard. Every park has been logged at least once. Many parks are forested with old, old Red Alder (Alnus rubra), which is native, but the trees are so old they're about to fall down, and there is no evergreen understory to replace them (because of the frickin' ivy, in part!)

I have a vision that makes me happy to think about: my own little native plant utopia! When we get a house with a yard, I'll have only native plants growing, especially my favorites. Sword fern. Pacific madrone. Douglas fir. Western flowering dogwood. Red-flowering currant. Salal. A little native plant oasis that native birds could visit.

Oh, yeah, I also go ballistically insane about introduced birds. I'll just stop here and leave you with another quote from Oyster, who I love so very, very much. Oyster understands me:

What we think of as nature, Oyster says, everything's just more of us killing the world. Every dandelion's a ticking time bomb. Biological pollution. Pretty yellow devastation.

The way you can go to Paris or Beijing, Oyster says, and everywhere there's a McDonald's hamburger, this is the ecological equivalent of franchised life forms. Every place is the same place. Kudzu. Zebra mussels. Water hyacinths. Starlings. Burger Kings.

The local natives, anything unique gets squeezed out.

"The only biodiversity we're going to have left," he says, "is Coke versus Pepsi."

Right back atcha!

2005-04-22T17:15:00.000-07:00

Last night, we had a couple of folks over for dinner who are just great! So much fun! I would write with all the details, but hey, one of our visitors blogged it already (and in great detail!) so I'll just point y'all to her:

http://purplegoddessinfrogpyjamas.net/archives/004562.html#comments

Chasmyn and her hubbie brought incredibly yummy ice cream. Thanks, both of you, for coming over. It's nice to see that people from inside the little boxes can materialize in the real world.

A windy day at Richmond Beach Park.

2005-04-17T20:32:00.000-07:00

Beanie at the beach. Aren't those big, puffy clouds pretty?

You can click on these photos to make them bigger, if you like.

Beach Beanie again.

Beanie liked finding little pieces of quartz and setting them aside. I managed to convince him to leave the cigarette butts alone.

Jai Guru Deva Om.

2005-04-17T19:16:00.000-07:00

Today, I listened to the Beatles song "Across the Universe" and idly sang along: "Nothing's gonna change my world, nothing's gonna change my world."

"Actually, a meteorite could change the world," Beanie added.

How true!

Sniff a millipede, lick a slug.

2005-04-13T22:09:00.000-07:00

Here's the answer to the question you're all dying to know: what are Kate's favorite northwest rain forest invertebrates?

1) The winner is the clown millipede, almond-scented millipede, or (here's a very lame but descriptive moniker) yellow-spotted millipede (yawn). This critter illustrates why Latin names are a good thing. Its scientific name is Harpaphe haydeniana.

Whatever you choose to call it, if you pick up this gorgeous little creature, it produces a soft, sweet almond smell. The lovely odor is actually from a powerful poison, cyanide. The amount produced won't harm you, but might give a tiny predator like a shrew a real headache. The millipede's colors, shiny black with yellow dots on the sides, are standard warning coloration (see my previous post about pitohui birds or poison-arrow frogs for other examples of this). "I taste nasty," the black and yellow indicates.

This millipede's most poetic name is due to those striking black and yellow markings, coupled with the creature's slow, deliberate motion: the night train. Can you see how it looks like a train at night (not when it's rolled up, but when it crawls)? It just needs a distant-whistle sound:
http://www.naturepark.com/ysmillip.htm

I only find them in relatively old-growth forests. Aren't they pretty?

2) Yeah, everybody loves banana slugs. Me, too.

Did you know that if you lick them, your tongue goes numb? I actually tried this, because I'm that kind of dork. Well, I didn't really lick the slug directly -- I touched a slug and then licked my fingers. Sure enough, my tongue was numb like I'd gotten dental work done. Again, not a strong enough poison to make me keel over, but if I were a bird or snake trying to eat that slug, I'd probably be dissuaded.

Here's a nice picture of the banana slug, complete with dark brown spots like a banana that's just starting to get ripe:

http://www.coestatepark.com/banana_slug.htm

This is a creature that has two scientific names, for now, as slugologists are currently debating (this moment!) whether there are one or two species. Lump or split? Some scientists think that there is only one banana slug, Ariolimax columbianus; others claim the presence of a second species, A. dolichyphallus. I favor the second species name, which translates to "huge penis".

These critters have big penises, indeed -- as long as their bodies, which means seven to ten inches. Many humans would be pleased to possess such a member! And since the banana slug is hermaphroditic, all slugs are phallused. The downside to hermaphroditic sex between banana slugs is that if the penises are mismatched in size (and supposedly, there is careful pre-coital comparison and measurement), disengagement is difficult, and one slug must bite off the other one's john thomas. Damn! You better believe I'd carefully employ a ruler, if I were a slug!

If sex with another slug doesn't work out (and you still have your willy), you also have the option of...ummm...fertilizing your own eggs. I guess, as Woody Allen famously put it, it's sex with someone you love....

As a final note, banana slugs do not eat your garden plants, so quit slandering them. The real nasty garden-eating culprits around here are the introduced European Black Slugs (Arion ater), or "black slugs of doom", as I dubbed them when I first encountered their inky blackness. You can see one at the bottom of this informative page:

http://www.bcbiodiversity.homestead.com/slugsandsnailsofBC.html

They're kind of pretty, in an evil way. There's also a red variety. See how they have bumpy, striated bodies? Banana slugs, on the other hand, are smooth all over.

3) The pseudoscorpion, of course! But I already did a post on these guys. Darn it, now I'm experiencing doubt -- should the pseudoscorpion be number one? Well, three is still a respectable placement, and they do have their own entire post already. So, yeah, number three.
Suck it up, arachnids.

Thieving starling steals $4000.

2005-04-11T15:37:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I didn't believe it, either. But look:

http://www.utahbirds.org/BirdStory.htm

With pictures and everything.

A short birding post to get back into the swing.

2005-04-10T13:52:00.000-07:00

On Friday I went birding by myself for many hours. It was good to be well enough to go walking again. I went to a big marshy park in Everett. I want to call it Spencer Island, but I think that's incorrect. I must have walked about eight miles.

I was happy to see an osprey at close range. At first, his behavior was a little baffling -- it looked like the osprey was trying to land over and over on a dead branch much too small to support his weight. When the branch finally broke, he carried it across the Snohomish river to the top of a high utility pole. He was building a nest there. From the looks of things, he had a lot of work to do.

I also saw some birds I haven't seen for a while: cinnamon teals, two males and two females. They're attractive little ducks; true to their name, the males are the color of cinnamon sticks. Their eyes are bright red, there is nice striping on their backs, and in one of nature's poorest color combinations, they have powder blue patches on their wings (but these usually don't show). Powder blue + cinnamon = yuck. But as long as the wings stay closed, the birds are lovely. Here's a nice picture of a male. You can't see the powder blue. Forget I even mentioned it:

http://www.bird-friends.com/BirdPage.php?name=Cinnamon%20Teal

I saw lots of garter snakes. I love the sound they make as they pour away from you through the brush. It's almost like someone drawing a blade.

I'll write more later. I'm feeling better physically, but I'm not feeling so hot emotionally yet. I'm sad. Eventually it'll pass, right?

Righto!

I've been gone for a while.

2005-04-03T16:12:00.000-07:00

But I've been really down and sick. I'll blog more when I feel better.

Unexpected sunny day, big dipterid.

2005-03-30T17:39:00.000-08:00

Today, after a week and a half of rain and cold, we had a gorgeous day.

Beanie and I went to a nearby park and explored. We spent a lot of time looking at bugs, climbing trees, and dissecting different kind of flowers.

I found a giant fly resembling this handsome fellow:

http://www.geocities.com/brisbane_flies/images/wpe134.jpg

Casually pointing it out to Beanie, I said, "Hey, look at that bug!"

"It's a robber fly," he corrected me, repeating it for emphasis. "Robber fly."

'Oh, yeah,' I thought, 'we saw one of those last time we were at this park, two weeks ago, and I guess I did remark off-handedly that it was a robber fly, but....'

Again, I was in awe of how well Beanie recalls things, and I was reminded to watch my mouth. Lord knows what idle things I've said that he's committed to memory!

This book is not just about sex, honest.

2005-03-25T13:51:00.000-08:00

I just finished "The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger last night (yes, it made me cry), and I feel compelled to share another quote from a sex scene. I guess all the background you need to know is that a fellow named Henry (narrating) has just started doing something nice to a woman named Clare:

"In the next fifteen minutes I take Clare several steps down the evolutionary ladder until she's pretty much a limbic core with a few cerebral cortex perepherals."

Again, I ask you, hot or not?

To be honest, this one had me yucking it up more than the Amusement Park sentence did, maybe because I pictured Henry licking a rapidly-devolving creature that eventually resembles a sea squirt. Nice, huh? This sentence is part of an otherwise quite romantic and sexy scene.

3-31-05, Edited to add:

Okay, now I feel like I've done this book a major disservice by throwing its two oddest sex scene lines at you. No, really -- it's good. This review by Michael Farrelly sums up what I liked about the novel without giving any serious spoilers:

http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2003_12_001165.php

"It is rare that lovers are portrayed well. Often the simple tropes of endless romance and infatuation override the reality of love. Love is about stolen covers and sex to end arguments. Love is about the smell of your lover’s hair after she showers. Simple wonderful things that will make you ache inside when you realize you can’t have them because of distance or circumstance. What Henry misses on his jaunts through time is waking up next to his wife, making love on sunday mornings, the way she looks deep in thought, the horror of her cooking. Henry is a fantastic entity, but he is humanized by his love for Clare."

Lost in concentration.

2005-03-23T21:39:00.000-08:00

Thanks, Skip and Joan, for the great chalkboard placemats! We all love to draw on them; Beanie especially likes drawing planets and stars, these days.

An early example of bioterrorism.

2005-03-23T18:01:00.000-08:00

This website might be pretty dull for most people. If you happen to be enthused about dioecious plants (like I am right now), go here:

http://hort.ifas.ufl.edu/gt/dioecious/dioecious.htm

Otherwise, just skip it and just read this excerpt:

"In Arabic lands, the cutting of male trees was practiced when war was being raged between tribes. The opposition would sneak into their enemy's palm grove and destroy the male trees. As a result no fruit would be produced. Since dates were a stable item of the diet, starvation was induced. The reason for removing only the male tree was that only a few were needed for a large palm grove. It did not require as much time or effort to remove the male trees as it would have required to remove the more numerously planted females."

Beanie is a punk rocker.

2005-03-23T15:22:00.000-08:00

He has fairly broad musical tastes, but still mostly likes his tunage fast and hard. "Too slow!" and "Too quiet!" are common complaints when I try to listen to something mellow.

Here's what's on heavy rotation:

The Beatles: "Helter Skelter", "Birthday", "All Together Now"
B-52's: "Devil in my Car", but "Rock Lobster" is still a favorite
Beastie Boys: "Intergalactic" (sung nasally by Beanie in his robot voice)
Devo: "Smart Patrol/Mr. DNA", and many, many other songs
Dr. Octagon: "Half Shark-Alligator, Half Man"
The Clash: "Should I Stay or Should I Go", "Rock the Casbah", "I Fought the Law"
Michael Jackson(!): "Bad", "Smooth Criminal", "Beat It", "Wanna Be Startin' Something"
Paul Simon: "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard"
Pete Seeger's kids: "Turkey in the Straw"
Ramones: "I Wanna be Sedated" and practically anything else by them
The Muppets: "Mr. Bassman", "Mississippi Mud"
They Might Be Giants: "Istanbul", "Particle Man", "Mammal"
Weird Owl 'Ankovic: any of many compilation polkas
Beach Boys: "Barbara Ann"
Sex Pistols: "No Future" (sung nasally by Beanie in his surly British punk voice)
Frank Sinatra(?): "Anything Goes" (although I have to try to explain what's shocking about a glimpse of stocking: "No, it means 'surprised', not 'electrocuted'. Don't worry, Bean.")

Two artists introduced to us by Rob (thanks!) are very popular these days.

The first is Richard Cheese, who does lounge-style covers of pop songs. He is wonderfully funny, and Beanie especially adores three of his songs: "Milkshake" originally by Kelis, "Yellow" by Coldplay, and "Butterfly" by Crazy Town. "Milkshake" makes Beanie run pell-mell up and down the hall, crashing into the walls. It's very cute when he stops to shake his legs to "Butterfly" (lyrics: "you make my legs shake"). Great stuff for rainy day exercise! The unfortunate thing about Cheese's schtick is that he usually slows down fast songs to make them loungey, bringing on many hysterical cries of "Too sloooooooow!" when Eemie wants to hear Outkast's "Hey ya", for instance.

The second most popular band is called Me First and the Gimme Gimmes (a name any preschooler can appreciate). They do punk-style covers of slow pop songs. It's great, because they don't change any of the words, so you get loud, angry-sounding punk, but it's utterly clean. Beanie likes R Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly" a whole lot -- it makes him spin like a dervish and flap his arms.

Have any of you heard R Kelly's version? It's so terribly slow and dirge-like. The lyrics, "Spread my wings and fly away, I believe I can soar, I see me running through that open door" sound like a suicide note when R Kelly sings them, but MFatGG's version sounds like they're all hopped up on sugary candy and ready to take on the world! Other MFatGG covers Beanie likes: "Where Do Broken Hearts Go", originally by Whitney Houston, and "Isn't She Lovely" by Stevie Wonder. Thanks again to Rob for introducing us to these guys.

Too bad that punk covers of schmaltzy pop songs make M's gorge rise. Especially the Whitney Houston song.

This paragraph tickles me.

2005-03-23T10:21:00.000-08:00

From the book "Monster Trucks" by Tom Morr:

"To many Americans, monster trucks remain a Jeff Foxworthy punchline. The fact that almost everyone who drove a monster truck during the sport's golden era, the mid-1980's to mid-1990's, sported a mullet perpetuated the industry's white-trash elan."

First of all, I love that monster trucking can be said to have had a "golden era."

Second, I love the term "white-trash elan" -- I never would have thought to put those words together. Brilliant.

Reproductive reboot.

2005-03-22T16:25:00.000-08:00

I just got back from the ob/gyn appointment, and the news was pretty good. Pat (my practically psychic baby-catching doctor) said that she suspects that I failed to ovulate last month because of the pneumonia.

If that's the case, I was never pregnant (yes!), and my confused body has been trying to get my hormone levels high enough to have a period ever since. "Think of an old car trying to get up a steep hill," said Pat. "Since you didn't ovulate, your hormones are having trouble getting up the hill to make the period happen." Am I an old car, then? Or my uterus is? Hmph.

Pat's theory doesn't explain why coffee was tasting like fish for a while (that's always been a reliable pregnancy indicator, for me), why my breasts were sore, and why I lost a little blood and tissue on the first of March. But I'm trying not to dwell on that.

Just to be sure, blood was taken today in order to test my hormone levels. I should get the results tomorrow. If Pat is correct, and the hormones indicate that my reproductive screen is frozen ("Dammit, I can't move my cursor!"), we will reboot using progesterone pills (Control, Open Apple, Reset), which should get me bleeding after a few days. Presumably, after the period, I'll get back on my normal cycle and ovulate next month.

If Pat is wrong, and I'm pregnant with another non-growing embryo, we'll take it from there. I will probably not want to wait for a natural miscarriage. So, another D&C. Blast.

So, let's pretend we know that Pat's right: my clever body decided that since I was roasting with fever and fighting to breathe, it wasn't such a good time to ovulate. "Let's not and say we did," said Ovary.

So....reboot!

..........................................................................................................

An update (3-23-05):

Pat called and told me I was never pregnant! Yippee!

I feel a bit silly for mourning and fearing a miscarriage that wasn't even happening, but that's okay. I have to forgive myself for being paranoid, since the miscarriage in August was so scary. Pat also said that my hormone levels indicate that I ovulated after all, just late, and that my period should start within a week. If it doesn't, I can give it a kick in the tuchas with progesterone.

............................................................................................................

Another update (3-25-05):

Howdy, Aunt Flo! Almost three weeks late, but welcome anyway.

Yes, my blog has tone problems.

2005-03-22T09:28:00.000-08:00

Me: "But Beanie, I don't like it when you step on my foot like that. It has an owie from where I walked into the fridge door, see?"

Beanie: "Oh, yeah. I see it. I'm sorry about your foot. But what can I step on that's hard and pink?"

Whistling in the dark.

2005-03-20T22:23:00.000-08:00

I'm a big liar. In previous posts, I may have given the impression that my miscarriages (one last August, one in progress) haven't been bothering me much.

Oh, but they have, and they do.

I didn't notice the fear and grief too keenly until this afternoon. I got to a part of the book I'm reading (sorry if this is a spoiler for anyone) where the female protagonist suffers a very nasty, must-go-to-the-ER kind of miscarriage. Blood everywhere. Ugh. I read that and noticed my heart started beating very fast, and my head was swimming.

I'm waiting to finish a miscarriage right now. I've been waiting for two weeks. What's going to happen? Will it be like last time? I'm scared. I'm glad I'm going to my ob-gyn on Tuesday, but in the meantime, I'm afraid to be anywhere too far from a hospital.

I keep thinking about my trip to the ER last August. I don't want to be brooding about it, but since I can't seem to stop thinking about it, I'll write about the experience a little. Maybe that will help, to get some of it written down. It's going to be a bit graphic, okay? I can't help that. The experience was gory.

First, there was the drive to the ER. I remember feeling my vagina fill with blood, over and over, and gasping every time it poured out into my lap. I wanted so badly to hold it in, but I was utterly helpless. I tried tightening my pelvic muscles (Kegels?), but I was fighting too big a force, like trying to stop the tide with a little pile of pebbles -- laughable, almost. The loss of blood felt like a lapse of self-control, weakness. Each gush surprised me, so I gasped again and again. M, who was driving as quickly and safely as he could, jumped every time I gulped for air. I'm often his navagator when he drives, so I suppose he kept thinking I was seeing things in the road: *gasp* "What?" "So much blood," -- pause -- *gasp* "What?" etc.

I gave up on trying to stop the blood with my muscles. I thought, 'Let's pretend I just got a rattlesnake bite. Let's slow everything down: my breathing, my heart, my mind -- calm, calm, calm.' This seemed to work a little. Once in a while, I felt a brief surge of rage at the doctor who told me to wait for a natural miscarriage: 'Aw, great. Now I'm going to bleed to death, naturally! Why?' Then I remembered the rattlesnake bite. Calm, calm, calm.

When we finally got the hospital, M helped me out of the passenger side of his SUV. Dark red bloomed over the front of my white shorts. Blood poured down my legs and pooled, slick and sticky, under my feet in the flip-flops I was wearing. M held me up and we stumbled into the ER. I felt very weak and cold, and I started to shudder violently. The rattle of teeth was so loud and annoying. One absurd thought I had: 'Why do they have carpet in here? I'm bleeding all over it. This must happen to them all the time! Stupid carpet.'

M held me up, spinning me a little from side to side as he and Eemie spoke to various intake people. It was like we were dancing. Over his shoulder, I saw a pretty little girl who was seven years old, maybe. She was with some adults in the waiting room. Incongruously, she appeared to be dressed for some fancy occasion: white ruffly dress, bow in hair, shiny black shoes with buckles, her hair in neat ringlets. I took all this in at once, and her eyes locked with mine. Then she looked down and saw the blood on me and around me. Her hands went to her mouth; her eyes widened. I felt guilty and sad. That perfect picture of innocence had to see this? 'So very sorry', I thought, and tried to project calm pleasantness to her: 'Oh, this? I do this all the time, yes. No big deal.'

I got a wheelchair and was pushed to a room, laid in a bed, and hooked up to monitors. Eemie and M waited with me, anxiously, holding my hand, comforting me. I kept bleeding. Filling, emptying. Over and over. I thought, 'blood is life, blood is life, there it goes.' I start to get fuzzy about the next part. I was having some trouble staying conscious.

Some kind of inexperienced hospital worker appeared, looking frazzled. Someone had told her to 'clean me up'. She stripped away my clothes, glanced (embarrassed?) at the ridiculous amount of blood glistening on my pubic hair, and timidly started dabbing at it. Another gush. "Oh, it just keeps coming out!" she exclaimed. 'Oh, you're new,' I remember thinking. 'I'm an old hand. Welcome to the club. Yeah, it does that.' A few more gushes. She captured and disposed of a particularly large jiggling clot (palm-sized! I was almost proud of that one), then she admitted defeat and fled, apparently relieved.

More time passed. My heart rate dropped. It continued to fall. I got colder, then felt terribly hot. Did the hospital forget I was here? Sweat poured down my face, and into my eyes a little. I turned my head to look at my heart rate, as I had been doing for a while. "No, no!" M and Eemie cried in unison, "You don't need to look at that!" But I saw it, and it said 48. I tried to focus on the light above me to stay conscious, but I so wanted to close my eyes and fold up into nothing.

I'd discovered a new sense, like heat, touch, cold, pain -- it was death. Are there death receptors somewhere? I felt immensely heavy, hot, pushed down, crushed, but it wasn't as scary as you might think. I also felt peaceful and enveloped. A lot of thoughts scrambled around, for example: 'My son will still have two parents, it was a good life, I wonder if Beanie will remember me, I love M and Eemie so much, I'm so grateful, I love my boy, thank you, try to look at light, I'm dying, but it's not so bad'. I was letting go, relaxing, uncoiling.

I shut my eyes and talked to Jesus for a minute. I couldn't see him, but I felt He was around. He seemed amused, almost, but in a friendly way. I thought at Him, 'Oh, it's you! Have I made you up? Is it just because there are a lot of Christians around here that I'm talking to you, and not someone else? Oh, well. It doesn't matter. Hi. I'm sorry if I ever offended you, I was always trying my best. Does talking to you count as believing in you? I don't know. Anyway, I'm sorry, thanks, it was a good life, thanks, thanks -- hey, wait a second, I don't want to die now! Open eyes, look at light! I want to see Eemie and M again!'

I cranked open my eyes with much effort and looked at M and Eemie. I remember deciding that I'd prefer to live. Thankfully, at that moment a nurse showed up, utterly unruffled, and gave me IV fluids. Was that all I'd been needing? Fluids? He also put a cool washcloth on my forehead, which was unspeakably wonderful. After a few minutes, my heart rate started to climb, and I didn't feel the oppressive crush of dying anymore. I could stay conscious effortlessly. I was still bleeding, but it mattered less. I thought, 'IV fluids: the water of life -- again, thank you, thank you.'

There's more to this story, of course, but that's all I can write for now.

You can see why I don't want to do it again?

"Helium is a type of tusk."

2005-03-19T16:26:00.000-08:00

A moment ago, Beanie said that helium is a type of tusk, which is just too fascinating. He's jumping off into a lecture, so I will transcribe:

Beanie: "Tusk is a part....some things are made of tusks, like the clock is made of tusk [points to clock]. Some metal and plastic is called tusk. Like our own milky way. This is the way with milk, and that has a lot of things that go up -- just like balloons. Many things are made of it. There's a little gas that you breathe. It's called, 'the gas you only [makes panting sound]'. If you live this big, you're about a hundred-twenty -- if you're this tall [gestures to purple crayon], you've got a big head. It looks like this. Some people have purple heads, like this. They're people who study birds, people that study farm animals. They're in laboratories. The food that bird eats [points to picture of bird]. Talking like a science guy is very difficult. He talks really wacky. Hey, do you know that bird? [Picks up 'Audubon' magazine]"

Me: "I think it's a thrush."

"What's that one with the yellow chin?"

"A yellowthroat."

"What's that bird? That's the easiest bird to find in the creature world that lives here."

"A nuthatch."

"Lemme flip it over. More birds to see. That bird and that bird. That's a woodpecker, he pecked a hole in the tree. He's looking for bugs. Peck peck peck, peck peck peck [with crayon on table, then stops to point]. What's that bird?"

"I think you know it."

"Cardinal! It's a cardinal, Mommy."

"What's that bird?"

"Still the thrush." [Beanie points to a penguin.]

"Penguins only walk; they cannot fly. They can only walk and swim. I told you. They're really 'entied' to people. That means they have a lot in common between people and penguins."

"Diaper change time! Are you ready?"

"This little ball that I'm looking at is actually Pluto." [Points with crayon to miniscule speck on wall.]

"Where?"

"Right there, that tiny little speck is Pluto. I'm looking at it."

"Okay, diaper change now!"

"I'm looking at Pluto! Pluto's in my room. All the planets are in my room. Zoomzoomzoom!" [Runs to room, gets diaper change.]

.................................................................................................................................................

Beanie is really into the PBS show "Bill Nye the Science Guy" these days, especially the episodes about outer space, the planets, the moon, and the earth's crust. He also saw a show about tusks recently. And just today I was telling him about helium and balloons. Just so you know where this stuff is coming from.

Writers: beware of your sex scene language.

2005-03-15T09:46:00.000-08:00

I just started reading an enjoyable novel called "The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger. Here's a review from a fellow whose judgement I've come to trust:

http://bluejay.mind.net/darkcrossings/timetravelerswife.html

So far, it's an intriguing story (which, as a bonus, has several references to J. J. Audubon's "Birds of America") and the time travel gimmick is fun. I'm grabbed, and I bet I'll finish the book.

However, the first sex scene contains this sentence:

"I now have an erection that is probably tall enough to ride some of the scarier rides at Great America without a parent."

I thought it was silly, but kind of cute. Then again, do I really want to be thinking about kids at an amusement park during a hot sex scene? I shared it with Eemie, who guffawed and said it was the stupidest thing ever.

I understand the need to not write the same-ol'-same-ol' sex scene, but sometimes taking a wild risk just doesn't fly. What do you think of that sentence? Lame, or not?

Space rabbits.

2005-03-14T14:39:00.000-08:00

Westerners usually say they see a man in the moon, but in China and Japan they traditionally see a rabbit. I've looked for that Asian leporine many times, but couldn't see him. Last week, while seeking planet pictures for Beanie, I was lucky enough to find the above picture to help me out. The dark seas of the moon are emphasized so you can find the rabbit. His head is the Sea of Tranquility. But what is he doing? In Japan, they say he's making rice cakes (mochi) with a mortar and pestle. In China, they say he's mixing the Elixir of Immortality. See?

About rabbits...they've been on my mind lately, and not just because of our impending celebration of the Pagan fertility goddess Eoster.

I have an admission to make. I have a pooka. A companion rabbit -- think Harvey:

http://www.geocities.com/harveytpooka/harvey2.htm

Mine happens to be a bunny, but pookas aren't always rabbits. A children's book caught my eye today, called "Jamie O'Rourke and the Pooka" by Tomie DePaola. It says that...

"...according to William Butler Yeats, who collected, edited, and published many Irish folktales, a pooka (also spelled puka) is an animal spirit who lives a solitary life. Some people think that the word pooka comes from the Gallic word poc -- a he-goat. Others also think that a pooka is the forefather of Shakespeare's Puck. Pookas come in many forms -- a horse, a he-goat, an ass, a bull, even an eagle. (One of the most famous pookas is Harvey, the ubiquitous friend of Jimmy Stewart in the play and the movie of the same name.)"

I'd never noticed that pooka book in the library before, and I'm always combing those stacks. Huh.

My personal pooka sits in the passenger side of my car when I drive down a certain stretch of road. I can only see him peripherally; if I turn my head to look at him directly, he's gone. He looks a lot like the Playboy bunny (or the moon bunny pictured above): overall rather dark, with the ears always askew at a certain angle. He's a little larger than a real rabbit, and sits upright. He always has an eye trained on me, which appears to periodically blink, or worse, wink. If Eemie is in the passenger seat, I can still see him on her lap (but she can't -- this unnerves her a bit).

So, what does he want? There are friendly pookas, like in "Harvey". There are menacing pookas, like the oversize rabbits in the films "Donnie Darko" and "Sexy Beast". Mine never speaks, but he's always sure to hitch that ride.

Maybe my long-eared copilot is from space. No, really. Check out the "UFOs PO Rabbits" part of this website, particularly the parts about R.A. Wilson's observations on space rabbits:

http://www.elfis.net/elfol3/elfis3.html

[R.A.] Wilson goes on to sight (sic) numerous other UFO incidents coincidentally involving rabbits. From UFO occupants seen stealing rabbits from a hutch in Italy during the 1950s, and a description of a UFOnaut as looking like a giant rabbit, to an abductee presented by Budd Hopkins who recounted seeing hundreds of paralyzed rabbits, and Mrs. Trent's encountering of a UFO while out feeding her rabbits. We have tales of jackrabbits dancing in the road prior to the sighting of a giant white UFO and of a southern England encounter where a witness saw the regionally known "Bunnyman" immediately following her sightings of a UFO. Bunnyman said, "Please pray for me."

There's also this, directly from R.A. Wilson's "Cosmic Trigger Volume 2":

The pookah takes many forms, but is most famous when he appears as a giant, six-foot white rabbit - which is the form most Americans know from the play and film, Harvey. Whatever form the pookah takes, he retains the special ability of his species, which is like that of Thoth in Egyptian legend, Coyote in Native American myth or Hanuman the Divine Monkey in Hindu lore -- he can move us from one universe, or Belief System, into another, and he likes to play games with our ideas about 'reality.'

Neat, huh? I'll keep you posted about my friendly (?) moon bunny. In the meantime, here's another rabbit in space, and a ridiculous amount of info on rabbit/hare/moon mythology:

http://www.winshop.com.au/annew/Leptus.html

Happy Easter (a little early)!

2005-03-09T10:40:00.000-08:00

Beanie playing air guitar in his Devo energy dome!

We must repeat.

2005-03-09T00:43:00.000-08:00

I have been asked, what is Devo? Is it a rock band? A group of renegade art students? A prank? All of the above?

I am only a beginning student of Devolution (though Beanie pushes me ever onward), but I can point other willing students to some cool Devo websites.

Here's a rough, rather simplistic overview of what they're about: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/story/214663p-184843c.html

There's also plenty of cool interviews with Devo available on the web. This one is with lead singer Mark Mothersbaugh in 1997. Witness, in the picture, the fantastic red hats. Those are the "energy domes" that Beanie loves so much (and now he has one of his own! See above post.)
I love how Mark answers the interviewer's question about what's good in the music scene of 1997:

I like a lot of little things. I think there's no such thing as the "good old days." It's bullshit. I think there's a time in your life when your metabolism is moving really fast and it's really functioning properly, and that's the good old days -- when you're beyond those. But, chronologically, I think now is the good old days. I think things are better than they've ever been right now. I think it's be great to be a teenager right now.

Mark nails it on the head -- what was great about most of the music of my youth? Uhhh.... my youth. My metabolism worked better. That's the only explanation for my enduring fondness for certain 80's pablum (like, why do I still crank up the Bangles when I'm alone in my car?) Thanks for explaining, dude, and thanks for the extra incentive to not get stuck musically in the past.

This surprisingly emotional interview is with Jerry Casale, another Devo guy:
http://members.tripod.com/vermontreview/Interviews/devo.htm
I had no idea that members of Devo were present at the Kent State shootings of 1970. They were students there. When the interviewer asked Jerry about seeing the massacre, he answered with great candor:

Whatever I would say, would probably not all touch upon the significance or gravity of the situation at this point of time. It may sound trite or glib. All I can tell you is that it completely and utterly changed my life. I was white hippie boy and than I saw exit wounds from M1 rifles out of the backs of two people I knew. Two of the four people who were killed, Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause, were my friends. We were all running our asses off from these motherf&*$#ers. It was total utter bullshit. Live ammunition and gasmasks – none of us knew, none of us could have imagined. They shot into a crowd that was running. I stopped being a hippie and I started to develop the idea of devolution. I got real, real pissed off.

Jerry went on to describe how Neil Young's "Ohio" was deeply moving to him, and how Neil was, coincidentally, one of the first celebrities Devo encountered on their rise to semi-fame.

(A minor digression: Devo did a lot of covers, but one of their best is Neil Young's "Worried Man". The video is terrific, the music is catchy -- but now I wonder, is the video in fact a scene from Neil Young's bizarre 1982 movie, "Human Highway"? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084099/
If so, I'd love to see the whole film, which has Dennis Hopper, Dean Stockwell, Devo, and Neil Young doing musical numbers together.)

So, Devo threw off their hippie peace/love/justice aspirations after seeing some of their fellow students shot in the back. I've been thinking about that. Almost every day, Beanie wants to see Devo's video of "R U Experienced", and the song and film just keep growing on me. (Listening to it over and over at the height of my fever didn't help, either.)

The video opens with a group of kids coming across a big metal peace sign on the ground in a dirty alley. They pick it up, declare that it's just a piece of junk that looks kind of like a chicken foot, and derisively throw it away as far as they can.

Dammit, I'm so sorry, Devo....

At least Devo carries on cheerfully and continues to bear witness to the devolving. They still tour; can you believe it? Look at these old, rockin' codgers: http://www.clubdevo.com/mp/live.html I love them. I hope they keep at it so I can take Beanie to a concert.

"R U Experienced" closes with the line, "Not necessarily beautiful, but mutated." (It was originally "Not necessarily stoned, but beautiful" in the Hendrix version). Want to see what Mark Mothersbaugh is up to these days?

Beautiful mutants: http://www.mutatovisual.com/beautifulmutants/gallery.html Some of them are just lovely. Have a look.

Not necessarily beautiful, but mutated.

2005-03-06T18:26:00.000-08:00

Back to normal, almost. Many thanks to antibiotics and codeine.

Man, that was a rough case of pneumonia. I still have some fluid in my lungs, but today is the first day that I can sit up for a while without feeling the invisible force flattening me. I can breathe more freely, and inhale all the way without too many crackling noises. The fever is gone. I'm almost going to miss the high fever. Lots of interesting dreams, flat on my back, watching the moon cross the sky. Sleeping or not. I hallucinated sights and sounds. Sidewinders crossing dunes. Morse code coming through the arm of the futon. Conversations with spirochete bacteria. For a while, I wondered if I was dying.

I'm relatively sure that on the worst day (last Tuesday), I had a miscarriage. I had been having pregnancy symptoms, but they weakened, then I lost some tissue and blood. I feel sad, though frankly, I didn't have much time to get attached to the idea of this pregnancy. It's good that I didn't bleed out this time -- this miscarriage was simple and fast. It clearly wasn't a good time for me to be pregnant. I suspect that I cooked the embryo with my high fevers. That makes two miscarriages in a row, which is a little troubling. But with this second one, there were certainly extenuating circumstances.

I won't be truly alarmed until I lose three in a row.

Ugh, I need to be flat, now.

In which I do Harvey a favor.

2005-03-03T02:24:00.000-08:00

Harvey Keitel is sitting on a short wooden crate, facing me. He's wearing sunglasses, so it's hard to see his eyes, but he appears...embarrassed. His fancy black shoes shuffle in the dust, and he keeps sweeping back his nearly absent hair with his free hand. In his other hand is a cigarette that is long-dead, burnt a little into the filter, even. But he keeps holding it. He sighs, and I wonder how long we've been sitting here.

"So, will you have a look? It's pretty awful in there." He looks at the marks on the ground again after he asks me.

"Sure," I say, "I'll look. Where is it?"

"Behind you, there." Harvey says, "But I'm warning you; it's been a long time before I or anybody have been in there." I turn to see what looks like a little circus tent, colorful but dingy, and stapled shut from the outside.

I walk there, and rip away a corner of the doorflap's bottom. Harvey follows and stands outside, but looks even more like he wishes he were anywhere else.

As I climb under the flap, I'm overcome by the smell of decay and bird shit. I swear several times. My eyes adjust to the low light, and I see that the tent was once an elaborate aviary filled with a variety of finches. Now, most are dead on the floor, apparently eaten by beetles and perhaps even by the remaining birds.

I'm amazed and confounded that any birds live at all! I can hear them calling. True, they are the hardiest species, the society finches, but -- dammit, the water bowls are overflowing with shit! I'm momentarily enraged with Harvey (are you the Wolf, Harvey? or Mr. White?) for neglecting these birds so heinously. At first, I think the aviary should be burned and forgotten. It's probably a health menace, by now.

But then I see...mothers on nests? A single male is singing. One nest certainly has babies.

I call out to Harvey, "You really just left these guys alone? Some of them are fine! Go get me some plastic bags, latex gloves, disinfectant....." I rattle off a long list of clean-up things, as well as water and food. "I can design you a better aviary, too -- if you like."

"Wow," I hear Harvey say brightly, "I'll get right on all that shit. I'm glad you're not too pissed off at me. Be right back." I hear him go away.

I crawl out of the aviary, feeling very good. The air is fresh and sweet. It's a bright day, and the sun seems to be burning through me. I check this by holding up my arm, and confirm that I'm a little transluscent. Those birds will get more sun, I think. I see Harvey coming back already with the stuff. I smile and wave, encouraging him.

News on the experiment.

2005-03-01T04:20:00.000-08:00

I know that I haven't made any journal entries for a while, but things around here have been changing fast.

The transformation of our two-story apartment into a Permian swamp is almost complete. I've grown accustomed to the rapid growth of the giant club mosses and horsetail ferns; they really took off due to the southern exposure of our giant windows. Between the spring sunlight and my cranking up the heat artificially, I'd say the temperature in here runs about 85 degrees most of the time. But I'm having a lot of trouble judging the temperature; like all of the creatures that now pervade the apartment, I can't seem to effectively regulate my own temperature. The fever and chills are getting in the way of my making accurate observations, I'm afraid, but I'm doing my best.

The atmosphere is very humid and dense. I have trouble breathing it, and have an awful rattle in my chest. However, the dragonflies with two-foot wingspans seem to love it -- the thick air helps them fly. I can see them shivering, perched on the posts of the loft bed in the morning. Then they catch stoneflies out of the air all day. They usually don't trouble me, but their wings make a distracting sound like a small outboard engine.

The most menacing animals are the giant salamanders. Since the downstairs is now flooded (and that is where my observation platform is), they can get dreadfully close to me while I sleep. During the day, they pull themselves out on the mossy stairs and soak up the sun, paying me no regard. But at night, I often roll over to see two large orbs (2, maybe 3 inches across?) blinking closed silently and sinking below the water. They are getting closer all the time. Sometimes I throw a used tissue at them, but the action seems laughably ineffectual.

So, don't be surprised if this is my last journal entry. I'm feeling very cold, so I'm now going back to sleep. Or I'll try to. There's a lot of weird sounds in here, and I can't breathe too well. The water is rising.

How can you not love the pseudoscorpion?

2005-02-22T23:15:00.000-08:00

Last summer, I saw a funny little beetle with clubbed antennae on the banister of our outdoor steps. I looked closer, and damned if it didn't look like a little scorpion (and I mean little) minus the stinger. It wasn't moving, so I plucked out one of my hairs and carefully waved it in front of the little creature -- was it alive? It attacked my hair, pinching with all its tiny might! I was in love.

After doing some research in a wonderful book by John Acorn called "Bugs of Washington and Oregon," I discovered that my fierce, diminutive beastie is called a pseudoscorpion. Here's a website that will give you an idea of the scale we're talking about here (and the ferocity):

http://biol.org/Pseudoscorpion.htm

I love the all-caps caption: "PSEUDOSCORPION IS ATTACKING THE RULER". Yikes!

They lack the stinger of scorpions, but their pincers (or "pedipalps" -- what a good word!) can deliver a little poison. It's enough to kill their miniscule prey, but not enough to harm a human. I think their pedipalps are cute.

Pseudoscorpions can make silk, which they use to make bag-like shelters. They spend the winter in their silk sleeping bags, or they make temporary bags to hide in while they're recovering from molting into a new skin. A male pseudoscorpion sometimes makes a special silk mat for presenting his sperm packet to the female (tah-dah!). She can look it over, then accept or reject it as she pleases.

Mommy pseudoscorpions are attachment parents. They carry their babies in a brood pouch (sling!) and secrete nutritious something-or-other (boobie juice!) for the babies to eat.

These little critters are even more crunchy-granola than that. When they want to go someplace far away do they take their gas-guzzling SUVs? NO! They take public transportation. (That is, they hitch a ride on a much bigger bug.) This is, I think, the pseudoscorpion's most whimsical habit, akin to Mary Poppins' opening her umbrella and floating away on the west wind. I know it's true, though, because I've seen it.

I was kicking a crane fly out of the house (that's "mosquito eater" to some of you -- you know, those bugs that look like humungous mosquitoes? They're not.) I hesitated before letting the crane fly out of the jar, and I noticed that its legs looked clumpy. Upon even closer inspection, I saw two pseudoscorpions holding on tight and hitching a ride! This was a mere week after finding the first one on the banister....

It's funny how once you know something exists, you can find it in the strangest places.

Beanie's definition of "metaphor":

2005-02-19T12:51:00.000-08:00

"A metaphor is a kind of ant, tangled up in lots of string."

No, really, go to "Chez Miscarriage".

2005-02-19T11:28:00.000-08:00

I know I just told you to go there, but in case you just looked at the link and thought, 'yeah, whatever' -- I say, go there effin' NOW:

http://chezmiscarriage.blogs.com/chezmiscarriage/thank_you_ill_be_here_all_week/index.html

The IM conversation between Celine Dion and Oprah, the guest writers, the stick figures with infertility problems, the Infertility Passover Haggadah, the teenage diary, the letters section (especially!), the haikus -- read it all.

From her Miss Manners segment:

Hi, I'm hoping you can help me. My friend had a miscarriage and I really want to get her a miscarriage gift. Can you recommend something very special?

....I needed something to lift my spirits. I thought that I'd cheer myself up and help Miscarriage Gift at the same time, so I drove over to the Habitual Spontaneous Abortion Emporium to do a little shopping. They were having a half-off sale on oversized maxi pads, but I walked right by those plush beauties and headed for the gift aisle. I found a D&C Barbie / Waiting Room Ken set that was very reasonably priced; for just a bit more money, you could add Skipper the Nurse Who Can't Get the Damn IV In. I also found a lovely needlepoint pillow that expressed a common sentiment: "Why, God? Why?" The words were bordered by clouds and an angelic blood clot looking down from heaven.

.........

Why am I hanging out with the funny barren women these days, you may ask?

I realized that the baby I would have had if I hadn't miscarried in August would have been born about now. I feel okay about that, too, as if everything has happened precisely as it should have. This interim time has not been wasted. I'm certainly grateful that I didn't bleed to death in August. And now that this imaginary gestation is over, I feel less gun-shy and more ready to try for another baby. Funny, huh? I'll keep you posted on my progress.

I'm angry that I have to do first trimester again, though. Damn, I hate that effin' first trimester.

More stupid crap for moms to fret about.

2005-02-18T11:23:00.000-08:00

This article pisses me off. Thought I'd share:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6959880/site/newsweek/

Moms are too attentive to their kids these days? Too concerned about their kids' education? Not dressing sexy enough (or screwing their husbands enough)? Too perfectionistic? Too worried about what experts ("Newsweek" -- hmmmm, are they parenting experts?) have to say about their parenting? Are we spoiling our kids? Is it an EPIDEMIC?

Freak out, mommies! (And buy the latest book.)

I love what the hilariously funny lady with the bad, bad uterus at "Chez Miscarriage" has to say about the Newsweek article:

http://chezmiscarriage.blogs.com/chezmiscarriage/2005/02/the_mothers_the.html

She puts this lame crap in historical perspective, and describes how mother-blaming-and/or-instructing has been yo-yo-ing back and forth for years: Go to work. Stay at home. Go to work. Be attentive. You're smothering him! But be attentive. You're spoiling your kid, but if you ignore him too much, you'll make him anti-social or autistic or something....

*sigh* Here's my free advice to mommies, including myself: Mommies, follow your hearts. Relax. Find lots of friends. Ask for help when you need it. Do what works for your family. There's no recipe for perfect kids, and anyone who tells you different is selling you something. Your kids will probably be just fine, honest. And their temperments probably have a lot less to do with your machinations than you think. Or with whether you co-sleep, or breastfeed, or whatever.

I think the pressure to be perfect is largely self-generated. What things on my mommy-to-do list are worth fussing over? What things can be totally dropped? Maybe Warner and I are agreeing about a lot of things, in fact, but I just don't enjoy her tone. I think moms might need to take the first steps with the people close to them in order to get what they need. They need to let their husbands, wives, pre-school mom friends, etc. know what's going on with them and what they need. Example:

I recently came out to some of the other mommies at my co-op preschool as...well...poor. It felt good to admit it, and to talk about how our family won't be able, probably, to afford the best private schools, or lots of expensive Gymboree-type classes, or a house -- not yet, anyway. (Our family is the only co-op family that lives in an apartment, I'm pretty sure.)

The other parents were a little awkward at first (discussing class issues always makes people twitchy), but later one of the moms told me about our co-op preschool's scholarship program, which I didn't know existed. She said that she thought our family was a major asset to the school, and that we were totally welcome there, not in spite of our being different, but precisely because we're different. I was really touched by her offer and her compliments! But my point is, I had to reach out first and expose myself a bit emotionally to get that help and support.

Eventually, can we get what we want from the government? Maybe (though I wouldn't count on it with W gutting social programs to feed his wars), but in the meantime, I think we mommies have to put energy into reaching out to each other and forming communities.

Back to that article: it's nobody's business how sexy I wanna dress, dammit! I dressed frumpy before I completely lost my identity and sanity and became a mom!

And doesn't this "slacker mom" have immaculate pillows? I don't have freakin' pillows like that:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6960732/site/newsweek/

Maybe the only reason I'm NOT insane is because there's two mommies in my house? Instant community right here? I don't know. But I know these "Newsweek" articles are annoying to me.
That delightful Chez Miscarriage gal wrote a wonderful IM conversation between the New York Times and Newsweek regarding mothers. I lovelovelove it:

NYT: those women are so boring

Newsweek: who?

NYT: the ones who stay home with their kids
NYT: they're so self-absorbed
NYT: unless they went to princeton
NYT: if they went to princeton and they stay home, they're cutting edge

Newsweek: no, that's wrong
Newsweek: they're overinvolved with their kids
Newsweek: they neglect their personal hygiene to take the kids to soccer practice
Newsweek: it's called "overparenting"
Newsweek: you should smell their sweatpants

NYT: no, they're self-absorbed
NYT: they get too many pedicures
NYT: they get that glitter painted on their toes, it's really expensive

Newsweek: no, they're over-absorbed in the kids

NYT: no, you have it backwards

Newsweek: whatever, it's not worth arguing about
Newsweek: either way, we agree that we hate them

NYT: that's true
NYT: let's just focus on our common ground

"Sharkabet!" raves. A helicoprion digression.

2005-02-18T00:14:00.000-08:00

This alphabet book by Ray Troll is amazing -- great for kids, but also amusing and informative for grown-ups. Chris and Martin Kratt like it, too, so it has to be good:

Sharkabet

The pictures are lovely. See the winsome cookie-cutter sharks? This is the book that sparked Beanie's interest in them.

These days, when we play cookie-cutter sharks with our index fingers, we give the sharks pretend cookie dough and they cut out different shapes, like hearts and stars. Our pretend CC sharks don't bite other fish anymore; they bake cookies. What kind? "Sugar cookies," says Bean, "of course."

My favorite shark from Troll's book is the helicoprion, an extinct shark known only from enigmatic fossil teeth. I like that scientists didn't know where to put the whorl of teeth at first (how do they know for sure now?):

http://www.trollart.com/boggle.html

As Ray Troll writes, "One poor Russian, A. P. Karpinski, spent years in futile attempts to restore the position of the whorl. He placed it in the tail, on the dorsal, and in the upper jaw (my favorite, a sinister swimming Dumbo!)."

Here's another conceptualization of helicoprion, but it doesn't hold a candle to Troll's:

http://school.discovery.com/schooladventures/prehistoricsharks/gallery1.html

And another look at the beast, although this one is a little baffling to me -- I thought helicoprion had only one spiral of teeth in the lower jaw. But why not two?:

http://dino.lm.com/images/display.php?id=86

Here's a gritty, apocalyptic vision of helicoprion. The Permian extinction was such a bummer:

http://thunderlizard.gn.apc.org/permian_ex.html

And look at these fossil helicoprion teeth. You can easily see how people thought this was an ammonite shell or something instead of shark teeth. Dang, I wouldn't know what this is:

http://www.acclaimimages.com/_gallery/_pages/0038-0410-1608-5550.html

In closing, if you have a shark fan in your house, young or old, get "Sharkabet!"

And think about where YOU'D put that spiral of teeth.

He looked better through binoculars.

2005-02-17T00:38:00.000-08:00

The gray, black-tailed smudge atop this pile of brush is a northern shrike! Honest. Get a magnifying glass.

If she blows, Nisqually will be under tons of volcanic mud.

2005-02-17T00:36:00.000-08:00

Looking southeast at Mt. Rainer (aka Tahoma) across the freshwater marsh. The specks in the water below the mountain are ring-necked ducks (take my word for it). The forested hill on the left is part of Ft. Lewis.

Low Tide.

2005-02-17T00:34:00.000-08:00

Looking northwest at the mouth of McCallister Creek across the saltwater marsh. The Olympic mountains are in the distance. This spot is very close to the epicenter of the big February 2001 earthquake.

Joyful Nisqually excursion.

2005-02-16T23:20:00.000-08:00

I went to Nisqually NWR today and had a great time. Tuckered myself out, though. I think I must have walked about seven miles. It was a beautiful day; clear and breezy, and there were no bugs. Well, a couple of bugs -- see below.

The highlight of the day was the northern shrike! Whoohoo! I was overjoyed to see him, but it was a little weird, too. It was as though I willed the bird to show up at that particular time and place. I thought, 'This would be a good place for a shrike,' and *poof* -- there he was, atop a bush....

I got a fabulous look at him as he snatched a bumblebee right out of the air, then flew to a perch with it. He deftly smashed the bee against a sharp twig with his beak until the bee broke in two. The bird ate what bug parts were in his beak, then flew to the ground to retrieve the other half and gobbled it down. Consistent with what I've read about shrikes, he used his feet only for perching, not for holding the bee (which would have conveniently saved him a trip to the ground).

This was all close enough that I could (with binoculars) clearly see the subtle gray striping on his belly, his nice sharp hooked beak, his cool bandit mask, and his fierce shiny black eyes.

When I finally left the shrike, he followed me for a good quarter mile, flying from bush to bush. Coincidentally going my way? He seemed to be watching me, though. Perhaps he sensed my keen interest in him and was curious? Whatever the reason, it was a real treat that he kept me company.

I also saw a male ring-necked pheasant at close range, a pair of courting northern harriers, a great variety of ducks, two greater white-fronted geese (I haven't seen them since Creamer's Field in Fairbanks!), the cackling subspecies of Canada goose, a gaggle of brants, a sharp-shinned hawk, a willow flycatcher, and I think I heard an American bittern.

I saw a mourning cloak butterfly that must have just woken up from hibernating. I looked for long-tailed weasels (we saw one the last time we were at Nisqually -- M and Eemie thought it looked like a tiny monkey!), but I didn't see any. I saw harbor seals swimming in McAllister Creek and the Nisqually River. I looked for pups along the banks, but didn't see any.

I was initially excited to hear a drumming ruffed grouse in the deciduous woods along the Nisqually river. I hadn't heard one of those guys since Alaska! It sounded right, at first: BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOMBOOMBOOM. Then I realized that I was hearing military exercises from Fort Lewis. What a downer!

But everything else about the day was wonderful. Many thanks to Eemie for hanging out with Beanie today so I could bird.

A favorite portion of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "Little Prince".

2005-02-15T11:13:00.000-08:00

....So the little prince, in spite of all the good will that was inseparable from his love, had soon come to doubt her. He had taken seriously words which were without importance, and it made him very unhappy.

"I ought not to have listened to her," he confided to me one day. "One never ought to listen to the flowers. One should simply look at them and breathe their fragrance. Mine perfumed all my planet. But I did not know how to take pleasure in all her grace. This tale of claws, which disturbed me so much, should only have filled my heart with tenderness and pity."

"The fact is that I did not know how to understand anything! I ought to have judged by deeds and not by words. She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her . . . I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little strategems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her . . ."

.....................................................................................

Wise thoughts on love. Here's a nice site about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the remarkable pilot and poet:

http://www.geocities.com/wsuvetadpi/

Did you know that he really met a fox in the desert who saved his life?

I think it's a vine snake.

2005-02-15T01:16:00.000-08:00

It makes him cry.

Snake flossing.

2005-02-15T00:33:00.000-08:00

I lived in China for two years when I was a kid, and I saw some weird stuff there. One of the most bizarre things I came across was a freak show at the local market. It had the usual preserved things in jars you'd expect to see: pickled punks, a two-headed goat fetus, a poorly-stitched-together fish/pig thing.

I had to pay a little extra to go into a dark tent to see something special. A scantily-clad young lady was dancing holding several snakes -- big pythons. I thought that was cool enough, but then she set the big ones down, took out a small snake and threaded it UP HER NOSE, then OUT HER MOUTH. I was aghast, and I've wondered ever since if I really saw that. Was that possible?

Well, see for yourself in the above post. Incredible, huh? Here's a strangely-written article about that gaping fellow with the lovely green snake emerging from his mouth. I guess he is now something of a minor TV star in India:

http://www.chennaionline.com/cityfeature/Personalities/mano.asp

Manoharan even used to put venomous snakes up his nose. The article recounts that a snake once took a wrong turn at his larynx (it got confused?). He didn't want to risk getting a deadly bite by pulling it back out through his nose, so he bit the snake in half and ate it, instead.

How, exactly, was that safer than pulling it out of his nose?

On the bright side, the man is vegetarian now. When he encounters a snake today, he picks it up to stroke it and give it a kiss, then he lets it go.

Addicted to that dying world.

2005-02-12T22:10:00.000-08:00

What the hell happened to all the shrikes? I saw them all the time when I was a kid.

Another name for the shrike is the butcher bird. It's a robin-sized songbird with a hawk-like bill and a taste for meat. It captures its prey -- anything from bugs to mice to small birds -- by deception, in part, since it resembles more innocuous birds like mockingbirds and kingbirds. It then impales its kill, trophylike, on sharp thorns and spikes around its territory. (Anybody out there read "Hyperion" by Dan Simmons? Just checking.) It skewers its prey on spikes in order to eat; after all, it doesn't have the talons of a raptor, just regular songbird feet for perching. The males also leave uneaten critter carcasses (and whatever else catches their eye, like pretty ribbons) plainly visible on spines around their territories to impress the ladies.

These birds seem to be disappearing all over the world. Britain has lost nearly all its red-backed shrikes, and New England has lost all its loggerhead shrikes. Japan and Russia are also seeing precipitous declines in their shrike populations.

No one really knows why. Habitat loss? Too many roads? Overuse of pesticides? Introduced species?

Here is a great article about shrike behavior, shrike decline, and attempts to save the shrike:

http://www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/article.cfm?issueID=28&articleID=251

Before it gets too much warmer, I'm going south to Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge to try to spot a wintering northern shrike. The habitat there is perfect, and that's where I saw my last one (fourteen effin' years ago *sigh*). Wish me luck.

I'll leave you with this little excerpt from Mark Twain's "Diary of Adam and Eve":

"By watching, I know that the stars are not going to last. I have seen some of the best ones melt and run down the sky. Since one can melt, they can all melt; since they can all melt, they can all melt the same night. That sorrow will come--I know it. I mean to sit up every night and look at them as long as I can keep awake; and I will impress those sparkling fields on my memory, so that by and by when they are taken away I can by my fancy restore those lovely myriads to the black sky and make them sparkle again, and double them by the blur of my tears."

What to do with human exudations, part two.

2005-02-12T13:41:00.000-08:00

I've been feeling nostalgic about breastfeeding lately. There were certainly things about lactating that were wonderful. Crap, if you're like me, you've heard and read about those delightful, tender moments a zillion times -- watching your baby fall asleep at the breast with a little drop of milk at the corner of his mouth, feeling overcome by love, etc.

What those stories don't usually cover is how, at that precise moment, I suddenly realize that I have to pee like a racehorse, but if I try to move, the baby will wake up and scream. My lips are dry and cracking, my throat's parched; I'm dying of thirst in the desert. Christ, I'm also starving -- I'd be happy to have a single, stale cracker to eat at this moment. And I can see that book I've been reading while the baby's asleep (I'm at a really exciting part!), but it's across the room on the table.

Experienced nursing mothers might chide me for not preparing better: "I always surround myself with everything I need before I start nursing." How nice for them! I never quite got that down, but then again, I still forget to take the diaper bag with us on outings (after almost three years)!

In spite of the above griping, I DO miss making milk. It's fabulous and magical to make food with your body. Fun fact: since 1993, Norway has included human milk output in its annual reports on national food production. They're the only country that does this.

This might gross some folks out, but I've been thinking about breast milk recipes. It's food, right?

Here's a slightly-too-long excerpt from Dan Savage's clever sex advice column, answering the burning question, "Can cheese be made from human breast milk?" Dan visits with Joe the cheesemaker ("blessed be the..." oh, nevermind...) at a cheese factory named "Say Cheese" (*cringe*) and asks him:

"When I asked Joe to recommend a cheese that would come close to one made from human breast milk, he balked: "I've never tasted breast milk." Was he bottle-fed? "I don't remember." When pressed, Joe said he didn't think cheese made from human breast milk would taste very good. "Sheep, goats, and cows don't eat meat, they don't eat onions or garlic, they don't drink coffee. The flavor of human cheese would depend on what you were feeding your human. Considering our diets, human breast milk would probably taste pretty awful." Does Say Cheese stock human breast milk cheese? "No, we don't." Why not? "It's a disgusting idea, and no one makes it." But if it were available, would you? "I don't think so."

Looks like the way to find out what human breast milk cheese might taste like is to roll up our sleeves and make ourselves some. According to Dale Baumgartner, head cheese maker at the Tillamook Creamery in Oregon, "It takes 10 pounds of milk to make one pound of cheese." A dairy cow makes more than that in one day, but the average lactating woman needs almost four days to produce 10 pounds of milk, and that would be a problem: "When you're making cheese, it's really important to use fresh milk," especially if your milk is unpasteurized. So, you need to find four lactating women, or make just a little tiny bit of cheese.

If you can get your hands on some fresh human breast milk, here's a simple cheese recipe from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company (http://www.cheesemaking.com/): Take your milk, put it in a bowl, and add some rennet (an animal derivative that contains an enzyme called rennin), which will cause the solids in your milk to clump up into curds. Then drain off the liquid, and serve the solids. Voilà! You're eating breast milk cheese!"

But I'm not lactating anymore, so I can't try it! (Plus, I'd have to find three other nursing mamas to make a worthwhile amount of cheese, apparently.)

Maybe with the next baby? Me and my breastfeeding babe could be so productive! I could make some cheese with my milk, and we could help someone get that baby poop enema they're looking for....

Fat, lovely pigeon.

2005-02-10T20:18:00.000-08:00

I saw a band-tailed pigeon at the park yesterday, flying in a wide circle.

They're big and heavy (compared to regular city pigeons), and the way they fly looks stiff and fake. It's like watching a poorly done computer-generated bird, or one of those model ornithopters that you wind up using a rubber band.

What they lack when viewed from a distance, they make up for at close range, with beautiful, subtle colors that change dramatically as the light changes: blue gray, rusty tan, irridescent. The little bright accents (yellow on the beak and feet, black beak tip, white comma on neck) contrast nicely with the grays and browns. And they have that sweet dove expression on their faces that I love. You can tell I adore these guys.

This website has some marvelously intimate pictures of many different birds, including the band-tailed pigeon up close. Scroll to the bottom to see the aforementioned pretty face and soft colors:

http://www.wrightwoodcalif.com/forum/index.php/topic,491.0.html

I saw my first band-tailed pigeon when I was eight; it was swaying precariously at the top of an elm tree (birding tip: regular pigeons almost never perch on the tops of trees). Band-tailed pigeons love to eat berries and nuts, which is what they're doing in this JJ Audubon print:

http://www.audubongalleries.com/prints/prints.php?cat=birds&subcat=amsterdam&sortfield=&pg=2&itemnr=276597&ordernr=7845

It's one of JJ's best.

Human exudations -- not for the squeamish.

2005-02-10T08:03:00.000-08:00

Oh, dear. Don't even ask how this came up, but....

Did you know that there are people out there who give themselves baby poop enemas?

http://curezone.com/cleanse/enema/#What_is_Fecal_Flora_Replacement

The website confidently asserts:

"You find anyone who has a 3 - 18 months old breastfed baby. You take diapers with fresh feces. Color of feces must be yellow, it must not be green, cause green color of feces indicates lack of good bowel bacteria..... You need fresh feces (not older then 12 hours). You can refrigerate diapers with fresh feces, and use it the next day, but the best is if you can get a hold of fresh diapers."

Okay, let me get this straight. You find ANYONE with the appropriately-aged breastfed baby and TAKE diapers with fresh poop? How does one do that on the sly? If thievery is not an option, how does one ask for those diapers? "Ummm....I need your baby's poop to....oh, never mind, can I have some?"

You can then refrigerate the poopy diaper, if you can't get to that enema right away.

And, if you're not pleased with the results for some reason, keep trying. Optimistically, they encourage you to seek the perfect intestinal flora for your needs: "If it doesn't work with one baby, try to find another one. One will work!"

The process is called "Fecal Colon Flora Replacement" (which sounds like a legitimate medical procedure, right?), and they recommend it for -- well, a lot of things, including Autism Spectrum Disorder.

At the top of the page, behold their gleeful enema logo. It's awesome: a graceful cross between getting an enema and competitive diving....yippie!

Forgive me for this entry, everyone.

It's a constant dance party around here!

2005-02-09T10:41:00.000-08:00

Here's Beanie's favorite tunes for rockin' out:

By Devo: "Jocko Homo", "Jonee Come Back", "Love Without Anger", "Satisfaction", "Worried Man", "We're Through Being Cool", "Whip It", "Girl U Want". If you ask Bean who the worried man is, he'll say, "Daddy!" "Whip It" is about whipping cream, naturally, and "Satisfaction" is about how you can't get something you really, really want. Beanie thinks Devo wants chocolate. Okay....

By Weird Al Yankovic (pronounced "Weird Owl Ankovic"): "Dare to be Stupid", "George of the Jungle", and any of his compilation polkas.

By Jim Croce (pronounced "Jim Croaky"): "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" (we had to explain to Bean why junkyard dogs are mean), "Don't Mess Around with Jim", and "Working at the Carwash Blues". Heaven forbid I try to put on "Operator" or "I Have to Say I Love You in a Song". Too slow. Bean says, "This is not the good song that I like!"

By the Muppets (yes, we do listen to SOME kid's music -- but most kid's stuff isn't thrilling to us or Bean): "Lydia the tattooed Lady", "Mr. Bassman", "Manah Manah".

By the Ramones: "Sheena is a Punk Rocker", "Teenage Lobotomy", "Blitzkreig Bop" (Bean sings, "Hey Ho, let's go, shoot him in the back now" and I invariably cringe. But he loves it so!), "Rockaway Beach", "Cretin Hop", "Judy is a Punk", "Beat on the Brat" (Yikes! But he thinks it's "Beat on the Rat" -- is that better?).

Bubbie likes to tease us about the discrepancy between how carefully we screen what Bean sees on TV versus how carefully we DON'T screen the music we let him listen to. Oh, well. As long as there's not too much cussin', I think most kinds of music are great for him. He sure loves to dance, and it's his main way to get exercise.

Favorite lullabies: "Yellow Bird", "Blue Bird, Singing a Song" (he likes me to change the bird's colors mid-song); "Night and Day", "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" by Cole Porter; "Summertime", "I Loves You, Porgie", "Bess, You is My Woman, Now", "But Not for Me" by Gershwin.

MOST favorite lullaby, sung over and over, slower and quieter all the time: "Lydia the Tattooed Lady". I love the song, but I have to admit, it's starting to make me CRAZY! Don't know the lyrics? Here they are:

http://www.whyaduck.com/info/movies/scenes/lydia.htm

A little off-color, no? But we learned it from Kermit!

Beanie likes to bird!

2005-02-07T22:02:00.000-08:00

Today Beanie and I went birding together at a nearby marsh. I think he had as good a time birding as I did! Maybe an even better time than me, since I carried him until my biceps and shoulders were on fire (note to self: bring stroller next time).

Bean is excited about early spring. He stroked the new leaves and emerging catkins of a weeping willow, and said, "Beautiful and soft." He saw the new green spikes of cattail leaves coming out of the muck, and said, "Look! Look! They're growing! It's spring!" When he says things like that, I just glow with love for my Bean.

He took apart a ratty-looking cattail seedhead from last year, then blew on the fluffy seeds to watch them lift up into the air. I explained to him how the cattail seeds float up higher and higher, some of them probably going over the mountains to dry eastern Washington. Maybe some seeds will find a wet place, a riverside or little pond somewhere in the vast sagebrush flats, and there some new cattails can grow. "And where there are cattails, there are...."

Beanie knows the answer: "Red-winged blackbirds!" Beanie loves to see those guys in the reeds, and he can imitate their song: "ko-ka-REEEEEEEEEE!"

We headed out to a viewing platform over the water, where we stayed for a long time and ate a snack. Beanie and I talked about the "No Fishing" sign posted there, and how it applied to humans, but not to cormorants, kingfishers, or bald eagles.

The last time we were at that spot, we saw a cormorant come up from a dive with a HUGE wriggling fish. Bean was fascinated (and maybe a little troubled -- predation bugs him, sometimes). The cormorant struggled with the fish, beat it against the water, and flipped it around in the air until it was oriented correctly for swallowing (head first, so it slid right down). As the fish went down the bird's gullet, we could still see it bending and wiggling.

Today, we were lucky enough to see a kingfisher catch a fish. He had a totally different fishing style than the cormorant. We watched the little male kingfisher try a few different perches over the water. He looked down in a focused way for a while, but didn't dive. Finally he flew out over the open water, hovered as though suspended (flapping) on a string, plunged into the water with a dramatic splash, then burst out of the water with a minnow in his beak. Beanie pointed and smiled broadly. We talked about how, if the kingfisher becomes a daddy, he'll bring little fish to his babies. (That takes some of the sting out of predation for him, if babies are getting fed.)

The find of the day for me was a bird we heard but never saw: the elusive Virgina Rail. We heard the frog-like castanet clicks coming from two places (two males having a territorial dialogue, probably). We sat quietly for a long time watching the cattail thickets. No luck getting a visual on 'em, though.

I've NEVER seen one, and now I'm officially obsessed, dammit. Here's a website that shows what I'm looking for. You can also hear their weird clicky song:

http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/Infocenter/i2120id.html

He's not much to look at, huh? Birders are crazy.

On a different note, the way Beanie seems to deal with his own meat consumption these days (since no one loves a juicy steak like Bean does -- well, except maybe for M) is to call himself a scavenger instead of a predator. You see, we FIND the meat, much as a vulture or hyena does. Okay, okay -- vultures and hyenas don't get their meat in nice little styrofoam shrink-wrapped packages. But the point is, we don't kill it ourselves. That is obviously ethically superior to predation.

"Mommy used to be a predator," he frowns and says, referring to how I used to go fishing years ago. "Now we're all scavengers," he announces, glowing with pride.

Scavengers ARE cool. Preach it, Beanie. Scavenger pride!

Animal facts I haven't shared with Beanie.

2005-02-05T23:24:00.000-08:00

As I've already made clear, I love odd animals.

But animals with bizarre mating strategies are especially cool! At the following website, I found some creatures with kinky (but evolutionarily advantageous) sexual behaviors:

http://is2.dal.ca/~macleaje/Sperm.html

For instance, this worm goes wild with crazy glue:

"The parasitic acanthosephalan worm Moniliformes dubius cements a female's reproductive opening shut after mating. Further, he male may cement the genitals of other males shut, preventing them from mating (Abele and Gilchrist 1977 cited in Krebs and Davies 1987)."

And these bugs practice -- what else to call it but sado-masochistic homosexual rape?:

"Homosexual copulation also occurs in the hemipteran insect Xylocoris maculipennis. Copulation normally involves the male piercing the female's body wall and injecting sperm. The males sometimes inject sperm into rival males, where they swim to the rival's testes and are inseminated with the next ejaculate (Carayon 1974 cited in Krebs and Davies 1987)."

That's kind of cool, but doesn't it also make you want to scream? Imagine if these creatures were cow-sized, running around, spearing each other. I've read about these bugs before. They can stack; that is, a female is on the bottom, being pierced by a male, who is likewise being pierced by another male, who is getting pierced by yet another -- but the top male's sperm makes it down (via all the other males) to the female. AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

I mean, isn't nature lovely?

........................................................................................................

Finally, for anyone who has ever felt themselves losing their identity in a close relationship, let the disturbing permanent embrace of the angler fish be a lesson to you:

http://www.bu.edu/sjmag/storypages/angler1.htm

"As soon as the male attaches himself to his mate, she begins to slowly absorb him (men, this part may sound familiar). Eventually, his lips grow into the skin of her side, his mouth and eyes disappear, his circulatory system ties itself to hers and he becomes a permanent appendage, dependent on her for food, protection, and a ride. He becomes little more than a reproductive organ, the sex act his only purpose (ladies, I’m sure this part sounds familiar)."

I repeat, AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

I said a blig blog the bliggie to the bliggie.

2005-02-05T17:18:00.000-08:00

The rock it to the blog blog bloggie say up jumped the bloggie to the rhythm of the bloggie, the beat.

The blog of my lovely wife, Eemie:

http://apikoreseemie.blogspot.com/

The blog of my beloved friend, Rob:

http://ktulurises.blogspot.com/

The blog of my half-brother, Chris:

http://www.absolutewisdom.blogspot.com/

The blog of my half-brother, Luke:

http://benevolism.blogspot.com/

My husband, M, will not make a blog. Nope. But I adore him, anyway.

Ptooey! Don't eat these frogs and birds.

2005-02-05T01:52:00.000-08:00

M, Beanie, and I had a funny discussion tonight before bed about venomous creatures.

Beanie mentioned the poison arrow frog, so dangerous that merely touching one might kill a predator. We talked about how the frogs' bright colors are like a sign that reads "back off"!

Somewhere in the conversation, M asserted that there are no venomous birds. At first, I agreed, but then I felt something tickling my memory....a bird with a funny name....

Thank goodness for the Internets. Or the Webernet. Interwebs?

Anyway, I found the aptly-named Pitohui bird (yes, pronounced "ptooey"!) right away. Pitohuis' feathers and skin were found to be venomous as recently as 1987 by a hapless scientist in New Guinea (one Jack Dumbacher -- is somebody making ALL these names up?) who caught a struggling bird in a net, then put his finger in his mouth. (Don't know why he did that, but okay.) Mr. Dumbacher's tongue and lips went numb. First, he freaked out, then he realized he was onto something:

http://www.interaktv.com/articles/pitohui.htm

The article mentions a couple of weird overlaps between the pitohui and the poison dart frog:

"The poison of the pitohui was identified, and it turned out that the poison is a very special one, and had only been seen once before -- in dart poison frogs of the genus _Phyllobates_ in the family Dendrobatidae. The specific toxin isolated from the birds is homobatrachotoxin, a steroidal alkaloid, and is chemically identical to the homobatrachotoxin produced by _Phyllobates_."

Also: "Pitohuis and dart poison frogs are also somewhat similar in coloration. All three species of pitohui have red and black plumage - warning colors used by _Phyllobates_. Also, like the frogs, the less poisonous Brown Pitohui is the least strikingly colored being mostly brown, and the more toxic Hooded Pitohui is the most strikingly colored."

Here's a look at the hooded pitohui. He's like a construction zone sign:

http://www.curator.org/LegacyVMNH/WebOfLife/Kingdom/P_Chordata/ClassReptilia/O_Archosauria/SubOAves/pitohui.htm

"Bird at Work" or "Keep Back 50 Feet".

Nobody seems to know how these birds acquire or survive their own poison. Incredible.

On a totally unrelated note (to this post, anyway), the record for the largest eyeballs of all time goes to a specimen of giant squid that washed ashore in Newfoundland in 1978. Twenty frickin' inches in diameter! I dare you to find a yardstick and envision those terrible, wonderful eyes!

And here are some animals that are just plain fake, but look damn cool:

http://www.worth1000.com/cache/gallery/contestcache.asp?contest_id=3695

They induce gales of Beanie laughter! Hooray!

Big Bird, full of longing.

2005-02-04T13:00:00.000-08:00

"You should get this for your son," said the little girl. I'd zoned out for a moment at the thrift store, bouncing Beanie (then about five months old) to the contemporary Christian music. His head bobbed up and down as he peered out of the sling.

"Huh? Uh, yeah, sure..." I said, taking the wind-up musical Big Bird from the girl, who smiled broadly. What else could I do? She handed it to me with such authority. "Thanks!"

I wound it up and played the music. I didn't know the tune, but it was hauntingly pretty, and the quality of the sound was less electronic and whiny than most little musical toys I'd found. And Big Bird played peek-a-boo (stiffly). Rock!

When our then-roomate's mom identified the tune, she expressed surprise. "Why, that's 'Yellow Bird' by Harry Belafonte! I haven't heard that song in years. What a strange, sad song for a kid's toy to play."

The singer wants to fly away as that unidentified yellow bird can. Here are the lyrics, as Chris Isaac sings them:

http://pgoh.free.fr/yellow_bird.html

But the original Harry Belafonte version, is, of course, also great.

One of the motivatations to go birding is to experience flight vicariously. I feel this especially when watching the powerful wingbeats of raptors, or the enthused bouncing joy of a flock of flying chickadees....and maybe not so much while watching, say, diving ducks, who can barely get enough lift to fly at all. Diving ducks fly like I run on a treadmill: flapflapflapflapflap. They look frantic and tired. So, no vicarious diving duck flights for me.

If you want to grok bird fascination and the desire to fly, "Birdy" by William Wharton is a great book about a boy trying to become a bird:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679734120/002-7480526-0177615

He eventually succeeds, after a fashion, but at great mental cost.

The movie based on the book is not as marvelous. It lacks the more spiritual elements of the book, and misses a lot of the bird biology (how do you put more than a little ornithology in a movie?), and is...grrrr...set during the wrong war, which presents some problems. Young Nick Cage and Matthew Modine are both kind of cute, though.

However, if you look at the film without comparing it constantly to the book, it's not bad. Cinema has its limitations; you can't have the main character narrating the whole time in order to know what's going on. Well, you SHOULDN'T have the main character narrating too much. (Witness the non-director's cut of "Bladerunner". Ugh.)

At any rate, "Birdy" has a damn cool soundtrack by Peter Gabriel.

To sum up (I must go change a poopy diaper), here's why my blog is entitled "Yellow Blog", though it is, in fact, green:

Big Bird wants to fly, sometimes. Me, too! Me, too!

Animal obsessions.

2005-02-03T22:23:00.000-08:00

I've always enjoyed the animal world, but my almost-three-year-old Beanie ADORES animals, especially weird ones. Since I'm always seeking out animal library books for him (and looking for stuff on the web), I've learned about so many interesting critters. Here's what I am now grateful for knowing.

Owl monkeys rock. These nocturnal primates are some of the most charming, beautiful animals on Earth, and before my son drew them to my attention, I had no idea they existed. Now I'm slightly obsessed with them. Behold:

http://www.primatesofpanama.org/projects/prsp/photoalbum/nightmonkeyindex.htm:

Tarsiers also make my Beanie giggle. They're not officially monkeys; they're more primitive primates. I think they look elfin, like Brian Froud creations with huge eyes and ridiculous long tufted tails:

http://www.hedweb.com/animimag/tarsier.htm

They're smaller than you might think. Here you can see a fellow holding three of them:

http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/3712/tarsier.html

So those are the favored big-eyed primates, these days. On to fish....

Consider the cookie cutter shark, who won't win a beauty contest, but gets major panache points for biting perfectly circular chunks out of anything that moves (whales, other sharks, even submarines!):

http://www.austmus.gov.au/fishes/fishfacts/fish/ibrasil.htm

In the bottom two pictures here, you can see the nice round bites these guys took out of a goblin shark (another completely bizarre animal). It looks like some Betty Crocker fiend with a circular cookie cutter went insane:

http://www.austmus.gov.au/fishes/fishfacts/fish/mowstoni.htm

And here, cookie cutter sharks had a go at underwater cables that are difficult to cut with a sharp knife, puzzling the hell out of the cable maintenance guy:

http://users2.ev1.net/~rickubis/cookie.html

(Beanie and others in our household pretend our index fingers are cookie cutter sharks. We pretend to take big chomps out of random objects and each other. Finger cookie cutter sharks are also useful for tickling.)

Finally, there's opthalmosaurus, an extinct marine reptile. Like the little primate friends mentioned above, these guys had GIANT EYES:

http://www.thefernleaf.com/Merchant2/Karen_Carr/fern_opthalmosaurus.shtml

He's not a dinosaur, contrary to what I'd thought before my small-boy-induced crash course in dinosaurs. Did you know that the marine reptiles (think plesiosaurs) and flying reptiles (think pterodactyls) who were contemporaries of dinosaurs are not considered true dinosaurs? They're considered reptiles, like turtles, crocodilians, snakes, and lizards.

Birds, on the other hand, are dinosaurs. Go figure.