durham

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The city has a new skatepark in the year since I was here last.
It's like small scale Robert Smithson, but much better because it is rideable.

Year of the....

On this Chinese New Year of the Tiger, any number could be found, northside and southside of the city.



















Here is one spotted during the parade in Chinatown this Sunday...























And this one in the living room.



I enhance them via Photoshop because that is the thing about tigers: You never know where one might be hiding - they camouflage and sneak.

For example, this tiger, that I'm sure you've all seen on the internets, where they hide in the grass.

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strike!

This was the big and foreboding question posed in the commentary column of a recent edition of my local paper, the Chicago Shimpo.* ( I love you Shimpo).

If Kelly Kulick and her historic victory this week have anything to say, it is a live and kicking! (and striking).


*Yes, there are other locals, like the Tribune or Sun-Times, but let's be honest, they are bad. Expect more posts on some recent reportage from it...

~ zurichness ~

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Following the trend of catching up, this is another post of events some 2 months past.

This brings us time-traveling to late mid-November, location: Zürich, Switzerland. Walking down Geroldstrasse you come across a strange dispenser on a post. It is nothing other than a bag for dog poo, with handy non-lingual visuals to guide you through the process of using the bag as a glove, and picking up after a pooch (and such a cute spotted one at that).

This is a nice resource for the people walking their dogs, but then I suppose even for the good Samaritan as well? I once read The Ecology of Stray Dogs by Alan Beck, a 70's urban ecology classic. He estimated an ungodly amount of dog waste that Baltimore absorbs into the grass and concrete every year. Shudder to think; better still, read about it! The photos of the dogs in the book are quite charming and the whole book is now available for free as a PDF online.






Walking down the road further still, past the crazy Freitag shop, and you come to Heils-Armee Brocki, a very nice Salvation Army Thrift shop if I ever saw one (go here to let the tidal wave of salvation music flow over you). Xa - the reason for which I was even in the city - had received advanced intel on this spot, and it did not disappoint. She bought two pairs of boots, and I picked up the two lovely, used items:

A set of pick-up sticks. One of my favorite games of all time, this set clearly got soe good use. An "H. Huber" appears to have been the owner according to the marker on the flap. The masking tape the flap must be over 10 years old, but still is sticky like new (those Swiss do not compromise on product excellence). I an happy to report the sticks have good action and are highly playable.









Another find was this copy of "Hobby" magazine circa 1954, completely in German, so I have no idea what it says, but I don't really have to. The pictures tell it all - specs and stories on hypersonic jets, car manufactury, blueprints of high speed underwater cameras, adventure narratives about tree houses, and LP player innovations, all inflected with a healthy dose of science fiction - everything for the young boy and the boy within most grown men. It is complete eye candy from a graphic design point of view in a way that can only be understood in seeing it, and perhaps first hand, in its loose, smooth and floppy magazine pages. The best couple franks spent


small richness of zürichness /

"a recalcitrant status quo"

"America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing to prevent us from paying adequate wages to school teachers, social workers and other servants of the public to insure that we have the best available personnel in these positions which are charged with the responsibility of guiding our future generations. There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer. There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum-and livable-income for every American family. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from remolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood."

The Living in a World House essay

to be found in
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galactic scone

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When staring down at the plate and the incidental sugar that sprinkled off breakfast is like looking up at the sky.

I don't even know the last time I was somewhere dark enough to see the Milky Way otherwise (perhaps Oregon 2007?)
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Ape Ogling

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Oh, how time evaporates...

Time Machine - the following post dateline November 8, 2009:

A bike ride that looped through the Lincoln Park Zoo was a nice opportunity to observe some apes. As not only on of the oldest, but also one of the still free zoos in the country, it is worth reflecting on our (albeit highly problematic) access to animal life as city dwellers.

N. and I took a stroll through the cat house, where we saw some very odd monsters in the cage, and wielding a hose no less. A couple days later in the Flaxman I came cross Animal Logic by Barnes by chance; the resonances resonated.


Onto the "Primate House" where the gorillas were typically quiet and somewhat withdrawn while the chimpanzees simply lounged. Cashew curled in one nest while her daughter poked at her occasionally, as parent and kids are wont to do.

A PBS show a couple years back watched Cashew with her son exploring a new "habitat enhancement" that had just been introduced to the enclosure. As biologist Elizabeth Lornsdorf talks to Alan Alda:

The individual that just took his tool is Cashew, who's an adult female and her son is next to her, swiping her ketchup from her. So he is not yet really into fishing on his own, he would rather mom do the work and he would rather steal. But notice, she is not offering it to him, she doesn't, you know, really seem to want him to have it, but he's just in a good place to get it from her.

The scene made me think of Alison Ruttan and her primatological body of work. Of course as cousins, the parallels are completely unsurprising to me, but maybe I'm just being anthropomorphic?

I aspire to join the ranks of the other "Great Apes" - chimps, gorillas, bonobos, and such. For now and s a human though, I wonder if its best to settle for " So-So Ape" status, till I get my priorities worked out a little bit more.

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petal to pollen

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the "Christmas cactus" in the bathroom is apparently eager to get a jump on the blooming holidays.

anything at the dollar store

funpops

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It reads:

"thanks for the chill thrill, Mom!"

Fair enough - no doubt it give one the chills!

Price Chopper, Shrewsbury, MA. August 09.

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tenodera

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chinese mantis in tall grass woods.

end of septembering.

















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marathoner

This photo was in the alley, on the left side, as I walked down two days ago. It is one of those photo-postcards that you almost never see anymore, but perhaps was never sent, given it's lack of a stamp.

On the back it says:

"What I looked like before the race."

"Hopkinton, 1980"

From that I realize it must be a image from the start of the Boston Marathon, 26 outside of the city.

The blurriness and peacefulness of everyone in the background, including the cherry tree

The website is very nice, and shows the times of the last-year's winners. "Dire Tune" came in second for the women. I'm sure in Ethiopian that name sounds and seems different than when I read it English. Deer-ay Too-nay. It sound like the name of a French delicacy.

What is so surprising the exactitude with which the men's and women's times are split. The top four finishers for both categories are piled up on each other within one minute of each other, and yet the the genders are split by 23 minutes. What explains this? As I biologist it seems natural for me to think of something physiological, but even that seems a bit fantastical given just how precise this 23 minutes difference is. Looking at other years, the clustering of top finishers is similar, but the split varies - 19 minutes, 25 minutes.

Clearly then I think that the leading racers must truly set the pace for the others. Even still the gender difference persists. What to make of it? perhaps nothing, as it is too much is being made of gender presently in the track and field world....

As for the emotions around such exertions, the competition and scrutiny, I remember the drama of "Heartbreak Hill" always covered by the commentators when I watched it on TV growing up. A map of the course shows an elevation profile; for your knees and mind both, this marathon is a monster thing.

It makes me finally wonder if the fellow in the photo I found had a picture taken at the end of the race, captioned "This is what I looked like after the race." At this point though, I'd rather leave it to the imagination.

lost wings

________I'm preparing for the autumn season of teaching, of cooling air, and of insect collecting. It is a pleasure to go out with students to round up the last of the six-legged's before the season's over and mid-October snaps that frosty door shut on all things invertebrate. It had me rooting through jars and nets and boxes and rearranging my collection kit in my office.

Among other things, I also peeked into an old collection of butterflies and moths I caught early in my graduate school days down in North Kacalaky. A summer's worth of learning the local Lepidoptera there, the collection had been through some hard times, including being knocked down by my cat and chewed on by some other insects.

That said, nothing prepared me for the carnage I came across in the butterfly box, devastated by another brutal round of those beetles that specialize on eating dead insects, and which somehow had found their way into my tightly sealed collection crate once again...

All told, perhaps a third of the collection lay in tatters, the little beetle larvae culprits weaving around below as well as inside the hollowed out carapaces of what were fine swallowtails, lunas, fritillaries. Now I'm in the process of freezing all the remaining specimens for two days in hopes of purging them of whatever eggs lurk inside, ready and waiting to whip through the box again like some wicked hexapod tornado at any possible time.

Meanwhile, I gathered just a few of the wings that lay at the bottom of the box and made a tidy pile of them. Perhaps some butterfly passing by my desk window will take confused notice of the eyespots and colors and wonder what Shiva-like butterfly species lived inside my apartment. If Nijhout had to figure out a "groundplan" for the wing patterns of such a mythic creature he'd had have to been twice as brilliant as he already is, or at least twice as patient.

cleaning consequence #A4Re2 (a wild list)

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A scrap a paper when I was clearly keeping tabs of what animals I saw on a trip to Panama in January of 2007. Marc was the generous host for part of the stay and guide into the jungleness of it all. The mentioned anteater appeared sitting right above our heads on BCI.


bats, anoles, small frogs, termites, ibises, trapjaw ants, army ants, dead tarantula, dead toucan, anteater!, strange mantises & beetles, leeches, black scorpion, coati (poop & tracks), multicolored kingfisher, big damselfly, Atta columbicus, Cephalotes briveps, bullet ants!, capuchin monkeys, agouti, Harpy eagle, dancing cluster daddy-long-legs, Heliconius buterfly, howler monkeys, ant-mimicking spiders, jumping - hopping water bug, morpho butterflies, fishing speiders, tanagers

white, mangled things update

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After the recent Dorami incident a couple other distressed objects came into view of the various stream, experiences of the white and the somewhat broken.

After unloading the dryer two sets of headphones where found in the pocket of some jeans. After 30 minutes of findings some way to untie them, I wondered what I had done that all for. After all, they had been through the washer and the permanent press/high heat cycles of the dryer as well, so they would clearly become yet another piece of useless consumer electronics.

So imagine my pleasant surprise to find that both sets still worked *fine* - eerily perhaps even better (?) than before once plugged in... I guess washing helps everything. Either way I humbly recommend this as a novel, contemporary disetanglement puzzle, the kind that I always seemed to see in Pennsylvanian Dutch stores when I was a kid. This one will appeal to the iPodding generation (especially for any Amish during their rumspringa).

The next morning was a matter of omelettes. That was the plan. I was enthusiastic, perhaps even giddy for breakfast and I pulled the carton out of the refrigerator a little too fast perhaps --fling-- went an egg out of the package and onto the floor.


It looked so perfect there, like the yolk finally had a taste of some freedom. A pity though. A two-egg omelette lacks what a three one can (literally) bring to the table.

It recalls to me another egg posting I'd done years back on the old Paper Boat blog*. That one actually made it into the pan...


* I must be walking down memory lane these days,folks, my apologies

orange addendum

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I found another orange mention while dusting off some of the old electrons from my a previous blog. That post, titled "Orange" is from five years back exactly...good memories of those poppy-colored walls.
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orange is the new green

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In the current eco-frenzy the color of vogue is naturally Green: green, green, green, green , green. blah, blah, blah.

Don't get me wrong, I love green, but here in the temperate region of the globe we sometimes neglect a full appreciation of nature's other colors. While walking up Mount Wachusett the other day I myself was lost in the mosses, the leaves, the lichens in an overall daydream of green when suddenly orange tapped poked me in the side in the form of a milkweed beetle.


Next thing I knew orange appeared at every corner in some novel fashion seriatim: fungus, leaf, newt(!), insect gall, toad, wasp, and then a the very summit of the modest mountain, a goldfish pond could be found, flikcering bits of orange in a deep brown soup...

A quick Google search for the words "orange nature" turns up an nice Flickr site devoted to the theme.

Such sentiments make Andy Goldsworthy smile on the inside, I have no doubt.

Dorami

~ ~ If something didn't break while you were gone, you probably weren't actually away ~ ~

A brief history of the thing:
Dorami - sister to Doraemon, purchased as a cute copyright infringement at a ceramics factory in Xi'an China, spring 1996. First fractured: spring, 1999, North Carolina (knocked off bedstand while reaching for alarm clock). 2nd fracture: summer, 2009, Chicago (whole shelf knocked down by housesitter).
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go ahead, stare at it

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fantasy creatures have hearts (and livers) too

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Japanese monster artists have created a vast menagerie of crazy creatures (or Kaiju 怪獣). the beloved Godzilla being a most notable specimen.

Godzilla/Gojira has always been a bad-ass, with her ability to breath fire, or breath ice, be radioactive, shoot lasers from her eyes, and various other things besides (depending on what model year we are talking). But if she eats some bad shrimp, does she get a stomachache like I do? Does she even have a stomach?

Where fantasy meets the possibility of reality and myth finds embodiment is the place where a monster’s monsterful anatomy might also be imagined, and in detail. Every cause has an effect, as modern science has taught us, so it is only fair that some odd organs should underlie what otherwise would seem to be “super”natural abilities:

Godzilla’s purported ability to move her limbs with the complex grace beyond that of a Shaolin monk or drummer Buddy Rich, for example? Well, according the the anatomy chart here, we can leave that to the two subsidiary nerve ganglia in her that work like two “sub-brains” to process all that muscle control - one for the arms and one for the legs, respectively. What I love about this is that even in such a fiction lies the fact that many insects are built in just such a neurologically distributed way. When it comes to science, perhaps the matters of "fiction" and "non-fiction" are fuzzy at best...

A glimpse at some more Japanese monster anatomy charts can be found here.
Better still, the old-school Leuckhart charts
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