So, when Barack Obama says he will put some lipstick on my pig, I am, like, Are you calling me a pig? If so, thanks! Pigs are the most non-Élite of all barnyard animals. And also, if you put lipstick on my pig, do you know what the difference will be between that pig and a pit bull? I’ll tell you: a pit bull can easily kill a pig.
The buck fence is gone
“You know, Moisés, how much has really changed in Manhattan in the last 10 years?”
Moisés Kaufman goes back to Laramie, ten years after.
Mixing the bowspirit with the rudder
Well, the team-building exercise part of the trip didn’t turn out to be much, but my director’s unit from the office (software engineering, QA, documentation, and network operations) spent an enjoyable sail on Chesapeake Bay on the Woodwind II out of Annapolis—at least most of us had a good time.
The Woodwind II is a schooner, fitted with two masts and four sails: aft to fore, mainsail, staysail, fisherman’s, and jib. According to lore, the fisherman’s sail evolved from the practice of hanging fishing nets in the area above the staysail on the mainmast and aft of the jib sail at the bow: sailors found that the nets caught some extra wind, and so this space was filled with another sail.
The idea of the team-building exercise was that we would split into four teams, two on yards controlling sails, one at the helm, and one navigating. Captain Duncan and his crew would teach each team the elements of the station, and then the teams would rotate around and we would teach each other. This didn’t work out so well in practice, but it did mean that most of us got a turn at the wheel as well as duty pulling rope. The crew were very good-natured about leading a group of clumsy office workers through the necessary tasks, along with fetching blown-away hats. And it probably didn’t hurt that one of us was an experienced sailor (Jody); there was lots of time on this 4-1/2 tour to kick back and swap stories. Captain Duncan kept up a good patter of historical lore (how Bloody Point got its name, for instance), bad jokes, and “tips” like “a stationary object [like a bridge piling] always has the right of way.”
We sailed as far south as Bloody Point light (at left), which marks the shoals at the southern tip of Kent Island, up and down the South River, then a turn at Thomas Point light (at right) and back into port. On my turn at the wheel, I was beginning to get the feel of steering to trim as opposed to steering to course (or to a landmark) as we moved up the South River. I think it was when we crossed a stretch where a scattering of crab pots were set that crew member Rachel took over for me.
Electrons and positrons
Downtown, the big-ticket Shakespeare Theatre Company is performing Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with a all-male cast (à la Elizabethan performance practices) while on the Hill, Taffety Punk has just opened a production with an all-female cast. Do the people running the Large Hadron Collider know about this?
Loss of pressure
A recent paper by Erin F. Baerwald et al. as summarized in Science Daily, suggests the cause of many bat fatalities near wind turbines: rather than direct collisions with turbine blades, bats die from barotrauma, internal injuries caused by sudden changes in air pressure. Unfortunately, the researchers don’t have ready suggestions to mitigate the pressure changes and hence reduce the kills.
Invaders from Europe, invaders from Asia
Recent publications by Steven D. Gaines and Dov Sax challenge the conventional wisdom that invasive, exotic species inevitably lead to extinctions and loss of biodiversity, as reported by Carl Zimmer.
Once again, from Dalkey Archive Press
For Powell’s, Deb Olin Unferth interviews Stanley Crawford on the occasion of the reissue of his novel Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine.
Unferth: Where did the name Unguentine come from?
Crawford: A fairly typical experience for me upon hearing or seeing a somewhat striking name in print is to repeat it silently in a sort of involuntary way, to the point often of annoyance. Unguentine was probably one of those names. I didn’t realize or remember until much later that it was also a brand name.
I wrote up some notes on the book in 2003.
Smetnicate all forms of antrifact
Rob Slade takes up Henry’s argument from The Real Thing in a post about the semantic drift of terminology in the field of computing security. Along the way he makes a great analogy:
… language is kind of like a giant Wikipedia, where anyone at all can make an entry. And anyone at all can try and modify that entry.
International Rock-Flipping Day 2008: 4
A few stragglers:
- Let’s Paint Nature (Illinois, USA)
- Sleeping in the Heartland (Midwestern U.S.)
- Three Oaks (Ohio, USA)
Yes we can’t
Via The Morning News: Matthew Guerrieri stumps for some presidential candidates whose campaigns never got much traction this time around.
On the trail: 1
There’s a stretch of the W&OD near my office that I walk about once a week: it rises on an fenced embankment to meet a bridge that crosses Broad Run, so the fence posts are the high ground favored by Indigo Buntings in season. And it also crosses a power line cut and some ground that’s been cleared for development. I’ve seen Wild Turkey down there a couple of times. Anyway, on this evening’s walk, I saw a bird that we don’t seem to see (or notice?) much any more: flying in to perch on a pokeweed stalk replete with berries, a solitary Cedar Waxwing.
International Rock-Flipping Day 2008: 3
More linky goodness:
- osage + orange (Illinois, USA)
- Rock Paper Lizard (British Columbia, Canada)
- The Crafty H (Virginia, USA)
- Chicken Spaghetti (Connecticut, USA)
- A Passion for Nature (New York, USA)
- The Dog Geek (Virginia, USA)
- Blue Ridge blog (North Carolina, USA)
- Bug Girl’s Blog (Michigan, USA)
- chatoyance (Austin, Texas)
- Riverside Rambles (Missouri, USA)
- Pines Above Snow(Maryland, USA)
- Beth’s stories (Maine, USA)
- Wanderin’ Weeta (British Columbia, Canada)
- Fate, Felicity, or Fluke (Oregon, USA)
- The Northwest Nature Nut (Oregon, USA)
- Roundrock Journal (Missouri, USA)
- The New Dharma Bums (California, USA)
- The Marvelous in Nature (Ontario, Canada)
- Via Negativa (Pennsylvania, USA)
- Mrs. Gray’s class, Beatty-Warren Middle School (Pennsylvania, USA)
- Cicero Sings (British Columbia, Canada)
- Pocahontas County Fare (West Virginia, USA)
International Rock-Flipping Day 2008: 2
Sharin’ the link love, with reports from:
- Pohanginapete (Aotearoa/New Zealand)
- Blaugustine (London, England)
- Nature Remains (Ohio, USA)
- Pensacola Daily Photo (Florida, USA)
- KatDoc’s World (Ohio, USA)
- Notes from the Cloud Messenger (Ontario, Canada)
- Brittle Road (Texas [?])
- Sherry Chandler (Kentucky, USA)
International Rock-Flipping Day 2008: 1
It’s IRFD today!
I warmed up with a quick look in my back yard. Under the cinder block that holds the back gate closed (long-deferred project) I found an earthworm (order Haplotaxida) and what I take to be a ground cricket (order Orthoptera). I didn’t even see the cricket until I downloaded the photo: I was watching something smaller in the field that doesn’t come out in the image.
I then moved down to the patch where I usually census for the Great Backyard Bird Count, a stretch of The Glade upstream from Twin Branches Road. The vegetation along the stream bank was still flattened by the runoff from storm Hanna, which passed through yesterday.
I found fewer flippable rocks in this area than I expected, so I fudged a little and looked under some logs as well. Hence this nice example of a slug. Land slugs that breathe air get their own order, Pulmonata.
On the way back to the car, my last flip turned up some tiny pale worker termites, order Isoptera. If we count the pillbugs that I didn’t photograph, then my tally for the day is five orders.
What are you doing?
Clive Thompson on Twitter, Facebook’s News feed, and the rise of online “ambient awareness.”
On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog!