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Here's what we mean when we say "red squirrel" (as opposed to the cute, Euro-style, tufty-eared eeckhoorn, below) in the U.S. This one's clearly a mama, and she held and devoured the pine cone like corn on the cob, but amazingly quickly. She was really fun to watch from the front porch of my little cabin at Signal Mountain Lodge, GTNP.
To my knowledge the only squirrel in the U.S. (and possibly, all of North America) that has significant tufts of fur on its ears is the Kaibab squirrel. I hope some day to visit the north rim of the Grand Canyon again and to get lucky enough to photograph one of these distinct black-furred squirrels.
Click on the image to get a good enlargement of the triptych.
I've had this lovely packet of postcards for many years. The images, dated 1979, are by Dutch nature artist H.J. Slijper. On Google search I'd say he (or she) is underappreciated. There's not even a Wikipedia entry (in English, at least) for this obviously talented painter. Some day I'll look for the translations of the subjects identified in Dutch, though I can speculate that "kraanvogel" are cranes, the blauwborst might translate as bluebreast, and that the image of the squirrel is somehow identified as an acorn... The scientific names are there. Stay tuned, and enjoy these luscious graphics, until I can do my homework, or please feel free to supply some answers if your Dutch is good or you know your British, European, and Eurasian species. Click on the images for an enormous burst of detail on your screen.
Addendum: For interesting updates on this post, see http://veronicawaldsamusingmusings.blogspot.com/2011/02/musings-on-bloggings.html
Did you know there was a very famous designer named Pat Pending who signed his or her name on this great variety of interesting items? Sometimes he/she just signed Pat Pend. Jewelry, electric guitars, golf clubs, cookware, toys, my goodness what an amazingly prolific and widely creative individual!
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
I wasn't a literature major and I don't think I ever took a poetry class. Though I certainly recognize glorious language, I often have to have a poet's allusions, or rhythms for that matter, pointed out to me. I'm just a bit of a lunk in that department (though I have my favorites, like John Donne). But I was taken with the bittersweet cleverness of the following exquisite poem by 17th century American poet Anne Bradstreet. I came across it in a Karen J. Winkler article in The Chronicle Review: A Weekly Magazine of Ideas (April 10, 2009) but the full work is readily accessible on the Web:
I had eight birds hacht in one nest, Four Cocks were there, and Hens the rest, I nurst them up with pain and care, No cost nor labour did I spare Till at the last they felt their wing, Mounted the Trees and learned to sing. Chief of the brood then took his flight To Regions far and left me quite. My mournful chirps I after send Till he return, or I do end.
Anne Bradstreet, from "In Reference to Her Children," 1659
I admit it, I don't instantly understand whether the "Chief of the Brood" refers to her firstborn (son) or to the children's father. (On investigation, I find those knowledgeable about her life say the reference is to her oldest son.) In either case, it appears that all eight chicks survived to fledge, in itself extraordinary in her day. And these are just the first 10 of 94 lines...
This morning while coffee-ing (like breakfasting, minus the bacon and eggs) in front of the TV, I happened mid-movie upon World Traveler on IFC (Independent Film Channel, which often screens films of interest). I paid attention because of the luscious settings in the Rocky Mountains of Montana, Idaho, and Colorado, and because I recognized renowned actors Julianne Moore and Billy Crudup. The premise and script are very slight: a married-with-child, urban, and successful young man ("Cal") from a paternally-deprived childhood suddenly comes down with a terrible case of ennui that can only be cured by upping and leaving on a cross-country journey of self-discovery. What was a little bit rewarding and a little bit subtle in this take on the age-old theme was the curative power of Nature. Cal's semi-estranged father just happens to live in a wonderul log cabin a few hundred yards from the Oregon coast where, at last, our hero's load of emotional baggage is lifted. After the long and winding journey from New York, Cal confronts, then reconciles with his father (played by David Keith, who looks to be at most 10 years older than Crudup; in their first scene together, I thought he was his brother) in this stunning setting. Glad as I am for Character Cal that it took so relatively little to put him on the path to emotional and family health and happiness, I was stricken with a terrible case of Nature-envy of my own. After all, on his way to his father's place, Cal passes roadsigns that point to Big Sky and Bozeman, for me both iconic gateways to the Greater Yellowstone area. And his father's cabin could be any-healing-where: the North Woods of Wisconsin/the Michigan UP (where I've been invited to visit this summer, contributing to my current restlessness), anywhere in Yellowstone or the Tetons, or near the Haystacks on the Oregon coast. But I can only be fully cured by going to Yellowstone. It's been nearly a year. Soon, soon, but not nearly soon enough, I will be there again.
...but when you look. These guys (actually, they look like bison cows, not bull guys) wandered in front of the Web cam at Mammoth Hot Springs this morning and were gone within two one-minute refreshes of the images. It was awfully nice to see them anyway!
Far too many hours of my life are spent staring at Web cams. Some day, when I'm retired (psst! Economy! Pick up fast, will you please?!?), I can spend my time in situ, off my behind in front of my computer and on my feet in front of the land- and wildlife-scapes I love so much. I've mentioned several of my favorite Greater Yellowstone area Web cams before: the Henry's Fork cam with its periodic moose and bird sightings; the Corwin Springs cam pointed from outside Yellowstone National Park at Electric Peak that is within its borders; and the camera in the fire lookout on top of Mt. Washburn in Yellowstone (out of commission at the moment, until the snows melt and technicians can get up up to fix it). Others I keep a sharp eye on include many in the Grand Teton area. The scenery, often dramatic with mountain weather and light, is heart-lifting; the geology-in-the-making around Yellowstone's Old Faithful (the Upper Geyser Basin) is amazing. But the opportunity to observe wildlife, sitting here in Chicago glued to my chair, is the best thrill of all, at least until I can be there in body as well as spirit.The live streaming Old Faithful-Upper Geyser Basin cam, when unattended, is pointed at (drum roll) the Old Faithful geyser scinter cone, ever ready to catch an eruption. Happily, it is occasionally attended by alert operators in Yellowstone and elsewhere in the country, who can zoom, pan and tilt it. Once in a while we get lucky, and wildlife happens by when the cam is attended; David M recently posted a few minutes of a coyote's visit. In the last few days, friends who work at the UGB report a grizzly bear hanging out. Yesterday numbers of people saw it on the live streaming cam (while I was out doing errands, drat!) and one got this still capture. These are the quiet weeks in Yellowstone. The gates have been closed to oversnow vehicles, and deep in the interior, park and concessionaire staff are readying for opening day, when the roads (at least those at lower elevations) open to auto traffic again. My friends who live in the area are champing at the bit for the day when they can again visit the heart of their favorite place on earth, April 17 this year. I, however, love the peace of the in-between season as viewed through the cams. Humans rarely come into view once snow mobile season has ended. So what is the bear doing in this normally heavily touristed site? When grizzlies awaken from their winter snooze, they've very, very hungry. The easiest source of quick high quality nutrition is winter kill, mostly ungulates that didn't make it through the deprivations of the season, perfectly-preserved bear food thanks to persistent subfreezing temperatures. Because of the warmth of the ground and air, and thus the thin snow cover, ungulates such as bison and elk do well to spend the winters in there. In spite of the less harsh conditions in the thermal areas, though, come the end of winter there is still an attractive concentration of carrion. Some creatures just collapse from undernnutrition and exposure, and others slide into a boiling hot spring and cook to death. Counting the days (51) until I can be there again to see for myself.
A friend and colleague, born abroad but raised in this country, is maybe 15 or 20 years younger than I, so his elementary education is out of synch with my own by about that many years. His education, of course, extends beyond - waaayy beyond - grade school. He's an MD, MPH, and MBA, a well educated and smart guy if there ever was one.
I recently enjoyed an online photo album of his and his wife's travels to places like New Zealand, Bora Bora, Vietnam, and China. One of his photos, taken very recently in a Beijing food market, shows a layout of what look to me to be tiny sharks on skewers, fried scorpions, some cricket-looking things (or are they waterbugs, aka, giant cockroaches??) on a stick, and so on. (Honestly, we never saw any such things for sale when we were in China in 1980 or in 1983. This is probably a good thing.) His own caption identifies the items on the tray as "scorpions, grasshoppers, and weebles."
By weebles, I suspect he meant weevils. Now every American who grew up with my cohort has heard of BOLL weevils. I gather my friend's elementary education occurred just long enough after mine that boll weevils had, for reasons unknown, been dropped from the fourth grade American history curriculum. Today I asked a girlfriend, who is just about my age, if she remembers boll weevils. She said, "oh, sure, they were some kind of insect infestation of the cotton crops of the South." That is all I too remember, but neither of us had the slightest idea of why this particular plague was important enough to make the history books (or when it was, or anything about its context). So much for history pedagogy!
I've since Wikipedia-ed it, and refreshed my memory of the evil weevils' story. It turns out that the plague occurred in the 1920s, approaching the Great Depression (could the timing have been worse?) and was a major part of the economic history of the cotton-growing states. Something I could not appreciate at the age of 10. I wonder, though, where the weebles went as far as the enlightenment of fourth-graders a half a generation later is concerned?
ADDENDUM April 4, 2009 It turns out the generational joke is on me. I talked to my friend who I thought was identifying weevils and weebles, and it turns out he was thinking of Weebles, a line of roly-poly toys that came out in the 1970s. Had I been of the roly-poly toy age in 1973, I might have caught on sooner!
Yesterday afternoon the winds picked up and it started to rain and then sleet before I fell asleep around midnight. This morning the sky was awhirl with big, fat, sloppy snow flakes that stuck everywhere and formed a couple of inches of very slick Slurpee-like stuff on the streets. Around 9:30 I had to drop KLK off at the Blue Line so he could get to the airport. Surprise! Every single access to the Loop where he could pop down any number of different rabbit holes to get on the train was blocked for the Shamrock Shuffle (foot race). Doubting that many people would show up in the 0.05° above freezing wet mess that was the Chicago ground, we drove considerably farther north, well out of the Loop, to get him on his way. The farther north we went, the worse the weather got. The trees were completely encased in what looked like white spray-on insulation. It would have been beautiful if driving conditions hadn't been so dangerous and the winds had been a little calmer. Nonetheless, he made it to the airport in time to find out his flight was canceled. He got on a another one an hour later and is now close to landing at his destination. This afternoon, back at home and done with the Sunday crossword, I looked out the front windows over Lake Shore Drive to Lake Michigan and saw beautiful blue skies and all the trees with that indescribable haze of green they get before they truly explode with new spring leaves. The biggest surprise of all is that where the snow has melted (as most of it has), the grass underneath is bright green for the first time since last October! (Note the still white sides of the tree trunks in the photo of Promontory Point. The view below shows Lake Shore Drive and Lake Michigan just slightly to the north of The Point).
Thanks to Youtuber michaelpgoad for posting this antique newsreel about Yellowstone, which he notes is from the "Public domain, Prelinger Collection, Internet Archive." Too bad it's truncated, and not dated. It's nonetheless fascinating to see what familiar 21st century spots looked like when this was made (? 1930s?)
The narration is also full of factual errors and rife with statements so imprecise as to be misleading, plus some downright deathly suggestions, such as "just step in" if you don't believe the thermal features are truly hot!
Notably absent are the now-ubiquitous bison.
Don't forget to turn on your sound.
Photo of Mt. Moran through the trees (Grand Teton National Park) from June 2006.
Youtuber sounds like some kind of potato, doesn't it?
Over the years I've read lots and lots of resumes. And it's true, if you apply to me for a job and your resume is a mess, I won't consider you for the job. A mess is defined as one typo, especially if you're responding to our posting for an editorial assistant position. In order to apply for a job at the university where I work, you have to upload a resume, and possibly a cover letter at an online application site. In addition, you must complete a multi-page, confusing, annoying, and tricky (yes, the data you entered can disappear) electronic application. The e-form has a box in which you are invited to type any additional information you think germane to your candidacy. One hapless applicant for our editorial assistant position (that was in the end felicitously filled) said, "I am a grammer expert."
The this true tale was brought to mind by All Tech Considered/All Things Considered (on NPR) this afternoon, in which the importance of a perfectly spiffy resume and cover letter was mentioned.
Last night I heard Jai Ho (Jai Ho) all the way through. My impression was the same, just firmly bolstered,as it was on the night it won the Oscar for best film score (technically, for “Achievement for Music Written for Motion Pictures”): Either the competition was negligible (I’ve not seen the other movies up for best score) or its win was a gesture toward America’s quest for forgiveness for classifying, and usually treating, faceless South Asians with suspiciously American-sounding names, at the far, f-a-r end of a staticky telephonic line, as annoying dunderheads.
Jai Ho is a sorry piece of music, both for Americans not familiar with first class Indian music, and for lovers of everything great from Bollywood. However, besides America’s sudden crush on all things Indian (but not including those sleepy people whose heavily-accented English we can’t make out, and who can’t get our point, either), there may be another reason it’s apparently so wildly appealing.
Assistant Professor Phil Maymin has, in the careful way empiricists do things, observed and objectively documented a striking relationship between stock market returns and popular music beat variability (“volatility”) over the last 50 years. I hope he will forgive me (since I work at the school where he earned his doctorate, though I have not met him) for quoting verbatim the abstract of his paper, Music and the Market: Song and Market Volatility:
“I compare the annual average beat variance of the songs in the US Billboard Top 100 since its inception in 1958 through 2007 to the standard deviation of returns of the S&P 500 for the same year and find that they are significantly negatively correlated. With the recent high stock volatility, people should now prefer less volatile music. Furthermore, the beat variance appears able to predict future market volatility, producing 2.5 volatility points of profit per year on average.”
So in other words, our market has been so treacherously volatile for months now that it seems we need to be stultified by an unchanging beat. By my unscientific analysis, that would pretty much characterize Jai Ho from beginning to end.
Maymin’s article appears as a working paper on SSRN (Social Science Research Network)’s page.
May I take this opportunity to recommend a charming, sweet, and infinitely more successful effort at humanizing the folks working the customer service departments and technical help lines? KLK and I both greatly enjoyed the movie Outsourced.Oh, and it’s so funny. Just thinking about it makes me laugh.
The image is from a pamphlet prepared to celebrate Kruti Patel's bharatanatyam arangetram, or classical Indian dance debut, in 1998. Kruti's mom and I became good friends and devoted colleagues years ago, when we worked together at the Clinical Research Center of the University of Chicago.
Not only did I at long last catch a good view of "my" moose, here is what I, and several of my friends experienced with such things, think is a bald eagle. Too bad I can't just sit at my computer all day waiting for wildlife to wander into view half way across the country...
Left click on the photos to enlarge them for a good look. That dot on the distant shore is a moose. I watched it moving around for 10 or 15 minutes. Now if it would just come to the near shore...
And here's a two-fer!
Check it out for yourself, you never know what you might see on the Henry's Fork Web cam. I will be on my way there in just 6 weeks!!
While taking a break this afternoon from a big pile o’ homework for a course I’m taking, I watched about an hour of the Travel Channel’s “Wild China” series. It’s the first of its kind that I’ve seen, that is, the first about not just wilderness and wildlife, but man’s effect on it, around the entire country; it stands to serve the Chinese tourist industry very well, given the panoply of opportunities it suggests for nature lovers. It’s also lusciously filmed and Britishly narrated.
What I thought was interesting in the segment on the area of Guangzi Province around Guilin and the famous Li River was the narrator’s statement that the Li is one of the cleanest rivers in China. Here’s what I said about it on a lazy 1980 boat ride down the Li:
The water of the Li River is famous for being clean and clear. It was certainly clear, as to its cleanliness, considering the amount of spit, candy wrappers, peanut shells, and cardboard boxes (from somewhere behind the kitchen) that our small boat alone contributed, not to mention the questionable disposal from the toilets, I’m not so sure.
And here’s what the Chinese said about it at the time in a little folder we were given: "Like a dark green ribbon, the Li River meanders zigzag southward. Along the river, there are numerous weirdly shaped hills on the banks. An 83-km journey by boat from Kwelin down the Li River to Yangshuo is just like a scene embroidered with mountains and water on silk brocade. All along the river, there are countless breathtaking scenic spots which one can hardly find time to take in."
I went on to describe it in my own words: This is surely an understatement. The karsts, hills, mountains, sheer cliffs, and pinnacles seem to go on endlessly in all directions. They reminded us of Zion National Park in sheerness, of Puerto Rico and St. Lucia in lushness. Near the end of the trip the banks are lined with tall, waving strands of bamboo, and the upright forms, ending in curving tips echoed perfectly the shape of karsts in the background. The sky was cloudless, burning hot blue. We sat and stared at the natural beauty but also there was a lot of human life, both along the river banks and in the water itself. We saw innumerable powered junks traveling upstream to Gwelin, loaded with produce...
The boats passed extremely close to our own in places, as the channels which are deep enough to navigate are often very narrow, and even so we frequently heard our boat scraping rocks under our feet. On board we could observe the crews, which were probably a whole family, with young and old, men and women punting, doctoring the sputtering motors, tending boiling contents of a pot or wok on a smoky coal stove. On some boats, toddlers stared amazed as we passed. In many boats we saw dogs. Xiao Wang [one of our escorts] agreed with my suggestion, that perhaps the dog’s duty is to guard the boat, which is perhaps these peoples’ home. The alternative is that the family is planning to eat the dog. But it would be extravagant to feed a carnivore just to eat it when it could be more useful otherwise employed.
We passed some villages on the river banks where we could see women washing their laundry in the river. There was evidence of small fishing industry in these villages, as we could see the nets hanging out to dry and large weirs made of bamboo or reed on the shores. In one spot we saw the small bamboo punts with fishermen and their trained cormorants diving into the water and flying back to their masters to disgorge their catch. We saw only very few of these, and we saw no wild birds of any sort fishing. In fact, I only saw sardine-sized fish in the water, so I’m not sure how important this industry actually is beyond subsistence. All along the river we saw herds of water buffalo, often with several calves.
Can you imagine how much pollution those smoky motorized vessels with their people and dogs (and slop buckets), the water buffalo along the shores, and people washing (?) their clothes, added to the clean River Li?Note that in the photo (taken in Guilin, same 1980 visit), people are rinsing soil fertilized with dung off the roots and bulbs of their produce in the Li.
Here's what we mean when we say "red squirrel" (as opposed to the cute, Euro-style, tufty-eared eeckhoorn, below) in the U.S. This one's clearly a mama, and she held and devoured the pine cone like corn on the cob, but amazingly quickly. She was really fun to watch from the front porch of my little cabin at Signal Mountain Lodge, GTNP.
