A lovely little animation about a kiwi. (via mefi)
I wrote a big long self-indulgent thing, and I was going to post it here, but then the internet went away for a little while, and now I’m not so jazzed on posting it. It’s just too long and rambly. It’s not bad, just unstructured. Sometimes that’s acceptable, but this one… not so much.
So basically I’m telling you I wrote something for you, and then didn’t let you read it.
You’re welcome. 
I’m world-weary. I want to sit on a porch in the woods and drink maybe too much scotch. Drift off to sleep to the sounds of the night creatures, the gentle breeze in the trees. Dare I even wish to be with somebody at that moment, somebody next to me on the porch swing, sharing an oversized sleeping bag, coiled and warm.
We’d read some poetry to each other at the rate of one word an hour, and tell stories about being embarrassed or overjoyed as a child. There’d be a fire in a fire place. Creaking floorboards, full of mystery. Sink delivers collected rainwater.
It would all come to an end when… Well, maybe it wouldn’t.
Kinda got off track. I’m just weary. I need to travel. This isn’t optional. I didn’t make it out to Idaho like I said I would; the rain was all the way across eastern Washington at the time. I’m a little stir crazy in the rain. Rain crazy.
I liked the rain when I first got here. I liked overcast days when I lived in Houston. How about overcast months, though? Overcast seasons?
I’m compelled by a desire to be around people and another desire to be completely alone. It’s often hard to rectify these two desires, as anyone might imagine. I blame the weather, but it’s just a convenient scapegoat. I’m stuck when it’s sunny, too.
If someone wants to drop ~$500 on a birthday/Xmas gift for me, you could do worse than one of these. (Click on ‘front view.’)
(I’ts a Victorian-looking wood-and-brass 6×12-format pinhole camera. I’m probably going to get myself the 6×9 version, which is considerably cheaper. This decision comes after looking at this flickr set.)
I’d like to think that all my readers are already engaged enough to read BLDGBLOG obsessively, but for those of you who aren’t, and those of you who happen to be geologists and geophysicists (more of my readership that one would think): BLDGBLOG covers Auditory Seismology, a web site that takes seismic data, speeds it up 2000 times, and then turns it into sound that you can play over your computer. You can even compare the sounds of earthquakes being diffused by the whole globe with point-and-click ease.
Yes, it’s time for another game of: Place-Name Or Genital Slang?
Today’s contexutally-ambiguous word:
Nooksack.
Is it a place name? Or is it a slang word for genitalia?
Update: Town name, Indian tribe (and casino), River, but not genital slang.
(I’m amused that the map of the watershed of the Nooksack on that ‘river’ link has a straight line on the top. USGS apparently thinks that Canadian water won’t flow into US streams.)
Yet another movie to seek out: Manufactured Landscapes. It’s about a photgrapher named Edward Burtynsky, whose work deals with the infrastructure of the global economy. For instance: A series on Chinese workers, a series on tailing piles, a series on recycled materials… And my favorite, the ship recycling beaches of Chittagong. (To see them, go here, click on ‘ships,’ and then click on ‘shipbreaking.’ I really hate web sites where you can’t link just to one thing.) As an added bonus, if you look at Chittagong on GoogleEarth, and follow the coastline, you’ll find the beached ships, in various states of decomposition.
You really do want to buy a book or CD, don’t you?
OK, so the idea of the writing assignment thing is that you take three things and put them in a story, hopefully as quickly as possible. Maybe call it ‘lightning round.’
But I have to admit that ‘ghost, rain, love song’ got me involved in a story that’s not a lighting round kind of thing. I have to actually research it and stuff.
And that’s good, too. I’m going to post what I’ve got at this point, however, because I don’t know if I’ll really get back to it. The love song would be a mating ritual between two bears, one of them a ‘ghost bear,’ or ‘spirit bear,’ a semi-rare recessive trait among black bears which causes some of them to be white. They’re not albino, they just have different coloring. Some pictures of spirit bears.
Both stories from the assignment so far have been set in the Pacific Northwest, and I think that’s because I’ve been reading ‘The Good Rain’ by Timothy Egan. It’s a very vivid set of personal essays having to do with the past and future of the region. So I’m thinking in those terms. Egan rocks, and everyone should read whatever he writes. Go now and buy some of his books (only a penny used!). And then come back and read this:
In the rain forest, the sun never fully rises, and the morning dew never goes away.
Sitting in a tiny shack built under a giant spruce. The spruce is actually wider than the shack. If the tree were hollowed out, I could live comfortably inside it.
Raincatcher. At the moment it’s made of leaves, arranged such that the rain trickles down into a pail. At first, the sputtering rainwater would clang on the bottom of the pail, sending a signal to the whole forest. Now it’s just a patter, and by early evening, the pail will be overflowing.
Dunk in the ladle, take a drink. Cool. Faint flavor of… Well, something. Something fresh. No idea. Cedar chips?
The rocks on the path are varnished with moist. Rivulets of runoff. Water pouring down the sides of the spruce.
Only tall enough to squat underneath, the roof of the shack wasn’t worth patching; I’d brought a plastic tarp just for it. Draped over the structure, covered with downed branches to deaden the sounds. Rain on a tarp can drive a man crazy.
Rain on a tarp can alert the bears, too. She smells me already, no doubt, and she’ll smell the energy bars I’ll eat, chosen because they require no preparation. She’ll take her cubs to the river anyway, though. In this area, the bears don’t know enough about people to care. At least, that’s my hope.
The river is about 200 feet away, down the hillside, in the bottom of a wide ravine. The salmon are running up it, so thick I can see their writhing mass from here.
Checking the tripod: It’s locked down, spikes digging into the slowly-rotting floor of the shack. Giant mammoth lens on the camera. Cover with another sheet of plastic. No bears yet.
I lay back on the bedding I’ve brought. Heave a sigh. This is the second day. I’ll run out of supplies soon, and that’ll be that.
I just want to point out something that maybe not so many would like to hear, which is maybe why not so many people will say it:
Ralph Nader finally won in 2006.
We’re about to begin Congressional investigations into the ties between Republicans (and Democrats, too) and big business. Corruption and the corporate takeover of American politics will be the agenda and the news story for the next two years at least. Investating Iraq alone will reveal so many ties that most Americans might reject them as science fiction.
Back in 2000, explaining why he wasn’t handing his momentum over to Gore as crunch time drew near, Ralph Nader explained that it had to get worse before it got better. And though it’s not easy to say it, he was right.
