I freaking love this man...

"You know, limitations are not necessarily bad. They actually inspire creation."

"So one day I sat down here and I says this is where I want to build a house. I had absolutely no idea of what I was going to do. And I looked up there and I says oh there's the sky, there's the trees, I want that point of reference to be the beginning of the house. So I thought okay I want this curve, 'cause orientation and everything is perfect, and so then in one second that's established. Then I get up and I look up here and I says oh, I don't want that ceiling to be that high and coming this way, so I say lets bring it down to human scale, then I turn around and I say oh I want to look uphill. Twenty seconds the whole house was designed."

Many people have little idea of how actually medieval that way is, in the best and truest sense of the word. During the Era of the Collapsing Cathedrals (a truly apocalyptic time) the process was live and learn as we go. That's how the cathedrals and churches were designed and built. The actual finish of the process is quite open to any number of executions. But they started with a root measurement, which started with someone standing somewhere and saying I want this to go here, and I'll make the reference of this particular viewpoint the standard for my own private form of measurement.

This is totally accessible to anyone today to do. The medieval period wasn't some special secret code that was lost to history. Just watch the series Secrets of the Castle to find that out. They rebuilt from foundations an old castle in France using only the methods and means of the old day and age. And people are like "NOOOO is it even possible for anyone in our modernist age to restore Notre Dame Cathedral or build something like Notre Dame Cathedral NOOOOO!!!" LOL

Hello

Hello

You have got to be kidding me

Stone

Stone bends - huh, imagine that.






Oh, you can't tooth it out like that say the experts - LOL.

Question

Am I a horrible person for loving so much to watch trained minks get all the rats?






What dexterous, diligent, obedient, powerful little creatures; taking care of business and working overtime. Heart minks so much.






And what a nifty little team they make with the dogs.





Here's all dogs bred for catching and killing rats. Twenty nine minutes of non-stop epic rat massacre. What good little dogs.

Ulmo

This last-named work, which translates as "Broad Waters," is actually a set of five pieces, and is a departure for the composer in that it consists of arrangements of existing folk melodies. Górecki had long been interested in the traditional folk and religious music of his native Poland, but he did not begin integrating these materials into his own music until Old Polish Music, Op. 24, from 1969.

Szeroka woda takes its melodies and texts from a pair of illustrated story books for children. All the texts have some connection, more or less direct, to water -- particularly the first, second, and fifth songs, which evoke the Narew and Vistula rivers. The settings are simple and unaffected. The harmonies flow naturally without being traditional. Górecki creates textures that match the texts and are gratifying to sing. In short, these are wonderful little pieces, and they launched a whole series of choral settings that Górecki composed over the next several years, many of which have yet to be published. --James Harley at AllMusic

Ulmo and Tuor by zdrava. More of his Tolkien-inspired work found here at Deviant Art

Feel the Burn

Just Because

Tasselled wobbegong shark swallowing brown-banded bamboo shark.

Water, water, everywhere

Hat Tip: Catawissa Gazeteer

Weak Spot

"It was like hitting a bag of thawed hamburger. It was just this tremendous resounding splat." --Wes Werbowy on what it was like punching a polar bear's nose.

If anyone feels so inspired by the above story, leave your poem in the combox. If not, that's perfectly fine.

H/T: Spirit Daily

The Wrong End of Mystery

Scientists Baffled by Amazon Mystery

Some new archeological discovery always "baffles" the "world's scientists", as though they would have a clear handle on everything all of the time and both ways, into the past as well as our future.

It's like a false humility. Well of course you're baffled, dim wits, because no one can see eighteen hundred years into the past. Not everything is some code purposefully presented to our minds as a way of proving our perfect immensity. The codedness of mystery is an accidental; but mystery is the purposeful foundation of all of our inquiries, our adventures of being.

But no, they always have to put up this big show about how they've come across something that has them so baffled, and this bafflement in reality only works to increase their stature as experts. It works in the negative to make people think that we know most anything; and takes our minds away from the fact that we know largely nothing.

Hi, we're the News here, just to remind you that we (by which we mean 'we the world') know absolutely everything and there's no reason to despair. But wait, hold on a minute, there is something inexplicable, coming in just now - to tip the scales a bit so that our supreme knowledge doesn't immediately crush us with boredom - that has even baffled the world's scientists! Don't worry; Latin America has always been the seat of mystery itself, and the mystery in question most likely has to do with that peculiar and quaint specimen we now know as "religion".

You have to love those first conclusions they always come to; such as that these trenches were dug for religious or ceremonial purposes.

I don't know what the most likely cause would be; it could very well be for ceremonial purposes. But I find it funny that the "world's scientists" would not first suppose that these trenches were dug merely for agricultural reasons (i.e. drainage).

That would be too mundane. I mean, they're all over the place! And in different shapes too! No way could they have been for small scale crop fields!

What could these ancient peoples possibly have been communicating to our aerial cameras?

A great mystery!

Hopkins and The Northern Lights

"Sept. 24. First saw the Northern Lights. My eye was caught by beams of light and dark very like the crown of horny rays the sun makes behind a cloud. At first I thought of silvery cloud until I saw that these were more luminous and did not dim the clearness of the stars in the Bear. They rose slightly radiating thrown out from the earthline. Then I saw soft pulses of light one after another rise and pass upwards arched in shape but waveringly and with the arch broken. They seemed to float, not following the warp of the sphere as falling stars look to do but free though concentrical with it. This busy working of nature wholly independent of the earth and seeming to go on in a strain of time not reckoned by our reckoning of days and years but simpler and as if correcting the preoccupation of the world by being preoccupied with and appealing to and dated to the day of judgment was like a new witness to God and filled me with delightful fear." --Gerard Manley Hopkins, from his note-books (italics mine)

The first and so far only time that I saw the Northern Lights was driving through Ontario, making my way back to B.C. In the black mountainous thick of the wilds, the road curved either way before me, devoid of familiarity, devoid twice over: once for me not having ever driven through Ontario before, and twice for it being pitch night. Signs warning for the encroachment of moose or elk regularly went past, and my vertical axis of being grounded was also thrown out, since the road constantly went up and down.

Then there were the semi-trucks that would appear from behind and bear down. I could decipher vaguely the stronger darks of mountains against the dark sky, and at one point I seemed to come around a curve and I was staring at something ahead of me; apparently it was the sky, which again, could be seen by the negative contrast of mountains. Slowly it dawned on me that I was looking at Northern Lights.

It's not a sight you are suddenly startled by, like say a white mountain or a particularly intense sunset. It is something that hugely takes you in before you fully see it. And then when you do see what you are looking at, that is, when you are consciously telling yourself that you are now looking at that wonderful phenomena that the human race has named the Northern Lights, they do not cease to be wholly different and strange as on your first gaze, but everything around you then becomes like an abyss of hugely present peace - a scarily living peace, a strange wonderful wide world. You are looking into another time zone from the one you are in.

But Hopkins gets to what they are like - indeed, what they really are - much more clearly.

Pigments

The idea of grinding my own pigments from native minerals has taken hold, though just a cursive glance at this field is somewhat dazzling and dizzying in spite of all the simplicity about it. A small part of the desire has to do with the ideal of local sustainability (how less dependent can I get on industrial manufacturing and shipping/importing, and can it be brought to the point of no dependence?). But the greater part of the desire has to do with being intimate with one's materials in a way that it causes you to appreciate more the characteristic of a particular pigment, making you more sensitive to its potential, and especially hunkering down with good old limits: a discipline where the science of your materials and their application is respected with regards to permanency and at the same time is fused with your vision, making your vision more real because it is humbled.

The notion has been growing since I read a small Canadian Geographic article about one artist-and-iconographer in Ontario. During my great root canal epic (a root canal in five sittings, since it was the one tooth that had a root canal ten years previous, making for what the dentist called the longest known dental operation, since they have to go in and take everything out that was put in to be permanent all those years before and then putting new stuff in…one of the sittings being four hours…fun, fun, fun!) I came upon the article while waiting in the operating chair, and something about it seemed providential. I determined right there to remember the name of the artist in the article who went about looking for ways to make his entire palette from minerals and deposits from his native Ontario, so that I could search his name on the internet and hopefully come upon a site.

Naturally, I completely forgot the name, and halfway forgot the article. Nonetheless, I came across his site without even looking for it, and seeing his name on the site I said: Oh yeah! That's the guy I read about! Of course I was searching on making one's own pigments.

The article in The Canadian Geographic didn't really do justice to the pursuits of this artist/iconographer; it made him look like a dabbling hobbyist. This guy is really into it, and yet, he's been going into it without knowing a whole lot about it. He seems to use as many resources (both literary and physical) that he can, going to old mines and queries, lakes and rivers; using kilns and furnaces; growing his own woad plants to make Maya blue.

You can go to his site/blog here. Be sure to search through older entries.

My, what big teeth you have

"The calculation is one of the largest bite forces ever calculated for any creature."

That's this one (a pliosaur, or Kronosaurus):

Not this one (a plesiosaur):


The one with the longer neck was at times the shorter neck's breakfast. But the quote above does not refer to the pliosaur next to Red Riding Hood in the above photo. It refers to what appears to be the largest discovered one yet; a new species, perhaps a new family.

Two partial skeletons have been discovered on a Norwegian island 800 miles from the North Pole. At least 50 feet long and 45 tons. A skull estimated to be 10 feet. Flippers also 10 feet. Each tooth being one foot. And that bite:

"With a skull that's more than 10 feet long you'd expect the bite to be powerful but this is off the scale," said Joern Hurum, an associate professor of vertebrate paleontology at the Museum of Oslo University.

"This one...could crush a Hummer," he said.

It had a bite force of about 33,000 pounds.

"More than 10 times that of any animal alive today and 2 to 4 times the bite force of T. rex." From this article, a pretty good read on the fossil discovery. Both photos above are from this site.

Do you ever get the notion that God is relaying some rather bold message to us from prehistory concerning His creative powers?

On the other end of the spectrum, I was looking at this helpful site, being interested in having plants that attract beneficial insects, and I learned that even parasites can get parasites. Take the parasitic mini-wasps. The stinger of the female allows her to lay eggs in the bodies of insect pests. When the eggs hatch the young eat the pest from the inside, leaving a hollow mummy. Which explains the paper husk of a woodbug that I occasionally find in the dirt.

Or the Tachinid Fly. The larvae are also internal workers, sucking the body fluids of the pest until it dies.

I want some. Not on me of course. But in the garden.

Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia)

At Redwood Park yesterday I noticed these cones in the vicinity of one of the dawn redwoods, close to one of the entrances. The Brown brothers planted at least two of them that I know of, and they are getting to be spectacular. With age these trees get very fissured and wide at the base, which spiders out in every direction; something straight out of Fangorn. Check out this one from somewhere else (the ones I know in Redwood Park don't even come close to that yet).

The dawn redwood was discovered alive in the 1940's, and was only known prior to that point through fossils. They thought it was extinct. So, it was quite something when it was happened upon in some remote part of China, living. The natives of that region were quite familiar with it though.

It's an evergreen, but it sheds its leaves in fall. It can tolerate swampy conditions. It grows very fast. It is long lived. In prehistory it covered much of the northern western hemisphere.

Some twenty years or so after the Brown brothers died, some crew came to the land and drilled down through all the layers. Of the fossils found, some were with imprints of dawn redwood. I like to ponder how it was many millenia until two deaf, reclusive twin brothers reimbursed that land with what was there, and then suddenly not there, millions of years ago.

What's nice about this is that typically you don't find seed-bearing dawn redwoods here in the west - not yet, because they were only brought over not too long ago, which means they need to reach something like 50 years of age to start bearing seed. Thank you, Brown brothers.

This handful I'm not going to stratify. I'm just going to try them straight up. Let's see what happens.

Takes more than rabbits to feed this snake

Fossil discovery in northeast Columbia of mega huge prehistoric boa snake that reached the size of 42 feet and weighed one ton and ate prehistoric alligators for breakfast sparks the deep imaginations of scientists who in their multiferous stores of knowledge and data bring the fantasy-fiction-exceeding discovery back to bear on the far greater and mind-boggling discovery of Global Warming, the more exciting thing that reaches through the deeps of time and is the One in All.

Quote of the year

"That's a colossal squid; that's one colossal headache to defrost."

Oh yeah, I had forgotten the colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) from last year, which those New Zealanders caught in the Ross Sea, off the coast of Antartica. Defrosting such a creature isn't simply a matter of, well, letting it thaw. The squid has so much squid (1, 089 pounds and 26 feet of it; and the eyes alone measure 10 inches each) that if you just let it thaw, the outer flesh will start rotting by the time the inner matter gets a chance to defrost. So you have to add ice into the saline solution in which you are immersing it (they haven't determined the sex yet). Indeed, one headache of a balancing act.

There's something interesting about the turmoil they go through in dealing with that hulking deep-sea corpse. I find it rather poetic. The situation, not the corpse. That mysterious colossal squid, which can descend down to 6, 500 feet in the ocean, and which has a sharp, wickedly strong beak, and has hooks on the tentacles; they just aren't seen underwater, alive and swimming and all.

So to have the largest one yet known above water, and to freeze it and have to defrost it, and all those scientists and researchers bustling around figuring out how they are going to do this right - over a colossal squid; it's a metaphor, yes. Nature has this built-in metaphor of our larger situation or story. No matter how much certain people make us out to be God, that conflict, that sunderedness between creatures still calls us: the enabling of our exploration and adventure, which God has created and made free. Free with the smiting proclamation of a thunderclap. It is to uncover the hidden metaphor and story that arouses our curiosity in such things of the natural world, like the colossal squid. One of those denizens of deep down where is found much other hideousness and freakishness incarnate:

Such are the rovers where no light breaks. And one of the strongest impulses of man is to bring things to the light; even when done as "playacting".

You can see some coverage of the squid thaw here.