Right. The fossil plant won by a landslide. Batten down your hats, my darlings, because this one is truly bizarre.
I’m going to show you it. But I’m not going to tell you what it is just yet. It’s a bit of a riddle, and I’d like to give you all a chance to figure it out. Ready? Synapses firing, neurons engaged and all that? Then let us begin.
At last, we leave North America! This magnificent UFD comes from our own RQ. It’s posing prettily in a Latvian forest.
I love it. I love the lushness of that forest, and the slight quizzical tilt to this bird’s head. I love it’s white-patched wings gleaming against the darkness. I love the fact we finally have an opportunity to identify something that’s not from North America!
Continue reading “Unidentified Flying Dinosaur: Tell Me About the Forest”
Sorry, my darlings. It’s apparently a holiday week: I’m disorganized as hell and keep getting distracted by shiny things when I should be writing. I’ve nearly got everything together for our next Prelude to a Catastrophe installment. Unless a squirrel happens, I should be writing it tomorrow night.
We will not discuss the post WordPress decided to eat earlier tonight.
In the meantime, the SciAm blog network turned one yesterday, and we celebrated with a bit o’ cake and curiosity. For those who didn’t see or didn’t feel like fighting with its comments system, you can answer nosy questions here, if you like. I know a little about some of you, and a lot about a few of you, but I know there are folks here who haven’t got the chance to say something about themselves. And you’re important to me. If you want to delurk, I’d love to hear from you!
And I’m going to give you, my patient darlings, a little bit o’ beauty from Mount St. Helens. These are from September last year, and I haven’t yet published them. Exciting, amirite?
Yeah, that’s me trying to get all artsy-fartsy with one of the blow-down stumps and the volcano in the background.
One thing I appreciate about Mount St. Helens, among many, is the blast zone. It’s amazing how much geology you can see with all the trees gone. Not that I don’t like trees, mind, and I hate clear cuts, but if a volcano wants to do a little deforestation, who am I to argue?
I’m off to Oregon soon. I might swing by and see the old girl, just the two of us. I’ve never spent quality time with her alone. We’ll be spending a lot of time together this summer: I’ve got to run Suzanne over for a nice jaunt later in the year, and Amanda and I are going to explore Ape Cave sometime before fall. We’ll see if temptation gets the better of me as I pass by her exit on my way down to collect Lockwood for some adventuring.
If I do go, what do you most want me to grab you photos of?
These little beauties come from our own Trebuchet, who got the whole UFD thing started. It’s a good thing other people don’t collapse in a molten heap of squee when they see birds like this, or we’d never have any decent UFDs. I’d have probably missed my opportunity by screaming “ZOMG they are so cute!!!” before grabbing the camera and snapping a photo. Birds, for some reason, tend to fly away when you make loud noises at them.
This is why I keep meaning to go buy a bird feeder. I’ll probably do it after I quit smoking – it will force me to go outside for things other than sacrificing another portion of my lungs to the nicotine demon. And my cat will be ecstatic. As long as the sliding glass door is closed, she can style herself the Great Huntress. She’s brave as long as she’s in no danger of getting pecked.
These little delights were snapped in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve not seen them round before, but then, I haven’t got a feeder, and the birds in this area seem to think it’s funny to hide behind leaves and sing lustily just out of sight – unless I don’t have my camera with me, in which case they parade around in plain view. Mocking birds, the lot of ’em. It’s all right. I’ll soon have my hands on a feeder, and we’ll see who laughs the last laugh then.
Gracias, Trebuchet!
You, too, can have your very own UFDs identified! Just send me a photo or several, with UFD in the subject line, and a description of where the photo was taken. You can find me at dhunterauthor at yahoo dot com.
Whilst picking photos for my post on Jerome’s geology, I stumbled across these lovelies. My old camera couldn’t do them justice, but it tried.
They were growing against a sort of cliff at Gold King Mine. I liked how they looked against the patterned rock. Wish I could tell you what the rock is – I think it’s sedimentary something-or-other, but it’s hard to tell from an awful photograph, and I wasn’t good enough with geology back then to do field identification of anything other than basalt and sandstone. It could be tuff, it could be something else – Jerome’s full of some pretty wild rocks.
One of the things I love best about blogging is stumbling across the unexpected. When I was researching for Oceans of Ore: How an Undersea Caldera Eruption Created Jerome, Arizona, I certainly wasn’t in the market for music. But I stumbled upon a reference to a song called “Old Jerome” by Kate Wolf. I’m not much of a folk music fan, but I sought it out on YouTube anyway, and discovered it’s quite beautiful.
Now, you may notice that’s not Kate Wolf singing. I couldn’t find a video for her. But a quick search uncovered the track on MySpace. She’s got the right voice for this old town: lovely, haunting, a little bit desert.
Since 1983, when she wrote this song, restoration has continued apace. A lot of the buildings that stared out with empty eyes are now homes and shops and museums. And this song is its anthem.
I meant to put this up a few weeks ago, but got distracted by other shiny things. Good thing, too, because I hadn’t copied the embed code for the song, so had to search for it again. I must have used a different search string this time, because a Tony Norris song came up called “High Tide in the Desert.” It’s about boats, and Jerome, and sailing the desert. It might sound a bit silly. But remember: this whole area has been a sea several times. It began under an ocean. If those boats wait patiently enough, they’ll get a chance to sail again, several million years from now.
Or, y’know, someone could just tow ’em down to a lake…
This little ghost town has inspired a lot of music, it turns out. For our final song, we’ll have Barenaked Ladies, “Jerome.”
When I saw this song mentioned on Wikipedia, I was all like, “Whatevs. They probably have no idea what they’re talking about.” But they do! Listening to this song was like being transported there. They know Mingus Mountain! They even know the old jail slid downhill! I have no idea how a Canadian came to know my little Arizona mining town so intimately, but Kevin Hearn got it spot-on. Beautiful!
All of this makes me want to wander those old streets again. Shame about it being in Arizona. But it’s a liberal enclave, so at least my tourist dollars will be supporting the rebels, eh?
I haz a happee. And it’s not just because I spent all last night and this morning in bed with science, although taking some time to devour a book on random bits of science and reading some nummy posts was excellent. So was having a purring felid curled up with me. But I iz happee for moar reasons!
Continue reading “CFI's Policy, SSA's Press, and Cromm's Doom – Happy Caturday, Everyone!”
Prepare for the squee! Reader Jes has got it for you:
One morning while checking the cat kennels at the clinic where I work, I discovered a small frog in one of the kennels, curled up next to/under a sleeping cat.
If there’s anything guaranteed to melt me into a puddle of goo, it’s this. I mean, seriously. Froggy and kitteh sleeping together. If that isn’t adorable, nothing is.
It certainly found itself a warm, safe place to sleep.
It reminds me of one of those service animals in hospitals who hang round the patients and aid their healing with the power of cute.
This has almost got me heading to the pet store to acquire a frog. I’m relatively certain Misha wouldn’t try to munch it. I think she’d find it fascinating for all of ten minutes, then ignore it for the rest of its life. She’s been an indoor cat for so long she doesn’t understand the whole hunting thing – she’ll occasionally stalk birds as long as there’s a window between her and them, but get her outside, and she freaks out if they get too close. Small crawly things don’t interest her for long. She won’t even eat insects, which is unfortunate, since she insists on me leaving the door open in the summertime.
What is it about frogs? I understand cats – they’re soft, they’re cuddly, they purr, they play. Of course we love them. But frogs? They’re cool and slightly moist. They don’t cuddle (unless you’re a convalescing cat, in which case, they do cuddle, apparently). They’re bald. And yet they also make us squee. Combine cats and frogs, and you’ve got squee squared.
Thank you, Jes!
Right, I’m in. I won’t win, but I can certainly enjoy playing the game – and so can a good number of you, I suspect. Callan Bentley just finished reading a review copy of 101 American Geo-Sites You’ve Gotta See, which seems like a damned fine book for getting people interested in geology. I likes it.
Let’s see what I have seen. Places I’ve visited are in bold.
I’m going to be doing a post on a magnificent bit of citrine I’ve currently got joint custody of, but this is not that post. Instead, this is me thinking of citrine and realizing I’ve had a piece sitting in a box by my bed for years, waiting for the right home. It’s one of a pair I picked up at a little shop in downtown Seattle called Raven’s Nest Treasure.
It’s going to Suzanne, who is one of my favorite people in the entire universe, and who doesn’t (yet) have enough pretty rocks lying around. We had some lovely sunshine on Sunday, so I took photos of her new delight. I figured a few of you might enjoy them as well.
