Monday, December 24, 2018

Christmas Music Recommendations


Soon it will be Christmas, when we can all settle down for a long winter’s nap. And I think that we should all settle down for a long winter’s nap, a very long winter’s nap, given my previously-expressed opinion on human hibernation.

But, until then, why not relax with some of my favorite pop-rock Christmas songs (of which there aren’t many)?


This one brings back the best memories.




  I find this one the most musically interesting.




If you want that Eighties snarky attitude, try this.  




Or . . . for something that was only a year earlier, but went in an entirely different direction, specifically the direction of a depressing Seventies-style singer-songwriter Christmas, there’s this.  






Sunday, December 23, 2018

Fall Fell


As I understand it, in mature forests, most of the trees are of the same kind, and so in the fall they all change color at the same time, leading to brilliant displays covering entire mountainsides.  But in the suburbs, people have planted many different kinds of trees that change color at many different times. In this area, at any point in the autumn one can find trees of different species anywhere on a continuum from fully green to completely leafless.  

To whatever extent there can be said to be peak color around here, it would likely be found in the first week of November.

Here is some foliage from the weekend after Halloween.



Two weeks later, it was all gone.



Ultimately, there is nothing remarkable, or even worthwhile, about my observation; I am just impressed with myself for taking before and after pictures that line up as well as they do.  




Thursday, December 20, 2018

The Graveyard of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons



Regular readers of this blog (by which I mean my family members and close personal friends) will be aware of my one-man crusade to expose the scientific inaccuracies of decorative plastic Halloween skeletons to the world (by which I mean my family members and close personal friends).

The weekend before Halloween, I was walking around town looking at the decorations, and I came upon this display.  It contained almost every plastic animal skeleton of which I had previously been aware, and some that I had never seen before, letting me know that there is more material out there should I wish to continue the series for a third year.






Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Blur




As blurs go, this one is pretty good. 




Wednesday, October 31, 2018

The Absolutely True Story of the Monster in the Wall


Halloween is here again, when I feel that I should post something that suits the tone of the day, even though it is sometimes hard to think of anything.  This year I’ve come up with something that’s a perfect fit for the occasion.

This account is absolutely true, as best I can remember it (and I have a very good memory).  There was documentation for the story, and I have some of the documentation, although I’m not sure where it is at the moment.  The events described did not occur at Halloween, though they do make a good Halloween story.  

For many years I volunteered at a museum.  One service that the museum provided was identifying natural history specimens for the public.  Someone would come across an unusual bone or rock, and bring it in, or otherwise contact us, to get information; the requests were mostly mundane, though sometimes humorous.  

One day the museum received an e-mail from a man in Delaware.  He had grown up in a three hundred year old house.  When he was ten years old, he had found a secret compartment in the wall of his bedroom.  Inside was the body of a tiny monster.  And it was not some toy or model, but the actual carcass of something that had once been alive.

He attached a photograph with his e-mail.  The photograph showed an entity about a foot tall and seemingly bipedal, indeed almost humanoid.  The thing appeared malevolent, even demonic.  And it looked undeniably authentic, even as it corresponded to no animal known on the Earth.  

The man had held onto the monster throughout his life, but he had begun to think that the monster was bringing him bad luck.  Eventually, not knowing what to do, he took it to his bartender. (It is at this point in the story that people tend to laugh.)  Here my memory becomes fuzzy as to what the exact role of the bartender was in these events, but probably he advised the man on how to find out what the monster was, and what to do with it.  

When the e-mail arrived, I had recently been reading about gaffs, hoaxed taxidermy items such as Fiji mermaids and jackalopes.  I suspected that the monster might be some similar fraudulent creation.  I checked the internet, and determined that the monster was a Jenny Haniver, a very specialized hoax item produced when a specimen of the cartilaginous fish known as a ray is extensively altered to appear as some sort of monster.  Jenny Hanivers have been manufactured for hundreds of years; the name is thought to possibly be derived from the ironic French phrase jeune d'Anvers (meaning “youth of Antwerp”, Antwerp being a prominent location where Jenny Hanivers were made and sold). 

This picture from Wikipedia (by M. Violante) is a pretty good approximation of the way that the Jenny Haniver looked, as far as I can remember.



Finding a monster in the walls of a three hundred year old house would make a great premise for a horror story.

Unfortunately, though, I am not a good storyteller.  



Tuesday, October 30, 2018

The Osteology of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons, Part 7: Frogs


The frog is not an animal which one normally associates with Halloween.  Two different styles are available, however, the first for £3.95 from Mad About Horror.  (It’s also available in the United States, but Mad About Horror had the best picture.)



Whoever designed this skeleton actually did a good job with it.  It has no glaring mistakes, and it even does a nice job depicting a frog’s unusual pelvic structure.  I examined one in a store, and found that it had no lower jaw, but I see that as more of an omission than an outright error.



I cannot, though, give the same praise to this second style of frog skeleton, available for $6.99 from HalloweenCostumes.com.  It shows the frog with a rib cage, which frogs do not have (as one can tell from the first skeleton).



Monday, October 29, 2018

The Osteology of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons, Part 6: The Bat


  Bats are a characteristic animal of Halloween, such that rendering one as a skeleton to make it scarier seems unnecessary, even redundant.  Yet we have the bat skeleton, available for $31.45 from DHgate.



It has external ears presented as bony elements of the skull, which is a common problem with plastic Halloween mammal skeletons.  

What’s even stranger is the depiction of the bones that make up the wings.  A real bat has one digit in each wing that is outside the wing membrane, and four more digits that support the wing membrane. This fake bat has only three digits in position to support the wing membrane.  And the metacarpal of the uppermost wing digit has been replaced with what are apparently meant to be a radius and ulna.  (That’s the weird double bone along the top of the wing in the plastic skeleton).  In reality the radius and ulna are part of the arm, and thus closer to the body, although in bats the ulna is greatly reduced.

If you find all of this confusingly technical, you can check out correct bat skeletal structure here



Sunday, October 28, 2018

The Osteology of Decorative Plastic Halloween Skeletons, Part 5: The Home Depot Triceratops


I hadn’t intended to return to this series from last year (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4), but then I was in Home Depot, and I noticed some Triceratops skeletons.  The ones that I saw were lacking at least half of their tails.  And so I thought that it was time to spring back into action critiquing the scientific accuracy of, well, decorative plastic Halloween skeletons.

But then I found the item pictured online (available for $19.98), and it has an almost complete tail, except for the smallest vertebrae at the end, which might be too fragile for something like this.



Other than missing some bones in the pelvic region (and of course the LED-illuminated eyes) this Triceratops skeleton is actually pretty accurate.  

I therefore assume that the ones that I saw in the store were broken.  

Or perhaps they had their tails severed in combat with the Home Depot Tyrannosaurus.



Thursday, October 25, 2018

The Dream That Came Undreamed


Ever since my childhood, I have wanted to write fiction.  And, specifically, I have wanted to write in the field of science fiction and fantasy.  People tell me that I am a good writer.  Unfortunately, though, I am not a good storyteller.  Successful fiction writers are filled with story ideas just waiting to burst out.  I almost never get any ideas for stories, and on the rare occasions that I do get ideas they are often more suited to a visual medium like television than to the written word.  Thus, although I would like to write, I generally have nothing to write.  

The one exception to this problem comes from my dreams.  Every so often I will have a dream that arranges itself into a narrative, or suggestions of a narrative.  

Years ago, perhaps fifteen or more years ago, I had one such dream.  In the dream, I was in eighth grade.  Another boy and I decided to skip class and go to Las Vegas, which was conveniently located next to the school.  There we saw a sign saying that on New Year’s Eve, a spacecraft high above the city would release two million ears of corn, which would burn up in the atmosphere, creating an artificial meteor shower.

An artificial meteor shower lighting up the Las Vegas sky on New Year’s Eve seemed like a good basis for a science fiction story.  I carried the concept around in my head for a long time, and a few years ago I started trying to develop a narrative around the concept.  (One immediate change that I made was to turn the ears of corn to grains of sand.)  But since I had a lot of other things to do, and very little self-discipline, I never got very far with the story.  

Then about a year ago I came upon an article on the internet reporting that a Japanese company is planning to implement an artificial meteor shower in the Hiroshima area in early 2019.  (A more recent account places the meteor shower in early 2020.)  Instead of ears of corn or grains of sand, specially-concocted pellets will be used to provide multiple colors.  

Normally one considers a dream coming true to be a good thing.  But in this case, my dream is robbed of its prescience, and thus of its effectiveness as a science fiction story. 

And so ideas become rarer still.




Friday, October 19, 2018

Harvestmen Eating Blueberry Muffins


I went camping a few weeks ago with some friends from high school. (We were at Burke Lake in Fairfax County, so it wasn’t exactly the deep wilderness.)  When night fell, our campsite was swarmed by harvestmen.  The next morning, we found dozens of them crawling over our tents.  But what was even odder was that during the night harvestmen were crawling over the picnic table, apparently looking to eat our leftovers.  

(I should note here that harvestmen are arachnids of the order Opiliones.  They differ from spiders in lacking a constriction between the two body segments, and having one pair of eyes rather than three or four  pairs.  An alternate, and probably more common, name is “daddy longlegs”.  I am using “harvestmen” here, because it is simpler, and because I am unsure of the plural form for “daddy longlegs”.  Is it just “daddy longlegs”, or “daddy longlegses”, or is it “daddies longlegs”, in the tradition of “courts-martial” and the Latin “patresfamilias”?) 

The harvestmen seemed particularly to like the blueberry muffins.  

Here are some pictures.







Harvestmen are known to be omnivores and scavengers, which would leave them well-suited to consume human-produced foodstuffs.  My casual internet searching provided two mentions of harvestmen eating human food, here (“One in a terrarium will survive on tidbits of bread, butter and fatty meat as well.”) and here (“A harvestman will eat little ants on a crumb of bread and then eat part of the crumb.“).  I have to wonder if the reason that harvestmen were common at the campsite was that they had become accustomed to scavenging the remains of campers’ meals.  



Monday, October 15, 2018

The Maize Maze


Autumn is the time for corn mazes, at least in areas that, unlike this one, still have agriculture.  This prompted me to think that if corn mazes were planted in countries where corn (Zea mays) is known as “maize”, then corn mazes would be “maize mazes”.  

And I thought that maybe I could write a short blog entry about that. 

But then I did a little very basic research (i. e. Wikipedia) and discovered that corn mazes in the United Kingdom are indeed known as “maize mazes”, which surprised me, because I had assumed that corn mazes were a uniquely American phenomenon.  

At this point, I can only remark that if British Prime Minister Theresa May were to construct her own corn maze, it would be May’s maize maze.



Sunday, September 30, 2018

It Started With “R”


Following somewhat on the theme of an earlier post . . . 

Months ago I was walking in a park.  A band composed of three teenage boys was playing a song that I recognized.  I recognized it as “What I Like About You” by the Kinks.

After a minute or two it came to me that I had recognized wrongly.  The song sounds like the Kinks, but it’s not.  It was recorded in a later era, by a band in the Eighties.  

My next thought was that I had heard “What I Like About You” by the Replacements. 

But again I was wrong; I realized that it was not by the Replacements, although they are considered an iconic Eighties alternative band.  I felt duly embarrassed by my error.  

As I walked along, I continued to ponder.

Was it the Refreshments?

No, the Refreshments did the King of the Hill theme song, and that song about giving your ID card to the border guard.

Was it the Rembrandts? 

No, the Rembrandts did the Friends theme song.  

I spent the rest of the day thinking, but I couldn’t remember who sang “What I Like About You”.  Not remembering bothered me.  I’ve been hearing the song for most of my life, and I used to know who the band was, and I’m a music snob, so I should know these things.  Finally, late at night, I gave up on trying to figure it out, and checked the internet.  

It wasn’t the Replacements, or the Refreshments, or the Rembrandts . . . it was the Romantics.  

But perhaps you can understand my confusion.



Friday, August 31, 2018

I’m Running out of August


I’d like to post on the blog two or three times a week, and I have a million billion trillion things about which I’d like to blog.  But I just don’t have the self-discipline to do it.  Honestly, I barely have the self-discipline to hold down a job.  

The one blogging commitment that I try to keep is to put up one post per month. Now August is almost over without a post.  I guess that I should post a picture or something.  

I’ll go with: debris floating in the Potomac. 






Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Strange Flower



I came across this very weird flower growing wild in Arlington.  I have no idea what it is.  (And by “it”, I mean the flower, not Arlington.  I am well aware of what Arlington is.)


You’ll definitely want to click to enlarge. 


Saturday, June 30, 2018

The Greta van Problem


I have to wonder if confused people sometimes walk up to Greta van Susteren on the street and accuse her of totally ripping off Led Zeppelin.  



Thursday, May 31, 2018

Kolchak: The Night Heron



Once again, I am in the position that I have a lot that I want to write for the blog, but I just don’t have the willpower to get it done.  But I have made a commitment to myself to publish at least one post per month, and May is almost over with no posts, so I need to put up something.  

Here is a Black-crowned Night Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) that I photographed over the weekend.  

The name reminds me of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, an obscure Seventies television series which I have been watching in recent weeks on the MeTV networkKolchak is best known today as a major influence on the development of The X-Files.  That connection gives Kolchak a lot of credibility in the science-fiction/fantasy/horror community, but it doesn’t mean that the show is necessarily very good.  Take for example the titular Kolchak.  The fact that he is a “night stalker” makes it sound as if he should be mysterious and ominous, but he’s actually an inept middle-aged reporter who wears a porkpie hat.  (I think that it’s a porkpie hat.  I’m not good with hats.)

Ultimately, then, we have accomplished nothing with this post.  But at least the monthly requirement is fulfilled.



Sunday, April 1, 2018

Today


Today is Easter.

Today is also April Fool’s Day. 

And, given the way that Easter moves around on the calendar, I have to wonder if maybe it isn’t really Easter, but we are being told that it is as an April Fool’s Day joke.  

I also sometimes think that online scientific journals that publish papers on a continuous basis shouldn’t publish anything on April 1, so that the authors won’t have to continually explain that their study isn’t a joke. 



Saturday, March 31, 2018

Daingerfield Island



Here is a picture of Daingerfield Island (which is not an island) on the Potomac River as viewed from the north.  

I’d like to dedicate this picture to the people who have left the Washington area to chase their dreams across the far horizons of the world . . . which sometimes seems like almost everyone whom I know.



Monday, March 12, 2018

The Pond Frog




Unlike the green of the last photo, this one is more brown.  It’s an American Bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana or Lithobates catesbeianus) in a drainage pond.  I took the picture at the beginning of September of last year. 

When one’s hobby is watching amphibians and (non-avian) reptiles in the wild in the temperate zone, there is an enforced period of inactivity in the colder months.  Birds, and thus bird watchers, are active all winter, but the reptiles and amphibians go into seasonal torpor.  In the Washington area the inactivity usually lasts (depending on variations in the weather) from some point in October to some point in March.  

And I have to admit that I kind of like this.  Something about being forced to take a rest appeals to me.  

But now the winter respite has come to an end.  A week ago I discovered that the Wood Frogs had already laid their eggs.  


Monday, February 26, 2018

Cicada


I’ve been going through my photographs from the last few years looking for things to put on the blog.  I came across this cicada, which looks like Linne’s Cicada (Neotibicen linnei), a type of annual cicada, although the thorax coloration is different than is seen in some internet examples.  

The picture has a nice sense of green, in that the green of the cicada is reflected in the green of the surrounding vegetation.




Here is a closer look from a related picture:




Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Check out the Claws on This Turtle



Click to enlarge, and take a look at the size of the claws.  This is a Red-bellied Turtle (Pseudemys rubriventris).  The males have elongate claws which they use to stroke the females during courtship.

  Red-bellied Turtles are common here in the Potomac, but are threatened in Pennsylvania, and endangered in Massachusetts.

In comic book terms, this is what happens when you cross the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with Wolverine



Monday, January 8, 2018

Now It Is 2018


A week ago I watched Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve (which contains neither Dick Clark nor rock music, but does contain a lot of apostrophes).  And then it became 2018.

How weird is that?

When I was growing up, 1997 seemed like the year in which it would become The Future, in which we should finally have those flying cars.  But eventually 1997 came, and it was no different then any of the earlier years.  And more years came, and we got the internet, and smartphones, but no flying cars, or really, anything else. 

But now, for some reason, 2018 sounds strange to me.  It shouldn’t be 2018.  The world has gone on too long, it’s gone too far.  

But then, I am still trying to figure out what happened to 2005.  

If anyone can tell me, please contact me and let me know.