Recently I saw a Red-shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus), which seems to be the only kind of hawk that I ever see. It was sitting in a tree by the river on a cold and very windy day.
This was probably my best picture.
This would have been a good picture if I had gotten all of the bird’s head into the frame.
And this might have been a good picture if it had been in focus.
It is more than a month since Christmas, and some people still have their Christmas lights up (although, as one can tell from the above picture, they are hard to photograph).
At this point, do the people who have these lights even think of them as Christmas lights, or as some kind of general winter lights?
I don’t like Christmas lights in January, because they remind me that the Christmas season is over, and it won’t be back for a long time.
A similar phenomenon that I noticed in the fall is that some people will put out Halloween pumpkins, and then after Halloween the pumpkins become Thanksgiving pumpkins, and stay out until the end of November. But then other people put out their Christmas lights before Thanksgiving, and so there is a period of overlap in which some houses have pumpkins, and adjacent houses have Christmas lights.
That is a contrast of textures, or flavors, or whatever, that I really don’t like.
Squirrels do seem to like the pumpkins, though.
The year is almost over, but there is still time for one more blog post, one more to add to the year’s undersized total.
Once again, despite my dislike of serious topics, I must address the pandemic.
At the beginning of summer, we naively believed that the pandemic was ending, and for a brief time we all took off our masks at the supermarket; then there came the delta variant. And now we have the omicron variant, which spreads much faster but is less severe than earlier variants.
There are two hypotheses about how our society will be affected:
One is is that the omicron variant will infect so many people that our hospitals will be overwhelmed, leaving many important health services unavailable for the foreseeable future.
The other is that the omicron variant will infect a huge number of people with relatively few fatalities, thus conferring natural immunity on enough people to effectively end the pandemic.
Or maybe it will do both of these things.
Or maybe it will do neither.
Or maybe it will do some things that we haven’t even imagined, like somehow going back in time to infect people in prior years.
That is how things in general have been going for the last 22 months or so.
Christmas is over, but the Christmas season is still here, as the above Antarctic Christmas cartoon penguin can attest. I suppose that I should be engaged in mirth and merriment, but I have returned to the blog to put up a belated Christmas post.
In previous years I have blogged about my favorite pop-rock Christmas songs, and about one Christmas song very particular to the local area. I thought that I would follow up on these with a post on the two worst Christmas songs of all time. (In a way, though, I felt that I shouldn’t do this, because even commenting on how bad these songs are might in some way be promoting them, and they should not be promoted.)
One could write multiple volumes on why each of these songs is terrible, but I will let them speak for themselves:
The summer of 2021 marked the ten year anniversary of the closure of the Smithsonian Naturalist Center in Loudoun County, Virginia. The Naturalist Center was a microcosm of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History, containing minerals, rocks, fossils, preserved plants and animals, and even a few anthropological items. Visitors got to not just look at the specimens, but touch and closely examine them, and go through drawers to see the Center’s full collections, something not possible at other museums.
I used to volunteer there when I was young, or at least younger than I am now.
The Naturalist Center came into existence in the Seventies (I think); it was housed in the Natural History Museum until late 1995, when it was moved out to make space for an IMAX theater. An agreement was made with the government of Loudoun County under which the Center would be given a site in an office park by the Leesburg Airport to function as a resource for science education in the Loudoun County school system. This arrangement was only supposed to last for a few years, but ultimately it continued until 2011.
I started volunteering at the Center to give myself something to do in the summer after I graduated from college, when the collections were being packed up for the move to Loudoun; I enjoyed it so much that I ended up driving out to the Loudoun location every week or two for the next fifteen years as my various work schedules would allow.
I would work with the fossils and the preserved reptiles and amphibians, cataloging new specimens, repairing things that broke, putting together a few skeletons, and otherwise engaging with the collections. And occasionally, some member of the public would bring in or send in something to be identified, and I would take a look at it. (I posted about the absolute strangest such incident several years ago.)
Ultimately, some powerful people in the Smithsonian decided that the Naturalist Center needed to move back into the Natural History Museum in Washington, DC. Unfortunately, when the Center was returned to the District, most of the collections were dispersed for various reasons. The new version that was eventually unveiled is known as Q?rius, which has a lot fewer specimens, and a lot more video screens. And since working with the specimens was what I enjoyed, I don’t have much interest in Q?rius (nor can I even remember how to spell it without extensive research).
Anyway, Naturalist Center was fun, as a few things in life are, and it is gone, as many things in life are.
Here are some videos that I shot in the last year before the Naturalist Center closed, and posted on YouTube about five years ago for the enjoyment of former volunteers.
Earlier in the year I wrote a blog post about seeing a piece of wood that looked like a sea monster floating in the Potomac River.
In June I saw a smaller piece of wood that looked like a beaver bobbing up and down in the same river. I photographed the wood, thinking that it would make a good basis for a follow-up post demonstrating the same phenomenon.
But, upon downloading the photo to my computer and zooming in . . . it was a beaver.
A few months ago, Wikipedia featured an article on the Battle of Caen, a conflict in which the English attacked the French town of Caen in 1346. The article was illustrated by a super-awesome painting from Froissart’s Chronicles.
As I examined that painting in detail, I noticed something very odd about one of the pole weapons (as Wikipedia calls them) or pole arms (as we knew them back in Dungeons & Dragons days) being used by a soldier. I present the relevant portion of the image below:
The man on the right is holding what looks like an ornate glaive. (I included a glaive in a Halloween illustration on the blog many years ago.) But what caught my attention was the object that the man on the left wields, something that I, speaking as a casual fan of Medieval weaponry, cannot identify. The wooden shaft is topped by a pointed spear head, and there are what appear to be two metal disks mounted on opposing sides of the spear head, with a spike protruding from the center of each disk.
This particular weapon is not some unique aberration; there are two at least additional weapons of the same type in another section of the image (posted below), as well as other possible (though unclear) examples elsewhere in the picture.
In my research, I did find other pole weapons that were similar in that they had a pair of spikes or blades on the opposing sides of a spear head, such as the ranseur and the Bohemian earspoon. (And doesn’t everybody need a Bohemian earspoon?) But there was nothing with anything close to those metal disks at the base of the spikes.
From a Dungeons & Dragons perspective, it seems that we are looking at something that didn’t occur even in E. Gary Gygax’s wildest dreams.
I will also note that weapon in question does not appear on the phylogenic diagram of pole arms shown below. (Was the phylogeny derived using cladistic analysis?)
