Art Culture Politics
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The panther’s escape
“Der Panterausbruch,” by Walton Ford. Ford based his painting on a Panthera pardus that escaped from the Zurich Zoo in 1934. The animal survived for two months in the Swiss winter before being killed for food (!) by a “casual laborer.” An excerpt of Ford’s source is quoted in the back of the Taschen volume…
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Antlered Associations
I found this mule deer antler in the bosque near Los Vegas, New Mexico.* I have been dancing around the cave with it ever since, throwing strange shadows on the wall. (While I have some sympathy for Bohemian imp Joe Gould’s definition of “My Religion” — “In winter I’m a Buddhist/In summer I’m a nudist”…
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Iceless Age
My apocalyptic post on the acidification of the seas, complete with junior home science experiement, turns out to be old news. Earth has been there, done that. Fifty-six million years ago, to be somewhat exact about it. This month’s National Geographic details the PETM: the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, in which a huge influx of carbon…
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Updates
I’ve hardly spent more than a couple days in NYC in the last month, so, even with the universal internet, I didn’t pay all that much attention to things going on around the virtual ‘hood. In catching up, I want to alert you to a few things you may also have missed: Melissa, Out Walking…
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Prospect Park’s Litter Mob
Once on a tour, which I wouldn’t recommend, with “Wildman” Steve Brill, we bushwacked through a condom-littered section of the woods in Prospect Park, and someone said, sotto voce, “Damn, these are the safest woods I’ve ever been in.” Neighbor and blogger Marie Viljoen has been organizing a team of volunteers to clean up the…
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Curiosities
A few of my natural history objects, removed from the bookshelf for dusting.I’m a big fan of cabinets of curiosities. My bookshelves, and other parts of my apartment and the Back 40, where the big turtle shell is to be found — I really want to make sure those carrion beetles are good and done…
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Furacan Hairycain
“Hurricane: 1550s, a partially deformed adoptation from Sp. huracan (Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdés, “Historia General y Natural de las Indias,” 1547-9), furacan (in the works of Pedro Mártir De Anghiera, chaplain to the court of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella and historian of Spanish explorations), from an Arawakan (W. Indies) word.* In Portuguese,…
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Thought
“If earth’s social organisms are scored by complexity of communications, division of labor, and intensity of group integration, three pinnacles of evolution stand out: humanity, the jelly-fish-like siphonophores [e.g. Portuguese Man o’ War], and a select assemblage of social insect species.” ~ E.O. Wilson
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Further Extracts of a Sub-Sub-Librarian
I live in Brooklyn, located on the westernmost end of Long Island, but I also have a family connection to another island east of here. I graduated from high school on Nantucket, Mass., back in the last century, and go there still with some frequency. Between here and there there’s also a geographical connection: both…
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Those Animals!
A local tabloid has seen fit to make up a name for the very rare Grey-headed gull at Coney Island. From the NY birding list, I learned that the birders the tabloider talked to said the bird didn’t have a nickname and that they didn’t name wild animals. When the tabloider nevertheless offered some suggestions…
Backyard and Beyond 