Art Culture Politics
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A short note on size
One of the things about harvesting fish, whether cod before the crash, blue fin tuna today, or any hunted species, is that the bigger fish are the most prized by the industry. An example that made the news in January was a 752-pound blue fin auctioned for $396,000 in a Japanese fish market. There are…
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Mussel Power
I had no idea there are around 300 freshwater mussel species in North America, making our continent the richest in the world for these animals. Most of them occur in the mighty Mississippi Basin, particularly in the southeast, but we have a few in the metropolitan area as well. AMNH has a short course on…
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A cool note on fire
Fire was probably the most important technology used by the native Americans before the coming of the Europeans. Fire cleared land for cultivation, fertilizing it with ash. Fire thinned out forests into game park-like woodlands for the all important deer, and prevented succession from taking over rich meadows with brush and trees again. Fire created…
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Field Etymology
Or armchair natural history…. I am but mad north-northwest. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw. ~ Hamlet, to those errand boys Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, letting them in on the wink-wink. Now, if you’re like me when you first came across this line, you wondered “say wha?” I should hope…
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Una Selva Oscura
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita. Words: Dante. Image: My Polaroid transfer from a friend’s slide negative. Reason: My birthday.
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Public Scope
UPDATE 3-11-11 State Senator Carl Kruger, whose district includes Four Sparrow Marsh, has been indicted. About time. According to today’s Daily News, it’s alleged that Kruger’s “no big box stores” demand at the meeting detailed below supported his developer buddy Aaron Malinsky (who has paid Kruger’s shell operation $472,500 in the past), who wants smaller…
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The Mall at Four Sparrow Marsh?
The twice re-scheduled public scope meeting for the proposed mall at Four Sparrow Marsh is tonight. The meeting is at 7pm in the Kings Plaza Community Room, 5100 Kings Plaza (intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Avenue U). All the delays have given me some time to look through the paperwork filed for the proposal, which…
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A scant note on abundance
Extinction is forever. The Anthropocene Extinction we are living through is much discussed, but in this discussion something gets lost as we attempt to save the last hundred or thousand members of a particular species of charismatic megafauna. That something is the antithesis of extinction. It is the incredible abundance of animals and plants that…
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Wild Urban Plants
Let us now praise infamous weeds. “It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how”… it got that way. Well, as early as 1672, a couple dozen European plants were already growing spontaneously in New England… Today, there are Paulownia trees growing on both ends of the Union Street Bridge over the Gowanus Canal.…
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Everybody talks about the climate
…(except the President) but nobody does anything about it, as Mark Twain almost said. A lot more snow than we’ve seen for a while and a brief snap of the Arctic chilly-willies means you must have heard the new cliché in the media stream, if not in person: “So much for global warming.” Meanwhile, the…
Backyard and Beyond 