Some cool things to do in nature

From The Bumper Book of Nature
Make a bark rubbing on a paper
sit/stand still for an hour and notice sounds
Record tree sounds in hollows
Blind walk in the woods
While keeping bird records in your nature diary - Date, Location, Time of sighting/time spent in the field, who you were with, weather conditions, names of species, any interesting or unusual behavior, memorable moments.

I was looking at Yellowstone trip pictures and found 2 rainbows in it and noticed that in the other the colors were reversed and 'count the colors of a rainbow' section confirms this.

Telling direction with a watch.

Poetry Feb 2010

Duns Grunbein
Modern day Rilke

Iceberg view of a young Weddell seal

Oceans
What a point it would be to stand away from earth and take alook at it, like the oceanographer and the child.
Blanket Octopus.
Marine Iguanas. A closeup shot. The patterns on its mouth like stiches in a row, cubes and then hexagons as you move up. The eye is like a far view of the cosmos. A picture of one going up with its forelimbs against the body and hind limbs like an outstretched frog's, like a ninja. It looks in peace.

Lion man

Part of the Pride
Paddatjie, my colleague tells me is pronounced as padykie and is a little frog. Padda is a frog. I overheard that Afrikaans is a language just a few months ago at a birthday party. He says that it is very similar to Dutch.
Kudu
Eternal enemies documentary. Lions and hyenas, one preying the young of the other.
White eye

Likeable Experimenter

Carrying the heart
Lazzaro Spallanzani

Why are unicorns always under attack?

The Natural History of Unicorns

Ctesias
Chiru
Kiang
Verteuil Tapestries
Khutu
Takin
Unbelievable SDZoo
okapi
Rishyasringa
While most animals have horns on their heads, tusks grow downwards. If man had some strong weapon like those sharp things, how different would our evolutionary path have been?

When things breakdown

Medical Mysteries
Tree Man from Indonesia makes us appreciate our functional immune system.
TMAU

Fair Day

Can a person who judges have mercy?

In a crystal ball

I should have written this long time ago, when it happened.
Have you ever felt like you are in a crystal ball?
A month ago, I went stargazing with friends. Four peaks ecen though very close to the freeway was far enough from th Phoenix city lights that only one side of the view had a hint of civilization. If you turn your back on the city, above and around you is a multitude of stars. There is the Milky Way. As shooting stars went, they became as common as dragonflies near a water source. We waited for the Orion to appear, not in the magical - whole of it at once, but in his imperfect, incomplete form with parts of his body showing up with patience on our part like a baby making its way from beneath the mountains. During my undergrad, I used the university telescope and the night I saw the ring around Saturn, I went home like Alice who is just back from her rabbit hole excursion. That was a time when I thought reading Antony and Cleopatra (keeping my engineering books aside during a college festival) would immerse me in their world and I will still be safe, back in time when my professors and the student world is ready to go over the lessons. The easiest to remember was Cassioepia. Easiest to spot too. When I looked at Pleides, the detail even through my binoculars got it alive for me. When I was showm Andromeda, the concept of light years picked from Carl Sagan's novel Contact still seems like a fairy tale. When I was told that it will take over a year to follow some points and see a good chunk of it, I started relating it to birdwatching. Seasons. I once had a very beautiful dream where I saw all the zodiac signs and clearly in their meant shapes.
I recall 'Two on a Tower' by Thomas Hardy, imagining as the person who looks to the sky.

Persona

Is persona free from fate?

Poem

When I read A Blessing, a poem by James Wright in poems about horses, I leapt at the last sentence. I recognise this reaction. The same one when I read it last time.

Recently Billy Collins against expectation did not consider rap as poetry. A friend considers unrhyming poetry as rap.

I like poems. I like songs. I like music. I like lyric.

One is not other.

What is Poetry? A posy that you want to add to your basket. A gadget that you know of it from its effect but not what it is. A Swiss army knife.

Throw back

Yesterday afternoon
I went on a walk
AC inside was too cool
Next to the bushes
breathing in
I was reminded of
white milk icecream
that we had on sticks
sold in blue cart on wheels
by a hawker
Was it the squeezing of self
to take in the melted juices?

Back inside I had momentary
cold and sneeze from the
pollen/milk icecream.

Proximate nature

Crow planet
If you tell me that you havent seen a young crow, I will believe you. But the author wont. She says " .. it is unlikely to be true... The problem is that we equate youngness with smallness, a mistake when it comes to most birds". Its through such breaking of our uninformed notions about crows, that the author makes us aware of the ubiquitous bird, its nesting behavior, its smartness.
Quoting Louis Pasteur that 'chance favors the prepared mind' she urges us to know more about our home ecosystems, get out walking and do the bird watching right outside our house instead of bringing our scopes out after driving hours to the other place called wilderness.
Bat box
Dec 22,2009

Aftermath

What happens to the passion
of artists like Jackson Pollock
when they die?

Next stop Getty center

By 1830s Victor Hugo was all Nostradamus about architecture being replaced by the products of printing press. But in 1420's, Cyriacus believed that ancient monuments were more crucial than texts. On travels as an accountant, Cyriacus was very fascinated by the ancient monuments in Venice, Alexandria, Constantinople. He set about travelling around and documenting all the sites of the ancient world. He turned the focus of the people from texts to the physical monuments.
To wake the dead

Dec 27,2009