A fern at Kew Gardens, London.

A fern at the ABG.

John and I have been combing through our slides, sorting out a few keepers for scanning, continuing our shift to digital images. Once upon a time, we visited Kew Gardens on a rainy winter day at the end of January 1999. I did not remember that I was even then fascinated with the lacy look of fern fronds.

I find that when we visit the Atlanta Botanical Garden (always a worthwhile urban escape!) and I commandeer the camera in the conservatories these days, I am drawn to the ferns (well, and the orchids, and the…). Part of it is the delicate edges, and I suspect another part of it is their long history of survival on this fine planet. Indeed, I remember staring at painted ferns in the backdrops of dioramas at the Michigan State University Museum, more fascinated with the vegetation than with the fossils or stuffed animals in the foreground.

Trivia: my favorite fern name is Polypodium polypodioides, also known by the more prosaic name Resurrection Fern; it grows across eastern North America. I remember first learning its name from specimens in North Carolina aeons ago when I was working on the Haw River excavations.

PC people: know that I love you anyway. But I sure don’t understand why you (home-users) stay with such a flawed set-up. Viruses by the dozen, awkward operating system and hours to upgrade, upload, and perform just about any other system/software tweak. Think of the person-hours invested in keeping the darned things slogging along!

Maybe you’ve heard about the worm out there that infects Macs (NYT story). Realize that (as I understand it) you have to have a particular operating system (OSX 10.4), be running iChat, manually decompress the worm file, and type in your administrative-level user name and password for it to go. That’s an awful lot of steps and unusual ones at that!

Mac people: still virus free!

P.S. That’s good ol’ Mac Sage in the photo. Wrote my MA thesis on it! It was named for a spice-bottle sticker it acquired sometime after this photo was taken.

“Wealthy women are going to injection parties,” said Dr. Daniel Kane, a plastic surgeon in Miami who treats complications from these procedures. “They tell each other: ‘So-and-so is having a guy over to inject stuff. She looks gorgeous.’ And then they go. They’re proud of it, until they have a problem.”*

If this is your idea of doing something racy that you can be proud of, you’d best stick to collecting wild bird’s eggs or butterflies! Or even ashtrays and bathrobes nabbed from hotels!

* From The New York Times “Beauty on the Black Market” by Natasha Singer, 16 Feb 2006, dateline: Miami. You may have to register—it’s free!

I know the buzz these days is loudest about the Cheney hunting accident (pomposity to the nth degree in the handling of that!), but I’m far more interested in this: Sotheby’s reports selling one of Edward Steichen’s nature photographs, “The Pond-Moonlight,” for more than $2.9 million US, a record for a photo, to a gallery on behalf of a private (and presently anonymous) buyer (I get my info from a Washington Post story).

Interestingly, the seller was the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If you have not yet realized that museums do not obtain and hold objects, but churn them back into the market at a regular rate, you must. This nets the museums cash for items that duplicate materials they already have, or items that they’d rather not hold (e.g., they don’t “fit” with their collection goals). It also enlarges the market so that illicit sellers can more easily insert illegally obtained items into the marketing stream.

I do not understand this kind of acquisition fever, but I’ve sure seen it in action. The Brits are particularly good at it: wild bird egg collecting–meaning nabbing the egg from the nest—was quite the thing in Victorian England (it’s now illegal there).

What do I collect? I guess it’s memories of good times!

Sometimes our Valentines surprise us. Here’s mine to me: population estimation redone! And it looks quite good!

[Thanks to John for making me this heart image, another Valentine!]

Some time ago we visited the 99 Ranch Market up on Buford Highway and found this lovely label. 99 Ranch Markets are a chain that began in the 1980s in California. They sell not only groceries—with signs in many languages and sometimes just pictures, e.g., a pig image over the pork and a cow over the beef—but also housewares. Beware the labels here, too, and stick with the images!

I think of translation as a filter, sometimes amplifying and sometimes reducing the quality of information transferred, but generally not exactly the same as the original, especially when you consider denotation and connotation. All too often this fact is overlooked, especially by monolingual people (who by definition don’t have enough experience with translation issues). Think of all the American fundamentalist Christians who have never read the bible in anything but translation. What do they know about what meaning was really intended? How can they make their own critical assessment of the text?

The Prime Meridian, the one through Greenwich, England, doesn’t line up in Google Earth. As you can see, the meridian in this projection is east of the observatory, by about 100 meters. The reason:

This is not a mistake on Google’s part. The developers of Google Earth (originally known as Keyhole) chose to support the same coordinate system as that used by GPS technology known as WGS-84 World Geodetic System.

Click here for a technical explanation of all this. Basically, the earth isn’t a smooth, regular sphere, and GPS is so accurate, something had to give. So they shifted the Prime Meridian. And there’s also the contribution of continental drift….

Google Earth (it’s FREE), if you haven’t yet explored it, is fascinating—searchable satellite photos of THE WORLD! Add places to your personal list, or send them out to the Google community.

Trivia: the GPS system uses 25 satellites, each with two atomic clocks. Bob Burns turns 80 today (Happy Birthday, Bob!). Jack Finlayson has come through his surgeries okay.

The term “abandonment” is often inaccurate and imprecise in archaeological discourse because it veils a range of behaviors in the past and assumes descendent communities have relinquished their present interests and claims in ancient places.

This bit of wisdom—and they’re so right!—is by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and T.J. Ferguson (”Rethinking Abandoment in Archaeological Contexts” in The SAA Archaeological Record, Jan 2006, pp. 37–41).

Substitute “collapse” for “abandonment” and it’s still accurate.

Now you have some idea why Jared Diamond’s books annoy me so much. His perspective is reductionist and ignores the range of comparative data available, indeed he ignores much of the data assembled by ARCHAEOLOGISTS, and the analysis we have done on the issues he’s commented on, especially in Guns, Germs, and Steel and his new Collapse book.

(I’ll quit now before this becomes a full-blown rant!)

The map above is of the civic-ceremonial core and the surrounding residential compounds at the huge city of Teotihuacán, Mexico. It was drafted during the 1960s as part of the the Teotihuacán Mapping Project, headed by Rene F. Millon. (The squares are 1 km on a side, so this city is BIG!)

Many, including probably JD, say Teotihuacán was abandoned at the end of the Classic period. Well, the civic-ceremonial architecture (temple mounds and the like) were burned and not rebuilt, but the residential areas remained mostly inhabited for at least several hundred years after the conflagration. Yeah, I know this sounds like an incomplete story, and it is. Many Mexican archaeologists, and a few foreigners too, are still excavating and working to help us understand what happened at Teotihuacán.

On today’s walk we once again looped around Piedmont Park’s Lake Clara Meer (John says the name is nobody’s, merely one that sounded good to the development types who planned it), and watched an unmoving Great Blue Heron, posed on the south shore of the lake amidst busy ducks. Sorry no picture….

Now, I smell the pizza dough’s ready to be kneaded—mmm, home-made tonight with goat cheese, mushrooms, and basil!

Along with shelling out your hard-earned cash for the ticket, when you take a plane ride, you get the cheap thrill of seeing the earth from what might now be known as the Google Earth perspective. It’s a lesson in how to feel small—or perhaps the size we should be feeling all the time.

We left Seattle Sunday in a big splash of sunshine, and had this great view of Mount Rainier as we began the eastbound leg back to Atlanta. The rain we saw all week dumped deep white stuff on the ski slopes and high elevations, heightening avalance potential and reminding us that there’re no looming white peaks back in the Southeast.