Wednesday, 19 April 2006
Today, Mama Duck took the family for a perambulation, to teach the young’uns how to provide for themselves and all, and met us on the river path at Piedmont Park. The ducklings readily hopped through the fence, but Mama had to find the way around, poor stressed out Mama that she was!
Friday, 14 April 2006
Impala setting: Tanzania (whereas Salthill is in the Hudson Valley).
Abigail sees the women of Salthill, her sisters: all of them beautiful. Strange, that all are beautiful. The plain have been transformed into beauties by the magic of affluence. … Meringue hair, glaring cosmetic faces, piranha smiles, jewels that wink like semaphore signals. That commingled drunken smell of myriad perfumes.
Doesn’t Joyce Carol Oates nail it? Aren’t you transported to this country club ladies luncheon?
This is from Middle Age: A Romance (2001).
Given the prominence of assorted female characters in this tale, and the pivot of a male character, I keep thinking of John Updike’s 1984 The Witches of Eastwick, although the tales are quite dissimilar.
Saturday, 1 April 2006
Today, we enjoyed a gorgeous spring day, with temps tipping toward summer, but vegetation solidly in spring. We had the additional fortune of spending much of the day with our friends Kay and Dean wandering around Callaway Gardens. While we certainly reveled in the blooms—especially the banks of azaleas and dogwoods scattered below the pines—we also spent considerable time watching languid koi, bream (HUGE “brim”!), and sunning turtles.
John, perhaps a bit gleefully and perhaps a bit disgustedly, pointed out several egregious misspellings in Callaway’s carefully made signs, e.g., restauraunt, bicyles (we speculated that the pronunciation was “bickles”), and their inconsistent use of typefaces.
Thursday, 30 March 2006
FYI, vulture populations in India are way down, suffering a 97% decline over the last 10 years, I understand. The reason? The drug diclofenac, a painkiller widely administered to cattle across South Asia, which is poisonous to the scavengers. In fact, it’s so toxic to the birds that fifty can die from eating a single carcass. These are birds that, however omnipresent they must seem, produce at best only a single egg each year. Without help, odds are against their survival in this region….
Think about India, its ecology, the human overpopulation and wandering cattle. Indeed, scavenging vultures are a key part of Zoroastrian death rituals, where dead bodies are left to the vultures atop towers.
A ban is promised. A replacement drug (meloxicam) is on standby.
And the outcome? For now, we wait. Just like with climate warming….
Wednesday, 22 March 2006
Which layer of visual reality to focus on? Fish or sky? Well, this was yesterday and today’s just too darned busy to go back and reshoot this. I’m sure you get the sense of the moment, though.
John told the fish, “Don’t be coy!”
Here’s a new and growing web page to check out. My neighbor is an incredible photographer—a professional, not a hacker like me!—and Diane’s opted for early retirement and is taking her pictures to a browser window near you. Now I know why she says she’s having a hard time picking just a few images for the web page!
These days I learn about Georgia natural history, both floral and faunal, from Diane and her husband, Felix. Indeed, we’re hoping to nail down a date for a walk in the mountains next month….