Japanese goshawk....mmmmmm....

Garfield minus Garfield

How did I not know about this before now?

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?
Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.

Thank you so much, JP for bringing this to my attention...

Baby magenpeep

Oh lord, a meme. Tagged!

I've been tagged with this virtuous meme, via Steve.

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people

Oh lord. Here goes...and this is the nearest book...

'But then the Moon is an even smaller target and one of 'em has just hit the Moon!'
'But what would happen if...?'
'If one hit us?'

Yes, we're talking about gobbets of superheated gas expelled by a superintelligent gaseous lifeform! Of course! Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud, which I'm teaching tomorrow. Old-school science fiction; with a thinly-disguised Hoyle as protagonist.

Hoyle's tendency to write thinly-disguised Hoyle protagonists is a special joy: in The Fifth Planet he finds—to his delight—that the mind of his unintelligent, errant, yet beautiful wife has been taken over by an intellectual extra-terrestrial presence. In October the First Is Too Late, physics dictates that he finds himself in an alternate timeverse where he is worshipped as a god by naked women.

See, I said old school!

Time to tag. Meme. Come on, Xtin, Matt, Indigoglyph, Rebecca and Katie.

I don't get out much

Afghanistan

Thanks to my colleague Sarah for pointing to these images of Afghanistan by Simon Norfolk. The full set of images — and not one a duffer — can be seen on Simon Norfolk's website. Go to "Afghanistan: Chronotopia" and click on "pictures."

A BLDGBLOG interview with Norfolk can be found here.

More pangolin

Oops

From the BBC webpage just now. Sub-editors!

Homesickness is misunderstood

This Wired article is really very good. From Talking Pictures; which I can't link to, alas, because it keeps crashing my rickety Mac. (There's a link to her from Querencia)

Here's an excerpt.

Australia is suffering through its worst dry spell in a millennium. The outback has turned into a dust bowl, crops are dying off at fantastic rates, cities are rationing water, coral reefs are dying, and the agricultural base is evaporating.
But what really intrigues Glenn Albrecht — a philosopher by training — is how his fellow Australians are reacting.

They're getting sad.

In interviews Albrecht conducted over the past few years, scores of Australians described their deep, wrenching sense of loss as they watch the landscape around them change. Familiar plants don't grow any more. Gardens won't take. Birds are gone. "They no longer feel like they know the place they've lived for decades," he says.

Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They're suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. But nobody is being relocated; they haven't moved anywhere. It's just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them, and they miss it terribly.

Frogs!

My friend Ben, who I've not seen for an age, has returned from fieldwork in Ghana with some fantastic photos -- waiting for the snake pictures, Ben! Check out the frogs! Here.

Happy falconer

Wish I knew where this came from. Emirates? Qatar? By the way, male falconers out there, you are so lucky. No-one ever calls you a "falconess" or, worse, "falconeress"

I can't help making a face like I'm sucking a lemon when I hear that. Rebecca, do you get it too?

Looking for a good proverbial expression for the brevity of life? May I suggest this gem?

Verily I do fear the stupid death of the moth.


Aelian, On Animals xii. 8, Zenobius, Proverbs v. 79

Mabel contemplating as her moult begins

(click for big!)
That next year she'll look like this:


Only nicer.

Ye Olde Update

Ah, fretmarketeers. Spring is here. Mabel's sitting in her bath, cooling her boots, with a crop full of prime quail. I'm gardening — gardening! — pulling long worms of white bindweed roots from the loam of my new flowerbeds, in a little, sunny break from work. Lots of it. Bindweed and work, both. Teaching, proofreading, working on illustrations for a book (not mine), and in between, writing the goshawk book. Still fretting about a title (suggestions welcome) but am astonished to discover that I've already (if you count blog posts and my lackadaisical diary) 40,000 words or so. Now I just have to write the clever bits.

Cambridge is beautiful in this weather. It's hard, this spring, though. For some reason the change in season has made me miss my father, suddenly, very much indeed. I'm broke, too, which is a bit tricky; my stock of Mabel-caught quarry has disappeared from the freezer, and I've raided all the jars of small coins already. But there are good things coming. My brother and his long term partner are getting married on Midsummer's Day, which is just thrilling and wonderful. I am so happy for them, I could burst. I'm doing the goshawk talks on the radio. And in July, my mother and I are off on a ship to Svalbard, via northern Norway, to witness a total eclipse. I shall be Ahabing from deck, trying to see white whales. Belugas are one of my special animals, and the thought of seeing them spy-hopping and carolling in arctic waters is like the feeling of Christmas coming for a five-year old. Crossing my fingers. Beep!

Back to book-writing and essay-marking....

Lanius excubitor

Went for a walk the other day. The first hawkless walk in a long time, with Xtin, to Wicken Fen. Aka: rewilding, with a teashop. Billions of wigeon, oodles of shovelers, and so on and so forth. A very cold evening, so we've turned our collars up and hunch our shoulders as we trudge back to the carpark via the hides. I hesitate outside the last one. I can hear voices in the hide, and I confess here and now that I hate, in a painfully British way, walking into occupied bird hides.

But we go in, and it isn't a scary experience; there's a boy of about six sitting on the bench, looking out of the observation window, and his father, too, and they are clearly loving their afternoon out in the fens.

“Someone showed me.." says the father to Xtin and me, "the great grey shrike up there" — and with the there, he points at a speck right at the tip of a tall dead tree in the patchwork of lagoons reflecting the evening sky upwards to burr everything dusty orange and rose. "Apparently they’re really rare.”

They are. I am delighted. I knew the shrike had been wintering here; indeed, that it had been here for a couple of winters. But I'd not seen it before. And I was surprised because I expected it to be lower. It must be a good fifty, sixty feet up. I’d only seen shrikes in hot places, shrikes with their toes around low thorn bushes in baking garrigue, hunting in hot air sizzling with crickets. Never perched crows-nest high. Up there, this bird is plump and round with a stubby tail, all near-sillhouette; you can’t see its head. It looks like a malevolent blue tit.

Of course, it wouldn't look malevolent unless you know what shrikes do.

“Shrikes, Daniel” says the man, turning to the small boy, “catch birds and frogs and then they …. “ he considers, briefly, “impale them on thorns on thorn bushes”
“So they die?” says Daniel
“Yes. And then they come back and eat them.”
“Coooool!” says Daniel, with infinite relish.