K is for Khaki

From Nightjar,

K is for Khaki ©Nightjar, all rights reserved

Khaki.

Telling apart tones of light brown is an exercise I find neither easy nor exciting, but the letter K doesn’t really afford many choices. I did learn that khaki is actually a RYB quinary color obtained by mixing equal parts of the quaternary colors sage and buff. Not that this piece of information helped me much, mind you. Hopefully some parts of this sheep’s portrait aren’t too far-off.

Link to previous alphabet post

Jack’s Walk

Drucilla the Prepared, ©voyager, all rights reserved

Murray the Inappropriate, ©voyager, all rights reserved

Jack and I had an interesting walk in the woods in the woods today. We ran into two young people from the Stone Tribe – that’s how they introduced themselves. The eldest is Drucilla the Prepared and she has lovely orange eyes and spots. The youngest is Murray the Inappropriate and he couldn’t stop giggling and the whole time his red and white spots kept jiggling as he wiggled and laughed. Drucilla says they are a long, long way from home and have been brought here by Pikes to act as sentinels.

I asked the obvious question. “How did pikes carry you here?”

Murray finally stops giggling and shouts out, “in their hands of course,” to which I reply “fish don’t have hands.”

“Of course they don’t, but what do fish have to do with it.”

“Well, you told me that you were brought here by pikes.”

“Not the fish Pikes,” says Murray. “The Palmerston Pikes, down near Punkydoodle Corner.” Then he starts to laugh again only this time he’s guffawing which makes him start to fart and that makes Jack start to giggle.

“You’d best be on your way now,” says Drucilla. “No more questions. I’ve said far too much already.”

“But, there’s so much more I want to know,” I said.

“Of course there is, but you’ll not hear it from me.”

“Please,” I pleaded.

“Off you go now. Don’t make call for aid.” Drucilla said finally.

I could hear hard steel in her voice and, since I don’t know what “aid” means to someone from the Stone Tribe, Jack and I sensibly, but reluctantly walked away. For now.

I have many questions.

 

YouTube Video: Lawrence Krauss, Jeffrey Epstein, and Firing Your Heroes into the Sun

Yup, losing heroes is nothing new to me personally. Everybody has flaws of course, but Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and many other “Skeptics” and “Rationalists” have really quickly sailed past the “Cape of Flawed Human” through the “Straits of Doubling Down” right into the “Sea of Shitlords” where they finally found their stable and comfortable niche.

What really gets me about the Epstein case specifically – and Rebecca alludes to it in the video, although probably coincidentally – is the sheer arrogance. He had a private jet, he could travel wherever and whenever he wanted for his sexcapades, so he could travel to countries with a lower age of consent. It would still be shitty behavior, but he would avoid doing something blatantly illegal (if he also avoided forcible rape that is). But, as is typical for such rich privileged assholes, he just did what he did in the USA and he was sure he will get away with it because he is rich.

That is the part that makes me angry.

The part that makes me sad is that he did get away with it. Even if he goes to prison now, it is too late and even a life sentence will be thus too short.

Jack’s Walk

Not the bunny in the story, but he’s cute! © voyager, all rights reserved

I swear this is a true story.

Last evening after supper Jack and I took a short stroll down to the end of our street. On our way back home we spotted a rabbit sitting in the middle of the sidewalk a few houses ahead. The rabbit was small and looked young and he was watching us approach and not moving – basically, frozen with fear and that “Oh, shit, now what do I do feeling.” We approached slowly – Jack has been taught not to chase anything alive and I was sure the bunny would finally bolt when we got closer. Nope. Jack amiably walked up to the rabbit and then bent down and took a sniff. Well, that rabbit turned his head and then rubbed his nose on Jack’s nose and the two of them just stood there for a moment looking at each other. Finally, the rabbit got up on his hind legs and gave Jack a good sniff or two and then he slowly hopped away into the shadows. Jack waited for me to tell him “let’s go” and then he ambled home slowly, deep in contemplation. I got the feeling that Jack was right pleased with the encounter and couldn’t quite believe that it had happened. Me, too.

Drought, Death, Despair.

So far the hottest year in the Czech Republic since the history of measurements was 2018. The rest of the top were years 2017, 2015 and now it seems 2019 will bump one of them off and three hottest years will be also three consecutive years. Right now we have a third consecutive year of not only abnormally hot but also abnormally dry weather. The area where I live is still relatively well off – and here it did not rain for eight weeks by now. Four of my bonsai trees have nearly died (and will probably die definitively) because I do not have as much water as I need to water them. I have managed to keep alive my freshly planted hornbeams in the coppice, but only just, and if no rain comes, they are toast. If I did not have my own sewage cleaning facility that allows me to use wastewater for watering trees they would be toast already. The well did not dry out yet, but it has merely 3 m of water now, which is not much.

And to drive the point really home I encountered this at work during my lunch break walk – a tiny baby frog or (more probably) a toad, dried and mummified (the pictures were not taken on the same day btw, it is still there).

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

It is fairly common to find dead dry frogs/toads on the road, but they are usually squashed by a passing car prior to that. This poor little wee thing had dried mid-step.

I am not particularly squeamish, but this sight shook me. It is a warning of things to come.

The Art of Book Design: Jude the Obscure

Thomas Hardy. Jude the obscure. London, James R. Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1896. First edition.

I have a bit of bit of trivia to go with today’s book. According to Wikipedia,

Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, met with an even stronger negative response from the Victorian public because of its controversial treatment of sex, religion and marriage. Furthermore, its apparent attack on the institution of marriage caused further strain on Hardy’s already difficult marriage because Emma Hardy was concerned that Jude the Obscure would be read as autobiographical. Some booksellers sold the novel in brown paper bags, and the Bishop of Wakefield, Walsham How, is reputed to have burnt his copy.[20] In his postscript of 1912, Hardy humorously referred to this incident as part of the career of the book: “After these [hostile] verdicts from the press its next misfortune was to be burnt by a bishop – probably in his despair at not being able to burn me”.[27]

 

via: Books and Art

Available to read at The Internet Archive

I is for Indigo

From Nightjar,

I is for Indigo ©Nightjar, all rights reserved

Indigo.

A deep rich blue, inclining towards violet, and one of the seven colors of the rainbow as named by Newton. The indigo dye is one of the oldest dyes known, historically extracted from plants of the genus Indigofera, but I think I found it on the berries of a Viburnum shrub.

 

Link to previous alphabet post

Dance Dance Snowball!

It’s been hitting other media sites as well, but I first caught the news of Snowball the dancing parrot at The Atlantic:

His owner had realized that he couldn’t care for the sulfur-crested cockatoo any longer. So in August 2007, he dropped Snowball off at the Bird Lovers Only rescue center in Dyer, Indiana—along with a Backstreet Boys CD, and a tip that the bird loved to dance. Sure enough, when the center’s director, Irena Schulz, played “Everybody,” Snowball “immediately broke out into his headbanging, bad-boy dance,” she recalls. She took a grainy video, uploaded it to YouTube, and sent a link to some bird-enthusiast friends. Within a month, Snowball became a celebrity.

What’s unusual about Snowball is his choreographic development:

Snowball wasn’t copying Schulz. When she danced with him, she’d only ever sway or wave her arms. He, meanwhile, kept innovating. In 2008, Patel’s undergraduate student R. Joanne Jao Keehn filmed these moves, while Snowball danced to “Another One Bites the Dust” and “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” And recently, after a long delay caused by various life events, she combed through the muted footage and cataloged 14 individual moves (plus two combinations). Snowball strikes poses. He body rolls, and swings his head through half circles, and headbangs with a raised foot. To the extent that a parrot can, he vogues.

See?

The article explains more about how his rhythmic ability was noticed and tested, but I will say this: he’s quite the talented bird, I definitely cannot lift my leg like that and still keep headbanging.

What’s interesting is the conclusions being drawn from Snowball’s dancing ability:

“Parrots are more closely related to dinosaurs than to us,” Patel says, and yet they are the only other animals known to show both spontaneous and diverse dancing to music. “This suggests to me that dancing in human cultures isn’t a purely arbitrary invention,” Patel says. Instead, he suggests that it arises when animals have a particular quintet of mental skills and predilections:

  1. They must be complex vocal learners, with the accompanying ability to connect sound and movement.
  2. They must be able to imitate movements.
  3. They must be able to learn complex sequences of actions.
  4. They must be attentive to the movements of others.
  5. They must form long-term social bonds.

A brain that checks off all five traits is “the kind of brain that has the impulse to move to music,” Patel says. “In our own evolution, when these five things came together, we were primed to become dancers.” If he’s right, that settles the eternal question posed by The Killers. Are we human, or are we dancer? We’re both.

Parrots also tick off all five traits, as do elephants and dolphins. But outside of trained performances, “do you ever see a dolphin do anything to music spontaneously, creatively, and diversely?” Patel asks. “I don’t know if it’s been studied.” He wonders whether animals need not only five traits that create an impulse to dance, but also a lot of exposure to humans and our music. Captive dolphins don’t get much musical experience, and even though they interact with trainers, their main social bonds are still with other dolphins. But Snowball, from an early age, lived with humans. He seemingly dances for attention, rather than for food or other rewards. And he appears to dance more continuously when Schulz dances with him—something that Patel will formally analyze in a future study.

More fascinating information in the article, also here’s the CBC link.

I say, keep dancing, Snowball! And here’s two dancing songs for the rest of us:

 

Jack’s Walk

What the Pluck!

Someone came into our peaceful, wee forest and deliberately plucked out plants by their roots and then scattered them along the entire length of the path. The wreckage looked fairly fresh so it must have happened yesterday or earlier today, but who would do that? And why? It isn’t exactly violence, but it has the look of violence about it and it’s certainly senseless and stupid. Those plants were probably minding their own business, just doing that growing in the summer thing that plants do. I doubt they were shouting out insults or hurling stones at passersby nor were they likely to be plotting to do mischief at midnight. Sheesh! I hope whoever did this get weeds.