Kris Delmhorst - "Hummingbird"

A tune I find myself repeating and repeating and repeating this summer is Kris Delmhorst's "Hummingbird" from her album "Songs for a Hurricane."

Besides the soothing vocals, it's the universality of an unrequited love / crush that every human being has had at some point and the simple lyrics that make this song so great.

Christmas Trees

By Robert Frost (A Christmas circular letter - 1920)

The city had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the country;
When between whirls of snow not come to lie
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,
Yet did in country fashion in that there
He sat and waited till he drew us out
A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.
He proved to be the city come again
To look for something it had left behind
And could not do without and keep its Christmas.
He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods — the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.
I doubt if I was tempted for a moment
To sell them off their feet to go in cars
And leave the slope behind the house all bare,
Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.
I’d hate to have them know it if I was.
Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees except
As others hold theirs or refuse for them,
Beyond the time of profitable growth,
The trial by market everything must come to.
I dallied so much with the thought of selling.
Then whether from mistaken courtesy
And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether
From hope of hearing good of what was mine, I said,
"There aren’t enough to be worth while."
"I could soon tell how many they would cut,
You let me look them over."

“You could look.
But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”
Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close
That lop each other of boughs, but not a few
Quite solitary and having equal boughs
All round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,
Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one,
With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”
I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.
We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,
And came down on the north. He said, “A thousand.”

“A thousand Christmas trees! — at what apiece?”

He felt some need of softening that to me:
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”

Then I was certain I had never meant
To let him have them. Never show surprise!
But thirty dollars seemed so small beside
The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents
(For that was all they figured out apiece),
Three cents so small beside the dollar friends
I should be writing to within the hour
Would pay in cities for good trees like those,
Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools
Could hang enough on to pick off enough.
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,
As may be shown by a simple calculation.
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.

(image (c) Four Winds Ranch)

The Leonids

The annual Leonid meteor shower this year is expected to be above-average viewing.

Some quality links:
◦ Strong Leonid Meteor Shower Peaks Early Tuesday Morning

◦ November's Best: The Legendary Leonids

Drag yourself out of bed after midnight tonight (peak is reportedly 1 a.m. - 4 a.m.), grab a blanket and sit by the window to watch falling space debris. The forecast is for clear skies, and we are moonless (officially called a "new moon"), so it doesn't get much better, weather-wise.

We have not had a very good viewing year here in the Northeast since 2001. I remember that I had been up that night writing a paper (not last-minute... I just did a lot of my best writing in college in the pre-dawn hours) and intermittently got up and sat at the French doors in the living room that overlook the lake. That show was quite good, and especially at that time, it served as a reminder --- for me at least --- to maintain perspective. There are constants even in our ever-changing world.

According to The [New London] Day link above, there should be about 500 meteors an hour. Enjoy the show!

(Image © Juraj Toth, Modra Observatory, 1998)

The Plantae P.O.V.

Have been anticipating "The Botany of Desire" since promos ran about a month ago, and it was on PBS last night. Truth be told, I've been waiting for longer than that. The program was based on a book by the same title that Michael Pollan wrote a while back. While I was taking the botany course at UConn, one of the teaching assistants sold me on it, and I decided to check it out at the library. I never got a chance. Whenever I looked, it was always taken out. Even the library in town here has a copy that seems to never be on the shelf for long. I guess that if I ever want to read it, I'll need to shell out.

In the meantime, however, the program was excellent, especially with all of the photographs and video in HD.

In a nutshell, Pollan uses four types of plants --- the apple, the tulip, cannabis, and the potato --- to explore mankind's relations with the plant world (I looked on disapprovingly during the cannabis section). Like that old joke about aliens determining that dogs are the leaders of Earth, Pollan asks, 'Who's really in charge here?' We do things for these and other plants. We breed them in mass quantity. We feed them. We perpetuate them in our culture. We think we control them. But, as Pollan notes, by looking from the plant's perspective, one could easily argue that they have power over us.

As I've written before, the botany course was probably the most interesting class I took at the U. I think what hooked me was seeing the green algae Volvox under the microscope the first time. It spirals as it moves through the water, and the formation is just beautiful. Like the flagellate movement of Chlamydomonas, you would almost swear that there is something alive in there with conscious thought. But, alas, there is no brain and its movement is entirely random and acted upon by chemical attractions and environmental conditions. Soon after, though, there's the thought 'What if we're like that?' What if humanity and anamalia are simply creations that do nature's bidding --- entirely controlled by chemical forces whose complexity we don't understand? And I think to a large extent in responding to this last question, we do and we are. Earlier this year came the discovery of "zombie" ants whose brains are controlled by a fungus. Would it be so hard to consider that other animal species could be similarly controlled? There's an argument in there that could cozy up with philosophical Hard Determinism.

4 August 2009

A couple of nature notes.... Yesterday morning, our resident great blue heron was down by the water in the boat launch next door. It had caught a catfish that was about 10 inches, and was working away at it. Thing was, the fish was just too big for the heron to swallow whole (as herons do). So, the poor fella whose cup ranneth over was left to stabbing at the catfish over and over with its beak, and flexing its throat, trying to swallow again, then repeating this process a few times. You could almost see the frustration on the heron's gestures, not knowing how he'd actually eat this thing that was just too big to fit down his gullet, but not wanting to give up on a kill that he'd already devoted about 45 minutes on. Then, someone came down the boat launch and the heron flew off.

Today, just about an hour ago, I was kayaking out on the lake and saw what looked like a turtle head popping out of the water, so I paddled over to investigate. Most of the time in these encounters the turtle is long gone, but the stealth of the kayak (my second time in it) might not have scared it. I got to within about a foot of the creature and it just floated there, as if in suspended animation. Its head was about the size of my fist and its body/shell was roughly the perimeter of an elongated toilet seat. I've heard stories of larger turtles on this lake, but this is the biggest I've ever seen firsthand.

In bathroom work news, I grouted the tile floor yesterday. Spray painted the radiator with appliance epoxy (you should not use regular paint for baseboard, as it cuts down on the effectiveness of the heat dispersion), which has to dry for about 9 hours to handle (fully dry in 24 hours). Plan on priming the walls with some Kilz tomorrow morning, sealing the grout in the afternoon, then painting the walls tomorrow night.