Bird of the Day: Grey Indian Jungle Fowl, Female (Thekkady, India)
The Drunken Bumblebee
A snapshot of the inebriated bee. Click for higher resolution!
No, it’s not a new mixed drink.
I was sitting on a bench a few days ago when I noticed something interesting Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Grey Indian Jungle Fowl, Male (Thekkady, India)
Maize
Despite the lush color in the photograph above, most corn mazes designed by Brett Herbst are enjoyed by people this time of year, when the pumpkins are filling their patches and the apples are filling their trees. During this season the mazes coincide well with hay rides and cider pressing, quintessential fall activities.
Mr. Herbst and his team have designed 1,800 mazes in the past 15 years, from custom made “Your Name Here” styles to the image above that almost feels inspired by the Nazca Lines.
Many of the mazes have bridges and signposts with clues to assist visitors to find the correct paths, versus the twists and turns that lead to either dead ends or back where you came from.
Wouldn’t it be great if life was like that?
Good Vibrations
Bird of the Day: Nilgiri Pipit (Paranthupaara, India)
A Reassuring Fable
Eight Year Echo Of Hope
When I described, a couple weeks ago, the echo of hope emanating from the Gulf of California it is fair to say I was pleasantly surprised. That may be putting it too mildly, especially in hindsight now that I have seen a major new entrepreneurial initiative come to life there. I will be writing more about that in the coming days.
But for now, I am in the Galapagos Islands and another echo is resonating. In this case, for me, the echo is an eight year feedback. As mentioned in this earlier post I had worked here on and off over several years, and the last time I was here there were some challenges that seemed intractable. Today, upon arrival and for the remainder of the day, I had the opposite feeling of the last time I was here. The photos below show the first thing I did with Reyna and Roberto after leaving the airport. In the first photo you can see, as I did, just a simple conversation between them and one of the workers; then slowly a parade of otherworldly creatures crept into the photos…
Rotam fortunae non timeo!
Rotam fortunae non timeo -- "I do not fear the wheel of fortune!"
“Mortal men travel by different paths, though all are striving to reach one and the same goal… happiness,”[1] or so says Boethius, the great Roman philosopher. I think we can all agree that, no matter what we want to do or how we choose to do it, our ultimate goal is happiness. It is “the good which once obtained leaves nothing more to be desired.”[2] It doesn’t necessarily take a philosopher to realize this, though; approach any random person and he or she will probably confirm that a happy life, is, of necessity, a good one.
But what is happiness? We say we are “happy” when we get an A on a test, win an important sports game, or finish a grueling paper—but what do we mean by it? The joy from these moments, however real at the time, begins to appear ephemeral in retrospect. Think back to the 6th or 7th grade: do you still glow with warmth when you remember getting a 93 on an Earth Sciences test (if you remember at all!)? Continue reading
Olives In October
October is the month for harvesting olives in Croatia. I thought about this recently when cooking in my Kerala kitchen as I opened a jar of imported olives, knowing in advance that they would never hold a candle to the quality of artisanal food. When we lived in Paris one could buy olives by the kilo at the marché, with numerous varieties to choose from. But here in southern India I have to settle for rather industrial Spanish imports at the table and memories of unparalleled flavor in my mind.
In reality, there are two harvests—one for olives that will be cured, and one for olives that will be pressed for oil. On smaller islands the frenzy of activity is much more evident for the latter—perhaps because fewer people cure olives anymore. The island people found me to be quite the curiosity. Here I was, a newcomer, trying to do all the traditional things that most young people were attempting to abandon.
There was no commercial production or agriculture on Koločep, one of smaller of the 5 Elafiti Islands, that sit like an extended constellation from the city of Dubrovnik. All gardens and orchards are for personal use, but there are people who certainly had large amounts of land in one sort of production or another. Our very overgrown home garden was a small example—there were figs, pomegranates, mandarinas, plums, carobs and of course, olives—none of which have been pruned for what looked like decades. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Indian Cliff Swallow (Ranganthittu, India)
Occupy Language!
The collection of thoughts, links, images, etc here is meant to bring attention to ideas and actions for a challenged and challenging world. Written and spoken language, to say the least, have been important tools to this end for some time. The language we use on this site, by default, is a function of those of us who banded together on a given day at a given time to do this jig. Other languages, the cultural patrimony sometimes referred to as intangible, are hopefully strengthened, rather than weakened by this effort.
This fellow makes some very important points about the English language. We have not read his book, but from his excerpted thoughts there is good cause to read more reviews and add it to the maybe list. Meanwhile, we make our cultural case (another reason, beyond skiiing, to put Kashmir on your map?) to keep languages alive, perhaps especially of those not included on the most-alive list:
There are anywhere from 350 to 500 million native English speakers, and up to 1 billion more who use it as a second or additional language to some extent. That’s 20% of the world’s 6.9 billion people. There are close to 7,000 languages spoken around the world today, but according to Ethnologue, 39% of the Earth’s people speak one of eight brand-name languages: Chinese, Spanish, English, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese, and Russian (Japanese is number 9). Of these, only English can claim global dominance.
Saving Rhyme and Reason
For me, reading has always been a route out of a chaotic world. That doesn’t mean that I read “fluff”. Far from it. (Anyone familiar with The Iliad or Beowulf, knows that neither Sam Peckinpah nor Akira Kurosawa invented the specificity or depiction of violence.) But whether sitting with my children and reading aloud, or better still, sitting with my children while we all read individually, books bring an intangible into our lives by opening doors that remain available to us indefinitely.
Frequently the educational systems in many parts of the world pressure students into making choices that seem almost binary; the “science track” or “business track” for example, setting them on an educational road that is fundamentally an express lane highway, with little chance of turn offs and detours. These systems produce very smart people in their fields, but it doesn’t easily provide opportunities for reaching full potential. Continue reading
Life Looks For Life
Putting Kashmir On The Map
Guest Author: CJ Fonzi
I recently received this link from a Facebook friend. One of those Facebook friends that you meet on an adventure somewhere, instantly bond with, keep in touch with forever. This particular guy is an oil engineer from Norway- an unlikely friend of a sustainable business consultant in New York City. But that is what travel and exploration are all about.
Kashmir- the name brings images of war, struggle, and International politics. But to those of us who have been there the images that come to mind are more like the ones shown here.
The village is called Gulmarg and it hands down has the best skiing in the world. Continue reading
Wordsmithing: Conservation
In a nod to recent posts on this site about new entrepreneurial conservation initiatives, some etymology to complement the OED‘s first entry in the definition of this noun:
The preservation of life, health, perfection, etc.; (also) preservation from destructive influences, natural decay, or waste…The preservation, protection, or restoration of the natural environment and of wildlife; the practice of seeking to prevent the wasteful use of a resource in order to ensure its continuing availability
No surprises there. A rather nice surprise, considering the world we live in today, is that most of the references, going back to 1398 and with a long line of ever-strengthening suggestions, point to a divine origin and in more recent centuries a responsibility of man to the divine, to engage in conservation.
Bird of the Day: Jungle Babbler feeding on a scorpion (Thekkady, India)
The High Line
Notice where the railway used to enter the building
The High Line railway was originally designed to bring shipments straight from the Hudson to manufacturing warehouses in Manhattan. The train cars could run packages from wharves to upper-level floors of these industrial buildings without having to obstruct street traffic or be carried up several stories manually (freight elevators weren’t a common sight in the 1930s, whether for safety, efficiency, or invention reasons I don’t know).
In 1980 the High Line trains stopped running, and construction of the new park design started in 2006 (after seven years of planning). The first section opened to the public in 2009, and the second section in 2011.
I first heard of the High Line Park this summer, while doing some browsing about the city online. I was immediately struck by the ingenuity of converting what had once been industrial space Continue reading
Double Standards
Kids and young adults are very good at identifying double standards. They can tell right away if you are preaching one thing and not acting accordingly. On the one hand, adults talk about honesty and truth. And then one day they might ask their children to tell the aunt that dad is not home (maybe he cannot talk to her at that moment). How many times does a parent tell his/her child to lower their voice to be respectful, but say it to the child with a strong, demanding tone? Continue reading
Through the Looking Glass
Hoopoo by Textile Artist Abigail Brown
Question: What would a Natural History Museum look like in Wonderland?
Answer: Abigail Brown’s studio.
The Victorians were avid collectors, and there’s something deliciously Victorian about the detail and precision with which textile artist Abigail Brown practices her craft, bringing the winged world to life with bits and pieces of cloth that each carries their own history. Continue reading
Organikos 