Author: pseudoisaac

I stepped out from work at just the right time. It looked as though a rounded chunk of the sun was being shorn off. It was touching that a viewing party was visible right there in my sight-line. How many other such parties, cascading across the earth, followed this accident of perspective as it moved through space, in an event worthwhile only because it was so coincidental? No doubt the oohs and aahs were uttered in a predicatble wave from east to west as the event unfolded.

I’ll be present, mentally, tomorrow when the Philae lander touches down on a comet for the first time. And I’ll see (if it’s not overcast) the Taurid meteor shower peak in a couple of days. Hopefully the skies will dump all the snow they can muster on Monday to allow for clear viewing on Wednesday.

A walk in the city provides so many fun things to look at !!

Voila, a box for a “Rookie” brand penis enlarger pump. What a great name for a penis enlarger ! I bet the happy owner discarded the box on his way home because he had to sneak it past his parents to get to his room.

And here, a pigeon nest made entirely of metal wire ! It was found when the old East Lake Library was torn down and replaced. There’s some kind of metaphor in there about how humans will rebuild after the current E. boli and swine AIDS catastrophe sweeps through.

All of which will be elaborated in later posts.

So I’m walking near the west bank light rail station, and against the odds I notice a dead bird on the ground. I can’t believe how tiny it is. Looking up I see, as expected, a big glassy walkway where the bird struck, probably during overnight migration.

I am sure it is a Nashville warbler in non-breeding plumage. I’ve never positively identified one in the field, though they are common. Birding is about the joy of small discoveries so it is sad that the first one I see should be dead due to a glass collision that could be avoided with better design.

That is the unfortunate pattern of many people who study nature: you’re thrilled to see a new species or habitat, only to feel grim forebodings about their future. This is especially true of scientists that study amphibians.

The owners of the new Vikings stadium have refused to adopt bird-friendly glass design despite the reasonable cost. Yet another reason for me to hate football.

The secluded site on Black Bass Lake is the best. The weather was fine. I ate a huge amount of peanut butter and nuts.

On the trails I left my binoculars behind and instead of seeing birds I began to notice all the fungus on the ground. Funny how one’s observations are predetermined by the tools one is equipped with. If I had brought a weed wrench I would have noticed lots of invasive buckthorn to pull. If I had brought a GPS unit I would have noticed the geologic features of the area.

The Tour de Fungus revealed reds, oranges, yellows and translucent whites. There was a turkey-tail fungus and a shelf fungus and a coral-like one. As an added treat I found a tiny common snapping turtle sunning itself on the park road.

I wish I could approach these strayings with the intellectual fearlessness of Newton. He found that algebra didn’t satisfy his insistent probings about the world, so he invented differential calculus to do what he needed to do!

I wish I could observe nature with the unbounded curiosity of Darwin. He observed and documented and toiled until he arrived at a theory that jarred his own conscience! But he published it (after much hesitation) because he had so thoroughly convinced himself of his own findings.

Do I have the courage to follow my curiosity wherever it may take me?

I got chatted up by two ladies for five minutes before one of them pulled out a Jehovah’s Witness bookmark and implored me to visit the church’s website. She seemed diffident. And her partner was looking down as if embarrassed.

I didn’t feel guilty about interrupting the spiel and contradicting her because of the disingenuous way she had used friendly conversation as a pretext to poop out her religious nonsense right there in front of me. No one likes having a nice conversation only to suddenly get a sales pitch at the end.

I should have said something about how I did not believe, but was convinced by, the evidence for a large, old universe, with natural selection driving life on Earth; and that we should not be preoccupied with ideas about cartoonish gods, but instead focus on improving ourselves and the environment in the here and now.

But instead I mumbled some kind of thank you and said I would check out the site. I don’t have the rhetorical skills or the energy to take a stand with every evangelist I meet.

Included: a primordial-looking island at Veterans Park in Richfield, MN.

Early summer storms

Tue 7-8-2014

It’s been a wet late spring and early summer in and around Minneapolis. Many of the thunderstorms have been quite violent and the flooding has been severe. In one of the very first storms I set out with my clear utility glasses, lights and waterproof layers and biked through the heavy rain, down the Minnehaha Creek trail.

It was a rare event and a privilege to get soaked by the first warm raindrops of summer. While cranking the pedals of my shitty steel bike I thought about the statistic that for every one woman who dies from a lightning strike, seven men die. This is thought to be due to men having more outdoor occupations and being generally dumber.

On that trail I thought about how people delight in a wide variety of natural phenomena. It’s fun and enchanting to see the sunrise or to be outside when the first snowflakes of winter start to fall, especially when you’re dripping with effort and exertion.

I thought about my most recent National Geographic magazine, whose feature article was on the huge numbers of exoplanets being discovered every year. There may be another world out there where storms burn the continents with acid rain. Or another world where the oceans churn with cold liquid alkanes. Or another world where ultraviolet light blasts apart the molecules of heredity of the inhabitants there, causing them to grow opaque exoskeletons or to live totally under the planet’s crust.

I pictured creatures whose greatest delight is to swim in those cold, volatile oceans, or to run about amid the caustic showers. Perhaps, even, there’s the collective joy of a wise old civilization that had calmly confronted its ultimate peril: thermal death and entropy. Maybe as their star fizzled out, they dispersed into space in a diffuse cloud of electronic signals, coding their memories and cognition into bits conveyed by the flickering charged particles they would become. They would still learn and grow, and remain individuals, but they would never again inhabit bodies, instead continuing to communicate and to reduce their use of energy asymptotically as they delayed oblivion for as long as possible.

“We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”

Perhaps these beings, in their remote cloud, would delight in suddenly feeling x-rays from a distant pulsar. Perhaps they would witness the birth of distant stars as grandparents do here on earth, with the most exquisite, genuine, vicarious joy, picturing the spring showers and cool dips those future beings are in for.

But back to my bike ride: I made it home safely, dumb as ever, and grateful to be acquainted with springtime.

Included: photos from a trip to the old Cedar Avenue bridge in Bloomington, Minnesota.

I am reading "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss. It provides ample motivation to follow the simple rule of thumb to avoid the center of the grocery store and instead make your way around the periphery, to pick up fresh produce, a small amount of meat and dairy if desired, and a moderate amount of whole-grain bread on the way out.

The findings in the book clearly suggest better laws regulating Big Food without bashing the reader over the head with a political message.

People are suffering and dying in part due to unhealthy foods. As the states said to Big Tobacco in the nineties, "You caused this, you pay for it." It’s a simple message certain food companies should internalize as they look toward their own future.

White Fang

Mon 6-16-2014

With my advancing years and graying temples I ascribe more things in life, good and bad, to chance rather than to my own active choice and discriminating judgement. Just look at the last relationship I was in – that was just a happy accident. Look at the last book I read: White Fang. I only read it because it was pre-loaded on my Kindle for free when I bought it. I don’t exactly seek out early twentieth-century American novels.

The dog-wolf hybrid in the book went from being a vicious Yukon fighting animal to being a beloved member of a California ranch family.

The relationship and the book were both great while they lasted.

A few passages I highlighted from White Fang:

“On every side was the silence, pressing upon them with a tangible presence. It affected their minds as the many atmospheres of deep water affect the body of the diver. It crushed them with the weight of unending vastness and unalterable decree. It crushed them into the remotest recesses of their own minds, pressing out of them, like juices from the grape, all the false ardours and exaltations and undue self-values of the human soul, until they perceived themselves finite and small, specks and motes, moving with weak cunning and little wisdom amidst the play and inter-play of the great blind elements and forces.”

“He was justifying his existence, than which life can do no greater; for life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.”

“His development was in the direction of power. In order to face the constant danger of hurt and even of destruction, his predatory and protective faculties were unduly developed. He became quicker of movement than the other dogs, swifter of foot, craftier, deadlier, more lithe, more lean with ironlike muscle and sinew, more enduring, more cruel, more ferocious, and more intelligent. He had to become all these things, else he would not have held his own nor survive the hostile environment in which he found himself.”

“He came out of the tangle a spectacle of malignancy, ears flattened back, lips writhing, nose wrinkling, his teeth clipping together as the fangs barely missed the hound’s soft throat.”

“They had hurt only the flesh of him; beneath the flesh the spirit had still raged, splendid and invincible. But with the master the cuff was always too light to hurt the flesh. Yet it went deeper. It was an expression of the master’s disapproval, and White Fang’s spirit wilted under it.”

When anything ends, whether it is big or small, it deserves reflection, consolidation in one’s mind, and closure. From my last relationship I will record and revisit certain vignettes: feeling a spontaneous surge of well-being and attachment when she avowed that she was “smitten” with me; seeing her in her glittery new dress that she liked so much; surprising each other and seeking to outdo each other’s delight in mystery-outings and adventures; and simply getting emails saying hi and describing her day, describing this and that event that she wanted to tell me about.

I will treasure each of these vignettes and more. I will use what I’ve learned to be a better person and to be a better special man next time.

From reading White Fang I will learn to claw my way out of the cold and the desolate places, to refuse to feed and justify the hate and contempt, even when it demands to be fed and justified. I will ignore compulsions about survival and self-protection. And I will learn ever to move toward warmth, trust, attachment, loving relationships and betterment.

Included: the coots that visit Lake Harriet each spring. They look like silly sea-chickens, and they are.

Also, me among the warm northern pines. Twenty years from now, with the unpredictability of climate change, those pines may be completely replaced by aspens.

I found a road-killed mink.

In life the animal Mustela vision is fierce, killing muskrats, squirrels, fish and waterfowl to eat and share with mates and young. You get an idea of its predatory dentition from the picture.

But here it lay dead and rotting. My book says mink are vulnerable to poisoning because the aquatic food chain tends to concentrate certain pollutants. But, "the most serious and permanent harm," my book says, was wrought by "stream channelization, wetland drainage, and dam construction."

In other words the current era is not favorable to the mink (and is probably hostile to many other predators too).

But the day was otherwise so beautiful and it outshined the sight of sad dead things. Already the great egrets are back. The frogs are chorusing, the big winter-surviving toads are hopping about and the tiny purple and white violets have emerged.

And look there ! Under the mink a contingent of beetles is laboring hard to make the mink into its own food and offspring. This has the effect of dispersing the previously mentioned pollutants, allowing them more time to degrade elsewhere, and reducing the danger they pose to other wildlife, to plants and to people.

Let us all be like those swarming beetles, taking the bad with the good, always helping to build a better future for our larvae to squirm around and feed in !

Mammals of Minnesota by Evan Hazard, 1982

People die all the time in my area but one recent story caught my attention: a 57 year-old woman was found on a recent Monday morning in -16 degF weather. An especially sad part was that she had planned to move to a warmer climate the next year. A relative was quoted as saying, "She’s wanted to move for a long time. She was going to do it."

If she had moved to a warmer climate she might have survived whatever caused her to be outside or whatever medical condition might have struck. Moving is certainly difficult but not a project of 57 years. Either many long winters had enervated her and weakened her vitality and resolve to travel south, or each glorious summer had blurred her memory of how grueling the previous winter was. It would look pre-eminently impotent and sad to see on her tombstone, "She wanted to leave."

I was reminded of when a loved one, who happened to be a depressed middle-aged woman, said she took personal comfort that "Time passes no matter what." This is a horrible thing for a teenager to hear: that adulthood is just something to endure, that there is no satisfaction and comfort to look forward to besides waiting out the clock. Especially since this person now has anything but spare time, and the time she does have is not quality time.

I was reminded also of a relative who keeps her three children locked indoors most of the time from November to March because, "It’s too cold to go outside." Meaning that half the year is to be devoted to watching Judge Judy and playing Xbox games.

Somehow these stories are connected in my mind. I am trying to teach myself a moral, a personal lesson about growing indifferent and languishing. It is about more than just moving to a warmer climate – it is a deadly warning! The cost of complacency may be to die alone in the snow!

Included: the winter kite festival on Lake Harriet in January. The wind died down too soon but it was fun.