Category: Writing

Just writing

Categories
Books Technology Writing

If only

It’s been slow going getting another book deal. The publisher I’m currently talking with about a book on MySQL/PHP wants to include a provision in the contract to bill me if I’m paid royalties on books that eventually get returned from the book stores. Normally, the returns are more than compensated for by new book sales in any given quarter, so this is a non-issue; most publishers don’t ask for this. Nowadays, though – everyone wants a sure thing.

My counter to them is to hold back a percentage of the royalites against return; any of the amount still remaining when the book’s shelf life ends is then sent to me in one lump sum. I don’t like doing this–the royalites we get are so small as it is–but I can’t be looking forward to a royalty check only to get a bill, instead. Hopefully the publisher will accept this counter-proposal.

I need a book, though. More than just the money, I need to get back into working on a book. I’m so eager that I considered, briefly, putting my name into the list of CSS Luminaries that Eric Meyer asked for recently, for work on a new book on CSS. Of course, we all know I’m not a CSS luminary; I’ve spent much of my last few years working the server-side of the development teeter totter. But don’t discount my CSS skills. Rusty they may be, but I’ve been working with CSS as long, or longer than any of the other existing stars in our web design firmament.

For instance, Eric Meyer’s first article on CSS was for the October, 1997 edition of Web Review. I was already writing on CSS, as you can see from a March 28,1997 article from the same publication. Eric stayed with CSS, while I drifted off to other technologies, such as ASP and Java, Linux, and of course, weblogging and RDF.

If only I had stayed with CSS. I think of that now, especially when I’m having a hard time finding a book. If only I had stayed with any one technology – enough to become established as a ‘luminary’ in the field. But like a blackbird, always attracted by some new and shiny thing, I would soon grow bored with technology once mastered, and look for something new and challenging.

However, I have been playing with CSS a bit more recently. I decided to do two new themes for Burningbird – one representing my feminine side, one my masculine.

The Paths: Book of Color theme represents my feminine side– with wide open areas; lack of constraints; a rejection of absolute centering; and the sensuously combined colors of purple and orange, with just a touch of crimson. Notice that the sidebar doesn’t close, either at the top or bottom. Notice, also, the positioning of the content – not completely to the side, but not centered, either. The changing character of this new theme is represented in the backdrop, randomly pulled from my “path” photos.

My new masculine theme is Route 66, and I do think it’s quite nice. The colors are rich, and subtle, and even quite adventurous. It’s also been the most difficult to create because it forces all parts of the page into a centered box, with no open spaces between the components–and this isn’t easy, as many of you know. It is precise, constrained, centered, and very controlled.

Feminine open, and masculine controlled. This doesn’t necessarily reflect common viewpoints of male and female. But I’ve always seen my femininity tied to that part of me which longs for new roads to travel; that burns with a desire to knock down arbitrary and unnecessary walls. It is the practical side of me, but also the passionate–the part of me that tilts at windmills and dragons with equal enthusiasm. My masculinity, though, is that part of me that wants to control and constrain. It is bound with my sense of honor and duty, and desire for finding order in chaos. It’s the side that says to me, “But what about the bills”. My masculine side wants to lead, while my feminine side just wants to do its thing. The only emotion both sides share is a dislike of maudlin sentimentality – the masculine because it’s contrived, the feminine because it’s cheap.

Of course, for others, the reflections of their masculine and feminine sides are as unique as the people. Some may see their feminine side as controlling or ordered, while their masculinity is loose, and unrestrained. Isn’t it funny how the same terms can mean something so completely different to each of us?

“I won’t have eleven children,” she asserted; “I won’t have the eyes of an old woman. She looks at one up and down, up and down, as if one were a horse.”

“We must have a son and we must have a daughter,” said Terence, putting down the letters, “because, let alone the inestimable advantage of being our children, they’d be so well brought up.” They went on to sketch an outline of the ideal education– how their daughter should be required from infancy to gaze at a large square of cardboard painted blue, to suggest thoughts of infinity, for women were grown too practical; and their son–he should be taught to laugh at great men, that is, at distinguished successful men, at men who wore ribands and rose to the tops of their trees. He should in no way resemble (Rachel added) St. John Hirst.

At this Terence professed the greatest admiration for St. John Hirst. Dwelling upon his good qualities he became seriously convinced of them; he had a mind like a torpedo, he declared, aimed at falsehood. Where should we all be without him and his like? Choked in weeds; Christians, bigots,–why, Rachel herself, would be a slave with a fan to sing songs to men when they felt drowsy.

“But you’ll never see it!” he exclaimed; “because with all your virtues you don’t, and you never will, care with every fibre of your being for the pursuit of truth! You’ve no respect for facts, Rachel; you’re essentially feminine.” She did not trouble to deny it, nor did she think good to produce the one unanswerable argument against the merits which Terence admired. St. John Hirst said that she was in love with him; she would never forgive that; but the argument was not one to appeal to a man.

Virginia Woolf’s “The Voyage Out”

I was thinking on this last week when that great storm brewed up on Monday. I could see the clouds when I left the house for my walk, and almost turned back for my camera. It was late, though, and I kept going.

At Powder, after finishing my walk, I could see through the lower layers of mist to this tall cloud, tall, tall, reaching up to the sky as far as the eye could see. I knew then that this storm was going to be something special. I took off in the car to find a place to watch it, but couldn’t find a place to even pull over; not until I turned into the parking lot of a medical center to turn around and found that the back of the lot opened up to a completely clear view of the entire valley. And the storm, that magnificent storm.

I parked not far from a truck also pulled over to watch the storm and several car lengths away from two cars with four young guys. The guys had been skate boarding down the hill next to the medical center; when I pulled in, though, they were all looking at the sky and one of them saw me and started shouting something about the storm, pointing up to the sky.

I walked over to them, as we watched one funnel cloud form and then break apart. And then another. And another. The front of the storm was huge, and the clouds were actually rolled under, as if they had been turned about by forces unseen. One of the guys yelled out, “Let’s get out of here! That’s a tornado that’s forming!” I yelled back, “Why leave? This is incredible!

“You only live once!”, I shouted at him.

“Yeah! Live! That’s what I want to continue doing!”

They piled into their cars and took off, as I stood in the lot looking up at the clouds as the boiled above me, thinking what an odd thing for that young man to say: being afraid of a storm after spending who knows how long riding a skate board down a very dangerous hill. Understandable though: it’s the degree of control. You control what you do on a skateboard; you have control over your life. But a storm – no man or woman controls a storm. They had chosen the masculine path. I had not.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Categories
Critters History Writing

Architeuthis Dux


Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep,
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
Above his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;

And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber’d and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green,
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,

In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

The Kraken — Albert, Lord Tennyson

The Giant Squid

The next time you sink your teeth into some calimari think of this: The giant squid has been measured to a length of 60 feet, and weighs in the neighborhood of between 1 and 2 tons. It has eight arms, each lined with two rows of suckers. The giant squid also has the largest eyes of any known creature, over a foot in diameter.

If the giant squid is like its smaller cousins, it is a predator. To make the giant squid an ideal predator, its suckers are ringed with a hard, jagged edge, resembling teeth, in order to better enable the squid to hold onto its prey. Additionally, two longer tentacles are also used to help move the prey to the large, sharp parrot-like beak.

Needless to say, you will not sink your teeth into this creature without a fight.

The Stuff of Legends

I looked in my turn, and could not repress a gesture of disgust. Before my eyes was a horrible monster worthy to figure in the legends of the marvelous. It was an immense cuttlefish, being eight yards long. It swam crossways in the direction of the Nautilus with great speed, watching us with its enormous staring green eyes.

So says the Naturalist, in the Jules Vern classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea 18. Though this book is a work of fiction, the squid encounter that Vern wrote about was based on fact, or at least a story that Vern heard about at the time. The story states that a French naval ship was attacked by a giant squid in 18611.

Since earliest times, there have been legends of sea serpents and large, many-armed creatures attacking boats. One of the fiercest creatures was the legendary beast known as the Kraken.

Now, modern belief is that the kraken was a giant squid and that the size of the creature has grown through numerous re-tellings of ancient stories; from creatures of 50 feet to creatures the size of islands.

A Norwegian Bishop, one Erik Ludvigsen Pontoppidan, wrote in his journals about the Kraken and mentions the size of the creature as being one and one-half miles long 3! More recently, another eyewitness account of the size of the giant squid is given by an A.G. Starkey, who was stationed on a British trawler in World War. Starkey tells of being on deck in the evening when he noticed a light in the water next to the boat. As he tells it, “As I gazed, fascinated, a circle of green light glowed in my area of illumination. This green unwinking orb I suddenly realized was an eye. The surface of the water undulated with some strange disturbance. Gradually I realized that I was gazing at almost point-black range at a huge squid.”

According to the Starkey account, he walked along the boat, measuring the giant quid and realized that it was as long as the boat he was on. It is at this point that accounts may differ. According to a Discovery Channel special on the Giant Squid (telecast July 31, at 8:00 pm in a show titled “X Creatures”), the boat Starkey was on measured 60 feet. According to the account given in the Museum of Unnatural Mystery4, where I pulled the quote, the boat measured 175 feet!

Eyewitness accounts of the size of the giant squid are matched by tales of squid behavior, specifically stories of squids attacking ships.

As said earlier, Jules Verne based his squid fight in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea on an eyewitness account of a giant squid attacking a French naval ship1. Another account of a giant squid attacking a ship is given in the logs of the Brunswick, a Norwegian Trawler. In the logs an account is given of a giant squid attacking this large ship three different times, before the squid finally slid into the ship’s propellers and was killed.

A third account tells of nuclear submarine losing the use of its sonar equipment on the ship’s maiden voyage. When the submarine returned to port, the Navy found that the covering on the Sonar had been torn lose and that hooks remained in the material, hooks from a giant squid.

Other accounts tell of giant squid grabbing men from the waters as ships were sunk in World War I and II, and also of the giant squid attacking small fishing boats. Two South African lighthouse workers reported in 1966 about seeing a giant squid wrapped around a baby whale, in a ferocious fight, with the baby whale surfacing and being pulled back under before it finally stopped rising to the surface4

So, are there giant squid lurking off our coasts that reach a size of 150 feet and that pull folks off boats? Well, behind every tale, there is a seed of truth, and now it’s time to take a look at what we do know about the giant squid.

What We Think We Know

Amid rumor and scant eyewitness accounts, we have little knowledge of the giant squid and its behavior. Giant squid have washed up on shore sporadically so we have had a chance to examine dead specimens. We also know that the giant squid forms part of the diet for toothed whales such as the sperm whale. Outside of that, though, we have little knowledge of these of the largest known invertebrate. We have never successfully viewed the giant squid in its natural environment, and we have never had a chance to examine a living specimen. But what we do know makes this an incredibly interesting creature.

First of all, when discussing giant squid, most folks are discussing the squid known as Architeuthis Dux. There are other large species of squid, some of which have been seen in the wild. For instance, the Navy provides an audio account of an encounter between a robotic research submersible and a variety of squid known as Moroteuthis. In the account, the squid was six feet in length5. Compared to its larger cousin, though, Moroteuthis is pretty small: Architeuthis Dux, or the Giant Squid by its popular name, has been measured at close to 60 feet in length.

The first recorded physical record of the giant squid was made by a Reverend Moses Harvey in Newfoundland, based on a dead giant squid that had been caught by local fishermen. Dead giant squid had been washed up on shore before, but this was the first time a person had taken samples of the squid, and made scientific observations of the creature — due to the foresight demonstrated by Rev. Harvey as he sent the creature to Yale University for study6.

Since that time, more creatures have been washed on shore or been pulled up, dead, in fishing nets. However, no live giant squid has been captured, nor has one been seen in its native element. Most of what is known about giant squid has been derived from these specimens and from the remains of giant squid specimens found in the stomachs of whales, primarily sperm whales.

Consider the giant squid: the largest size of the giant squid is between 60-70 feet as determined from pieces of the creatures that have been found7. It should weigh in at close to 1 to 2 tons. In addition to its large size, the giant squid also has the largest eyes in the animal kingdom, with each larger than your typical dinner plate!

The giant squid’s territory is in the depths of the ocean, up to 3000 feet below the surface of the ocean, in a world that is as foreign and deadly to us as is the vacuum of space8. It, just like other squid, does not live on the ocean floor, as an octopus does, but lives, instead, between the surface and the bottom, a state easily maintained by its natural buoyancy.

In addition to its size and habitat, the giant squid’s physical makeup also differs from the squid normally consumed by people: instead of sodium chloride in its system, biologists have found ammonium chloride. Snacking on Architeuthis would be similar to sucking on a bottle of your favorite ammonia floor cleaner, without the lemon scent. Nummy.

Other than these small differences, the giant squid is similar to other species of squid. It has a mantle, which is where its internal organs are found. Along the length of the mantle is a funnel, used for expelling waste, water, and for locomotion10 — the squid ejects water through the funnel to push it along the water.

The giant squid has eight arms, each containing several suckers; to make the suckers even more interesting, the edges of the suckers have a jagged set of “teeth”11 to help the squid grasp prey.

The giant squid also has two longer feeding tentacles used to push food into the squid’s mouth, which resembles a parrot’s beak. A large parrot. A large beak. It also can squirt ink to confuse predators, matching its smaller cousins capability 12.

Other than these facts about the squid’s physical makeup, little is known about how the squid acts in its environment, a void that scientists have been trying to fill for the last several years.

In Search of…

There have been numerous attempts to study giant squid in its natural environment. Two expeditions have been sent to Kaikoura Canyon, off of New Zealand, the first in 199713, and the second of which occurred in February and March of 199914. Both of these expeditions were under the leadership of Dr. Clyde Roper from the Smithsonian Museum, probably the world’s leading expert on the giant squid. He is also one of the few people to actually taste a sample of giant squid, and it is from his reaction that I pull my “ammonia without the lemon scent” taste description.

The Kairkoura Canyon is considered a favorable spot for finding the giant squid because several specimens have been found by fishermen in the area, and sperm whales also like to hunt in the area — a good indication as sperm whales feed on giant squid.

While neither expedition was able to capture images of the giant squid, neither trip was considered a failure due to the other information the scientists were able to find, and the observations they were able to make. In addition, during the trip in 1999, Dr. Roper was able to examine a captured, dead giant squid that was in very good shape, something that doesn’t always happen when squid are caught up in fishing nets as the creatures are very fragile.

Using manned submersibles isn’t the only approach to filming giant squids. Another approach used whales, with scientists attaching video cameras to whales before they begin their hunting dives. I have seen these films, and though they haven’t, yet, been successful (the cameras tend to get knocked off by other whales), this approach is an innovative effort17.

Robotic submersibles have also been used to try and capture images of the giant squid, including the MIT Sea Grant Autonomous underwater robot16. Unfortunately, all of these efforts have not succeeded in filming an adult giant squid in its natural habitat.

However, folks like Dr. Roper aren’t giving up in their efforts. Dr. Roper is already talking about an expedition back to Kairkoura in the Spring of 2000.

Unfortunately, the 2000 expedition wasn’t successful.

So What About the Attacks?

One major question that remains about the giant squid is its behavior; specifically, would the giant squid attack boats and people. The more I learn about this creature, the more I wonder whether the giant squid was attacking boats and people as food sources — or perhaps just trying to find a ride home.

The giant squid inhabits that nether region of the ocean that is hundreds to thousands of feet below the surface but not at the bottom of the ocean. Its entire physical makeup is suited specifically to this environment. The main reason that the giant squid has been found dead and washed up on shore is most likely because of clashing ocean streams, cold water meeting warm water.

The giant squid lives in cold water that can get trapped above a layer of warm water. This pushes the poor creature to the surface. The squid’s natural buoyancy makes it difficult for it to sink beneath this warm water, and I imagine the hostile surface area weakens the giant squid to a point of desperation. So, what’s a good way to return to the depths? Why, hitch a ride on one creature it knows dives to the depths: whales. And since boats can look like whales…

Now, attacking a submarine as a food source makes a bit more sense, as these craft are much closer to the giant squid’s preferred environment than a boat on the surface of the water. However, a submarine would strongly resemble a whale, a creature the squid knows it can’t beat, so it’s hard for me to believe that the squid would attack a naval submarine because it considers it “food”.

As for giant squids attacking a whale, a creature the same size as it but weighing many, many times more than the squid — again, this doesn’t make sense unless the squid is desperately hungry. We know, though, that a giant squid defends itself from the feeding whale, which is why there are squid sucker scars found on whales, but the giant squid wouldn’t have a chance against an adult whale. However, it might have a fighting chance against a smaller, juvenile whale, which would explain the sighting of a young whale fighting with the squid, and the squid shown at the surface mentioned by the lighthouse men earlier — the giant squid was still wrapped around the young whale in combat, and the whale dragged the creature to the surface. Going back to my original hypothesis about why a giant squid would grab a boat, the giant squid attached to the young whale is not going to let go when it’s on the surface. Hence, the look of a battle.

Okay, so my guess is just that, a guess, and most likely not an accurate guess at that. But I can’t help thinking its a better interpretation of the boat attacks then the giant squid leaving its perfect little world to venture to the surface, an almost guaranteed act of death for the squid, just to nosh on a tasty new takeout.

The truth of giant squid behavior is out there, waiting for folks like Dr. Roper to find.

Updated for 2004

The majority of giant squid research is moving, more and more, to Australia and New Zealand. In particular, one of the leading researchers now is Dr. Stephen O’Shea at Auckland University of Technology.

In 2002, he managed to grab photos of baby Architeuthis dux, and even keep a few alive for a short period of time for study. (Read a lovely New Yorker magazine article on Dr. O’Shea.)

O’Shea was also the one to tentatively identify the new species of giant squid discovered recently (“giant squid” is really a category of squid, rather than any one species), calling it Colossal Squid, or by its scientific name, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni.

The Colossal is an amazing find, and may actually be the squid at the root of so many stories we hear. However, we’ll never know for sure until we can see it, as well as its cousin, Architeuthis, alive, adult, and in their native habitat.

So even now, the search continues…

The Giant Squid is found

Cephalopod enthusiasts were ecstatic when an excellent video of a giant squid was made after great effort.

Photo of Squid, (c) National Resource Center for Cephalopods2

References:

Don’t just read about the Kraken — hear Chris Hall recite the famous Tennyson poem at the BBC Nature web site.

1 The Smithsonian has an article of Dr. Clyde Roper that discusses, among other things, the french battle with a giant squid in 1861.

2 Image from National Resource Center for Cephalopods.

3 The tale of the Norwegian Bishop and the mile wide kracken comes from the Museum of Unnatural Mystery’s Kraken page.

Image of Kraken from Museum of Unnatural Mystery3

4 Read accounts of the giant squid at the Museum of Unnatural Mystery’s Giant Squid page.

5 Sorry, dead link

6 Read about Rev. Harvey’s squid and other interesting information at the excellent Ocean Planet: In Search of Giant Squid from NASA and the Smithsonian.

7 Read the Squid Educational Page at Chalk Hills Educational Resources.

8 Check out the How Deep can they go page at Ocean Planet — very well done!

Early illustration of giant squid, by Professor A.E. Verrill of Yale, from Ocean Planet6.

9 Diagram of Giant Squid at Ocean Planet. For fun, also check out a robotic version of the giant squid at The Tech’s RobotZoo.

10> Again from the RobotZoo, the mechanics of funnel locomotion.

11 Photo of sucker teeth from the Ocean Planet.

12 See a video of a squid using its ink defense at the Ocean Planet.

13 Read about the 1997 Expedition to Kaikoura, at the National Geographic Web site.

14 Read about the 1999 Expedition to Kaikoura at Ocean Planet/Smithsonian.

15 A day in the logs of the second Kaikoura expedition, Setting up for a dive.

16 Discussion of the use of the MIT Sea Grant underwater robot at MIT.

17 Read an article on the use of Whales to film giant squid.

18 Complete text of the translated Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne — from the Jules Vern Collection.

Photo of submersible used to search for giant squid in 1999 expedition, NIWA/NASA15.

Also check out the The Octopus News Magazine Online.

Categories
Writing

The Crystal story is back online

I was able to recover the hard copy pages of the Crystal Story, fomerly known as “A Girl and her Rocks”. Somehow in all the moving I made a few months back, I blew away the MT database for the site, and have to hand edit the pages.

Eventually I’d like to move these into a WordPress weblog, and create a new style for the pages, but you can see the rocks and read the stories online now.

Including the following, a story about amber, and a man named Kristof…

—

Coming home from the park tonight, I had the windows rolled down to catch the evening breezes, and the music cranked loud, enjoying being out of the house and away from the computer. I was on autopilot, not really paying attention to my surroundings until I pulled up behind a dark bronze colored car at the spotlight. The license plate read KRSTOF.

KRSTOF. Kristof. A name that evokes images of dark gypsies with mysterious ways, brilliant red sashes holding hair back from unnerving black eyes. I peered into the back window of the car but the glass was too dark and the sun against it to bright to see anything more than a shadow of a head. A male head. Of course.

When the light changed and as we drove, I thought about this man in the gold car, with the name that rolls across your tongue like fine chocolate or the merest wisp of fine cognac.

Like me, Kristoff is a hiker; however unlike me, with my walks along simple paths close to home, he’s traveled all throughout the world: hiking the fjords in Norway and the hills of Scotland and Spain. He speaks with a slight accent, the product of his early youth spent in Europe, as the son of a university professor who taught medieval history.

His face is lean and dark from the sun, and wrinkles form grooves down his cheeks and a single line between his eyes. He’s is in his late 40’s, but age sits on Kristof as lushly and caressingly as the dark, sable soft mustache sits over his thin lips.

His hands grab the leather wrapping of the steering wheel, fingers long and slender but strong; gentle hands with calloused fingertips, a legacy of years of playing classical guitar. Around his neck he wears a silver necklace, weighed down by an extraordinarily carved amber leaf, held in place by intertwined silver vines. The pendant was a gift on his 40th birthday from his mother, an artistic and ecentric woman who used to make him soft boiled eggs sprinkled with chives and dotted with caviar for Sunday breakfast.

His parents are separated, and have been for years; though apart, they still remain close. There is love between them and always will be, but it’s not enough to overcome their need to be free – a need that chafes at the bonds of daily cohabitation. As soon as Kristof was old enough, they talked with him about this need to be apart and from that moment he alternated his time between them, content with his odd but satisfying family.

Kristoff’s father is retired, living in Denmark and doing research for a book on Margaret, Queen of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Margaret, a queen in a land dominated by men, was gifted enough to capture the hearts of the people and keep peace in her homeland of Denmark; strong enough to extend that peace through marriage and alliance to include Denmark’s neighbors, a rare moment of unification for an area with strong regional ties.

Kristof’s mother is visting Russia, searching for fine specimans of baltic amber, the stone she uses for all of her jewelry. At one time she used other stones, such as onyx and opal and lorimar, but after her first creation with amber – the very pendant on her son’s necklace – she would work with no other material. In Moscow, she meets with an old friend and over cups of strong tea served in tall glasses held by delicate silver filigree, they talk of rumors that another piece of the famous Amber Room has surfaced. Entirely crafted of fine amber in different hues, the Amber Room was a gift to Peter the Great from the King of Prussia, and they say to walk within it was like bathing in pure sunlight. The room disappeared during the War, stolen by the Nazis and some said destroyed in a fire, others said at the bottom of Baltic Sea when the ship carrying it was sunk.

As much as he loves his parents, though, Kristof’s mind is not on them, Margaret, or amber. He’s thinking of a trip two weeks ago when he was visiting a close friend who lives in Maine. They had spent a fine day out on a boat owned by his friend’s brother, sailing about the bay with the Atlantic breezes cool as they blew through Kristof’s thick, dark hair; the sun warm as it touched upon the glint of silver at his temples and in his mustache.

The boat was trim and sleek and the gathering of friends and family was warm and friendly, made more so by another guest, the cousin of his friend’s brother’s wife. He had noticed her as soon as he stepped on to the boat, a woman with chestnut hair down to her shoulders softly framing a face lovely, but not beautiful. She had a light dusting of freckles across her nose that he only noticed that evening when they walked along the beach and he bent down to meet her face tipped up to meet his. The moonlight and the golden glow of the antique streetlight next to the beach picked out her soft grey/green eyes, a hint of laughter and something else, something more subtle, reflected back at him.

In the morning, they shared strong, rich coffee made smooth by sweet creme, and spread blueberry jam on fresh, still warm muffins. The day promised to be another fine one, with only faint wisps of fog curling around the trees by the shore. They ate on the porch, sitting in rockers worn grey from years in the salt air and smooth by the bodies of past visitors, occasionally tossing crumbs to the seagulls that shamelessly begged at their feet.

Kristof remembered her soft curves and generous mouth and the blue-green tang of the ocean, always the ocean behind and around them; but more, he remembered her laughter and how well their words met and melded into crystaline phrases he could still recall. He told her about autumn in St. Louis, looking at her from the corner of his eye as he spoke about the deep greens of the hills turned into the same brilliant colors of his mother’s collection of fine amber. He also made sure to talk about nights filled with delicately fried catfish accompanied by dark beer, and cool, blue jazz. His words were both a promise and a lure, and he wondered whether he should wait until he got home, or pull over then and there and call her on his cell phone.

At that moment, Kristof turned into the left turn lane, and I pulled up beside him and then passed, eyes forward and on the traffic surrounding my car.

Categories
Writing

New Icy frost Leatherwood

Allan Moult has completely redesigned Leatherwood Online and I like the new look. It’s a variation on the triple column, but giving more prominence to the main content. Allan’s also created a bunch of new blogs to support the site.

One new section focuses entirely on the Antarctica, and I think this really gives the site the one last hook it needed, appealing to the scientist/adventurer in all of us. And think of the photo opportunities, such as the following photo from Doug Thost.

If I ever get around to trying out more new site looks, I’d like to do some based on that unique and glorious blue color that very old ice gets.

Of course, this new effort also fits with my interest in squid, in particular the giant varieties of squid. I’m working on an interview of Dick Williams, expedition leader for a unique land/marine study that resulted in this accidental photo of one of the larger squid species (still being determined).

But all my attention isn’t devoted completely to icy vistas and tenacious marine life. There was this recipe for warm stout and chocolate pudding that also caught my fancy…

Categories
Writing

Rose garden

I can’t just ‘do’ technology. The longer I don’t feed that other half of me, the more somber I become.

The weather was too nice to stay inside pasting, cutting, and folding for my Art of Book projects, so it was a good time to visit the rose gardens; take some pictures, though I know it must seem like the only photographs I take are those of flower and weed, with an occasional aside into something that doesn’t have roots.

I hope to explore with my photography this summer, with different subjects including local bikers and river rats (human that is). Or not, and take a break from it. But for now, just plain flowers.

I also looked for something to go with the flowers, some writing. A poem or two, and if you search on poems with roses, you’ll find hundreds. But they all seemed so weepy, and sentimental. I don’t like sentimental poems, and I don’t need weepy.

So I guess I’ll stick with just flowers.