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Friday, August 30, 2002
Wrong-way Tama-chanTama-chan, the wayward Arctic Bearded Seal, has now apparently extended his range from the Tamagawa River in Tokyo to the nearby Tsurumi River in Yokohama. Tama-chan fever is sweeping Japan. Even Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi wants to see the seal. Residents of the Tokyo/Yokohama area are spending happy summer afternoons tracking their resident pinniped. [previous story]Here's a picture of an Arctic Bearded Seal in its normal habitat, courtesy of National Geographic's Photo of the Day. Thursday, August 29, 2002
DiscontentHere is the full text of a letter which appeared in last Tuesday's Washington Post:My wife and I recently took our grandson to the Imax theater at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and discovered that the theater now is known as the "Lockheed Martin Imax Theater."Meanwhile, columnist Zay N. Smith of the Chicago Sun-Times quotes the introductory page for the Orkin Insect Safari (also sponsored by the Smithsonian): "For 100 years, Orkin Pest Control has been a leader in educating people about the wonders of insects. So, Orkin proudly joins the Smithsonian Institution to present the Smithsonian O. Orkin Insect Safari, a traveling education exhibit created to teach humans about the vital role insects play....""Is this an exhibit with a very unhappy ending?" he comments. And, indeed, a prominent part of the Orkin Insect Zoo in NMNH is about detecting and killing insects in the home. The WhoseSmithsonian.org website, which raises issues such as these, is sponsored by Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees Union Local 25: a strange affiliation, one might think, until one learns that the former employees of NASM's public and staff cafeterias were fired by the new concession-holder, McDonald's. [their press release] Wednesday, August 28, 2002
Rain. No links.The rain came during the night, unheard but dream-sensed. It has been falling all day, muddling the reading room's glass ceiling. I lean and peer out my office door: yes, it is still raining. I knew it had been. Its waterfall finger-drumming lies under the hiss of the HVAC and the ticking of the hard drive, wrapping the world with water.It's a soaking rain, more like winter than the overwrought squalls of summer. I lean on the window-wall supports and look out at a grey-mist world: the Hirshhorn soaked dark, the yellow patches on the Mall looking marginally greener. Or perhaps they only look like puddles. But the grass beside the museum, which was not so grievously abused, has taken on the naked green of growing. The trees still look shocked, drooping and brown around the edges. It takes a longer rain to repair a tree. But a longer rain is coming. The forecast promises rain all week. Heavier today and tomorrow, scattered thunderstorms for two days, then heavier again on Sunday. I am delighted. I love rain. I should move to Seattle, or to Bali during the rainy season. I love it when the world closes in. "Sleeping weather"; yes, but rain-sleep is not escape; it is a merging with the deeper world wakened by water. No links today. In rain, the mind curls in, like a cat in sleep. Outside this page, the world roars on. I let it go. Here, briefly, is silence. Tuesday, August 27, 2002
The state of not-quite-beingWashington is having a spate of "San Francisco weather" -- gray heavy clouds pregnant with rain not yet fallen. It feels appropriate. I've spent three days doing HTML markup on a very fussy 130-page document; I'm now on page 79, and there's probably a week of work yet to go. It's the Bellcomm Collection finding aid, an index to a dragon-hoard of documents on the US space program. Facing page after page of Proposals and Interim Reports, I marvel at the mindset that denies that the US space program, or at least the Apollo Project [photos], ever existed. Would the government have commissioned all these cubic yards of paper to support a hoax? Could it all have been a plot on the part of the paper manufacturers? Or perhaps it was the archivists, realizing that their tenure was assured because someone would have to conserve and catalog all these things. It's certainly keeping me employed this week, though not quite sane. My brain has clouds in it.Clouds. If I were in Switzerland, I would visit the ethereal Blur Building, an "inhabitable cloud" on a pier in Lake Neuchatel. It's part of the Swiss National Expo 2002, which has otherwise gotten mediocre reviews. But everyone loves the Blur Building. It's a concept as pure and radical and the Vietnam Memorial -- a dissolving architecture with walls of mist. I wish someone would build one here. Or perhaps they could install mist nozzles on the Mall monuments: Washington's obelisk dissolves into a pillar of cloud. A carpet of fog creeps down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to cover the reflecting pool. It will never happen. We lack the humility to build with air. Humility. This week's New York Times Magazine contained a deeply distressing article on walrus-hunting in Canda. [registration required] The Inuit, who have subsistence-hunting rights to the otherwise-protected Altantic Walrus, are selling their kill quotas to sports hunters. "It's like shooting a cow," remarks one of them while the Inuit guides butcher his kill. The Inuit keep the meat and the hunters' money. The hunters keep photographs, and may someday receive their trophies if laws change to allow it. The hunting quotas have not been enlarged to accomodate the sportsmen. It should be an ideal compromise. So why do I feel so disgusted? Thursday, August 22, 2002
Segue cityOne of the fascinating aspects of weblog-ownership is seeing where your business comes from. The little odometer at the bottom of the page provides more than a gate-count. It also tells how visitors got here: was it a direct link from another page? a bookmark? or the result of a web search? And, if it was the latter, it records the search terms.Thus, I was surprised today to see that someone had stumbled on pinniped by searching for "Smithsonian's most haunted places". I suppose my office would qualify -- although it is mostly haunted by a gang of little blue Doraemon tchotchkes, including my PC speakers and an animated musical clock. But all this got me thinking about haunted museums, and Halloween, and the prolific ranks of Japanese spirits and monsters. A Google search on "haunted museum" turned up the United States Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton [official site] -- one of the least likely places for spooks, one would think. But apparently the place is crawling with spirits, including pilots who died in the exhibited aircraft and "a little Asian boy" who haunts Bockscar, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Next I found the Haunted Museum, a small, serious-minded museum in Illinois on the history of ghost research, paranormal investigation and Spiritualism. If you have old books and paraphenalia, they are looking for donations. On a less scholarly note, Professor Cline's Haunted Monster Museum in Natural Bridge, Virginia, looks like good tacky fun. Their web site states: "Bizarre and unique, it's like Scooby Doo meets the Twilight Zone." Speaking of hokum, Ftrain's recent story "Seance" is delightful. The description is "speaking impolitely to the dead", specifically to the channeled ghost of Jim Morrison of The Doors. On to Japanese spirits: another excellent essay on the names and nature of the critters is here, on Asianart.com. I wish I had noticed it when I wrote my O-bon post last week. Also useful is this article on Japanese.About.com. Not supernatural, but definitely spooky: Noh masks change expression when seen at different angles. This article explains why. [From consumptive.org] Finally, (and most definitely not supernatural), the CSICOP Crop Circle Experiments site is hilarious. The investigators discovered why the circles appear in cereal crops. (Wild grasses spring right back). And why crop circles are made at night. (It's bloody hot and dusty in the daytime.) Wednesday, August 21, 2002
The last reported position of the model plane attempting to cross the Atlantic was 50 20.73 N, 42 58.98 W at 0428 GMT August 21. It seems likely by now that the model has been lost. But isn't it amazing it got that far? Previous posts on the TAM (Trans-Atlantic Model) Project are here and here. Tuesday, August 20, 2002
Back in the ancient days when the net was email and sometimes Gopher, we spent a lot of time creating really cool sig files from typewriter characters. ASCII graphics, a near-lost art in the pixel-glutted West, have been reborn in Japan. The double-byte character-sets which allow documents to contain Japanese characters have provided a broad palette of tools for the character-artist. 
I first ran into these creations quite by accident when a Google search for "mczilla" turned up a site called Ahyazilla, which seems to be a Japanese chat-board. Many of the notes were decorated with character-graphics, which I have captured as graphics and displayed in this post. 
I found more evidence of Japanese character-art in a Flash movie linked by Yakitori! This musical tribute to Nagoya includes some of the best character-graphics I've seen in years. 
Google searches soon turned up more collections of Japanese character graphics. The three below helpfully display the pictures as graphic files, so people without double-byte character sets may view them: Flying down to Graceland...Elvis Presley's private plane, the "Lisa Marie", was a Convair 880 formerly used by Delta. The 120-passenger jet was gutted and reconfigured with 29 seats, a conference room, a living room, bar area, a couple of bedrooms and baths. Elvis's flight engineer and pilot recall life aboard the "Lisa Marie" during the last two years of his life. Friday, August 16, 2002
While listening to National Public Radio the other day, I heard a story about artist John W. Jones, a black artist who is painting the images of slaves from Confederate currency. Fascinated, I ran a web-search and found a great deal more on the subject. Two web-essays on the subject of slave imagery in Confederate currency are the related Face Value, an article in the Journal for Multimedia History, and Beyond Face Value, a spectacular interactive website produced by the U. S. Civil War Center. The official site for John W. Jones' exhibit displays some of his paintings; a review of the exhibit appeared in the Bay Area black newspaper San Francisco Bay View. A misplaced pinniped[from Yakitori!]An Arctic Bearded Seal ( Erignathus barbatus) has made its home in the Tamagawa River, in Tokyo. [more] The seal has been named Tama-chan, after its adopted river. Local biologists speculate that the seal may stay a long time, despite the Japanese summer heat and water pollution, since the river teems with fish and shrimp.
As of Tuesday, August 13, the first two attempts to
fly a model plane across the Atlantic Ocean
had failed,
each only minutes into its flight. The
undaunted modelers will keep trying.
[previous story]
What he meant to say was...White House spokesperson Amy Call assures us that President Bush still wants new housing for the bugs and worms in NMNH, just not now, and not as part of the homeland security budget. Thursday, August 15, 2002
Phocine distemper has spread from German, Dutch and Scandinavian shores to the coast of Great Britain. Scientists suspect that the epidemic, which last decimated Europe's seals 14 years ago, may have been caused by diseased mink on the Danish island of Anholt, where the mass death started. Seals don't eat carrion, but they might have played with floating bodies. Research into the cause of the disease continues. There is no known cure. We're doing something rightiCan, an advocacy group for people with disabilities, has rated the Smithsonian one of the best museums for disabled visitors. The Smithsonian's Accessibility Program has existed since 1978. The article notes that finding nearby parking is still a problem, as it is for all visitors. Wednesday, August 14, 2002
fire is beautiful and we know that if we get too close it will kill us but what does that matter it is better to be happy for a moment and burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while -- Don Marquis "The Lesson of the Moth" So much for the increase and diffusion of knowledgeFrom an article on Bush's veto of the $5.1B homeland security bill:Bush singled out for ridicule the package's $2 million to build what he derided as "a new facility for storing the government's collection of bugs and worms," a Smithsonian Institution ... project included in his own budget request in February.Wait a minute... if he valued the bugs and worms in February, has he changed his mind about them now? Granted the wet specimens were probably never that great a security risk to anyone except museum staff and visitors, but one is annoyed by the disrespect to the national systematic collections. Of course I'm just the least bit prejudiced; if my polychaete worm publication were on the web, I would link it here: Weitbrecht, B. E. 1984. Muscular anatomy of Trochochaeta multisetosum (Polychaeta; Trochochaetidae). Proc. 1st Int. Conference, Sydney. 4-9 th July 1983. pp. 401-412.Some of us like worms, Mr. President. Tuesday, August 13, 2002
Ghost paradeAs we mentioned before, mid-August marks the O-bon festival in Japan, when the spirits of the dead return for family celebrations. Japanese people tell ghost stories in the sweltering heat of late summer for the pleasure of the chills they send up the spine. In honor of the holiday, the Japan Times has published a special series of weird feature stories:
Monday, August 12, 2002
Deer stones, enigmatic memorial stones in Mongolia and southern Siberia, may provide clues to the origins of the Mongolian people. Modern Mongolia: Reclaiming Genghis Khan, a new exhibit at NMNH, includes a cast of the most famous of these stones, the only one with a full human face. The inscribed deer images which cover the lower part of the stone may represent tattoos. Elaborate tattoos, including images of deer, have been found on mummies of ancient Siberians. The flying deer represented in these carvings may also be related to Meandash [more], the mythic reindeer of the Saami people of northern Scandinavia, or to the deer imagery of the nomadic Scythians. Addendum 8/13: Mouse and I visited the exhibit last night after work. The deer stone cast is a wonderfully magical object. The rest of the exhibit isn't bad either. We especially enjoyed the modern ger (yurt) interior, with its mixture of traditional and modern Western furnishings and clothing. The attached gift store is positively dangerous. I escaped with one book, an anthology of Mongolian folktales with wonderful illustrations. But the exhibit will be there through September. I may be back. Happy birthday to usOn August 10, 1846, Congress chartered the Smithsonian Institution, named after English scientist James Smithson, whose bequest of $500,000 had made it possible. Smithson's will stated that, should his nephew die without heirs, his estate was to go the “to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” Smithson's motives remain mysterious, but may have been related to his disillusionment with British society. Their loss, our gain.This should have been announced closer to the day itself, but your phocine reporter was off financing several new chandeliers and some neon tubes (the bright pink ones) in Atlantic City. It was a wonderful trip: fireworks over the wetlands, Antigravity at the Trop, summer nightlife on the Boardwalk, a chocolate milkshake at the Internet cafe. The only thing missing was luck. [Many thanks to the indefatigable Mouse for the reminder.] Thursday, August 08, 2002
Flying flowersIt's the Dog Days, and it should by rights be the butterfly season. So where are they this year? They're rarer than usual in the Smithsonian's Butterfly Habitat Garden [official] [charming] ; in fact, they seem to be rare all over. Is it global warming? Habitat destruction? Or just one of those inexplicable things? The Butterfly Garden is wonderfully overgrown these days, jungle-like, fragrant with rosemary and lavendar. But it is woefully uninhabited, except for the pair of mallards who treat the bathtub-sized lily-pond as their private lake, filling it as if they were Godzilla-ducks.Everywhere, weblogs are coming up butterflies. Eeksy-Peeksy, a brilliant Polish web-diary (subtitled "Augury Doggerel"), notes a pair of chasing brimstones with some rare external links. And over at Fragments from Floyd (Virginia), Fred First provides a stunning photograph of a Hummingbird Clearwing Moth, known as Hemaris thysbe in entomological circles. (Where, one wonders, is Pyramis?) Wednesday, August 07, 2002
Coyote was trotting thereCoyotes, Canis latrans, are usually a symbol of the wild, free West. However, they are now increasing east of the Mississippi. In this interview, Dr. Matthew E. Gompper of the University of Missouri answers questions from a National Geographic News reporter.Eastern coyotes tend to be larger than their western brethren, and the northern ones are larger than the southern. (This is true of many mammals--heat-retention is more efficient with a larger body.) Coyotes have been found in Cape Cod and the Elizabeth Islands off Massachusetts. In 1999, a coyote was captured in New York's Central Park. [Thanks to Mouse for this one, as well as plenty of Coyote bibliographic leads.] 
The Spirit of Butts Farm weighs only 11 pounds, but it will attempt to cross the Atlantic. If it makes it, it will be the first model plane to do so. If it doesn't, the team has three more models in reserve. They are hoping to land the craft intact, so it can be exhibited at NASM. And nobody noticed the huge hangars?A common type of UFO is the Big Black Delta (BBD). Now the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), an organization which investigates paranormal phenomena, proposes an explanation for the BBD's: they are secret US military transport airships, powered by silent electrokinetic drives. Proponents of secret giant LTA craft find it highly suspicious that Lockheed-Martin, a major military contractor, is interested in airships.One feels a certain amount of deja vu, remembering the Great Airship mania of 1896-1897. [more] [more] Tuesday, August 06, 2002
Japanese days of the deadRobert Brady, an American living in rural Japan writes:In America as I recall, the dead don't come back to visit the living in any organized way but rather choose their own occasions, which is very much in the American tradition, now that I think of it. In Japan, by contrast, where things often seem preternaturally systematic, the dead all come back in the middle of August, when it's convenient for the living to take a few days off.Like most of Brady's posts in his weblog, Notes from Pure Land Mountain, The Days of the Dead is thoughtful, eccentric and informative. He is describing the Japanese festival of O-Bon, a combination of Buddhist rituals for the dead with indigenous folk rituals invoking the favor of the ancestors. Workers are given time off (the O-Bon yasumi) August 13-15 to honor the family spirits. A related Japanese festival is Higan, held twice a year during the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. This is a time when people traditionally clean family graves. It's the days of the dead in another sense as well. August 6, 1945 was the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The event is memorialized in an annual ceremony in Hiroshima's Peace Park. This year's ceremony was marked by a protest of American policy and an invitation to President Bush to visit the city devastated 57 years ago. Monday, August 05, 2002
A joke, but a cute oneOn the face of it, it's a weird idea. But stranger things have happened on the net. Tadoos, a site in England, is apparently offering to connect you with companies who will pay you to wear their logos as temporary or permanent tattoos. However, buried in the stupifying legal verbiage of the terms-and-conditions page is the following disclaimer:IN FACT, TADOOS DOES NOT EXIST. THE WHOLE OF THE ABOVE TERMS AND CONDITIONS IS PROBABLY INVALID. WE SHALL NOT PROVIDE YOU WITH TATTOOS, ADVERTS, INFORMATION, DETAILS OR MONEY IN ANY FORM. THE COMPANY, THE CONCEPT, THE ADVERTISIERS, THE CLIENTS, AND "TIMED TATTOO TECHNOLOGY" ARE ALL FICTIONAL. SORRY TO DISAPPOINT YOU IF YOU FELL FOR THE JOKE. PLEASE DO NOT TAKE ANY PROCEEDINGS AGAINST US. BY COMPLETING REGISTRATION YOU ARE STATING THAT TO THE BEST OF YOUR LIMITED KNOWLEDGE THIS IS NOT A JOKE, AND YOU WISH YOUR NAME TO BE PLACED ON THE LIST OF FOOLS AT THE RELATED WEBSITE. IF YOU DO NOT WISH YOUR NAME TO BE PLACED ON THE PUBLICLY AVAILABLE LIST, ALONG WITH SOME OR FEWER OF: THE TIME SPENT AT THE SITE, NUMBER OF FORM FIELDS FILLED IN, AND ANY OTHER INFORMATION CHOSEN AT THE SOLE DISCRETION OF OR MADE UP BY THE SITE CREATORS, THEN DO NOT SUBMIT YOUR REGISTRATION FORM BUT INSTEAD CLICK HERE. [Original story from MetaFilter] Beating your swords into artifactsThe USS Intrepid, an aircraft carrier which saw action in WWII and Vietnam and served as a recovery ship for NASA's manned space flight program, is celebrating its 20th anniversary as a museum berthed at Pier 86 in New York.[history of this and previous Intrepids] [former crewmembers' associations] In one of the ironies of modern life, many of the Google hits for "USS Intrepid" point to Star Trek resources. There is, for instance, a fan club in Michigan and a play-by-email role-playing game, as well as an apparently defunct British fan site. One interesting point: nobody seems to agree what the Intrepid's NCC registration number was. The actual Intrepid (at least the aircraft-carrier incarnation) was CV-11. The first Intrepid was an armed ketch built by the French in 1789, sold to Tripoli and captured by the Americans in 1803. It was destroyed by explosion in 1804 in Tripoli Harbor, in circumstances worthy of a Patrick O'Brian novel. Friday, August 02, 2002
Artist-created brassieres were displayed in two Seattle exhibits to increase public awareness of breast cancer and raise money for research. Confessions of a Russian clairvoyantPravda provides this first-person account by an "ex-healer", of the training of a clairvoyant in post-Soviet Russia. Assuming this is not a work of fiction, it is an amazing window into occultism and mental illness.Punch and Judy links and factoidsGuardian Unlimited has posted a handy list of Punch and Judy information, including their "birthday": May 9, 1662, when Samuel Pepys discovered a show in Covent Garden. Thursday, August 01, 2002
The space hangar at NASM's
Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, now under construction near Dulles International Airport, will be
named for aviation pioneer James S. McDonnell.
"The gentleman known as 'Mr. Mac' helped write so much of the history we preserve," retired Marine Gen. J.R. "Jack" Dailey, NASM's director, explained. "His accomplishments illustrate the growth of flight in the 20th century." Of course it also helped that the McDonnell family's JSM Charitable Trust and McDonnell's two sons have donated $10 million toward the construction project. [more] |
