Tuesday, April 21, 2009

highway 50 - Salina, UT to Reno, NV and back







Circus Circus' house kennel channel, w/ the Cure playing. no kidding.

Austin, NV. Serbian Christmas, now you know.

basin and range

river of shoes



a little something for everyone in Fallon


trash or treasure was here

hauling a warp and weft of sheetrock across the Paiute rez

petroglyphs at Hickison Summit. lava caves at Pyramid Lake (w/ flycatcher nest).



Humboldt - Toiyabe


Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Ash draws the school bell. Ash draws a crowd.

over the last couple weeks Ash has really been getting into the green blackboard.
when I found her doing this one in chalk and pencil she got excited and shouted "school-bell!" and made the noise of the grinding prison-camp alarm of an elementary school bell that sounds daily from the playground behind our house.
not bad, right? I don't think she's ever seen any Cy Twombly.


and here she is visiting the petting zoo.

Monday, April 06, 2009

capybaras and barnacle geese



ROME
Dear Pope Julius,

There's this 150lb animal here that's scaly, with webbed feet, but it's also hairy. And it spends most of its time in the water, but sometimes comes on land. Can we call it a fish? We know it's Lent but the Indians are really hungry.

Yours,

the Capuchins
BRAZIL

***


print by Jenny Pope

“Nature produces Barnacle Geese against Nature in the most extraordinary way. They are like marsh geese but somewhat smaller. They are produced from fir timber tossed along the sea, and are at first like gum. Afterwards they hang down by their beaks as from a seaweed attached to the timber, and are surrounded by shells in order to grow more freely. Having thus in process of time been clothed with a strong coat of feathers, they either fall into the water or fly freely away into the air. They derived their food and growth from the sap of the wood or from the sea, by a secret and most wonderful process of alimentation. I have frequently seen, with my own eyes, more than a thousand of these small bodies of birds, hanging down on the sea-shore from one piece of timber, enclosed in their shells, and already formed. They do not breed and lay eggs like other birds, nor do they ever hatch any eggs, nor do they seem to build nests in any corner of the earth.”
-Giraldus Cambrensis
1187, Topographica Hiberniae

***

“Pope Innocent III considered it necessary in 1215 to prohibit the eating of barnacle geese in Lent, since although he admitted they are not generated by the ordinary way, he yet maintained that they live and feed like ducks and cannot be regarded as differing in nature from other birds.”
-Sir Edwin Ray Lankester
1915, Diversions of a Naturalist

***

This (Spanish) website has more details on chigüiro/capibara history (along with cuisine and some things you can do with capybara leather and oil)! London's The Independent did a good article about the Easter fish in 2000. And a couple years ago, The NY Times put together a nice slideshow of a capybara hunt in Venezuela. Other "fish" you can eat during lent include sea turtles, iguanas, beavers and, in Michigan, muskrats.

related: cladistically, we're all of us fish and imaginary beings/seres imaginarios

Wednesday, April 01, 2009