In search of lost time

December 18, 2020 • 1:15 pm

Truth be told, it’s a cold and lazy day, with one lone hen (named Soft-Serve) swimming in a half-frozen pond, and a tired PCC(E) trying to stay awake. Braining just isn’t on today, so let’s revisit some of the past—without the help of madeleines or tilleul. That is, here are a some old photos for your delectation. Click to enlarge them.

First, here’s a photo that warms my heart: Honey overseeing her 17 offspring, half of which weren’t hers but were kidnapped from Dorothy. It was a great joy for me to see Dorothy re-nest and produce a brood of her own, which she raised to fledging.  This photo was taken on June 12 of this year. Yes, Honey stole another hen’s brood, but she took good care of them, and all flew away. She’s now produced 29 ducklings on my watch.

The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, where I spent two glorious days in July, 2011, surrounded by palatial architecture and fantastic paintings. It’s still the nicest art museum I’ve ever visited in regards to architecture and paintings (the Louvre comes second):

Throne room, with lovely inlaid floors:

You’re allowed to take photos so long as you don’t use a flash. Here’s a gorgeous Rembrandt: “The Descent from the Cross” (1634):

And what may be one of the few Leonardos in the world: it’s not absolutely certain this is by his hand: “Madonna Litta” (ca. 1495, sadly with a glass reflection). The Hermitage labels this as a genuine Leonardo. (It’s my goal to see every Leonardo painting in existence, though I can’t be arsed now to look up how many there are.)

October, 2011: Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut. During the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s annual meeting, where I spoke that year, the FFRF ran a field trip to the house. (Twain was, of course, an atheist.) You can see he made enough dosh to have a big place to live! Some say it was designed to partly resemble a riverboat, which of course Twain had piloted (that’s where he got his pseudonym):

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the FFRF raffling “clean money”, i.e., currency printed before 1957, and thus lacking the “In God We Trust” motto added by Congressional declaration that year:

I traveled a lot that year. In October I spoke in Valencia, and my friends took me to the market. Such delicious raw hams for sale!

The Spanish love their ham, as do I:

Local mushrooms:

And local people waiting to cross the street:

Olives of all sorts!

Onions?

After Madrid I met a friend in Switzerland, near Geneva. Two trees on a walk:

Richard Burton’s house in Céligny, Switzerland, where he died in 1984. He was 58. Note the ducks on the gate.

January, 2012: After the Evolution Society’s mid-year officers’ meeting in Costa Rica, I traveled around a bit. This is the humble abode of Alexander Skutch, (1904-2004; a near centenarian), the great ornithologist who lived here for many years. It’s now a museum, but preserves the house as it was when he lived there:

The house is just as he left it, including his clothes, office, and books. As you see below, he was well read:

The Skutches had a beautiful garden with local and imported plants.

And of course there was a bird feeder, replenished with fruit. Can you identify these two birds?

Finally, a few photos of the famous field station La Selva, where I spent two weeks in 1974 as a grad student in the OTS Tropical Ecology Course. Here I was, back again nearly 38 years later.

Some birds (you identify them; I can’t):

Sexual dimorphism:

Some bats on the ceiling of the field station; the dots are marks put on by researchers:

And my favorite frog (besides Atelopus coynei, of course), Oophaga pumilio (I knew it as Dendrobates pumilio). There are several color morphs, and this one gives it the name “blue jeans frog”. It’s a poison-arrow frog, very toxic—as you might guess from its coloration:

I love making these posts. In a time of no travel or adventure, they bring back good memories.

31 thoughts on “In search of lost time”

  3. “In Search of Lost Time” — personally I prefer my Proust old-school, Remembrance of Things Past.

    But never mind me; I’m old-fashioned that way.

      1. And of course remember the All-England Summarize Proust Competition (I think this was one of the only cases in which the BBC censored the original content of a Python sketch, when Chapman’s character described his hobbies as strangling small animals, golf, and masturbation).

      2. Yours is certainly the more accurate translation of the French original — À la recherche du temps perdu — but the other, the more euphonious.

        Kinda like Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground, for which a more accurate English translation of the title would be (or so I’ve been told; when it comes to speaking Russian, I got nyet) “Notes From a Hole in the Floor.” 🙂

    3. I’m still working my way through A la Recherche at bedtime, at the rate of about two pages/night. I’m about halfway through vol. 2. Sometimes I dream en français.
      Agree with Jerry on the Hermitage. I was there in July 1969, when it was still in Leningrad. July White Nights along the Neva.

      1. I think Proust is a great writer, and I read him at bedtime too. Appropriately in bed. I rarely could finish more than a page. But then, I was not really what you would call an insomniac.

  4. I have at least a couple of those books on one of my shelves at home.

    I always enjoy your travel pics. But the food pics . . . I feel like one of Pavlov’s dogs. I’d love to have access to mushrooms like that.

  5. Thanks for sharing these Jerry; and I hope you are feeling better very soon. Your evening tipple should help! 🙂

    I hope this becomes a (more) regular posting! 🙂

  6. Thanks for this vicarious journey of past travels.

    I was shopping at Costco yesterday, and they were selling 15lb. Serrano ham legs with stand and all. $130, so very inexpensive. Don’t know the quality, but it got good reviews. I love Serrano ham, but 15lbs. is way too much.

    1. Those prices are ok for Serrano but if you can afford it, always go for Ibérico! I usually buy ibérico on special occasions, 150-200 grams at the time, cut by hand. My company gives all their employees a “Christmas basket” (cesta de Navidad) with an Ibérico ham, only it is not the leg, 7-8 kg, but the arm (“paletilla”), around 4-5 kg; I have it cut for a small price and vacuum packaged in 150 g packs, and keep them in the fridge, still good in April (never last longer than that); the bone is cut in pieces and frozen, to make broth.
      https://www.jamonlovers.es/clasificacion-jamon/

    1. Here are my best guesses of the bird species in your Panama photos:

      1) Green Honeycreeper ( Chlorophanes spiza) and Golden-headed Tanager (Tangara larvata).
      2) Broad-billed Motmot (Electron platyrhynchum).
      3) Great Currasow, male and female (Crux rubra)

  8. Bird identities- Green Honeycreeper and Golden-hooded Tanager in photo 1, then Broad-billed Motmot and finally Great Curassow. Cross posted with John, my reference calls it Hooded rather than Headed, but it is T. larvata. Also the Honeycreeper is female.

  9. It seems that the other duck from whom Honey stole her brood actually benefitted quite a bit, from an evolutionary point of view. As a parent, I feel bad for her, but her genes probably came out ahead.

  12. “It’s my goal to see every Leonardo painting in existence, though I can’t be arsed now to look up how many there are.”

    Isaacson’s fairly recent bio of Leonardo is very enjoyable I think. These days when his name comes up, as one of greats in painting of course, the humour of the near to last sentence in his long letter to the chief cook and bottllewasher (sorry, more like King) of Milan always appears in my head. The letter was basically a list of accomplishments, a CV for a good job to move there from Firenze, AKA Florence.

    More or less at the end he mentions something like: “I can paint too”.

  13. Onions?

    I’m thinking maybe shallots — an essential staple of the prep station on a high-end cooking line, according to both my bestie the teaching chef at a culinary institute and Anthony Bourdain.

    1. I would guess the same, though they must be very fresh and young. There is usually a hint of red/purple, esp. at the ends, those these are cleaned very nicely. The shape is also reminiscent of shallots. I grew some for the first time this year…they were small, but packed a nice bite. I only have a handfull left…should have grown more. I was interested to find they grow just like garlic bulbs. One clove creates a head…though with shallots it is a loose crown.

    2. I think these are “cebolletas” (little onions, in Spanish -bunching onions), or Allium fistulosum, while onions are Allium cepa. They are smaller and not as pungent as their big cousins, suitable to be consumed raw in salads; the green stem, finely chopped, is also used, in curries for example.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allium_fistulosum
      Shallots (Allium ascalonicum) are a bit different.

  14. I once went to a talk by Skutch in Costa Rica. This man who so loved birds had spent so much of his life craning his neck to see birds that, by the time of this talk near the end of his life, he could no longer lift his head, even to look at birds. This was an incredibly cruel fate.

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