Readers’ wildlife photos

September 28, 2017 • 8:32 am

Today is Potpourri Day, assembling the photos from readers who sent only one or two. The first is by reader Tim Anderson from Oz (all readers’ notes indented):

This is a picture of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud (the nebula is identified as NGC2070). The picture comprises sixty images each of red, green and blue filtered light, that were then “stacked” to intensify the photons and combined to create a colour picture. For anyone interested in the technicalities, I used a 126mm triplet refractor telescope, and an ASI1600 monochrome camera.
From Florian Maderspacher, we have several mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus; apparently all bucks) that invaded his back yard:

Not sure if this qualifies as a reader’s wild-life photo (only in so much as I am a reader and this is wild-life), but I only had my iphone with me when I went to the garden the other day to check on my tomatoes. They had been vandalized by these three rambunctious teenagers. Sadly, bow and arrow were not at hand… [JAC: That’s an invidious comment!]

Greetings from Utah, where safe spaces are being threatened and student bodies triggered by Ben Shapiro this afternoon…

From reader Snowy Owl, we have “spider web season”:
From Susan Heller, whose email was called “Not a prayer”:
I was on a trip to the San Juan Islands (Washington State) and for ?? reason praying mantises were everywhere.  This one landed on my shirt and took up this defensive pose.  I finally got him on a stick for a formal portrait. I haven’t seen one of these in years…
From reader Carl Sufit:
I can’t provide the photo quality of most of your contributors, and if you don’t need these, I won’t be hurt if you don’t show them.   However, if you’re truly desperate, here are samples of the two most common dragonfly species which are constantly in our pool yard (San Joaquin Valley) every summer.   I’m no naturalist, but based on googling, they are the Flame Skimmer, Libellula saturata, and the Blue Dasher, Rhionaeschna multicolor. 
And from Roger Latour, who sent a photographic plate from his upcoming book:
I thought I’d share this botanical plate I just finished. I shared it on my Facebook page and on Twitter and it raised quite a lot of interest.  Of course such images don’t go viral (catnip WITH a cat would be better for that!) but it is good to see the response.
It shows pretty much all maple species growing in Montreal. Natives and exotics, a few of which are now naturalised. Done in the span of ten years… This is one plate of many for the maple chapter in an ebook i’m finishing. Anyway, if you think it is of interest to your readers… please share!
When I asked him about how this was done, he replied: “They are all scaled digital macro photos done in the studio, with exact same flash lighting for consistency, followed by cut out in Photoshop.”

Hugh Hefner died

September 28, 2017 • 8:15 am

I suppose he thought he was immortal, and tried to keep the important parts going with Viagra, but no man lives forever; and yesterday Hugh Hefner died of natural causes in Los Angeles. He was 91.

Playboy was founded in 1953, and has been going for 64 years. I’ve heard it’s now abjured most nudity, though of course I haven’t seen it (when I read it, it was only for the stories [LOL], though I did have a letter to the editor —solicited by the magazine published in the August, 2006 issue). They sent me a free copy, which now sits on my shelf next to issues of Science and Nature where I published articles or book reviews.

Say what you will about Hefner, his objectification of women, and his glamorizing of the materialistic lifestyle, but he was still an advocate of many good liberal causes, and the magazine had some great interviews and fiction. The New York Times ends his obituary with this:

Mr. Hefner will be buried in Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles, where he bought the mausoleum drawer next to Marilyn Monroe.

And, as a bit of self-aggrandizement, here’s the one time I appeared in Playboy, going after Michael Ruse. I will fight accommodationism in the universities, in the public squares, in the journals, and in the salacious magazines:

UPDATE: I jut got an email from Michael Ruse, whose article I was criticizing in my letter. The contents:

   “Yes but I got the last laugh”


Indeed: all I got was a lousy copy of the magazine containing my letter.

Thursday: Hili dialogue

September 28, 2017 • 6:47 am

October approaches inexorably: it’s now Thursday, September 28, 2017, and National Strawberry Cream Pie Day. I’ll eschew the pie—and everything else save a latte—as it’s one of my biweekly fast days. It’s also International Right to Know Day (it’s about the dangers of government secrecy, but should include the right to know about evolution). The weather in Chicago is is turning fall-like at last, with a high of 73° F (23° C), although by Tuesday it will get a bit higher. It’s good weather for ducks to consider migrating. . .

On September 28, 1066, William the Conqueror arrived on England’s shores, beginning the Norman Conquest.  On this day in 1928, Alexander Fleming noticed that a mold growing in an unused Petri dish had killed bacteria around its perimeter; this was the beginning of penicillin and other antibiotics.  On this day in 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany agreed to divy up Poland after they conquered it (the invasion began Sept 1), and on that same day Warsaw surrendered to the Nazis. Finally, on this day in 1970, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser died of a heart attack. Anwar Sadat was named his temporary successor, and then became his permanent one (until, that is, Sadat was assassinated in 1981).

Notables born on September 28 include Thomas Crapper (1836; invented the ballcock, or float valve for loos), William S. Paley and Ed Sullivan (both 1901), Tuli Kupferberg (1923), Brigitte Bardot (1934), Christina Hoff Sommers (1950), Sylvia Kristel (1952) and Mira Sorvino (1967; 50 today).  Those who died on this day include Herman Melville (1891), Louis Pasteur (1895), Harpo Marx (1964), John Dos Passos (1970), Gamal Nasser (also 1970; see above), Ferdinand Marcos (1989), Miles Davis (1991), Pierre Trudeau (2000), Althea Gibson (2002) and Elia Kazan (2003).

Kazan, of course, directed “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951), a great film. Here’s the scene where Stanley meets Blanche, who is much taken with his torso:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has looked over Hiroko’s new book on cat embroidery, and read the last chapter on embroidering Hili. The chapter’s title reflects the difficulty of embroidering tabbies: Hili’s embroidery (shown on the cover) required 18 different colors of thread. Hili, however, is paranoid:

Hili: Did you notice that the title of the chapter about me is “Difficult cat”?
A: Of course.
Hili: I wonder what Hiroko meant.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy zauważyłeś, że tytuł rozdziału o mnie nosi tytuł “Trudny kot”?
Ja : Oczywiście.
Hili: Co Hiroko miała na myśli?
Here’s the book cover again, sporting an embroidery of a flower-surrounded Hili:

 

Matthew found this tw**t, which he retweeted saying, “Ceiling cat is REAL!”. But this is Ceiling Teacher:

This is scary: Roy Moore, former ultrareligious Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, is now the Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama, running to fill Jeff Sessions’s vacated seat. Here’s a bit of a speech by Moore, and midway through he pulls out his revolver to tout his love of guns and his misinterpretation of the Second Amendment (h/t: Heather Hastie)

To get the bad taste out of your mouth, I’ve also purloined from Heather a tw**t of a fruit bat nomming watermelon. By the way, Heather has a new daily feature, the “Daily Homily,” which is a combination of her take on the latest news combined with a bunch of nice stuff she culls from Twitter. It’s worth checking every morning on her site.

https://twitter.com/CUTEST_ANlMALS/status/913186038616592384

I’d call them sky kitties!

Cat o’ the day

September 27, 2017 • 2:00 pm

Reader Ken Elliott sent a cat photo and the tail behind it:

If you are ever in need of a photo of a reader’s moggie and would like to share a sad/humorous capture, I have attached one here. This is Sterling, my son and daughter-in-law’s newest addition, after having been neutered. He’s trying his best to reach around his cone to scratch that persistent itch. I’ve never felt such empathy and humor at once in my life.

Big fight inside Berkeley’s “empathy tent”; 4 arrested

September 27, 2017 • 1:00 pm

Okay, now it’s time to just laugh about it all. Here’s a tweet from Dave Rubin, whom many here don’t like; but you have to share his mirth at the quote (see below) and four arrests taking place inside an “empathy tent”. The fights were a clash between Left and Right demonstrating over the cancellation of Berkeley’s “Free Speech Week”, which never really happened because the organizers were disorganized.

The quote that tickled Rubin’s funny bone is from a Fox News report:

David Marquis, who identified himself as a senior at the school, said he was tired of the protests on campus. Marquis was outside the protest area and described the scene.

“If you look at them, it’s ridiculous,” Marquis told the Los Angeles Times. “You’ve got a guy with purple hair with a f—ing lightsaber talking about Hitler. It’s hard for me to take any of this seriously.”

That made me laugh out loud. If you want the facts, SFGate has these, and more:

Berkeley police arrested three people after several fist fights broke out between liberals and conservatives when dozens of people gathered for a short time at Sproul Plaza Tuesday afternoon.

Members of a conservative group called Patriot Prayer arrived near Sproul Plaza around 2 p.m. and were met by protesters, including representatives of the leftist activist group By Any Means Necessary. Neither of the groups are student groups, and students and faculty — busy with midterms — did not appear to get involved in the rally or protest.

After the two groups scuffled inside an “empathy tent,” set up on campus to offer a calm space in what has been an area of violent clashes, they marched to People’s Park in Berkeley.

In this case both sides clearly were involved in the violence, this time with a 3:1 Right/Left ratio:

Police said Yvette Felarca, 47, of Oakland, was arrested for battery and resisting arrest; Ricky Joseph Monzon, 20, of Las Vegas, was arrested for carrying a banned weapon; and Eddy Robinson, 47, of Oakland, was arrested on charges of participating in a riot and resisting arrest.

At People’s Park, Patriot Prayer speakers, including Kyle “Stickman” Chapman, decried what he called a war on whites and said the ongoing demonstrations are a “battle for Berkeley.”

Chapman was arrested during a March protest and was charged in August with possession of a lead-filled stick. He faces eight years in prison, because of a previous violent felony conviction in Texas. He initially emerged as a hero for white supremacists, but later said he wasn’t a racist because he has an Asian wife. [JAC: Well that’s certainly proof!]

Felarca, the woman in Rubin’s tweet, is an Antifa-ite who had previously been arrested for punching a nonviolent alt-Rightie in Sacramento (see video here). She’s a teacher in a Berkeley middle school, and with two arrests and probably at least one conviction in the offing, she’ll likely lose her job.

I’m disgusted by anybody fighting and carrying weapons, and by both sides thinking they can hash out their views by literally punching each other—or worse. It solves nothing except to vent rage. But to think there was a big fracas in an “Empathy Tent” puts a veneer of humor over the whole thing, for at least nobody got hurt.

No duck today

September 27, 2017 • 12:17 pm

It’s now been 2.5 days since Honey showed up at our pond, and the weather is getting cooler. I have no way of knowing whether she’ll stay in the area this winter, but she’ll surely not visit our small pond after it freezes over. In the meantime, I hear the echo of the “Soup Nazi” episode: “No duck for you!”

Meanwhile, the autumn leaves are falling into the water:

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ the True Book

September 27, 2017 • 11:00 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “await,” came with the following email:

If it wasn’t for the Koran, we wouldn’t know how important it was to believe in the Koran.

Even if the Qur’an says somewhere “this book is true,” which it doesn’t, that wouldn’t make it any truer than the Bible, which avows its own truth precisely as much as does the Qur’an. And although the Qur’an contains a lot from the Old and New Testaments, they can’t both be true as they differ in fundamental assertions, like whether Jesus was the Son of God and whether he was crucified.