tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35531546401582119892024-02-07T01:45:24.939-08:00Would you like chickens with that?Chickens, cats, kids, books, craft, collecting, mothering and more!Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.comBlogger72125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-24005166845344630222013-09-30T03:35:00.001-07:002013-10-09T15:36:31.304-07:00True crime<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ8kSRTBtZpD8MNoDniRnpHi5StkAFk68qOG3pXXpBH1yyCyhb4RoGo13IvKb7uj8fCEk_yXygCFuv65T96YOQGQRC6rSHx68JJssDYaVdRkXLitnAaVPt_GqBqo8I9faOj7ZlqqUT9I4/s640/blogger-image-1008895948.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ8kSRTBtZpD8MNoDniRnpHi5StkAFk68qOG3pXXpBH1yyCyhb4RoGo13IvKb7uj8fCEk_yXygCFuv65T96YOQGQRC6rSHx68JJssDYaVdRkXLitnAaVPt_GqBqo8I9faOj7ZlqqUT9I4/s640/blogger-image-1008895948.jpg"></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Seen at my local Target, August 2013.</div>Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-48497133422290777782013-09-30T03:19:00.001-07:002013-09-30T03:20:54.540-07:00Been a long time gone...Has it really been so long since I posted on this blog? Feels like an eternity!<div><br></div><div>I've been persuaded to have another go at the whole blogging thing, so brace yourselves cos winter is coming. Just kidding!</div><div> <div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrpnYofTw4XnfwNoIdDtPeoBaRYs34C-BeySz3Jbrq0rdYGvV6JHkSG0qtkSTdv3T91P7M1GpPyCbopTPk65MnYPV0m2TEr1l0IWRTF7FwzATkO7fFfOlUDF2dWGDyiKbcm5r64vdV-l4/s640/blogger-image-1222212652.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrpnYofTw4XnfwNoIdDtPeoBaRYs34C-BeySz3Jbrq0rdYGvV6JHkSG0qtkSTdv3T91P7M1GpPyCbopTPk65MnYPV0m2TEr1l0IWRTF7FwzATkO7fFfOlUDF2dWGDyiKbcm5r64vdV-l4/s640/blogger-image-1222212652.jpg"></a></div>Here's sweet little Clara tempting fate and climbing into her favourite place :-)</div><div><br></div><div> Brace for more chickens, more cats, and a lot of random stuff to follow. I've now got less time, more animals, a Real Job, and a Masters Degree that's leaking out of my ears... </div>Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-46307249519291575352013-03-01T01:21:00.000-08:002013-03-01T01:21:01.379-08:00Aussie slangBudgie smugglers... (men's swimming trunks)<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXamd_wX0Xf11ZeTdU6_7UrH-a_m7KN9CmH3fqj4s-rNv12wMw395DrvTDB2blCpwX9gH0hC4YyUnWoN15TD2ZhcyU7WVe0KHo2q0jHsMpyyNARj7ElwbvWvXjlnp27rmtqJ5fj1adVB0/s1600/BUdgieSmugglers_3_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXamd_wX0Xf11ZeTdU6_7UrH-a_m7KN9CmH3fqj4s-rNv12wMw395DrvTDB2blCpwX9gH0hC4YyUnWoN15TD2ZhcyU7WVe0KHo2q0jHsMpyyNARj7ElwbvWvXjlnp27rmtqJ5fj1adVB0/s320/BUdgieSmugglers_3_1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The very talented <a href="http://www.johnmurrayart.com.au/posters" target="_blank">John Murray</a> illustrates the term PERFECTLY!</td></tr>
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A mouth like the bottom of a cockie's cage... (dry mouth, particularly when hungover)<br />
<br />
Dunny documents (toilet paper)<br />
<br />
And other such phrases that are causing our current exchange student much confusion and hilarity (particularly the budgies, as her grandmother has pet budgies!).<br />
<br />
I love Aussie slang, it's versatile, humorous, clever and irreverent, all the best things about Aussies. It can also be impenetrable, head-scratchingly obtuse, rude and all kinds of wrong!<br />
<br />
What's your favourite piece of Aussie slang??Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-67767198715292778622013-02-20T00:35:00.003-08:002013-02-20T01:06:55.441-08:00Doctor Who?How do you explain Doctor Who to someone who has never seen it before, or even never heard of it?<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIZ1DBBYDpxVSn_Lq9AjoM4lEmD7s7hY0ex4aWToHtPk0MFU3YRLTPAJGrvmBsp5PSbveyrrJYKbZShYtPXzalPgPobaBJ5LdCAPUUNi9FGsrZik4GjoDVYR45gtbdSXW9HguMerzH3qA/s1600/smaller+on+the+outside.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIZ1DBBYDpxVSn_Lq9AjoM4lEmD7s7hY0ex4aWToHtPk0MFU3YRLTPAJGrvmBsp5PSbveyrrJYKbZShYtPXzalPgPobaBJ5LdCAPUUNi9FGsrZik4GjoDVYR45gtbdSXW9HguMerzH3qA/s320/smaller+on+the+outside.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This may only make sense if you've seen the 2012 Xmas special!</td></tr>
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I've been attempting this with our new German exchange student, and telling her 'it's about an ancient alien who travels through time and space in a blue phone box, and takes people away with him' makes very little sense and makes the Doctor sound a tad serial-killer/stalker-ish. Also the whole regeneration thing sounds well suss. <br />
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It is kind of hard to sum up this culmination of 50 years of British eccentricity in a few sentences. It's been part of my life for as long as I can remember, so it takes a real cultural mind-set shift to be able to contemplate how you could exist without it in your life!<br />
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There's a young man on youTube called Charlie McDonnell (?) who has done a pretty good summary of why Who rocks, and why we love it despite and because of its faults. Check him out at<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf6H4gkErt4" target="_blank"> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf6H4gkErt4 </a><br />
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If you're a Whovian, how would YOU describe Who to a newbie?<br />
If you've never seen it, please consider having a go, it's got a lot to offer if you let it try :-)<br />
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And yes, I named my cat after a character in it. Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-29301839465987467572013-02-12T00:07:00.000-08:002013-02-12T00:07:15.263-08:00New kitten - best puppy toy ever<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg_wEpD4x1N35SdLnIRIj_UtQlNfocsj63zepuJZ_oJiPKm8bAbodEc1GTs5XJX6B2lKkUP4oonDNzrH5BvB6WDDmmPM8yq5MkWRs1bzCdIApe7kG7h2e4m3Q5y6VIy90L6McWdIz_0UU/s1600/jenny+and+clara.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg_wEpD4x1N35SdLnIRIj_UtQlNfocsj63zepuJZ_oJiPKm8bAbodEc1GTs5XJX6B2lKkUP4oonDNzrH5BvB6WDDmmPM8yq5MkWRs1bzCdIApe7kG7h2e4m3Q5y6VIy90L6McWdIz_0UU/s320/jenny+and+clara.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jenny and Clara - BFFs</td></tr>
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To add to the crazy mix at our house, and because of the time share situation with our middle cat, Lister, who has left home and now lives up the road, I finally allowed Darling Daughter to talk me into getting another cat. So we trotted up to the <a href="https://animalwelfare.com.au/" target="_blank">Animal Welfare League</a> and came home with little Clara, a 16 week old dark tortoiseshell, with a massive purr and beautiful markings. Jenny is absolutely smitten, Clara is extremely tolerant, and they spend a lot of time chasing each other around the garden and wrestling.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ3swmdkXwttOlECBkUQTXH38Mp7UmzmoI63-qX5U3MtNzZp8F_uaXC5yM5NIgDR5ZSdnB2y2iY9vNWlt-jmMfe1QAAS-1dp2S9KDNj9Iw5l9O9KnsIgZHTBgqfhiL3XA0TNXvx1iFAZo/s1600/growing+clara.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ3swmdkXwttOlECBkUQTXH38Mp7UmzmoI63-qX5U3MtNzZp8F_uaXC5yM5NIgDR5ZSdnB2y2iY9vNWlt-jmMfe1QAAS-1dp2S9KDNj9Iw5l9O9KnsIgZHTBgqfhiL3XA0TNXvx1iFAZo/s320/growing+clara.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Growing Clara in a basket</td></tr>
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<br />
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In a nerdy moment I decided to name her after <a href="http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Clara_%28The_Snowmen%29" target="_blank">Clara Oswin Oswald</a>, the new Dr Who assistant (or companion, as they call them these days), who made a great impression in the 2012 Christmas special. Geek attack!<br />
Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-42417495207567008162013-01-30T12:19:00.000-08:002013-01-30T12:19:00.576-08:00Road Runner (Adelaide style)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgXOkkFBA3AxOMUkaYvmqgpsxrjE4dROtYn3I7s7yQzcvj0Qf6ox8RSiaCS9SHTZOoZgUJnXz3jAi0pesjnb3-zEVs8cS6lc9eEImiX9xbA1cdeDio4MLY0Am9FpziAqny5bwe6wfzvnM/s1600/guineafowl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgXOkkFBA3AxOMUkaYvmqgpsxrjE4dROtYn3I7s7yQzcvj0Qf6ox8RSiaCS9SHTZOoZgUJnXz3jAi0pesjnb3-zEVs8cS6lc9eEImiX9xbA1cdeDio4MLY0Am9FpziAqny5bwe6wfzvnM/s1600/guineafowl.jpg" /></a></div>
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<br />
<sup><i></i></sup>This little fella lives in a street in Clearview, near a friend's house *waves at Ms C!*. He saunters along the pavement, pecking for food, or waddles along the side of the road, blithely ignoring cars, who have to go around him. My thought the first time we saw him was that he was lost and needed rescuing. But let me tell you, they are remarkably hard to catch, so I couldn't take him home! Having seen him 3 or 4 times now in the same street, it seems that he lives there as a free ranger.<br />
<br />
He (or more likely She) is a guineafowl, a species of ground-dwelling bird native to Africa. According to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guineafowl" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a> guineafowl have a long history of domestication, mainly involving the
Helmeted Guineafowl.
The young (called "keets") are very small at birth. The keets are kept
in a brooder box inside the house until about six weeks of age, before
being moved into a proper coop or enclosure. They eat lice, worms, ants,
spiders, weedseeds, and ticks while on range, or they can also eat
chicken layer crumbles (one kind of commercial <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_feed" title="Bird feed">bird feed</a>)
while housed in a coop. The cooked flesh of guineafowl resembles
chicken in texture, with a flavour somewhere between chicken and turkey.<br />
<br />
There is also a band in Sydney called Guineafowl, and you can like them on Facebook <a href="http://www.facebook.com/guineafowl" target="_blank">here</a>.<sup><br /></sup><br />
<br />
<br />Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-27721171526332116712013-01-23T18:10:00.000-08:002013-01-23T18:10:00.319-08:00Chicken + cola flavoured potato chipsI find the idea of these strangely appealing! But <a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/pepsi-chicken-chips-lays-added-weird-potato-chip-flavors-snack-epicureans-delighted-936794" target="_blank">only for sale in China</a>, sadly... Thanks to International Business Times for the story. <br />
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Pepsi-Chicken Chips By Lay's Added To Weird Potato Chip Flavors, Snack Epicureans Delighted</h1>
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BY IBTimes Staff Reporter | December 13 2012 2:35 PM<br />
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Crab, Seaweed, Pickle and Lobster. Bizarre flavored
potato chips flavors are nothing new internationally. But Lay's has a
brand new bag in town: Pepsi-Chicken flavored chips.</div>
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<img alt="Pepsi-Chicken Chips By Lay's Added To Weird Potato Chip Flavors, Snack Epicureans Delighted" src="http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/article_large/public/2012/12/13/image-axd1.jpeg" title="Pepsi-Chicken Chips By Lay's Added To Weird Potato Chip Flavors, Snack Epicureans Delighted" />
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PepsiCo,
the Purchase, N.Y., company that owns Pepsi and Frito-Lay, combined its
iconic Pepsi flavor with chicken-flavored chips which went on sale in
China.</div>
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The chips launched in late August in China and
news of the new snack has finally made its way across the seas to the
U.S. to potato chip epicureans. The Pepsi-chicken chips join the ranks
as the newest flavor put out by Lay's, including lemon tea, cucumber and
hot-and-sour fish.</div>
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While for many, the chicken and cola combo may seem odd, <a href="http://adage.com/china/article/china-news/pepsi-cola-and-lays-team-up-for-snack-flavor-in-china/238655/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">according to Ad Age</a>,
the flavors are prevalent in China. Cola chicken is a common recipe in
China where chicken wings are tossed in wok then caramelized in soy
sauce and cola.</div>
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And if you still think it sounds weird, <a href="http://www.ibtimes.com/potato-chips-my-international-adventure-frito-lay-chip-flavors-426312">IBTimes went on its own international adventure</a>
in chips in March, trying all sorts of flavors from Thailand's Hot and
Spicy crab chips, to Spain's prawn, garlic and peppers (Gambas al
Ajillo) chips to Thai Nori Seaweed chips, just to name a few.</div>
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According
to Ad Age, the idea came about from PepsiCo's CMO Richard Lee during a
recent researched and development session. Lee said Lay's was looking
for a fusion-themed chip.</div>
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"We thought it would be
really cool to have a cola combined with chicken. ... It's a very
popular dish in China," Lee told Ad Age. "Also it would be very cool to
involve one of our most-iconic soft drinks."</div>
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<span class="s1">The combo of Lay's and Pepsi was a mutually beneficial collaboration, according to</span> China Market Research Group's Ben Cavender, who said the cola company was looking to expand its brand in China.</div>
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“Coke
and Pepsi have both stalled out in terms of growth potential in China,"
he said. "It’s important for them to be developing new products and
driving into these growth categories. I think Pepsi is probably
better-positioned with the packaged food that it has to really make some
gains there.”</div>
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Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-48394961455394515252013-01-16T13:58:00.000-08:002013-01-16T13:58:00.696-08:00Smoked salmon tried to kill me<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRvTbIcgDTu5hyd6QS9DoE8Ae0vMUx7Znf6gbypJHZDrJ8WdjZcCBOcRRcGwgj1f-Lue5Vrd3y3khXIRXSg02MHNeK_6h30GRDMtnAqi5BkrUS6_Qp24rNQrRfV3uDyhU10j4wLIhtekU/s1600/nice+stitching.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRvTbIcgDTu5hyd6QS9DoE8Ae0vMUx7Znf6gbypJHZDrJ8WdjZcCBOcRRcGwgj1f-Lue5Vrd3y3khXIRXSg02MHNeK_6h30GRDMtnAqi5BkrUS6_Qp24rNQrRfV3uDyhU10j4wLIhtekU/s200/nice+stitching.JPG" width="149" /></a></div>
So, the amazing knives of the last post? They're really REALLY sharp. <br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbWSz1NjgtrqzkdpDXLMRSQOUwrDyWKcFsqq7TIgOdm_9UxLXG7h8J_S3rhL2ny44BObDoOJk_-pPPEqeqIzcMJDkvDkv7qaMqOpz1oYWl0hAOlmho4oP29Eyjw9wxflY2klD2tVNetqs/s1600/emergency+dept.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="140" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbWSz1NjgtrqzkdpDXLMRSQOUwrDyWKcFsqq7TIgOdm_9UxLXG7h8J_S3rhL2ny44BObDoOJk_-pPPEqeqIzcMJDkvDkv7qaMqOpz1oYWl0hAOlmho4oP29Eyjw9wxflY2klD2tVNetqs/s200/emergency+dept.png" width="200" /></a><br />
Note to self - don't try to pry frozen smoked salmon slices apart with a brand new knife, because it will slip and stab you in the palm, and you will have to phone your best friend to drive you to the hospital at 10 o'clock at night for stitches... And then she will laugh at you.<br />
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(when labelling this post I found I already had all the labels I needed - accident, embarrassing, F Dick, funny, hospital, ouch, shame - which says a lot about my escapades, lol)Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-66256976684107245372013-01-09T22:18:00.001-08:002013-01-09T22:18:28.273-08:00Knifegasm, or 'how I learned to love F. Dick' (it's a German brand of knife)My lovely friend Mrs F has long been horrified by the 'quality' of my kitchen knives. She's a chef, so she finds it particularly painful to see me try and chop things with the blunt metal sticks I've been using for years. In my defence, I've never bothered with really sharp knives since the kids were big enough to pull over a chair and climb up to my knife block. And when you find your largest carving knife embedded 'sword in the stone' style in a tree stump in the garden, there really is very little point in being precious about them!<br />
<br />
This Christmas Mrs F finally persuaded me that my children are now old enough to respect my knives, and so she arranged for my hubby to get me some PROPER quality blades as a gift to us all. Hence my new love for <a href="http://www.dick.de/en/tools-for-chefs-and-butchers/" target="_blank">Herr Friedrich Dick</a> of Esslingen, Germany, and his very shiny and very VERY sharp products.<br />
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I've got this one:<br />
<h3>
3 inch Kitchen Knife</h3>
<a href="http://www.dick.de/bilder/KochUndFleischerwerkzeuge/Kochmesser/Superior-DieTraditionelleSerie/84040080.jpg" rel="lightbox[Produkte]"><img alt="Küchenmesser" class="artbild" src="http://www.dick.de/bilder/KochUndFleischerwerkzeuge/Kochmesser/Superior-DieTraditionelleSerie/84040080.jpg" title="Küchenmesser" /></a><br />
and this one:<br />
<h3>
8 inch Chef´s Knife</h3>
<a href="http://www.dick.de/bilder/KochUndFleischerwerkzeuge/Kochmesser/Superior-DieTraditionelleSerie/84447210.jpg" rel="lightbox[Produkte]"><img alt="Kochmesser" class="artbild" src="http://www.dick.de/bilder/KochUndFleischerwerkzeuge/Kochmesser/Superior-DieTraditionelleSerie/84447210.jpg" title="Kochmesser" /> </a><br />
<br />
and they're amaaaaaaaaaaazing. Carving the Christmas ham was an absolute pleasure this year, although I did feel a little like a serial killer (maybe I've been watching too much Dexter, hey?)! Even Darling Hubby admitted that he could see what all the fuss was about after he tried them for the first time. <br />
<br />
Wunderbar! Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-65443377610103409982013-01-02T18:48:00.000-08:002013-01-02T18:48:00.330-08:00The most romantic gift I got my hubby this Christmas......was the amazing, heavenly condiment that is Heinz HP Sauce! We haven't had any in the house for years, and I found it at our local Asian grocer, next to the soy and sweet chilli. Awesomesauce, indeed.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="width: 770px;"><tbody>
<tr><td align="left" id="bodycopy" valign="top"><h2>
<a href="http://www.heinz.com.au/Recipes/RecipeViewer.aspx?imagetype=11&product_id=238" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://www.heinz.com.au/Recipes/RecipeViewer.aspx?imagetype=11&product_id=238" width="219" /></a><a href="http://www.heinz.com.au/Food/fooddetail.aspx?ProductID=238&ProdCat=Sauces+%26+Dressings&ProdRangeTitle=Heinz+Sauces&keyword=HP+Sauce" target="_blank">HP Sauce</a></h2>
"The
original and unmistakeable HP sauce. Used for generations in all styles
of cooking. Its malt vinegar base is blended with fruit and spices, but
the rest is a closely guarded secret. The name HP comes from the Houses
of Parliament, a restaurant that first served this sauce. There’s
nothing like it to give a kick to pies, grilled meats and burgers. It’s
low in fat with no added colours, flavours or preservatives. Available
in in a squeezy 372ml and 220ml glass bottle."<br />
<hr />
</td><td align="left" valign="top" width="4"> </td><td align="left" valign="top" width="219"><div align="center">
</div>
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="width: 100%px;"> <tbody>
<tr><td colspan="3"> </td></tr>
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</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-7479961374729593622012-12-26T12:20:00.000-08:002012-12-26T12:20:00.372-08:00Don't panic! Enjoy the Christmas season :-)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioEmT5h5UQdO4RbnzlEY80IfSqkYqlRPfsEDMvmVMt3_5CoZJO9_vZw2zXjPdV8-xN2rhgbuGWCbnLuibGnHbjpLjcBxbK2BrVQePHw28_eGGLTb9YVfsouSZNt5SXha4gOcHPoxQ3L3c/s1600/clucking+xmas.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioEmT5h5UQdO4RbnzlEY80IfSqkYqlRPfsEDMvmVMt3_5CoZJO9_vZw2zXjPdV8-xN2rhgbuGWCbnLuibGnHbjpLjcBxbK2BrVQePHw28_eGGLTb9YVfsouSZNt5SXha4gOcHPoxQ3L3c/s400/clucking+xmas.PNG" width="338" /></a></div>
<br />Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-28427574574321664032012-12-19T11:59:00.000-08:002012-12-19T11:59:00.488-08:00Lost at sea....This caught my eye whilst looking for something entirely different! It's a long article, first published in <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2007/01/moby-duck/" target="_blank">Harper's Magazine in 2007,</a> but is absolutely worth reading in its entireity. It details the story of a huge shipment (28,000) of ducks and other bath toys lost at sea in 1992, only to be tracked and collected by beachcombers
and oceanographers as they circulate around the world for the next 15 years. These ducks have a cult following, and their story even inspired Eric Carle to write
<em>10 Little Rubber Ducks.</em><br />
<h1 class="Big">
Moby-Duck</h1>
<h2 class="sbHead italic">
Or, the synthetic wilderness of childhood</h2>
<div class="byline">
By <a href="http://harpers.org/author/conwilliamson/" rel="author" title="Posts by Donovan Hohn">Donovan Hohn</a></div>
<br /><div class="articlePost">
<span class="init-cap">W</span>e know
exactly where the spill occurred: 44.7°N, 178.1°E. We know the day,
January 10, 1992, but not the hour. Neither do we know the name of the
ship nor of its captain nor of the shipping magnate who owned it. We do
know the harbors from which it sailed (Hong Kong) and to which it was
headed (Tacoma). We know that despite its grandeur, when rocked by
forty-foot waves, the colossal vessel, a floating warehouse weighing
50,000 deadweight tons or more and powered by a diesel engine the size
of a barn, would have rolled and pitched and yawed about like a toy in a
Jacuzzi.<br />
<br />
We know that twelve of the colorful containers stacked above deck
snapped loose from their moorings and tumbled overboard. We can safely
assume that the subsequent splash was terrific, like the splash a train
would make were you to drive it off a seaside cliff. We know that each
container measured forty feet long and eight feet wide and may have
weighed as much as 58,000 pounds, depending on the cargo, and that at
least one of them—perhaps when it careened into another container,
perhaps when it struck the ship’s stays, perhaps as it descended to
high-pressure depths—burst open. We know that when it left port, this
ill-fated container had contained 7,200 little packages; that, as the
water gushed in and the steel box sank, all or most of these packages
came floating to the surface; that every package comprised a plastic
shell and a cardboard back; that every shell housed four hollow plastic
animals—a red beaver, a blue turtle, a green frog, and a yellow
duck—each about three inches long; and that printed on the cardboard in
multicolored lettering were the following words: <span style="font-variant: small-caps;">floatees. the first years. from 6 months. expert developed ♥ parent preferred. 100% dishwasher safe</span>.<br />
<br />
From a low-flying plane on a clear day, the packages would have
looked like confetti, a great drift of colorful squares, exploding in
slow motion across the waves. Within twenty-four hours, the water would
have dissolved the glue. The action of the waves would have separated
the plastic from the cardboard. There, in the middle of the North
Pacific, in seas almost four miles deep, more than six hundred miles
south of Attu Island, the western extreme of the United States, more
than a thousand miles east of Hokkaido, the northern extreme of Japan,
and more than two thousand miles west of Sitka, Alaska, 28,800 plastic
animals produced in Chinese factories for the bathtubs of America—7,200
red beavers, 7,200 green frogs, 7,200 blue turtles, and 7,200 yellow
ducks—hatched from their plastic shells and drifted free.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">E</span>leven years later, more than 7,000
nautical miles to the east, an anthropologist named Bethe Hagens and her
boyfriend, Waynn Welton, a retired digital cartographer, spotted
something small and bright perched atop the seaweed at the southwest end
of Gooch’s Beach near the entrance to Kennebunk Harbor in Maine. They
stopped and crouched. Its body was approximately the size and shape of a
bar of soap, its head the size of a Ping-Pong ball. A brand name, the
first years, was embossed upon its belly. The plastic was “white,
incredibly weathered, and very worn,” Hagens would later recall. Welton
remembers it differently. It was, he insists, still yellow. “Parts of it
had started to fade,” he told me. “But not a great deal. Whatever
they’d used for the dye of the plastic had held up pretty well.” Yellow
or not, the thing looked as though it had crossed the ocean; on that
Hagens and Welton agree. It was fun to imagine, a lone duck, drifting
across the Atlantic, like something out of a fairy tale or a children’s
book—fun but also preposterous. Sensibly, they had left the toy where
they found it and walked on.<br />
<br />
The classified ads in the July 14, 1993, edition of the Sitka <em>Daily Sentinel</em>
do not make for exciting reading, though they do convey something of
what summertime in Alaska’s maritime provinces is like. That week, the
Tenakee Tavern “in Tenakee” was accepting applications “for cheerful
bartenders.” The Baranof Berry Patch was buying berries—“huckleberries,
blueberries, strawberries, raspberries.” The National Marine Fisheries
Service gave notice that the winners of the 1992 Sablefish Tag Recovery
Drawing, an annual event held to encourage the reporting of tagged
sablefish, would be selected at 1:00 p.m. on July 19 at the Auke Bay
Laboratory. “Tired of shaving, tweezing, waxing?!” asked Jolene Gerard,
R.N., R.E., enticing the hirsute citizens of Alaska’s Panhandle with the
promise of “Permanent hair removal.” Then, under the ambiguous heading
of “Announcements,” between “Business Services” and “Boats for Sale,” an
unusual listing appeared.<br />
<blockquote>
ANYONE WHO has found plastic toy animals on beaches in Southeast please call the Sentinel at 747-3219.<br />
</blockquote>
The author of the ad was Eben Punderson, a high school teacher who
moonlighted as a journalist. On Thanksgiving Day, 1992, a party of
beachcombers strolling along Chichagof Island had discovered several
dozen hollow plastic animals amid the usual wrack of bottlecaps, fishing
tackle, and driftwood deposited at the tide line by a recent storm.
After ten months at sea, the ducks had whitened and the beavers had
yellowed, but the frogs were still as green as ever, and the turtles
were still blue.<br />
<br />
In subsequent weeks beachcombers on other islands found more of the
toys, and new ones kept washing ashore. Laurie Lee of South Baranof
Island filled an unused skiff with the horde she’d scavenged. Signe
Wilson filled a hot tub. Betsy Knudson had so many to spare she started
giving them to her dog. It appeared that even the sea otters of Sitka
Sound were collecting them: one toy had been plucked from an otter’s
nest. On a single beachcombing excursion with friends, Mary Stensvold, a
botanist with the U.S. Forest Service who normally spends her days
hunting rare varieties of liverwort, gathered forty of the animals. Word
of the invasion spread. Dozens of correspondents answered the <em>Sentinel</em>’s
ad. Toys had been found as far north as Kayak Island, as far south as
Coronation Island, a range of tide line extending for hundreds of miles.
Where had they come from?<br />
<br />
Eben Punderson was pretty sure he knew. Three years earlier, in May of 1990, an eastbound freighter, the <em>Hansa Carrier,</em>
had collided with a storm five hundred miles south of the Alaskan
Peninsula. Several containers had gone overboard, including a shipment
of 80,000 Nikes. Six months later, sneakers began washing up along
Vancouver Island. The story had received national attention after a pair
of oceanographers in Seattle—Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a scientist with a
private consulting firm that tracked drifting icebergs for the oil
industry, and James Ingraham of the National Oceanographic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—turned the sneaker spill into an
oceanographic experiment. By feeding coordinates collected from
beachcombers into NOAA’s Ocean Surface Current Simulator, or OSCURS, a
computer modeling system built from a century’s worth of Navy weather
data, Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham had reconstructed the drift routes of some
200 shoes. In the process the basement of Ebbesmeyer’s bungalow had
become the central intelligence headquarters of what would eventually
grow into a global beachcombing network. Would a similar accident
account for the appearance of the bath toys?<br />
<br />
Punderson had one lead. The ducks—and for some reason only the
ducks—had been embossed with the logo of their manufacturer, The First
Years. A local toy store was unable to find the logo in its merchandise
catalogues, but the director of the Sheldon Jackson College Library
traced the brand back to its parent company in Massachusetts, Kiddie
Products. Punderson spoke to the company’s marketing manager, who
confirmed the reporter’s speculations. Yes, indeed, a shipment of
Floatees had been lost at sea. “Solved: Mystery of the Wandering Bathtub
Toys,” ran the headline in the <em>Sentinel</em>’s “Weekend” section a
month after Punderson’s ad first appeared. And that is where the story
should have ended—as an entertaining anecdote in the back pages of a
provincial newspaper. Mystery solved. Case closed. But then something
unexpected happened. The story kept going.<br />
<br />
In part the story kept going because Ebbesmeyer and his beachcombers
joined the hunt, in part because the toys themselves kept going. Years
later, new specimens and new mysteries were still turning up. In the
autumn of 1993, Floatees suddenly began sprinkling the shores of Shemya,
a tiny Aleutian island that lies about 1,500 miles closer to Russia
than to Sitka, not far from the site of the original spill. In 1995,
beachcombers in Washington State found a blue turtle and a sun-bleached
duck. Dean and Tyler Orbison, a father-son beachcombing team who every
summer scour uninhabited islands along the Alaskan coast, added more
toys to their growing collection every year—dozens in 1992, three in
1993, twenty-five in 1994, until, in 1995, they found none. The slump
continued in 1996, and the Orbisons assumed they’d seen the last of the
plastic animals, but then, in 1997, the toys suddenly returned in large
numbers.<br />
<br />
Thousands more were yet to be accounted for. Where had they gone?
Into the Arctic? Around the globe? Were they still out there, traveling
the currents of the North Pacific? Or did they lie buried under wrack
and sand along Alaska’s wild, sparsely populated shores? Or, succumbing
to the elements—freezing temperatures, the endless battering of the
waves, prolonged exposure to the sun—had they cracked, filled with
water, gone under? All 28,800 toys had emerged from that sinking
container into the same acre of water. Each member of the four species
was all but identical to the others—each duck was just as light as the
other ducks, each frog as thick as the other frogs, each beaver as
aerodynamic as the next. And yet one turtle had ended up in Signe
Wilsonhot tub, another in the jaws of Betsy Knudson’s labrador, another
in the nest of a sea otter, while a fourth had floated almost all the
way to Russia, and a fifth traveled south of Puget Sound. Why? What
tangled calculus of causes and effects could explain—or predict—such
disparate fates?<br />
There were other reasons why the story of the toys kept going,
reasons that had nothing to do with oceanography and everything to do
with the human imagination, which can be as powerful and as inscrutable
as the sea. In making sense of chaotic data, in following a slightly
tangled thread of narrative to its source, Eben Punderson had set the
plastic animals adrift all over again—not upon the waters of the North
Pacific but upon currents of information. The Associated Press picked up
the <em>Daily Sentinel</em>’s story. Newspapers across the country ran it. The Floatees eventually made brief appearances in <em>The Guardian</em> and <em>The New York Times Magazine,</em> and a considerably longer appearance in <em>The Smithsonian.</em> Like migrating salmon, they returned almost seasonally to the pages of <em>Scholastic News,</em> a magazine for kids, which has reported on the story seven times. They were spotted in the shallows of <em>People</em> and MSNBC, and in the tide pools of <em>All Things Considered.</em>
They swirled around the maelstrom of the Internet and bobbed up in such
exotic waters as an oceanography textbook for undergraduates and a
newsletter for the collectors of duck-themed stamps.<br />
<br />
These travels wrought strange changes. Dishwasher safe the toys may
have been, but newspaper safe they were not. By the time they drifted
into my own imagination, the plastic animals that had fallen into the
Pacific in 1992 were scarcely recognizable. For one thing, the plastic
had turned into rubber. For another, the beavers, frogs, and turtles had
all turned into ducks. It had begun the day Eben Punderson published an
unusual ad in the pages of the Sitka <em>Daily Sentinel</em>—the metamorphosis of happenstance into narrative and narrative into myth.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">F</span>ar across the ocean, in a toy factory
made of red brick, a pinkly Caucasian woman in a brick-red dress and a
racially ambiguous brown man in a sky-blue shirt work side by side at an
assembly line. From a gray machine, yellow-beaked and lacking irises in
the whites of their eyes, rubber ducks emerge, one by one, onto a
conveyor belt. <em>Chuckedy-chuckedy-chuck</em> goes the rubber-duck
machine. As the ducks roll past, the woman in the brick-red dress paints
their beaks brick red with a little brush. The man in the sky-blue
shirt paints their irises sky blue. It is beautiful, this unnamed
country across the sea. Green grass grows around the factory. The people
who work there clearly enjoy making rubber ducks. They are all healthy,
well rested, and smiling. At the end of the assembly line another
racially ambiguous brown man, lighter and yellower than the first, packs
the ducks, ten to a cardboard box, onto a grass-green truck that
carries them to a waiting ship named the <em>Bobbie.</em> The <em>Bobbie</em>’s
crew consists of a racially ambiguous stevedore in a hard hat and a
pinkly Caucasian, white-bearded captain whose blue cap matches his blue
coat. There are two gold stripes around the cuffs of the coat and two
red stripes around the smokestack of the ship. A few decades ago the
captain would have been smoking a pipe. Now he waves jauntily from a
porthole. Above him, a white puff rises from the smokestack into a
sky-blue sky.<br />
<br />
Away the <em>Bobbie</em> chugs, carrying five cardboard boxes across a
blue-green sea, a white streamer of smoke trailing behind it. Smiling
overhead is an enormous sun the color of a rubber duck. Then a storm
blows up. Waves leap. The <em>Bobbie</em> tosses about. The captain
cries and throws his hands in the air. Down goes a cardboard box. Ducks
spill like candy from a piñata. The sea calms. Slowly, the ducks drift
apart, across the ocean, to diverse and far-flung ecosystems. One duck
frolics with a spotted dolphin. A second receives a come-hither look
from a blueberry seal in a lime-green sea. A polar bear standing on an
ice floe ogles a third. And so their journeys go, each duck encountering
a different picturesque animal—a flamingo, a pelican, a sea turtle, an
octopus, a gull, a whale. Finally, who should the tenth rubber duck meet
but a brood of real ducks. “Quack!” says the mother duck. “Quack!
Quack! Quack!” say the ducklings. “Squeak,” says the rubber duck. “Press
here,” says a button on the rubber duck’s wing, and when you do, a
battery-powered computer chip embedded in the back cover of Eric Carle’s
<em>10 Little Rubber Ducks</em> emits what to my admittedly untrained ear sounds like the cry of a cormorant tangled in fishing line.<br />
<br />
Published in the spring of 2005, shortly after my own duckie hunt
began, Carle’s picture book was inspired by a newspaper article, titled
“Rubber Ducks Lost at Sea,” that he’d happened upon in 2003. “I could
not resist making a story out of this newspaper report,” a brief
author’s note explains. “I hope you like my story.” Beautifully
illustrated with Carle’s signature mix of paint and paper tearings, the
book is hard not to like. Studies have shown that the primary colors,
smiling faces, and cute animals with which <em>10 Little Rubber Ducks</em>
abounds—and of which the rubber duck may well be the consummate
embodiment—have the almost narcotic power to induce feelings of
happiness in the human brain. The myth had at last found if not its
Aesop, then at least its Disney.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">T</span>he loss of fantasy is the price we have paid for precision,” I read one night in an outdated <em>Ocean Almanac</em>
while investigating the journey of the Floatees, “and today we have
navigation maps based on an accurate 1:1,000,000 scale of the entire
world.” Surveying the colorful, oversized landscape of my <em>National Geographic</em>
atlas, a cartographic wonder made—its dust jacket boasted—from
high-resolution satellite images and “sophisticated computer
algorithms,” I was unconvinced; fantasy did not strike me as extinct, or
remotely endangered. The ocean is far less fathomable to my generation
of Americans than it was when Herman Melville explored that “watery
wilderness” a century and a half ago. Most of us are better acquainted
with cloud tops than with waves. What our migrant ancestors thought of
as the winds we think of as turbulence, and fasten our seat belts when
the orange light comes on. Gale force, hurricane force—encountering such
terms, we comprehend only that the weather is really, really bad and in
our minds replay the special-effects sequences of disaster films or
news footage of palm trees blown inside out like cheap umbrellas. In
growing more precise, humanity’s knowledge has also grown more
specialized, and more fantastic, not less: the seas of my consciousness
teem with images and symbols and half-remembered trivia as fabulous as
those beasts frolicking at the edges of ancient charts. Not even
satellite photographs and computer algorithms can burn away the
mystifying fogs of ambient information and fantasy through which from
birth I have sailed.<br />
<br />
Not long ago on the Op-Ed page of the <em>New York Times,</em> the
novelist Julia Glass worried that her fellow Americans, “impatient with
flights of fancy,” had lost the ability to be carried away by the
“illusory adventure” of fiction, preferring the tabloid titillation of
the “so-called truth.” Perhaps, concluded Glass, “there is a growing
consensus, however sad, that the wayward realm of make-believe belongs
only to our children.” By the spring of 2005, I had reached different
conclusions. Hadn’t we adults, like the imaginative preschoolers Glass
admires, also been “encouraged”—by our government, by advertisers, by
the fabulists of the cable news—“to mingle fact with fiction”? Hadn’t
millions of adults bought the illusory adventures of both Frodo Baggins
and Donald Rumsfeld? Medieval Europeans divided the human lifetime into
five ages, the first of which was known as the Age of Toys. It seemed to
me that in twenty-first-century America, the Age of Toys never ends.
Yes, stories fictional and otherwise can take us on illusory adventures,
but they can also take us on disillusory ones, and it was the latter
sort of adventure that I craved.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">I</span> tracked down a phone number for
Curtis Ebbesmeyer and asked him how the journey of the castaway ducks
had ended. I’d read that some toys were supposed to have crossed the
Arctic, reaching the North Atlantic by the summer of 2003. Had they made
it? Oh, yes, Ebbesmeyer assured me, yes, they had. Right on schedule,
he’d received a highly credible eyewitness report from a trained
anthropologist in Maine, which he’d published in his quarterly
newsletter, <em>Beachcombers’ Alert!</em> He promised to send me a copy.
But—he added—if I really wanted to learn about things that float, then I
should join him in Sitka that July. “You can’t go beachcombing by
phone,” he said. “You have to get out there and look.”<br />
<br />
Since 2003, Sitka has played host to an annual Beachcombers’ Fair
over which Ebbesmeyer—part guru, part impresario—presides. Beachcombers
bring him things they’ve scavenged from the sand, and Ebbesmeyer
illuminates these discoveries as best he can. “Everything has a story,”
he likes to say. When an object mystifies him, he investigates. At this
year’s fair, a local fisherman would be ferrying a select group of
beachcombers to the wild shores of Kruzof Island, where some of the toys
had washed up. Ebbesmeyer, who would be leading the expedition, offered
me a spot aboard the boat. Alaska—snow-capped mountains, icebergs,
breeching whales, wild beaches bestrewn with yellow ducks. There was
only one problem. The Beachcombers’ Fair ended July 25, and my wife and I
were due to have a baby on August 1, which was cutting it pretty close.<br />
<br />
Soon thereafter an envelope with a Seattle postmark arrived. Inside, printed on blue paper, were a half-dozen issues of <em>Beachcombers’ Alert!</em>
Thumbing through this digest of the miscellaneous and arcane was a bit
like beachcombing amid the wreckage of a storm. Alongside stories about
derelict vessels and messages in bottles, the oceanographer had arrayed a
photographic scrapbook of strange, sea-battered oddities, natural and
man-made—Japanese birch-bark fishing floats, the heart-shaped seed of a
baobab tree, land mines, televisions, a torn wet suit, a 350-pound safe.
Many of these artifacts had accumulated colonies of gooseneck
barnacles. Some were so encrusted they seemed to be made of the
creatures: a derelict skiff of barnacles, a hockey glove of barnacles. A
disconcerting number of the photographs depicted the plastic heads of
mannequins and dolls, including the head of a plastic infant impaled
like a candy apple on a stick.<br />
<br />
At the end of an article titled “Where the Toys Are,” Ebbesmeyer had
published Bethe Hagens’s letter. “You won’t believe this,” she’d written
after hearing about the castaway toys on NPR, “but two weeks ago, I
found one of your ducks.” In fact, Ebbesmeyer <em>had</em> believed her,
or wanted to. The details of her description matched the profile of a
Floatee perfectly. Because Hagens had neglected to keep the evidence,
however, her testimony remained in doubt. Accompanying the article was a
world map indicating where and when the toys had washed up. Off the
coast of Kennebunkport, Ebbesmeyer had printed a pair of question marks
the size of barrier reefs.<br />
<br />
There are two ways to get to the insular city of Sitka—by plane and
by boat. In my dreams, I would have picked up the frayed end of that
imaginary, 7,000-mile-long trail that led to Gooch’s Beach and followed
it, Theseus-style, to its source—sailing back across the Gulf of Maine,
back through the Northwest Passage, that legendary waterway which the
historian Pierre Breton has described as a “maze of drifting, misshapen
bergs,” a “crystalline world of azure and emerald, indigo and
alabaster—dazzling to the eye, disturbing to the soul,” a “glittering
metropolis of moving ice.” To Lieutenant William Edward Parry of the
British Navy, who captained the <em>Alexander</em> into the maze in 1818, the slabs of ice looked like the pillars of Stonehenge.<br />
<br />
By the summer of 2005, global warming had gone a long way toward
turning that metropolis of ice into the open shipping channel of which
Victorian imperialists dreamed. That September climatologists would
announce that the annual summer melt had reduced the floating ice cap to
its smallest size in a century of record-keeping. Nevertheless, even a
transarctic journey aboard a Coast Guard ice breaker was out of the
question if I wanted to make it to Sitka and back before the birth of my
first child. Instead I booked passage on the M/V <em>Malaspina,</em>
part of the Alaskan Marine Highway, which is in fact not a highway at
all but a state-operated fleet of ferries. Sailing from Bellingham,
Washington, the <em>Malaspina</em> would reach Sitka five days before
the Beachcombers’ Fair began. If I flew home as soon as the fair ended, I
would be in Manhattan a week before the baby arrived—assuming it did
not arrive early, which, my wife’s obstetrician warned us, was
altogether possible. My wife was not at all happy about my plan, but she
consented on one condition: that if she felt a contraction or her water
broke, I would catch the next flight home, no matter the cost.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">O</span>n my way to Bellingham I stopped in
Seattle to visit Curtis Ebbesmeyer. I met him at home, in a quiet
neighborhood near the University of Washington, where he had earned his
Ph.D. Navy blue awnings overshadowed the porch of his bungalow, and
peering into the semidarkness I could see four matching Adirondack
chairs, lined up, side by side, as if to behold the vista of the lawn.
Ebbesmeyer himself greeted me at the door. “Come in, come in,” he said.<br />
<br />
His face was familiar to me from photographs I’d seen in the press and in the pages of <em>Beachcombers’ Alert!</em>,
where he makes frequent cameo appearances, displaying a water-stained
basketball, hoisting a plastic canister that was supposed to have
delivered Taiwanese propaganda to the Chinese mainland, gazing down
deifically at the four Floatees perched upon his forearm. He has a white
beard, a Cheshire grin, and close-set eyes that together make his face a
bit triangular. Since Ebbesmeyer likes to wear Hawaiian shirts and a
necklace of what appear to be roasted chestnuts but are in fact sea
beans, the waterborne seeds of tropical trees that ocean currents
disseminate to distant shores, pictures of him often bring to mind
cartoons of Santa Claus on vacation.<br />
<br />
He brewed us each a cup of coffee and suggested we adjourn to the
back yard, which he refers to as his “office.” Passing through his
basement, I saw many of the objects I’d read about in <em>Beachcombers’ Alert!</em>
Piled high on a bookshelf were dozens of Nikes. Some of them had
survived the 1990 container spill—the first Ebbesmeyer ever
investigated—in which 80,000 shoes had been lost. Others came from later
accidents: 18,000 Nike sneakers fell overboard in 1999; 33,000 more in
December of 2002. In January of 2000, some 26,000 Nike sandals—along
with 10,000 children’s shoes and 3,000 computer monitors, which float
screen up and are popular with barnacles—plunged into the drink.<br />
<br />
Nike’s maritime fortunes are not unusually calamitous; as many as
10,000 containers spill from cargo ships annually. But few commodities
are both as seaworthy and as traceable as a pair of Air Jordans, which
conveniently come with numerical records of their provenance stitched to
the undersides of their tongues, and which—<br /> submerged up to the
ankle, laces aswirl—will drift for years. It helps, too, that Ebbesmeyer
learned the serial numbers for all the shoes in the 1990 spill. In his
basement, Ebbesmeyer selected a high-top at random and taught me how to
“read the tongue.” “See the ID?” he asked. “‘021012.’ The ‘02’ is the
year. ‘10’ is October. ‘12’ is December. Nike ordered these from
Indonesia in October of 2002 for delivery in December.”<br />
Next he pulled down a black flip-flop, and then a matching one that
he had sliced in half. Inside the black rubber was a jagged yellow core
resembling a lightning bolt—a perfect identifying characteristic. If
Ebbesmeyer had discovered the coordinates of this particular spill, the
sandals would have provided a windfall of valuable data. Unfortunately,
the shipping company, fearing legal liability, had “stonewalled” him,
“like usual.”<br />
<br />
It took Ebbesmeyer a year of diplomacy and detective work to find out
when and where the Floatees fell overboard. Initially, the shipping
company stonewalled him, like usual. Then one day he received a phone
call. The container ship in question was at port in Tacoma. On the
condition that he never reveal its name or that of its owner, he was
welcome to come aboard. For four hours, Ebbesmeyer sat in the ship’s
bridge interviewing the captain, a “very gracious” Chinese man who had a
Ph.D. in meteorology and spoke fluent English. The day of the spill the
ship had encountered a severe winter storm and heavy seas, the captain
said. The readings on the inclinometer told the story best. When a ship
is perfectly level in the water, its inclinometer reads 0°. If a ship
were keeled on its side, the inclinometer would read 90°. Containers
begin to break loose when a ship rolls more than 35°, Ebbesmeyer has
found. When this particular spill occurred, the inclinometer would have
registered a roll of 55° to port, then a roll of 55° to starboard. At
that inclination, the stacks of containers, each one six containers
tall, would have been more horizontal than vertical. Perhaps Dr.
Ebbesmeyer would like to have a peek at the log book, the captain
discreetly suggested. He’d already opened it to January 10, 1992. There
were the magic coordinates.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">O</span>SCURS could now reconstruct, or
“hindcast,” the routes various toys had traveled, producing a map of
erratic trajectories that appeared to have been hand drawn by a
cartographer with palsy. Beginning at the scattered coordinates where
beachcombers had reported finding toys, the lines wiggled west,
converging at the point of origin, not far from where the International
Dateline crosses the 45th parallel. The data that Ebbesmeyer’s
beachcombers had gathered also allowed NOAA’s James Ingraham to
fine-tune the computer model, adjusting for coefficients such as the
height at which the toys rode in the water (an object with a tall
profile will sail as well as drift). The toys, it turns out, rode high,
skating across the Gulf of Alaska at an average rate of seven miles a
day, twice as fast as the currents they were traveling. Among other
things, the simulation revealed that in 1992 those currents might have
shifted to the north as a consequence of El Niño.<br />
OSCURS could forecast as well as hindcast, and in this respect,
Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham were like clairvoyant meteorologists of the
waves. OSCURS was their crystal ball. To the eyes of a driftologist,
even the most state-of-the-art globe is in one respect as fabulous as
the cartographic dreamscapes of the past. No clouds swirl across a map’s
invisible skies. The painted topography of its empty seas are not
troubled by the wind. The polar ice does not thicken and thin with the
seasons and the ages. There is no sign of “thermohaline circulation,”
the vertical movement of water layers caused by variations in density
and temperature. A globe is a static illusion of permanence because it
lacks a crucial dimension, the dimension that OSCURS was programmed to
map—time.<br />
<br />
By simulating “long-term mean surface geostrophic currents” (those
currents that flow steadily and enduringly, though not immutably, like
rivers in the sea) as well as “surface-mixed-layer currents that are
functions of wind speed and direction” (those currents that change as
quickly as the skies), OSCURS could project the trajectories of the toys
well into the future. According to the simulator’s predictions, some of
the animals would drift south, where they would either collide with the
coast of Hawaii in March of 1997, or, more likely, get sucked into the
North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.<br />
<br />
“‘Gyre’ is a fancy word for a current in a bowl of soup,” Ebbesmeyer
likes to say. “You stir your soup, it goes around a few seconds.” The
thermodynamic circulation of air, which we experience as wind, is like a
giant spoon that never stops stirring. Comprising four separate
currents—the southerly California Current, the westerly North Equatorial
Current, the northerly Kuroshio Current, and the easterly North Pacific
Drift—the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre travels from the coast of
Washington to the coast of Mexico to the coast of Japan and back again.
Some of the toys would escape the gyre’s orbit, spin off toward the
Indian Ocean, and, eventually, circumnavigate the globe. Others would
drift into the gyre’s becalming center, where a high-pressure system has
created what Ebbesmeyer calls “the garbage patch”—a purgatorial eddy in
the waste stream that is approximately the size of Texas. “It’s like
Jupiter’s red spot,” says Ebbesmeyer. “It’s one of the great features of the planet Earth, but you can’t see it.”<br />
<br />
A similar high-pressure calm at the center of the North Atlantic Gyre
gave rise to the legend of the Bermuda triangle as well as to the
Sargasso Sea, named for the free-floating wilderness of sargasso seaweed
that the currents have accumulated there. <em>A Sargasso of the imagination,</em> I thought to myself as I listened to Ebbesmeyer describe the garbage patch. The phrase comes from a scene in <em>Day of the Locust</em> in which Nathanael West is describing a Hollywood backlot jumbled with miscellaneous properties and disassembled stage sets.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">T</span>he Atlantic is far shallower and
narrower than the Pacific, and upwellings of cold, nutrient-rich water
nourish the sargasso forest and the marine life that inhabits it. The
center of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, which circles around the
deepest waters on the planet, is, by contrast, a kind of marine desert.
If you go fishing in the garbage patch, all you’re likely to catch aside
from garbage is plankton.<br />
<br />
In 1998, with help from Ingraham and Ebbesmeyer, a researcher named
Charlie Moore began collecting water samples from the eastern edge of
the North Pacific garbage patch, trawling along a 564-mile loop
encompassing exactly one million square miles of ocean. Approximately
800 miles west of California, where the wind speed fell below ten knots,
drifts of garbage began to appear. The larger items that Moore and his
crew retrieved from the water included polypropylene fishing nets, “a
drum of hazardous chemicals,” a volleyball “half-covered in barnacles,” a
cathode-ray television tube, and a gallon bleach bottle “that was so
brittle it crumbled in our hands.” Most of the debris that Moore found
had already disintegrated. Caught in his trawling net was “a rich broth
of minute sea creatures mixed with hundreds of colored plastic
fragments.”<br />
OSCURS’s simulations predicted that relatively few of the bathtub
toys would have contributed to this “plastic-plankton soup,” as Moore
calls it. The majority would have stayed well to the north, closer to
the site of the spill, caught in the Sub-Polar Gyre, which travels
counterclockwise between the coasts of Alaska and Siberia. Smaller and
stormier than the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, the Sub-Polar Gyre
does not collect vast quantities of trash at its center. Here, the
Floatees would have remained in orbit, completing a lap around the Gulf
of Alaska and the Bering Sea once every three years, until a winter
storm blew them ashore or they strayed onto one of the northerly
currents flowing through the Bering Strait.<br />
<br />
There, OSCURS lost them.<br />
Ingraham had not programmed his model to simulate the Arctic. To
follow the animals into the ice, Ebbesmeyer had to rely on more
primitive oceanographic methods. He went to a toy store and purchased a
few dozen brand-new Floatees to use as lab animals in various
experiments. Several specimens he subjected to the frigid conditions
inside his kitchen freezer in order to find out whether cold would make
them crack (it didn’t). Others he bludgeoned with a hammer to see what
it would take to make them sink (a lot). Even breeched and taking on
water, they kept afloat. Able to withstand fifty-two dishwasher cycles,
the toys, Ebbesmeyer concluded, could also survive a ten-year voyage
through the ice. Using data collected from transarctic drift experiments
conducted in the late 1970s, he calculated that, once beset, the toys
would creep across the North Pole at an average rate of a mile per day.
When they reached the North Atlantic, the ice would melt and set the
Floatees loose upon the waters east of Greenland. Some would catch the
Gulf Stream to Europe. Others would ride the cold southerly longshore
current that flows past Gooch’s Beach.<br />
<span class="init-cap">A</span>lthough his library of shoes may
suggest otherwise, Ebbesmeyer has not amassed a museum of flotsam in his
basement. He collects stories and data, not things. Fat, three-ring
binders occupy most of the shelf space. They contain “a small portion”
of the studies he has conducted over the years. I saw binders labeled
Fishing Floats and Vikings, Phytoplankton and Drifting Coffins, Eddies
and Icebergs. There was an entire binder devoted to Isis and Osiris, the
star-crossed Egyptian gods. Ebbesmeyer told me the tragic ending of
their tale: “Osiris’s brother killed him, put his body in a coffin, put
the coffin in the Nile River, and it washed up 300 miles to the north of
Lebanon. His wife, Isis, went to find it, and she did. That’s the first
documented drift of an object between point A and point B that I know
of.”<br />
<br />
In the back yard, seated on the patio, where a string of rubber
duckie Christmas lights festooned a grape arbor and wind chimes made
mournful noises on the breeze, Ebbesmeyer waxed ecclesiastical. “There’s
nothing new around,” he said. Take Osiris. Even today, when the Nile
floods, flotsam follows that same route. Not even pollution is new. He
told me to think of volcanic eruptions, of the tons of pumice and toxic
ash an eruption throws into the sea. No, when you studied the history of
flotsam long enough you realized that only one thing was fundamentally
different about the ocean now, only one thing had changed since the time
of the ancient Egyptians. “See, pumice will absorb water and sink,” he
said. “But 60 percent of plastic will float and the 60 percent that does
float will never sink because it doesn’t absorb water; it fractures
into ever smaller pieces. That’s the difference. There are things afloat
now that will never sink.”<br />
<br />
Ebbesmeyer went inside and returned a moment later carrying what at
first glance appeared to be exotic produce—a new, flatter variety of
plantain or summer squash, perhaps. He spread these yellowy lozenges out
on the patio table. “Remnants of high-seas drift-net floats,” he said.
There were four of them, in varying stages of decay. The best-preserved
specimen had the hard sheen of polished bone. The worst was pocked and
textured like a desiccated sponge that had been attacked with a chisel.
Ebbesmeyer picked up the latter float. “This is a pretty cool old one,”
he said. By “cool” he meant that it told the story of drift-net floats
particularly well.<br />
<br />
“High-seas drift nets were banned by the United Nations in 1992,” his
version of this story began. “They were nets with a mesh size of about
four inches, but they were, like, fifty miles long. The Japanese would
sit there and interweave these for fifty miles. There were something
like a thousand drift nets being used every night in the 1980s, and if
you do the math they were filtering all the water in the upper fifty
feet every year. Well, they were catching all the large animals, and it
clearly could not go on.”<br />
<br />
According to Ebbesmeyer, those high-seas drift nets had not gone
away, and not only because pirate drift netting still takes place.
Before the moratorium, fishermen had lost about half of their nets every
year, and those lost nets were still out there, still fishing. “Ghost
nets,” they’re called. When he tells stories like this, Ebbesmeyer will
punctuate the most astonishing facts with his eyebrows. He’ll say
something like, “What happens is, the nets keep catching animals, and
then the animals die, and then after a while, the nets get old, and they
roll up on a coral reef, and the waves roll it along like a big
avalanche ball, killing everything in its path.” Then his bushy eyebrows
will spring up above his glasses and stay there while he looks at<br /> you, wide-eyed with auto-dumbfoundment.<br />
<br />
And killer drift-net balls are genuinely dumbfounding, like something
from a B horror movie—so dumbfounding that, smelling a hyperbole, I
later checked Ebbesmeyer’s facts. A ghost net may not kill everything
that crosses its path, but it sure can kill a lot. News reports describe
nets dripping with putrefying wildlife. Just three months before I
showed up on Ebbesmeyer’s doorstep, NOAA scientists scanning the ocean
from the air with a digital imaging system had spotted a flock of 100 or
so ghost nets drifting through the garbage patch. When they returned to
fetch them, they found balls of net measuring thirty feet across.
“There is a lot more trash out there than I expected,” one of the
researchers, James Churnside, told the Associated Press. A few years
earlier, Coast Guard divers had spent a month picking 25.5 tons of
netting and debris—including two 4,000-pound, fifteen-mile-long,
high-seas drift nets—out of reefs around Lisianski Island in the North
Pacific. They estimated that there were 6,000 more tons of netting and
debris still tangled in the reefs when they left.<br />
<br />
In Ebbesmeyer’s opinion, ghost nets may pose a still greater danger
once they disintegrate. While we were conversing on his patio, he handed
me the oldest of the drift-net floats. “Hold this a minute,” he said.
It weighed almost nothing. “Now put it down and look.” On the palm of my
hand, the float had left a sprinkling of yellow dust, plastic particles
as small as pollen grains in which, if you believe Ebbesmeyer, the
destiny of both the Floatees and of the ocean could be read.<br />
<br />
Out on his front lawn, as I was leaving, I asked him what he thought of <em>10 Little Rubber Ducks.</em>
Despite the gloomy future he glimpsed in that handful of plastic dust,
he thought Carle’s cheerful picture book was “delightful,” especially
that little squeaker in the back, and he hoped that it would “make the
ocean fun to kids.” He did have one criticism. He couldn’t figure out
why Carle along with just about everyone else seemed compelled to turn
the four Floatees into rubber ducks. Coverage of the story in newspapers
and magazines almost always showed a picture of a solitary rubber duck,
and usually not even the right kind of duck. What was wrong with the
other three animals? “Maybe it’s a kind of racism,” Ebbesmeyer
speculated. “Speciesism.”<br />
<br />
The Floatees are no longer on the market, but before I left,
Ebbesmeyer loaned me a set that had survived his experiments, to be
returned when I was done with them. I have been carrying them around
with me ever since, and they are at present perched before me on my desk
as I write. Monochromatic and polygonal in a Bauhaus sort of way, they
bear little resemblance to the rubber ducks in Carle’s book or, for that
matter, to any other plastic animal I’ve ever seen. Although
blow-molded out of a rigid plastic (probably polyethylene), they look
whittled from wax by some artisanal tribesman. The frog’s four-fingered
hands (the left smaller than the right) seem folded in prayer. The limbs
of the turtle are triangular stubs. The duck’s head, too large for the
flat-bottomed puck of a body it sits upon, is imperfectly spherical, the
flat plane of its beak continuing like a crew-cut mohawk over the top
of the skull. Poke an axle through the duck’s puffed cheeks and its head
would make a good wheel. Wildly out of scale and dyed a lurid,
maraschino red, the beaver seems altogether out of place in this
menagerie, a mammalian interloper from somebody’s acid trip. A seam left
by the split mold bisects all four animals asymmetrically, and there’s a
little anal button of scarred plastic where the blow pin, that steel
umbilicus, withdrew.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">“W</span>hy do precisely these objects we behold make a world?” Thoreau wonders in <em>Walden.</em>
“Why has man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if
nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice?” Since Thoreau’s
time, ecologists have explained why that mouse filled that crevice, and
since then Walden woods have grown far less bewildering. For Thoreau the
distinction between the natural world and the man-made one matters less
than that between the subjective experience within and the objective
world without. For him, both rocks and mice are objects that he
perceives as shadows flickering on the walls of his mind. For him,
anthropomorphism is inescapable. All animals, he writes, are “beasts of
burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts.”<br />
<br />
The word “synthetic” in its current sense of “chemically unnatural”
would not appear in print until 1874, twenty years after the publication
of <em>Walden</em> and five years after the invention of celluloid, the
first industrial synthetic. In its 137-year history, the synthetic
world has itself grown into a kind of wilderness. With the exceptions of
our fellow human beings and our domestic pets, the objects that make
the worlds we behold today are almost entirely man-made. Consider the
following: In nature, there are 142 known species of Anatidae, the
family to which ducks, swans, and geese belong. Of those species only
one, the white Pekin duck, a domesticated breed of mallard, produces
spotless yellow ducklings. Since the invention of plastic, four known
species of Anatidae have gone extinct; several others survive only in
sanctuaries created to save them. Meanwhile, by the estimates of one
collector, the makers of novelties and toys have concocted more than
5,000 different varieties of novelty duck, nearly all of which are
yellow, and most of which are not made in fact from rubber but from
plasticized polyvinyl chloride, a derivative of coal. Why has man just
these species of things for his neighbors, a latter-day Thoreau might
ask, as if nothing but a yellow duck could perch on the rim of a tub?<br />
<br />
Let’s draw a bath. Let’s set a rubber duck afloat. Look at it
wobbling there. What misanthrope, what damp, misty November of a
sourpuss, upon beholding a rubber duck afloat, does not feel a crayola
ray of sunshine brightening his gloomy heart? Graphically, the rubber
duck’s closest relative is not a bird or a toy but the yellow happy face
of Wal-Mart commercials. A rubber duck is in effect a happy face with a
body and lips—which is what the beak of the rubber duck has become:
great, lipsticky, bee-stung lips. Both the happy face and the rubber
duck reduce facial expressions to a kind of pictogram. They are both
emoticons. And they are, of course, the same color—the yellow of an egg
yolk or the eye of a daisy, a shade darker than a yellow raincoat, a
shade lighter than a taxicab.<br />
<br />
Like the eyes of other animals (rabbits, for example, or deer) and
unlike the eyes of a happy face, the rubber duck’s eyes peer helplessly
from the sides of its spherical head. Its movement is also
expressive—joyously erratic, like that of a bouncing ball, or a dancing
drunk. So long, that is, as it doesn’t keel over and float around like a
dead fish, as rubber ducks of recent manufacture are prone to do. It’s
arguable whether such tipsy ducks deserve to be called toys. They have
retained the form and lost the function. Their value is wholly symbolic.
They are not so much rubber ducks as plastic representations of rubber
ducks. They are creatures of the lab, chimeras synthesized from whimsy
and desire in the petri dish of commerce.<br />
<br />
Apologists for plastics will on occasion blur the semantic lines
between the antonyms “synthetic” and “natural.” Everything is chemical,
they rightly say, even water, even us, and plastic, like every living
creature great and small, is carbon-based and therefore “organic.” But
to my mind the only meaningful difference between the synthetic and the
natural is more philosophical than chemical. A loon can symbolize
madness, and a waddling duck can make us laugh. But the duck and the
loon exist outside of the meanings with which we burden them. A loon is
not really mad. A duck is not really a clown; it waddles inelegantly
because its body has evolved to swim. A rubber duck, by comparison, is
not burdened with thought. It <em>is</em> thought, the immaterial made material, a subjective object, a fantasy in 3-D.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">O</span>ne night, during the thirty-third week
of her pregnancy, my wife and I attended a practicum in infant CPR.
With the other expectant parents, we sat around a conference table set
with babies—identical, life-size, polyethylene babies, lying there on
the formica like lobsters. The skin of these infantile mannequins was
the color of graphite. Even their eyeballs were shiny and gray. Their
mouths had been molded agape, so that they seemed to be gasping for air.
To dislodge an imaginary choking hazard, you were supposed to lay the
baby facedown over your left forearm and strike its back with the heel
of your right hand. If you struck too hard, its hollow head would pop
from its neck and go skittering across the linoleum. The morning after
my visit with Ebbesmeyer, hurtling up the eastern shore of Puget Sound
aboard the Amtrak Cascades bound for Bellingham, it occurs to me that
“garbage patch” sounds like “cabbage patch,” and for a moment I am
picturing a thousand silvery, gape-mouthed heads bobbing on the open
sea.<br />
<br />
The old woman across the aisle, a retired high school chemistry
teacher from Montana, tells me that she and her husband are traveling
the globe. They have been to every continent but Antarctica. She teaches
me how to say “I don’t have any money” in Norwegian. She tells me about
the mural she saw in Belfast depicting a masked man and a Kalashnikov.
She tells me about her nephew, who has in fact been to Antarctica. He
spent a night dangling from the ice shelf in something like a hammock. <em>National Geographic</em>
named him one of the top mountain climbers in the world, she says. Then
he died in an avalanche in Tibet. Left three little boys. She smiles as
she says this. In the window behind her, the blue waters of Puget Sound
flash through the green blur of trees.<br />
<br />
The train groans into a curve. Suddenly there are green and orange
and blue containers stacked atop flatbed train cars parked on a
neighboring track. The polyglot names of shipping companies speed by:
Evergreen, Uniglory, Maersk. Then, at a clearing in the trees, the great
brontosaural works of a gantry crane loom up above a Russian freighter
loaded with what looks like modular housing. port of seattle, a sign on
the crane reads.<br />
<br />
We are somewhere east of the Strait of Juan de Fuca—Juan de Fuca,
whom I read about in one of my books. He was a Greek sailor in the
Spanish navy whose real name was Apostolos Valerianos. He claimed to
have discovered the entrance to the Northwest Passage at the 47th
parallel in 1592. The transit from the Pacific to the Atlantic had taken
a mere twenty days, he reported, and the northern lands between these
oceans were filled with riches. Despite how familiar this tale must have
sounded, for centuries people actually believed him. Although no one
knows for certain whether the Greek sailor ever even visited the North
Pacific, his description of the entrance to the passage, then known as
the Strait of Anian, bears a superficial resemblance to the entrance of
Puget Sound, and so the Strait of Juan de Fuca memorializes the
pseudonymous perpetrator of a hoax.<br />
<br />
Viewed from the patio of the Bellingham ferry terminal, the M/V <em>Malaspina</em>
is a splendid sight, its white decks gleaming, a yellow stripe running
the length of its navy-blue hull, its single smokestack painted in the
motif of the Alaskan state flag—gold stars of the Big Dipper and the
North Star against a navy-blue sky. All the motor vessels in the Alaska
Marine Highway system are named for Alaskan glaciers, and the <em>Malaspina</em>
is named for the largest, a 1,500-square-mile slow-moving mesa of ice,
which is in turn named for an eighteenth-century Spanish navigator,
Alejandro Malaspina, whose search for the Northwest Passage ended in
1791 at the 60th parallel, in an icy inlet that he christened <em>Bahía del Desengaño,</em> Disappointment Bay. When I wheel my suitcase down the gangway that evening, the splendor of the M/V <em>Malaspina</em>
diminishes with every step. The ferry is, I see upon boarding it, an
aging, rust-stained hulk, repainted many times. Posted in a display case
of documents near the cocktail lounge one can read a disconcerting open
letter in which “past and present crew members . . . bid farewell to
this proud ship.” Queen of the fleet when it was first launched in 1962,
the <em>Malaspina,</em> the letter explains, “will cease scheduled runs
of Alaska’s Inside Passage on October 27, 1997.” Why the old ferry is
still in service eight years later the documents in the display case do
not say.<br />
<br />
The <em>Malaspina</em>’s diesel engines rumble to life. I am going to
sea! Who can resist an embarkation? The thrill of watery beginnings?
Not me. The evening is cool and exhilarating, the sky clear save for a
distant, flat-bottomed macaroon of a cloud. The wavelets on Bellingham
Bay are as intricate as houndstooth, complicated by cross breezes and by
ripples radiating from the hulls of anchored boats. The dock falls
away. I stand at the taffrail and think to myself, <em>taffrail,</em>
enjoying the union of a thing and its word. Out on the sundeck, at the
mouth of the Plexiglas solarium where I will spend the next three nights
sleeping for free in a plastic chaise longue, backpackers are pitching
their tents, duct-taping them down so that the wind doesn’t toss them
overboard. Soon a rustling nylon village of colorful domes has sprung
up. “Tent city,” the veteran ferry-riders call it. On the forested hills
of Bellingham, the houses face the harbor. How festive the ferry must
look from up there! As the ship turns and slithers toward the horizon,
the low sun moves across the windows of the town, igniting them one by
one.<br />
<br />
During the middle of the first night, off the eastern shore of
Vancouver Island, the temperature drops, a fog shuts down, and my cell
phone loses reception. So much for daily phone calls to my pregnant
wife. A plastic deck chair, it turns out, makes for a miserable
mattress. Cold air seeps between the slats. The government-issue cotton
blanket I rented from the ship’s purser for a dollar is far too thin.
Some of my neighbors in the solarium move inside to sleep like refugees
on the carpeted floor of the recliner lounge. I rent a second blanket
for the second night, but it hardly makes a difference. Shivering in a
fetal position, I think about that mountain climber dangling from the
Antarctic ice shelf in a hammock and feel faintly ridiculous. After two
nights in the solarium of a cruise ship—a state-operated, poor man’s
cruise ship, but a cruise ship nonetheless—I have already had my fill of
adventuring.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">W</span>hat is childhood? Developmental
psychologists will tell you that infancy and toddlerhood and childhood
and adolescence are neurologically determined states of mind.
Sociologists and historians, meanwhile, tell us that childhood is an
idea, distinct from biological immaturity, the meaning of which changes
over time. In his seminal, 1960 study of the subject, French historian
Philippe Ariès argued that childhood as we know it is a modern
invention, largely a by-product of schooling. In the Middle Ages, when
almost no one went to school, children were treated like miniature
adults. At work and at play, there was little age-based segregation.
“Everything was permitted in their presence,” according to one of
Ariès’s sources, even “coarse language, scabrous actions and situations;
they had heard everything and seen everything.” Power, not age,
determined whether a person was treated like a child. Until the
seventeenth century, the European idea of childhood “was bound up with
the idea of dependence: the words ‘sons,’ ‘varlets,’ and ‘boys’ were
also words in the vocabulary of feudal subordination. One could leave
childhood only by leaving the state of dependence.” Our notion of
childhood as a sheltered period of innocence begins to emerge with the
modern education system, Ariès argues. As the period of economic
dependence lengthened among the educated classes, so too did childhood.
These days education and the puerility it entails often last well into
one’s twenties, or longer.<br />
<br />
Twenty-two years after Ariès published his book, media critic Neil Postman announced in <em>The Disappearance of Childhood</em>
that modern childhood as Ariès described it had gone extinct, killed
off by the mass media, which gave all children, educated or otherwise,
premature access to the violent, sexually illicit world of adults.
Children still existed, of course, but they’d become, in Postman’s word,
“adultified.” I was ten years old when Postman published his book, and
in many respects my biography aligns with his unflattering generational
portrait. In Postman’s opinion the rising divorce rate indicated a
“precipitous falling off in the commitment of adults to the nurturing of
children.” My parents divorced just as the American divorce rate
reached its historical peak. After my mother moved out for good, my
brother and I came home from school to an empty house where we spent
hours watching the sorts of television shows Postman complains about (<em>Three’s Company, The Dukes of Hazzard</em>). Reading Postman’s diagnosis, I begin to wonder if he’s right. Maybe my childhood went missing.<br />
<br />
But then I think of Joshua the Mouse. One day at the school where I
teach I stopped to admire a bulletin board decorated with
construction-paper mice that a class of first graders had made. Above
one mouse there appeared the following caption: “My mouse’s name is
Joshua. He is 20 years old. He is afraid of everything.” I love this
caption. I love how those first two humdrum sentences do nothing to
prepare us for the emotional revelation of the third. And then there’s
the age: twenty years old. What occult significance could that number
possess for Joshua’s creator? When you are six, even eight-year-olds
look colossal. A twenty-year-old must be as unfathomable as a god. And
contemplating poor, omniphobic, twenty-year-old Joshua, I am convinced
that children may impersonate adults but they will never become them. I
doubt that childhood has ever been the safe, sunlit harbor adults in
moments of forgetfulness dream about. I suspect that it will always be a
wilderness.<br />
<br />
“For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land,” Ishmael
philosophizes midway through his whale hunt, “so in the soul of man
there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by
all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off
from that isle, thou canst never return!” We canst never return, but oh,
how we try, how we try.<br />
<br />
Postman does not only argue that television produced “adultified
children”; paradoxically, it also produced “childified adults.” As
evidence, he points to the absence on television of characters who
possess an “adult’s appetite for serious music” or “book-learning” or
“even the faintest signs of a contemplative habit of mind.” One wonders
what he would have made of the popular culture of centuries past—the
pornographic peep-show boxes, the slapstick vaudeville acts, the violent
and salacious Punch and Judy shows, the bearbaitings and cockfights,
the dime novels and penny weeklies. The great difference to me seems one
not of quality but of quantity: entertainment has become so cheap and
ubiquitous that it is inescapable. Even the material world has become a
“Sargasso of the imagination.” Life is still half known.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">T</span>he Alaskan stretch of the Inside
Passage snakes through the Alexander Archipelago, a chain of 1,000 or so
thickly forested islands, some as small as tablecloths, some as large
as Hawaii. These are, in fact, the tops of underwater mountains, part of
the same snowcapped range visible on the mainland to the east. Most
rise steeply from the water and soar to cloudy heights. Before going
there, I expected southeast Alaska to feel like a giant outdoor theme
park—Frontierland—and the shopping districts of the resort towns where
the gargantuan cruise ships dock confirm my worst expectations.
Cruise-ship companies now own many of the businesses in those districts
and may soon be able to “imagineer” (as the folks at Disney call it)
every aspect of your vacation experience. But the backwaters of the
Inside Passage, too narrow and shallow for the superliners to enter,
contain lost worlds.<br />
<br />
In the narrowest of the narrows, it feels as though we are motoring
down an inland river rather than along the ocean’s edge—some Amazon of
the north. Although this is the Pacific, the water doesn’t look, smell,
or sound like the sea. Neither waves nor flotsam get past the outer
islands to the placid interior. In the summer, streams of glacial melt
freshen the channels, and in places the minerals those streams carry
turn the channels a strangely luminous shade of jade. The banks
sometimes loom so close you could play Frisbee with a person standing on
shore. Hours go by when we see no other ships, or any sign of
civilization besides the buoys that mark the way among the shoals.<br />
<br />
Early in the morning, fog rises here and there from the forests of
hemlock, cedar, and spruce. It is as if certain stands are burning,
except that the fog moves much more slowly than smoke. On the far side
of one mountain, a dense white column billows forth like a slow-motion
geyser that levels off into an airborne river flowing into a sea of
clouds. I’ve begun to notice currents everywhere, a universe of eddies
and gyres. Phytoplankton ride the same ocean currents that carried the
Float ees to Sitka. Zooplankton follow the phytoplankton. Fish follow
the zooplankton. Sea lions, whales, and people follow the fish. When, at
the end of their upriver journey, salmon spawn and die en masse, their
carcasses—distributed by bears, eagles, and other scavengersthe forests
that make the fog, which falls as rain, which changes the ocean’s
salinity. All deep water travels along what oceanographers call the
“conveyor belt,” which begins with warm water from the Gulf Stream
draining into the North Atlantic, where evaporation increases the
salinity and makes it sink to the ocean floor, where it creeps south
into the Antarctic circumpolar stream. After a thousand years—a
millennium!—the conveyor belt ends here, in the North Pacific, where the
ancient water wells up, carrying nutrients with it. Oceanographers
learned much of this from studying radioactive isotopes released into
the sea as fallout from nuclear tests. I’m becoming a devout
driftologist. The only essential difference between rock, water, air,
life, galaxies, economies, civilizations, plastics—I decide, standing on
the <em>Malaspina</em>’s deck, totally sober, watching the fog make pretty shapes above the trees—is the rate of flow.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">E</span>verywhere they look, archaeologists
find them—buffalo sprayed with pigments onto the walls of caves, killer
whales cut from cedar or stone, horses molded from terra-cotta or
plaited out of straw. Our primal fear of predators and our hunger for
prey cannot alone account for this menagerie. Three thousand years ago
in Persia, someone carved a porcupine out of limestone and attached it
to a little chassis on wheels. Four thousand years ago in Egypt, someone
sculpted a mouse and glazed it blue. Why blue? Whoever heard of a blue
mouse? Is this the forebear of the red beaver and the yellow duck? In
fact, many of the figurines that look to us like toys turn out to have
been totemic gods or demigods, used in religious ceremonies or funerary
rites. To make the archaeological record all the blurrier, some totems
in some cultures were given to children as playthings once the
festivities had ended. One thing is clear: animals held an exalted
position in the lives of both children and adults. Even after the
missionaries came and cleansed them from the temples, the animistic gods
survived, adapting to the altered cultural landscape. In Europe of the
Middle Ages, one of the most popular books after the Bible was the <em>Bestiary,</em>
a kind of illustrated field guide to the medieval imagination, wherein
the animals of fable and myth were reborn as vehicles of Christian
allegory. From the <em>Bestiary</em> came the idea that after three days a pelican could resurrect a dead hatchling with her blood, and from the <em>Bestiary</em>
we learned that only a virgin girl can tame a unicorn. Even Aesop, that
pagan, remained a favorite with old and young alike well into the
seventeenth century.<br />
<br />
Gradually, as allegory gave way to zoology and farming to industry,
we decided that animals were for kids. “Children in the industrialised
world are surrounded by animal imagery,” notes John Berger in “Why Look
at Animals?” Despite the antiquity of zoomorphic toys and the
“apparently spontaneous interest that children have in animals,” it was
not until the nineteenth century that “reproductions of animals became a
regular part of the decor of middle class childhoods—and then, in [the
twentieth] century, with the advent of vast display and selling systems
like Disney’s—of all childhoods.” Berger traces this phenomenon to the
marginalization of animals, which the age of industrialism either
incarcerated as living spectacles at the public zoo, treated as raw
material to be exploited, processed as commodities on factory farms, or
domesticated as family pets. Meanwhile, “animals of the mind”—which
since the dawn of human consciousness had been central to our
cosmologies—were sent without supper to the nursery. Animals both living
and imaginary no longer seemed like mysterious gods. They seemed,
increasingly, like toys.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">G</span>o bird-watching in the pre-industrial
libraries of literature and myth, and you will find few ducks, which is
puzzling, considering how popular with the authors of children’s books
ducks have since become. Search, for instance, the fields and forests of
Aesop, whose talking beasts are the ancestors of both Chanticleer the
Rooster and Walter the Farting Dog, and you will meet ten cocks, a cote
of doves, several partridges, a caged songbird, six crows, three ravens
(one portentous, another self-loathing), a dozen or so eagles, five
jackdaws (one of whom wishes he were an eagle), many kites, flocks of
cranes, two storks, three hawks, a cote of pigeons, three hens, a
sparrow with a bad case of schadenfreude, five swallows, many peacocks, a
jay who wishes he were a peacock, many swans, two nightingales, two
larks, two owls, a gluttonous seagull, a thrush en snared in birdlime,
and nary a single duck.<br />
<br />
Aesop’s fables exhibit considerable ornithological knowledge, but
their primary aim is to transmute animal behavior into human meaning—to
burden them, as Thoreau would say, with some portion of our thought.
“The lot of each has been assigned by the will of the Fates,” the god
Juno explains to an insecure peacock in one fable, “—to thee, beauty; to
the eagle, strength; to the nightingale, song; to the raven, favorable,
and to the crow, unfavorable auguries.” The closest to ducks that Aesop
gets is geese, which invariably end up on dinner plates.<br />
<br />
Even Aesop’s most famous goose, the one who lays the golden egg,
succumbs to the carving knife. In a Kashmiri version of the same tale,
Aesop’s barnyard variety Anatidae becomes the Lucky-Bird Humá, a visitor
from the magical avian kingdom of Koh-i-Qáf. A Buddhist version of the
tale replaces the egg-laying goose with one of the only mythical ducks I
have found, a mallard plumed in gold, which turns out to be a
reincarnation of the Bodhisattva.<br />
<br />
In all three versions of the fable, the human beneficiaries sacrifice
their magically profitable waterfowl on the altar of their greed. The
farmer kills the goose, cuts it open, and finds no eggs. Dreaming of
rupees, a Kashmiri woodcutter accidentally asphyxiates the Lucky-Bird
Humá while carrying him to market in a sack. A family of Brahmin women
decide to pluck out all of the Bodhisattva’s golden feathers at once;
they turn into the feathers of a crane. Unlike the others, the Buddhist
version tells the fable from the bird’s point of view, and for that
reason it is peculiarly affecting. Both Aesop’s fable and the Kashmiri
one show us the folly of human desire, and it is satisfying, reading
them, to watch our wicked, bumbling protagonists endure dramatically
ironic reversals of fortune. The Buddhist fable shows us the folly of
human desire, but it also makes us experience that folly’s cost, the
debt of suffering our appetites can incur. The tone of the final
sentences is more sorrowful than ironic. Trying to escape, the once
golden mallard stretches his plucked wings but, featherless, finds he
cannot fly. His captors throw him into a barrel. With time, his feathers
grow back, but they are plain white ones now. He flies home, never to
return.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">O</span>n the morning that I disembark from the <em>Malaspina</em>
at Sitka, Tyler and Dean Orbison are just returning from a two-week,
300-mile beachcombing expedition to Latuya Bay and back. They go on such
expeditions every summer, traveling farther and farther afield every
year, poking around in bunkers abandoned at the end of World War II,
walking beaches where the only footprints in the sand are animal tracks.
They have a cabin cruiser big enough to sleep in and a skiff for going
ashore. From the cruiser, they look for V-shaped coastlines that funnel
the tides, and they look for “jackstraw”—driftwood logs jumbled like a
pile of pick-up-sticks—and, most important of all, like prospectors
panning in the tailings, they look for “good color,” their term for
plastic debris visible from afar. Where there’s some color, there’s sure
to be more. Their style of beachcombing is by necessity a two-man job.
One person has to stay in the skiff to keep it from foundering on the
rocks while the other person wades in and combs. They take turns. Dean
prefers to hunt high up, in the purple fireweed, where storms will throw
objects out of the reach of tides. Tyler, Dean’s son, is “a digger.”
Like a human metal detector, he’s learned to divine the location of
buried objects by reading the terrain. This year, for the first time,
Tyler and Dean started combing in seaside caves where tangled driftwood
will form a kind of flotsam trap. It’s dark in the caves. You have to
beachcomb with a flashlight. It’s also cold, but the labor of
log-lifting keeps you warm. The effort’s worth it. Every cave the
Orbisons searched contained a farrago of wrack—a Dawn dish detergent
bottle, glass fishing floats, Floatees. Half a water pistol turned up in
one cave, the other half in another. By far the most common objects the
Orbisons find are polyethylene water bottles. They have begun keeping
the screw-tops, cataloguing the varieties. On this last trip they
identified seventy-five different brands, many of them foreign in
origin. Up in Latuya Bay they saw a black wolf and the bones of a whale,
and they picked wild strawberries, and when their cooler ran out of ice
they floated alongside a glacier and broke off a chunk.<br />
<br />
Now, at the end of my first day ashore, they’ve fetched me from my
hotel. “Growing up here, I mean, there’s nothing,” Tyler tells me from
the back seat of his father’s truck while we’re waiting for his parents
to emerge from Sitka’s only supermarket. “I mean we don’t even have a
mall. So I took to the outdoors pretty hard.” It is clear that Tyler has
never given much thought to the marginalization of animals. You
wouldn’t either if you’d grown up in southeast Alaska, where bears make
off with household pets, and ravens alighting on transformers cause
power outages, and bald eagles sometimes come crashing through dining
room windows. If anything, it’s the people who occupy the margins here.
Just look at a map: Sitka perches on the coastal brink of Baranof
Island, wedged between mountainous wilderness to the east and watery
wilderness to the west. Sitkans share their island with an estimated
1,200 grizzly bears—more than are found in all of the lower forty-eight
states combined. In May and June, eagles and ravens—the supreme deities
in the pantheon of the native Tlingit—wheel overhead. In July and
August, the creeks grow dark with spawning sockeye and chum. In
November, the whales and the whale watchers arrive. People like me may
feel sorry for the 1.2 million sea otters that the Russian American
Company parted from their pelts in the early 1800s, but Sitka’s otters
have replenished themselves with such procreative gusto that local
fishermen now regard them as pests—crop-thieving, net-wrecking vermin of
the sea.<br />
<br />
Like most beachcombers of the Pacific rim, the Orbisons started out
collecting Japanese fishing floats, the glass balls that you sometimes
see hanging in nets from the ceilings of seafood restaurants, or
decorating the window displays of maritime boutiques. The popularity of
glass floats owes partly to their delicate, soap-bubble beauty, partly
to the Kuroshio Current that sweeps them across the Pacific and bowls
them up the beaches of the American West Coast, and partly to Amos L.
Wood, an aeronautics engineer and beachcombing enthusiast whose books <em>Beachcombing for Japanese Floats</em> and <em>Beachcombing the Pacific</em> have become to beachcombers what Audubon guides are to bird-watchers.<br />
<br />
A century and a half ago, beachcombers tended to be transcendental
weirdos like Ellery Channing and Henry Thoreau. Back then, much of New
England’s shoreline was as wild as Alaska’s is today and more
treacherous to passing ships. Just before Thoreau arrived at
Provincetown in 1849, a ship carrying Irish immigrants sank off
Cohasset. The bodies of the drowned lay strewn along the beach, torn
asunder by the surf and fish. “There are more consequences to a
shipwreck than the underwriters notice,” Thoreau observed. “The Gulf
Stream may return some to their native shores, or drop them in some
out-of-the-way cave of Ocean, where time and the elements will write new
riddles with their bones.” Even where no shipwrecks had occurred, a
Cape Cod beach in 1849 was “a wild rank place” littered “with crabs,
horse-shoes and razor clams, and whatever the sea casts up—a vast <em>morgue,</em> where famished dogs may range in packs, and crows come daily to glean the pittance which the tide leaves them.”<br />
<br />
Still a recent coinage, the word “beachcomber” in 1849 meant
approximately what we mean by “beach bum”: it evoked a character like
the narrator of Melville’s <em>Omoo,</em> a transient ne’er-do-well
who’d fled from civilization hoping to sample tropical women and
tropical fruits and loaf around beneath the blowsy palms. “Idle,
drunken, vagabond,” Edward J. Wakefield wrote in 1845, “he wanders about
without any fixed object, cannot get employed by the whaler or any one
else, as it is out of his power to do a day’s work; and he is
universally known as ‘the beach-comber.’” The local Cape Codders whom
Thoreau met on his seaside rambles usually took him for a traveling
salesman. What other explanation could there be for a vagabond with a
walking stick and a knapsack full of books?<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">T</span>he Orbisons gave up collecting for
driftology in the summer of 1993, when they began discovering bath toys.
Tyler was just twelve at the time, but he was the one to find their
first toy, a beaver, and he remembers the moment vividly. “We were on
Kruzof Island, looking for glass balls,” he says. “We didn’t really know
what else to look for. It was beautiful weather; the reason we went to
Kruzof is because it’s really hard to get ashore, and that’s where we go
when the weather’s good. We were up beyond the high-tide line. It was
in the drift a ways. It had been there for a little bit. And I thought,
This is cool. It was bleached out, exactly like the beavers we find now.
I would say it had been there since the winter storms.”<br />
<br />
They assumed that their beaver was a solitary castaway, but when they
arrived back in town, talk of the mysterious invasion was in the air.
Dean and Tyler went looking for more plastic animals, and found them.
They started keeping meticulous records, treating the Floatees as data,
which they eventually reported to Ebbesmeyer. About three years later,
the oceanographer began publishing <em>Beachcomber’s Alert!</em>, and
the Orbisons were among his first subscribers. They own every issue.
“Curt tells us what to look for, and we go out there and find it,” Dean
explains. This year, at Ebbesmeyer’s bidding, they searched for and
found a computer monitor, Japanese surveying stakes, hockey gloves,
“antisandals” (a sheet of rubber from which flip-flop–shaped blanks have
been stamped), part of a naval sonar buoy, and six new Floatees,
including a turtle they’d chiseled from the ice. After cataloguing the
junk on their and showing it to Ebbesmeyer, they’ll take most of it to
the dump.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">B</span>ack in the 1970s, when I was a child,
rubber ducks were wilder than they are now. There was nothing iconic or
nostalgic about them. Some rubber ducks of the Nixon era were white,
some were calico. Some had swan-like necks and rosy circles on their
cheeks. Some came with rococo feathers molded into their wings and
tails. No one used them to sell baby clothes or soap. Normal adults did
not give them to one another, or decorate their desks with them. As far
as I can remember, no one I knew even owned a rubber duck. I did own
one, however, on account of the pet name my mother had given me: Donovan
Duck. My duck was a somewhat hideous specimen, with white plumage, a
green topcoat, a big head, and the posture of a penguin. It resembled a
Hummel figurine that had sprouted a beak.<br />
<br />
Not long ago, my mother sent me a photograph in which, naked, eight
months old, sitting in the bath across from my brother, I appear to be
attempting to gnaw through my rubber duck’s skull. The picture is dated
January 1973. Most exotic varieties of rubber duck have since gone
extinct—they are the dodos and carrier pigeons of the nursery—and what
new ones have evolved share a single, yellow ancestor whose pop-cultural
apotheosis was by January 1973 already under way. It had begun three
years earlier, in 1970, when an orange puppet named Ernie appeared on
PBS and said, “Here I am in my tubby again. And my tubby’s all filled
with water and nice, fluffy suds. And I’ve got my soap and washcloth to
wash myself. And I’ve got my nifty scrub brush to help me scrub my back.
And I’ve got a big fluffy towel to dry myself when I’m done. But
there’s one other thing that makes tubby time the very best time of the
whole day. And do you know what that is? It’s a very special friend of
mine. My very favorite little pal”—at which point Ernie reaches into the
suds and, brandishing his yellow duck, bursts into song.<br />
<br />
You can watch a video clip of the number online. A pink towel hangs
from a wooden post at the left edge of the frame. The post looks like
something out of an old Western. There is no other scenery to speak of.
Behind the bathtub—which is huge, presumably claw-footed, and decorated
with three pink daisies—hangs a sky-blue backdrop. Bubbles of the sort
you blow with a wand come floating up from the bottom of the screen, and
the gurgle of water accompanies the music. Although I watched my share
of <em>Sesame Street</em> as a child, I far preferred Super Grover’s
mock-heroic pratfalls to Ernie’s snickering bonhomie, and I have no
memory of the rubber duckie number. My wife, on the other hand, still
knows the song by heart.<br />
“Rubber Duckie, joy of joys,” Ernie sings. “When I squeeze you, you
make noise,/Rubber Duckie, you’re my very best friend, it’s true.” It’s
all so synthetic, so lonely, so imaginary, so clean. And apparently
children loved it. In the 1969 pilot episode of <em>Sesame Street,</em>
in which a version of the rubber duckie song appeared, children in the
test audience responded so enthusiastically to Ernie and Bert and so
tepidly to segments featuring the live actors that the show’s creators
redesigned it, giving the puppets a starring role.<br />
<br />
However novel the medium, however inventive Jim Henson’s puppetry,
Ernie’s bathtub serenade draws upon a history of representation that can
be traced back to the eighteenth century, when British portraitists
stopped painting children as diminutive adults and turned them into
puppy-eyed personifications of Innocence. In the Romantic era, no longer
was innocence merely the antithesis of guilt; it was also<br /> the
antithesis of adulthood and modernity. Children became little noble
savages and childhood became a place as well as an age—a lost,
imaginary, pastoral realm.<br />
<br />
It is striking how much the modern history of childhood resembles
that of animals. “In the first stages of the industrial revolution,”
John Berger writes, “animals were used as machines. As also were
children.” In the latter stages of industrialism, poor children who
escaped the factory often took to the street, where they formed what
social historians call “child societies,” gangs of urchins who—like
feral cats—invented a social order all their own. Partly in fear of
child societies, middle-class parents of the Gilded Era began treating
their children increasingly like pets. Nurseries and playrooms became
more common, and toy chests began to overflow.<br />
<pre>
</pre>
In 1869, a printer from Albany, New York, named John Wesley Hyatt
mixed ground camphor with nitrocellulose, thereby inventing celluloid.
In 1873, the first Pekin ducks were imported to the United States from
China. And in the 1880s, bathtubs began appearing in middle-class homes
along with indoor plumbing. Celluloid eventually evolved into the
plastics industry. The Pekin duck eventually became the preferred
species of American duck breeders, making yellow ducklings a familiar
symbol of birth and spring. And the average American bathroom, which had
once consisted of a washtub and an outhouse, was consecrated as a
temple of cleanliness. Much as the modern nursery sheltered children
from the social contamination of the street, so the modern bathroom
protected their naked, slippery bodies from germs. In the first decades
of the twentieth century, public-health campaigns and soap
advertisements—usually illustrated with pudgy little tots—exhorted
parents to bathe their children often. Little boys, the thinking went,
were naturally indisposed to bathing. Bath toys not only made hygiene
boyishly fun; they helped overcome the naughty urges that bathing tended
to arouse: “The baby will not spend much time handling his genitals if
he has other interesting things to do,” one government-issue child-care
manual advised in 1942. “See that he has a toy to play with and he will
not need to use his body as a plaything.” Enter the rubber duck.<br />
<br />
Ducklings are the aquatic equivalent of kittens and bunnies. In fact,
it’s hard to think of a smaller, cuddlier animal that can swim. Most of
the frogs and turtles of children’s literature are middle-aged men,
whereas even in nature ducklings are model offspring: obedient,
dependent, vulnerable to predation, clumsy, soft, a little dumb. Just
think of them waddling in a train behind a mother duck, a familiar image
memorialized by Robert McCloskey’s best-selling children’s book <em>Make Way for Ducklings.</em>
McCloskey’s baby mallards, penciled in black and white, look like real
baby mallards—a little stylized, but real. Like the ducks depicted in
other venerable children’s books, they bear little resemblance to
Ernie’s Day-Glo squeak toy. Beatrix Potter’s Jemimah is a white Pekin
duck in a bonnet and shawl. Donald Duck, the most famous water fowl at
mid-century, was also a white Pekin, and the most common toy duck was
still the ancient bird-on-a-leash, a wooden pull-toy with wheels instead
of feet. Before the rubber duck could eclipse it, plastic had to
replace wood as the preferred material for toys, which, following the
technical innovations spurred by World War II, it did.<br />
<br />
McCloskey published his book in 1941. That same year, at the
beginning of the war, two British chemists, V. E. Yarsley and E. G.
Couzens, prophesied with surprising accuracy and quaintly utopian
innocence what middle-class childhood in the 1970s would be like. “Let
us try to imagine a dweller in the ‘Plastic Age,’” they wrote in the
British magazine <em>Science Digest.<sup> </sup></em>This creature of our imagination, this ‘Plastic Man,’ will come into a
world of colour and bright shining surfaces, where childish hands find
nothing to break, no sharp edges or corners to cut or graze, no crevices
to harbour dirt or germs, because, being a child his parents will see
to it that he is surrounded on every side by this tough, safe, clean
material which human thought has created. The walls of his nursery, all
the articles of his bath and certain other necessities of his small
life, all his toys, his cot, the moulded perambulator in which he takes
the air, the teething ring he bites, the unbreakable bottle he feeds
from . . . all will be plastic, brightly self-coloured and patterned
with every design likely to please his childish mind.<br />
<br />
Here, then, is one of the meanings of the duck. It represents this
vision of childhood—the hygienic childhood, the safe childhood, the
brightly colored childhood, in which everything, even bathtub articles,
have been designed to please the childish mind, much as the golden fruit
in that most famous origin myth of paradise “was pleasant to the eyes”
of childish Eve. Yarsley and Couzens go on to imagine the rest of
Plastic Man’s life, and it is remarkable how little his adulthood
differs from his childhood. When he grows up, Plastic Man will live in a
house furnished with “beautiful, transparent, glass-like materials in
every imaginable form,” he will play with plastic toys (tennis rackets
and fishing tackle), he will, “like a magician,” be able to make “what
he wants.” And yet there is one imperfection, one run in this nylon
dream. Plastic might make the pleasures of childhood last forever, but
it could not make Plastic Man immortal. When he dies, he will sink “into
his grave hygienically enclosed in a plastic coffin.” The image must
have been unsettling, even in 1941; that hygienically enclosed death too
reminiscent of the hygienically enclosed life that preceded it. To
banish the image of that plastic coffin from their readers’ thoughts,
the utopian chemists inject a little more technicolor resin<br /> into
their closing sentences. When “the dust and smoke” of war had cleared,
plastic would deliver us “from moth and rust” into a world “full of
colour . . . a new, brighter, cleaner, more beautiful world.”<br />
<br />
For new parents who had themselves grown up during the Depression and
the war, the fantasy of childhood as consumer paradise exerted a
powerful appeal. Browsing through issues of <em>Parents Magazine</em>
from 1950, I came upon an ad campaign for Heinz baby food (“Scientific
Cooking Gives Finer Flavor, Color and Texture to Heinz Strained
Carrots”). In one Heinz ad, targeted at new mothers, cartoon
butterflies, fairies, and dolls encircle the photograph of a baby girl.
“Wee elfin creatures go riding on butterfly wings,” the copy reads,
“dolls speak in a language all their own and something altogether new
and wonderful happens everywhere a baby looks . . . your child lives in a
magic world where everything’s enchanted.” Then came television,
enchantment in a box. Annual toy sales in America shot from $84 million
in 1940 to $1.25 billion in 1960. Peg-and-socket pop beads sold to girls
as costume jewelry consumed 40,000 pounds of polyethylene resin per
month in 1956. In 1958, “twirling hoops” consumed 15 million pounds of
the stuff. Polystyrene replaced balsa wood as the material of choice for
model cars and planes. Plasticized polyvinyl chloride, the material
from which the brand-new Barbie doll was made, provided a cheaper, more
durable alternative to latex rubber, rendering traditional molded rubber
animals and dolls obsolete except in name.<br />
<br />
Not long after PBS first broadcast it, Ernie’s rubber duckie song went to number 16 on the <em>Billboard</em> charts. Radio stations were playing it, adults were buying it. And, unlike the other <em>Sesame Street</em>
characters, Ernie’s rubber duck could not be licensed. Producers had
picked up the prop at a local dimestore, which meant that even as it
became a recurring character and a pop music phenomenon, it remained in
the public domain, free for the taking, no fees required. Does that mean
that if Ernie had gone bathing with a white duck or a green one, our
iconic ducks would be white or green? I’m not sure. The threads of
chance and meaning are hard to disentangle. On the album cover of the
single of the song, Ernie, for some reason, is holding a different duck,
a white one with burnt-orange spots. Perhaps there is more to the
message in this particular bottle than the medium. Perhaps Ernie alone
does not explain the yellowness of the duck.<br />
<br />
“Ideals of innocent beauty and the adorable have changed little in a
hundred years or more,” the historian Gary Cross writes. “Many today
share with the Victorian middle class an attraction to the blond,
blue-eyed, clear-skinned, and well-fed child and are appalled by,
uninterested in, and even hostile to the dark, dirty, and emaciated
child. Even when humanitarian groups try to shame us into giving money
to support poor peoples far away, they usually show us an image of a
smiling olive-skinned (not black) girl, a close copy of our ideal of
innocence.” So maybe it’s just as Curtis Ebbesmeyer suspected. Maybe
there is a racial bias at play. Is it too much of a stretch to see in
the yellowness of the rubber duck a visual reminder of that well-fed,
blue-eyed, clear-skinned, yellow-haired Victorian ideal? After all, real
ducklings have black, beady eyes, not blue ones like the ducks in Eric
Carle’s book. The lyrics to Ernie’s serenade show just how childlike his
rubber duckie is. “Every day when I,/Make my way to the tubby,” the
song’s chorus goes, “I find a little fellow who’s/Cute and yellow and
chubby!” Chubby vs. well-fed, blond vs. yellow, what’s the difference?<br />
Tuesdays during the seventh month of her pregnancy, my wife and I
attended a prepared childbirth class on the maternity ward of our
hospital. On one wall of the classroom hung a poster of an egg,
mid-hatch.<br />
<br />
Contemplating it during the long, tedious hours of
instruction, I began to wonder why this particular poster had been hung
before our eyes. Was it meant to comfort us? Did we prefer the clean,
white orb of an egg to the bloody, mammalian mess of one body gushing
forth from the wounded nethers of another? On the opposite wall of the
classroom hung an enlarged, sepia photograph of naked, racially diverse
babies; aligned firing-squad style along a fence over which they
appeared to be attempting an escape, they displayed their wrinkly bums
for our delight. Children are fundamentally the same, such images
suggest, as indistinguishable as ducklings despite the color of their
skin. They inhabit a world before sex, before race, before history,
before self, before humanity. Children, then, are beasts of burden,
too—ducklings and bunnies of burden—asked to carry the needful daydreams
of adults. The apotheosis of the rubber duck wouldn’t be truly complete
until the children who had watched that 1970 episode of <em>Sesame Street</em> grew old enough to look back forgetfully with longing and loss.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">W</span>e are going beachcombing. We are going
beachcombing on Kruzof Island, along a pumice beach at the mouth of
Fred’s Creek, which originates high on the perennially snow-capped
slopes of Mt. Edgecumbe and empties into Sitka Sound. Curtis Ebbesmeyer
is here, aboard the <em>Morning Mist,</em> wearing his sea-bean necklace
and a baseball cap decorated with stickers from Seattle coffee houses.
Dean Orbison is here, in his customary plaid woodsman’s shirt and a pair
of Sitka sneakers—the local name for knee-high rubber boots. Tyler
Orbison is not here; sadly, he had to work. Piloting the <em>Morning Mist</em>—a
white, twin-engine troller with outrigging as tall as flagpoles and
orange floats the size of beach balls dangling like ornaments from its
rails—is Larry Calvin, a spry, white-haired fisherman in suspenders.<br />
<br />
A self-employed, left-wing entrepreneur who subsidizes his fishing
with profits earned in the building-supply business, Calvin embodies an
old brand of American individualism that seems to flourish in the
strange demographic conundrum that is maritime Alaska, a place both
rural and coastal, both red and blue, Western and Tlingit, industrial
and aquacultural and wild. On Calvin’s black ball cap a fish leaps above
the words<br /> absolute fresh.<br />
<br />
With us aboard the <em>Morning Mist</em> are a dozen or so
scholars—oceanographers, archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists,
historians—who have come to Sitka for the annual Paths Across the
Pacific Conference, an academic symposium scheduled to coincide with the
Beachcombers’ Fair. The organizing theory of the conference is this:
People started crossing the Pacific Ocean by boat tens of thousands of
years ago, far earlier than was previously thought. Some Asian
immigrants sailed to America by mistake when blown astray. Some came on
purpose, paddling along the coast of the Beringian ice shelf, traveling a
little farther east with every generation. Comparatively little is
known about these ancient migrations, and on the way to Kruzof Island,
an oceanographer named Thomas Royer tells me one reason why. Sea levels
have risen so much since the last ice age that the earliest settlements
in Alaska are now 100 meters underwater.<br />
Another passenger, an archaeologist, interrupts to contest Royer’s
figures. Sedimentation adds about a centimeter a year to the ocean
floor, this archaeologist says, which means you’d have to dig deeper
than 100 meters. You’d have to dig about 400 meters to find any
artifacts.<br />
<br />
Most of the chitchat aboard the <em>Morning Mist</em> is similarly
quibbling, interdisciplinary, and esoteric. When did people first begin
using boats—40,000 years ago? 50,000 years ago? What does it take to
start a migration—a critical mass, or a few individuals with the itch to
explore? Why did people migrate in the first place—the profit motive?
hunger? exile? Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham’s computer simulations may help
these marine archaeologists reconstruct the routes of those transoceanic
migrations, the history of which is inseparable from the history of
global climate change. In other words, it is humanity’s own past and
future that the oceanographers are scrying in the tangled drift routes
of the toys.<br />
<br />
Looking out from the cabin of the <em>Morning Mist,</em> Royer
teaches me how to read the surface of the sea. “You see that smooth area
there?” he asks. “Either temperature or the salinity will change the
surface tension of the water, so the same wind will ruffle the water in
one spot but not in another.” All variations in the surface are the
effects of hidden causes. What to me looks simply like an expanse of
water is in fact a kind of shifting, aquatic topography, like an
enormous lava lamp, only far more complex and subtle. Instead of one
liquid suspended in another, there are slopes of dense, salty water and
rivers of light, brackish water, and all of it, over the course of
centuries, will eventually intermingle. As in all complex systems,
minute changes to the ocean—in salinity, in temperature, in air
pressure—can entail grand and unpredictable climate events. Because of
melting glaciers, for instance, the salinity in the 18-mile-wide coastal
current that flows north along the Alaskan seaboard is presently
decreasing, making the water fresher and lighter. Counterintuitively,
however, sea levels in Alaska are falling—or so it seems—because the
land, relieved of the weight of ice, is lifting, the way an air mattress
resumes its shape after you stand up.<br />
<br />
In the half hour or so it takes us to get to Kruzof, centuries seem
to recede. Sitka disappears into a blur of blue horizon. The world out
here would not have looked much different a millennium ago, I think to
myself. It resembles the opening verses of Genesis. There is only the
land, the water, the trees. And then, at the edge of my peripheral
vision, an orange figure swoops and dives. It’s a kite. A kite shaped
like a bird, and there on the beach below it are three figures, a father
and his children, dressed in colorful swimsuits. They have rented one
of the four rustic cabins that the National Forest Service maintains on
Kruzof Island. The cabin itself becomes visible now, tucked back into
the trees. Here, in the forest primeval at the foot of a dormant
volcano, is a scene from the New Jersey Shore. Larry Calvin anchors the <em>Morning Mist</em>
well away from the rocky shallows and ferries us in several at a time
aboard his aluminum skiff. The father flying the kite hollers hello, the
children eye us warily. Ebbesmeyer hands out white plastic garbage bags
in which to collect our discoveries. Dean Orbison will lead one
beachcombing party to the south. I join Ebbesmeyer’s party, headed
north.<br />
<br />
I try to remember what the Orbisons and Amos Wood have taught me. Up
ahead, where the beach curves and tapers into a sickle, there’s lots of
jackstraw and even a little color—a fleck of blue, a daub of red. To get
there we have to cross Fred’s Creek, which spills down through the
trees over terraces of rocks before carving a delta of rivulets and
bluffs through the sand. The delta is perhaps a dozen yards wide, and
those of us without Sitka sneakers have trouble getting across. I manage
to leap from rock to rock. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who ambles along somewhat
effortfully, is in no state to go rock jumping. He hikes up into the
trees and crosses where the creek narrows. Reuniting on the far shore,
we make our way down the beach in a line, scanning the sand. Ebbesmeyer
launches into one of his litanies of facts. Bowling balls float, he
informs us, or rather the nine-, ten-, and eleven-pounders do. Heavier
ones sink. And did you know that the valves of clams are not
symmetrical? A colleague of his once surveyed the clamshells along a
mile of beach. “At one end of the beach, it’s mostly rights, and at the
other end it’s mostly lefts.” The currents can tell the difference.<br />
In <em>Beachcombing the Pacific,</em> Amos Wood tells us “to keep
looking out at the horizon and not continuously at the sand, for, after a
few hours this can be tiring on the neck”—advice that I am all too
happy to follow. For the first time since I entered Alaska aboard the <em>Malaspina</em>
a week ago, the rain clouds have cleared. A strong breeze is blowing
inland across the sparkling waves. To our right, there is the sound of
the surf; to our left, the soughing of the trees. Peering into them, I
see<sup><em> </em></sup>only shadowy depths of green. The beach here is more gravelly
than sandy. It’s like walking over peppercorns. Our boot soles crunch,
and I fall into a kind of trance. No matter how crappy a pittance the
tide leaves, no matter how darkly ominous the riddles in the sand,
beachcombing has its delights. There is pleasure in setting your senses
loose. At the sight of something half-buried, the eye startles and the
imagination leaps. At the edge of the waves flickers a silver flame. A
hundred yards off, from beneath a pile of driftwood, glows a small,
fallen sun. Then, at the moment of recognition, there is a kind of
satisfying latch. The silver flame? An empty bag of Doritos, torn open.
The small sun? A red, dog-chewn Frisbee. The strange becomes suddenly
familiar once again, though never quite as familiar as before.
Occasionally the object you’ve inspected is unrecognizable or exotic or
mysteriously incongruous. Occasionally that surf-tossed bottle turns out
not to have been left by a camper but tossed from a Malaysian shrimp
boat crossing the Andaman Sea.<br />
<br />
It occurs to me that this is what I have been pursuing these past
months, this is what I found so spellbindingly enigmatic about the image
of those plastic ducks at sea—incongruity. We have built for ourselves
out of this New World a giant diorama, a synthetic habitat, but travel
beyond the edges or look with the eyes of a serious beachcomber, and the
illusion begins to crumble.<br />
<br />
According to Ebbesmeyer, the beachcombing this year has not been
good. It all depends on the winter storms. But to me the junk seems
abundant. I clamber over the jackstraw, finding there a predictable
assortment of water bottles, but also a polystyrene ice cream tub, a
plastic length of hose, nylon nets, huge cakes of Styrofoam, all of
which I dump into Ebbesmeyer’s bag.<br />
<br />
“Aw, man,” Ebbesmeyer says of the Styrofoam. “That’ll break up into a
billion pieces. That’s the worst stuff. In Seattle you can’t recycle
Styrofoam. Pisses me off. So what do you do with it? See all those
little cells? The irony is, it’s made of polystyrene, which sinks, and
they foam it to make it into something that floats. That’s what I think
of when I see that stuff, all the windrows of Styrofoam, coffee cups
with barnacles growing on them. You say you’d love to get it off the
beach, but there’s no way.” He tells me about a container that spilled a
shipment of filtered cigarettes. “There are about 10,000 polymer fibers
per butt—that’s, what? Ten to the order . . . about ten billion fibers
for just one container.” His eyebrows spring up above his glasses.<br />
<br />
<span class="init-cap">T</span>his, then, is the destiny of those toy
animals that beachcombers fail to recover: baked brittle by the sun,
they will eventually disintegrate into shards. Those shards will
disintegrate into splinters, the splinters into particles, the particles
into dust, and the dust into molecules, which will circulate through
the environment for centuries. The very features that make plastic a
perfect material for bathtub toys—so buoyant! so pliant! so smooth! so
colorful! so hygienic!—also make it a superlative pollutant of the seas.
No one knows exactly how long a synthetic polymer will persist at sea.
Five hundred years is a reasonable guess. Globally, we are presently
producing 200 million tons of plastic every year, and no known organism
can digest a single molecule of the stuff, though plenty of organisms
try, including many of the friendly organisms depicted in Eric Carle’s <em>10 Little Rubber Ducks.</em><br />
<br />
Luckily for them, none of Carle’s ducks runs into a Laysan albatross.
The encounter would not be pretty. The Laysan albatross is probably the
most suicidally voracious plastivore on the planet. Although the bird
prefers squid, it will scarf up almost anything colorful that it sees on
the ocean’s surface. Albatross nesting grounds in the North Pacific are
littered with the plastic debris that the birds have crapped out
intact. Three to four million cigarette lighters have been collected
from seabird rookeries on Midway. Albatross chicks have been known to
starve to death on the plastic their parents regurgitate into their
mouths, and the intestines of the adult birds can handle only so much
before a fatal case of indigestion sets in. Naturalists recently found
700 different plastic items inside the feathery carcass of an albatross
found in the Pacific. After cataloging this scrap, they assembled it
into a mosaic, a great technicolor mandala of detritus, that is a marvel
to behold. The other day, during a lecture he gave at a Rotary Club
luncheon in Sitka, Ebbesmeyer showed a slide of the thing. Backlit
against a white screen, it at first calls to mind stained glass. Then,
as you look closer, you start spotting familiar objects strewn amid the
shrapnel. Two cigarette lighters and a dozen-odd bottlecaps appear to be
as good as new. Somewhere among those 700 items may be the remains of a
Floatee.<br />
<br />
Where does all that plastic come from? Container spills, fishing
boats, and recreational beaches, but also sewers and drainage systems
that empty into the sea. Bottlecaps are especially abundant in the North
Pacific because they are small enough to slip through grates. The lost
Super Balls of my childhood may now be abob in the garbage patch. The
California Coastal Commission, an independent, quasi-judicial state
agency, estimates that there are 46,000 pieces of visible plastic
floating in every square mile of the ocean, never mind the invisible
pieces Charlie Moore has gone trawling for. Based on the samples he
collected, Moore calculates that in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre
there are now six pounds of plastic for every one pound of zooplankton.
Zooplankton such as salps, a kind of chordate jellyfish that feed by
pumping seawater through their gelatinous bodies and straining out the
nutrients, ingest bits of plastic far too small to catch an albatross’s
eye. But the journey of the toys won’t end there, in the watery belly of
a salp. Long after my own organic chemistry has fertilized leaves of
grass, the pulverized, photo-degraded remains of that hollow duck of
mine will, chemically speaking, live on, traveling through the food
chain, scattering toxins in their wake.<br />
We find the remains of a derelict motorboat, a bayliner. The boat was
here last year, Ebbesmeyer says, marooned but intact on the beach to
the south. A year’s worth of wave and wind action has torn its
fiberglass hull asunder. It looks as though someone blew it up. We find
one big blue shard of fiberglass and then, fifty feet farther, another
piece. I would like to place a time-lapse camera on a beach like this
and watch what happens over the course of a year, watch the giant logs
jump around and the flotsam explode. Not far from the bayliner’s gas
tank, we find a child’s baseball mitt that looks as good as new, and
then, not far from the glove, in the damp sand at the edge of the ebbing
surf, we come upon the fresh footprints of a bear. The beach ends, the
shoreline giving way to a labyrinth of wave-washed boulders into which
the footprints continue. “Stonehenge for bears,” says Michael Wilson, a
Canadian geoarchaeologist who later this week will deliver a lecture
titled “Natural Disasters and Prehistoric Human Dispersal: The Rising
Wave of Inquiry.”<br />
Wilson leads us into the boulders, talking loudly. The wind is behind
us, and we assume that the bear will keep its distance, but you can
tell that Ebbesmeyer is feeling nervous. I am, too. We both start
glancing into the trees. Wilson’s spotted something, something big and
blue, and runs ahead to see what it is. It turns out to be an empty
plastic barrel with the word “toxic” printed on the lid. It appears to
be watertight. Wilson thumps it like a drum, then hoists it up above his
head and roars like one of the apes in <em>2001.</em> We’d like to take
it back with us rather than leave it here to decompose, but the damn
thing is just too big, and we end up abandoning it there, among the
rocks. As we turn to retrace our steps, I think of Wallace Stevens’s
anecdotal jar: <em>The wilderness rose up to it,/And sprawled around, no longer wild.</em><br />
<em> </em><br />
<span class="init-cap">A</span>nother incongruity: in 1878, nine
years after the invention of celluloid, a sales brochure promoted it as
the salvation of the world. “As petroleum came to the relief of the
whale,” the copy ran, so “has celluloid given the elephant, the
tortoise, and the coral insect a respite in their native haunts; and it
will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of
substances which are constantly growing scarcer.” A hundred years later,
in the public mind, plastic had gone from miracle substance to toxic
blight. In 1968, at the dawn of the modern environmental movement, the
editor of <em>Modern Plastics</em> argued that his industry had been
unfairly vilified. Plastic was not the primary cause of environmental
destruction, he wrote, only its most visible symptom. The real problem
was “our civilization, our exploding population, our life-style, our
technology.” That 1878 sales brochure and that 1968 editorial were both
partly, paradoxically, right. Petroleum did save the whale, plastics did
save the elephant, not to mention the forest. Modern medicine would not
exist without them. Personal computing would not exist without them.
Safe, fuel-efficient cars would not exist without them. Besides, they
consume fewer resources to manufacture and transport than most
alternative materials do. Even environmentalists have more important
things to worry about now. In the information age, plastics have won.
With the wave of a magical iPod and a purified swig from a Nalgene jar,
we have banished all thoughts of drift nets and six-pack rings, and what
lingering anxieties remain we leave at the curbside with the recycling.<br />
<br />
Never mind that only 5 percent of plastics actually end up getting
recycled. Never mind that the plastics industry stamps those little
triangles of chasing arrows into plastics for which no viable recycling
method exists. Never mind that plastics consume about 400 million tons
of oil and gas every year and that oil and gas may very well run out in
the not too distant future. Never mind that so-called green plastics
made of biochemicals require fossil fuels to produce and release
greenhouse gases when they break down. What’s most nefarious about
plastic, however, is the way it invites fantasy, the way it pretends to
deny the laws of matter, as if something—anything—could be made from
nothing; the way it is intended to be thrown away but chemically
engineered to last. By offering the false promise of disposability, of
consumption without cost, it has helped create a culture of wasteful
make-believe, an economy of forgetting. The flotsam Ebbesmeyer and his
beachcombers find is not only incongruous, it’s uncanny, in the Freudian
sense—a repressed fact breaking forth with the shock of strangeness
into our conscious minds. As he, Charlie Moore, and other oceanographers
can tell you, the ocean does not so easily forget. Chemically, it
remembers. An environmental geochemist at the University of Tokyo has
shown that on the open sea polyethylene acts as a toxin sponge,
attracting and concentrating free-floating non-water-soluble chemicals
such as DDT and PCB, and plastics themselves contain a host of known
carcinogens, including PCBs, that are safe only as long as they remain
inert. Some of these compounds have also been recently identified as
“gender-bending” endocrine disruptors. The American Plastics Council has
called such findings “fascinating” but inconclusive, and many concerned
scientists agree. A PVC duck in the bathtub may well be harmless to
your child, but no one yet knows how post-consumer plastics that escape
the landfill are altering the chemistry of the environment. The
experiment, which began a century or so ago, is ongoing. In the
meantime, Ebbesmeyer worries that plastics could do to our civilization
what lead did to the Romans. He thinks the garbage patch may betoken
nothing less than “the end of the ocean.” The seas have become
synthetic. The planet is sick. It can no longer recycle its ingredients,
or purge itself of pollutants.<br />
<br />
Some of the archaeologists in our beachcombing expedition have
studied the midden heaps of shells that prehistoric seafarers left
around the Pacific Rim. Garbage often outlasts monuments, and if 10,000
years from now archaeologists come looking for us, they will find a
trail of plastic clues. It will be easy to date us by our artifacts. At
the rate we’re burning and extruding fossil fuels, the age of
petrochemical plastics promises to be relatively short.<br />
<br />
I have yet to reach the end of my own trail of clues. I’d like to go
farther. I’d like Larry Calvin to ferry me 2,000 miles west, to that
spot in the middle of the North Pacific where thirteen years ago a
container of bath toys tumbled into the sea. I’d like to ride a
container ship through a winter storm and return with it to Guangdong
Province, where low-wage factory workers manufacture 70 percent of the
toys we Americans buy—about $22 billion worth—71 percent of which are
made of plastic. I’ve read disturbing reports about the Chinese toy
industry, and now when I read Eric Carle’s <em>10 Little Rubber Ducks,</em>
which was itself manufactured in China, and come to the scene of the
woman in the brick-red dress painting brick-red beaks with her little
paintbrush, I can’t help but think of Huangwu No. 2 Toy Factory, where,
according to the nonprofit China Labour Watch, in order to earn the
legal minimum wage of $3.45 for an eight-hour day, a piece-rate worker
in the spray department “would have to paint 8,920 small toy pieces a
day, or 1,115 per hour, or one every 3.23 seconds.”<br />
<br />
Did workers make the Floatees under similar conditions? Before
leaving for Sitka, I called The First Years, Inc., which has recently
been bought out. The current management seemed to know less about the
Floatees than I did, or pretended to. There was no way they could tell
me which factory produced that yellow duck of mine, they said. I would
like to know the provenance of everything. I would like to follow the
duck back into the blow molding machine, back into the resin extruder,
back to the petroleum refinery, back to the oil field or coal mine
whence it came. But for now, it’s time to give up the chase. In 1827,
returning from another failed attempt to find the Northwest Passage,
Lieutenant Parry, upon learning that he was to become a father, sent a
letter home to his pregnant wife: “success in my enterprize is by no
means essential to our joy, tho’ it might have added something to it;
but we cannot, ought not to have <em>everything</em> we wish. . . .”<br />
<br />
On Kruzof Island, I find that for the first time since Bellingham my
cell phone is picking up a signal. I call my wife and tell her I’ve
decided to fly home sooner than planned, just to be safe. A week after
my return, following a difficult, thirty-hour labor, my wife will give
birth to a son, the sight and touch of whom will dispel my usual,
self-involved preoccupations and induce a goofy, mystical,
sleep-deprived euphoria. My wife will cry, and when she does so will I.
These will be tears of joy, of course, but also of exhaustion and of awe
and, truth be told, of sadness. Holding my son for the first time, I
will feel diminished by the mystery of his birth and by the terrible
burden of love, a burden that, requiring hopefulness, will feel too
great to carry, but which I will take up nonetheless.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, back on Kruzof Island, there is Fred’s Creek to cross.<br />
<br />
Tired, loaded down with our plastic bag of scavengings, Ebbesmeyer is
having a hard time fording the stream. He picks his way carefully up
into the trees, places his foot on a partially submerged rock, but
hesitates. His breath is short and his footing poor. The rest of our
party has continued on without us. I wait. “Throw me the bag,” I call to
him, and he does. It lands with a splash at the edge of the creek. I
met the aging oceanographer in person only a week ago, but I feel oddly
protective of him, oddly filial. I watch the trees for bears. Finally he
is over to the other side, and we walk together back to the landing on
the beach and wait for Larry Calvin to come for us.<br />
</div>
Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-9601921636915421832012-12-12T19:38:00.000-08:002012-12-12T19:38:00.326-08:00Kiva - or the power of small things to make big changesKiva is... amazing! Don't take my word for it, check them out and make a loan. You won't regret it :-)<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigB5PO7F-egLYfnfQQolgJKLIlVnUSDLeI7xm6nSvIWrQbHceEvS8GKKruGKBThCe2uFkamihxaztSAQKDjlB9Oi2ijRN-l5GpAlKMmOrJs4BeMmkQ3eYB0PXJaGXNcS3cay36YusJgR8/s1600/kiva_holiday_logo.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigB5PO7F-egLYfnfQQolgJKLIlVnUSDLeI7xm6nSvIWrQbHceEvS8GKKruGKBThCe2uFkamihxaztSAQKDjlB9Oi2ijRN-l5GpAlKMmOrJs4BeMmkQ3eYB0PXJaGXNcS3cay36YusJgR8/s1600/kiva_holiday_logo.png" /></a></div>
<br />
It's a non-profit organization with a mission to connect
people through lending to alleviate poverty. Leveraging the internet
and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions, Kiva lets
individuals lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the
world. Learn more about <a href="http://www.kiva.org/about/how" title="How Kiva Works">how it works</a>.
<br />
<div class="stats g4 a pL">
Since Kiva was founded in 2005:
<br />
<ul>
<li>
<span class="number" id="lenders">852,116</span> Kiva lenders
</li>
<li>
<span class="number" id="amount_loans">$380,014,100</span>in loans
</li>
<li>
<span class="number" id="repayment_rate">98.98%</span> Repayment rate
</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="stats g4 z">
We work with:
<br />
<ul>
<li>
<span class="number" id="field_partners">171</span> Field Partners
</li>
<li>
<span class="number" id="volunteers">450</span> volunteers around the world
</li>
<li>
<span class="number" id="amount_countries">66</span> different countries
</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="moreStats cL taR">
<a href="http://www.kiva.org/about/stats">More metrics and stats ></a>
</div>
<h3>
Why we do what we do
</h3>
We envision a world where all people - even in the most remote areas of
the globe - hold the power to create opportunity for themselves and
others.
<br />
We believe providing safe, affordable access to capital to those in
need helps people create better lives for themselves and their families.
<br />
<h3>
How we do it
</h3>
Making a loan on Kiva is so simple that you may not realize how much work goes on behind the scenes.
<br />
Kiva works with microfinance institutions on five continents to provide
loans to people without access to traditional banking systems. One
hundred percent of your loan is sent to these microfinance institutions,
which we call Field Partners, who administer the loans in the field.
<br />
Kiva relies on a world wide network of over 450 volunteers who work
with our Field Partners, edit and translate borrower stories, and ensure
the smooth operation of countless other Kiva programs.
<br />
Learn more about <a href="http://www.kiva.org/about/how" title="How Kiva Works">how it works</a>.
<br />
<h3>
How we're funded
</h3>
100% of every dollar you lend on Kiva goes directly towards funding
loans; Kiva does not take a cut. Furthermore, Kiva does not charge
interest to our Field Partners, who administer the loans.
<br />
Kiva is primarily funded through the support of lenders making optional
donations. We also raise funds through grants, corporate sponsors, and
foundations.
<br />
We are incredibly thankful for the support that has enabled us to do the work that has touched the lives of so many people.
<br />
Learn more about our <a href="http://www.kiva.org/about/supportus/supporters">partnerships</a> or <a href="http://www.kiva.org/about/supportus">make a donation</a>.
<br />
<h3>
How you can get involved
</h3>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://www.kiva.org/lend">Make a loan!</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.kiva.org/gifts/kiva-cards">Purchase a Kiva card</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.kiva.org/portfolio/invites">Share Kiva</a> with your family and friends
</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.kiva.org/jobs" title="View employment opportunities with Kiva">Work</a> or <a href="http://www.kiva.org/volunteer" title="View volunteer opportunities with Kiva">volunteer</a> with us
</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.kiva.org/about/microfinance">Learn more about microfinance and why Kiva is unique</a>
</li>
</ul>
Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-92090603443073005472012-12-05T17:33:00.000-08:002012-12-05T17:33:00.629-08:00Miseri(cord) loves company<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJq-PiMrspgl-mYbI2JfgMsucbvgqT1GuxhyzsWn-fzAot-mE_O8FvZOTnkGDhLgs-WZhUcwtJKyz1CTKOnJrkHC1__vSf6BBtS8EWP-oVtqQA09ZLQxQ_yGDxCH2NSYg5A-lHFiUVl_A/s1600/misericord.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJq-PiMrspgl-mYbI2JfgMsucbvgqT1GuxhyzsWn-fzAot-mE_O8FvZOTnkGDhLgs-WZhUcwtJKyz1CTKOnJrkHC1__vSf6BBtS8EWP-oVtqQA09ZLQxQ_yGDxCH2NSYg5A-lHFiUVl_A/s320/misericord.jpg" width="311" /></a></div>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misericord" target="_blank">Misericord</a>s hold an important place in medieval art, as they a provide tangible illustration of the many folk myths and tales in circulation at the time, as well as more Biblical images. The symbolism of the cockerel is generally associated with St Peter.<br />
<br />
I bought this in the UK, and it caught my eye for a few reasons - it's medieval (14th century), it's artistic, it's unusual, and (let's face it, the numero uno reason) it's a chicken! AKA <i><b><span style="color: black;">'Angry Cockerel Misericord' </span></b></i><span style="color: black;">a </span><span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"> 14cm x 13cm </span>replica of a</span><span style="color: black;"> medieval carving found
upon the misericords and supports within the choir stalls of Lincoln
Cathedral, England. You can even buy them online <a href="http://www.lincolncathedral.com/shop/product-details/23" target="_blank">here</a>.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: black;"> It's an Angry Bird! </span>Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-60632346556830113582012-11-28T17:13:00.000-08:002012-11-28T17:13:00.327-08:00Another kind of chicken museum...<div id="header">
<h1>
<a href="http://www.thomasmailaender.com/">Thomas Mailaender</a></h1>
<ul>
<li class="cat-item cat-item-3"><a href="http://www.thomasmailaender.com/category/works/" title="Voir tous les articles classés dans Works">Works</a>
</li>
<li class="page_item page-item-2"><a href="http://www.thomasmailaender.com/about/" title="About">About</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<h2>
Chicken Museum</h2>
Installation <em>Chicken Museum, </em>2010.<br />
Wood, plasterboard, pictures, chickens.<br />
Collaboration with Juste Le Cabinet Architecture office<br />
(manon gaillet / sylvain bérard / amélie cazalis de fondouce)<br />
Théâtre National La CRIÉE, Marseille – Février 2010<br />
<img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-698" height="400" src="http://www.thomasmailaender.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_21191.jpg" width="600" /><br />
<img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-708" height="438" src="http://www.thomasmailaender.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_21221.jpg" width="600" /><br />
<img alt="IMG_2037" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-711" height="400" src="http://www.thomasmailaender.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_20371.jpg" title="IMG_2037" width="600" /><br />
<img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-700" height="400" src="http://www.thomasmailaender.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_1913.jpg" width="600" /><br />
<img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-703" height="400" src="http://www.thomasmailaender.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_2032.jpg" width="600" /><br />
<img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-704" height="400" src="http://www.thomasmailaender.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_2066.jpg" width="600" /><br />
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<img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-721" height="400" src="http://www.thomasmailaender.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_2270.jpg" title="" width="600" /><br />
<img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-719" height="900" src="http://www.thomasmailaender.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_2000.jpg" title="" width="600" /><br />
<img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-720" height="400" src="http://www.thomasmailaender.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_2010.jpg" title="" width="600" /><br />
<img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-701" height="900" src="http://www.thomasmailaender.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_1963.jpg" width="600" /><br />
<img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-707" height="438" src="http://www.thomasmailaender.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_2122-copie.jpg" width="600" /><br />
<img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-706" height="400" src="http://www.thomasmailaender.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_2097.jpg" width="600" /><br />
<img alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-705" height="400" src="http://www.thomasmailaender.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_2083.jpg" width="600" /><br />
<img alt="IMG_1967" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-723" height="900" src="http://www.thomasmailaender.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/IMG_1967.jpg" title="IMG_1967" width="600" />Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-76181488362909850052012-11-21T20:44:00.000-08:002012-11-21T20:44:00.402-08:00Little cuties<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6o0fOM8B60yokYr2SJKMPK1p23OQtHjMZgJHKqoHRNSZPqEiXTKHKEQ5H7k1yqxtYGBP20RXjlXbfyXxTf2fYMDLK7OqVcBKmPF2S2vrm1Dz5gIN4CEf0L2LwQwGphqAMkxgmYYpdLjs/s1600/IMG_1364.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6o0fOM8B60yokYr2SJKMPK1p23OQtHjMZgJHKqoHRNSZPqEiXTKHKEQ5H7k1yqxtYGBP20RXjlXbfyXxTf2fYMDLK7OqVcBKmPF2S2vrm1Dz5gIN4CEf0L2LwQwGphqAMkxgmYYpdLjs/s320/IMG_1364.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
This is my littlest chicken, and her BFF. I bought her on holiday in Wales last year, I think it's a range of tiny whimsies called KK animals, perhaps. She's a mysterious one, alright :-) Her bestie is a darling little glass duckie bead given to me by a friend, and together, they hang out on my kitchen windowsill. <br />
<br />
Awwwwwwww!Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-61921409064632313482012-11-14T22:50:00.000-08:002012-11-14T22:50:00.658-08:00A lot of hot (and useful) air!<div class="mod-nytimesarticleheader mod-articleheader" id="mod-article-header">
<h1>
What a Little Chicken Breath Can Do </h1>
</div>
<div class="mod-nytimesarticlebyline mod-articlebyline" id="mod-article-byline">
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/07/style/cuttings-what-a-little-chicken-breath-can-do.html" target="_blank">By Anne Raver, NYTimes Published: March 07, 1993</a></div>
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<strong></strong>EVEN
on a blustery zero-degree day, it's so warm -- 80 degrees -- in Anna
Edey's solar greenhouse on Martha's Vineyard in Massachsetts that the
vents are open. Let those blizzards with their raging winds pound the
four layers of plastic glazing outside. The greenhouse has survived
hurricanes. And every week, this 3,000-square-foot space produces 60
pounds of greens -- 25 varieties of leaf lettuce and 20 other greens and
herbs, like chicory, arugula, beet greens, sorrel, cilantro, dill and
parsley. Nasturtiums and borage bloom. Insects drink their nectar.<br />
<br />
This
winter greenhouse, which grosses $100,000 a year, is a Solviva
greenhouse -- Ms. Edey's own invention. The name is her tribute to the
good life that the sun can bring. The greenhouse runs without oil or
gas. Its heat and electricity come from the sun -- and the body heat of
100 chickens.<br />
"Each chicken puts out eight B.T.U.'s an hour per
pound," Ms. Edey said, as the clucking of hens and the occasional crows
of two roosters filtered through the north wall. Each hen, scratching
about on the earth floor and laying eggs in coops next to the greenhouse
wall (lined with 50-gallon bags of water that collect heat), saves the
business about two and a half gallons of fuel oil a year. And don't
forget the two roosters. Multiply the savings by 100, and you save about
250 gallons of oil a year.</div>
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Not to mention the gold in chicken breath. Chicken breath?<br />
<br />
"They're
producing CO2 , which plants need because carbon is their basic
building block," said Ms. Edey, a 53-year-old Swedish-born weaver who
raises her own sheep for wool. "So if you add more CO2 , the plants will
grow more." The carbon dioxide content in the greenhouse is about three
or four times as high as in the air outside, she added.<br />
"So even
with shorter days in winter, the plants grow faster than outside in the
summer garden," she said. Considering that many commercial growers use
bottled carbon dioxide to bolster production in their greenhouses,
chickens might become a hot commodity.<br />
<br />
The chicken breath gets to
the plants via a solar-powered fan that draws the air from the chicken
coop into a series of perforated pipes that lie beneath the soil of the
growing beds. The carbon dioxide then simply rises up through the soil
particles and into the air of the greenhouse, where it is absorbed by
the leaves.<br />
On Tuesdays, Ms. Edey and a crew of three harvesters
pick enough greens, leaf by leaf, for about 200 one-ounce salads a day.
The combinations, complete with edible flowers like nasturtiums, red
salvia and borage blossoms, which are electric blue and as sweet as
honey (bees love them, too), are rinsed in a big tank in the middle of
the greenhouse, dried and bagged, and then sold on the island or shipped
to restaurants in Boston. The greens are grown without chemical
fertilizers or pesticides. Compost and seaweed beef up the soil, and if
the aphids and whiteflies get out of control, Ms. Edey just orders more
ladybugs and parasitic wasps.<br />
Meanwhile, there is no burning oil to pollute the atmosphere.<br />
<br />
Ms.
Edey learned about the body heat and carbon dioxide of animals from a
newspaper article that her ex-mother-in-law had sent her about 10 years
ago, when Ms. Edey was experimenting with growing plants in the solar
house that she built in 1980. The article told of a nurseryman in Oregon
who had traded his oil furnace for 450 rabbits, which saved him $750 a
year. (The annual oil bill was $1,000; rabbit food cost $250.)<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4tANYqRDSi5KqA6VczqoRPZ6nEw0pNASS5BNj6cjU4Cq5dmtF15nlmUVHFC6z6ecDKBX9P9Vl3iRHkgzqhRRkNIpNx9W2eUQ8UIVE-CPRsoTPMTnOuc3SaOU4kkURuXxos5w54EvhW5A/s1600/solviva.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4tANYqRDSi5KqA6VczqoRPZ6nEw0pNASS5BNj6cjU4Cq5dmtF15nlmUVHFC6z6ecDKBX9P9Vl3iRHkgzqhRRkNIpNx9W2eUQ8UIVE-CPRsoTPMTnOuc3SaOU4kkURuXxos5w54EvhW5A/s320/solviva.gif" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.solviva.com/">www.solviva.com</a> </td></tr>
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Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-26538176814637955602012-11-07T13:52:00.000-08:002012-11-07T13:52:00.120-08:00Seoul Museum of Chicken Art - yes, really!!Oh my god!! You couldn't make this stuff up! Not only has Seoul given us Gangnam Style (I find Psy quite charismatic, love him), yes, there is also a <a href="http://visitkorea.or.kr/enu/SI/SI_EN_3_1_1_1.jsp?cid=562869" target="_blank">museum dedicated to all things chicken</a>.<br />
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<br />
From its official website: "Located in Bukchon, the Seoul Museum of Chicken Art is a private museum that opened in December of 2006.<br />
With a theme of the fowl in both the East and the West, the museum
exhibits crafts expressing ideas of the chicken through different
contexts of culture and art. In Korean, the museum is actually called a
Culture Center of Chicken Art. This means that it has on exhibit, all
artwork related to chicken, regardless of when or where they come from
and by whom they were made. The curator of the museum hopes that it will
become a space for sharing, learning, and feeling."<br />
I'm in heaven!Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-10687337926772794862012-10-31T13:44:00.000-07:002012-10-31T13:44:00.357-07:00The Dorking Cockerel (my, he's a big boy!)<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://surrey.greatbritishlife.co.uk/article/the-dorking-cockerel-has-landed-16997/" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8baA8o2IFcfY251X0gsqxAnHfSf34XJdSTNC_1DdXhpuvOCW47H-ABCMQENLa5aCnVQqCG0vAn6eydvo7jMlAO2zPas7VdIeUZMAw9Mr0w76LJ1RvNTAwxoNZNDbhBlvvdsqQHuRWt9Q/s320/dorking+cockerell.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://surrey.greatbritishlife.co.uk/article/the-dorking-cockerel-has-landed-16997/" target="_blank">The Dorking Cockerel in all his glory</a></td></tr>
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We saw this beauty in Dorking, Surrey, last year, whilst on our big European trip. We were going too fast to do anything other than do a double take ('was that a ten foot metal chicken??! Yes!'), so I was delighted to find this very detailed article about it that first appeared in Surrey Life magazine in 2007.<br />
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"RARELY has a piece of Surrey art work ruffled as many feathers as the
Dorking Cockerel. Now standing proudly on the Deepdene roundabout,
where it was erected a few weeks ago, the 10ft high sculpture has been
the cause of many a wry smile, not to mention several near-misses, as
drivers stare in wonder at the giant bird.<br />
<br />
However, while there are those who find the quirky creature a cause
for much amusement, there are others who think it has been a monumental
waste of time and money – especially given the fact that it was the
brainchild of the local council.<br />
It all started in 2005 when Conservative councillor and former
chairman of Mole Valley District Council, Neil Maltby, hatched the plan
for the cockerel during his year in office. He wanted to give something
back to the people of Dorking and to celebrate the bird that has long
been associated with the town.<br />
But while he was excited about the prospect of commissioning a
massive statue of the five-toed creature, residents of the town were
less convinced. Their need for public toilets and a solution to the
summer smelly bins problems seemed more important issues for the
chairman of the council to be concentrating on.<br />
There were also fears that council money would be used to fund the
controversial structure. Instead, Councillor Maltby used £10,000 that
had been donated by housing company Linden Homes for artwork in the town
and raised the other £13,000 through donations from businesses and
individuals equally ready to crow about the idea.<br />
“I started off by writing to a number of people including the
chairman of the preservation society, the town centre manager and the
chief executive of the council, to ask how people felt about the idea,”
he says. “No-one told me I was crazy and I got mostly very positive
comments. The fact that I managed to raise about £14,000 in sponsorship,
from both businesses and individual contributions, I think speaks for
itself.”<br />
There are a number of theories about how the Dorking cockerel came to
reside in the area. One conjecture is that the bird was brought into
Surrey by the Romans around AD43. Another is that the species was
already a resident in Dorking before Plautius’ army arrived. Meanwhile,
breeders in the area believe it may have been discovered by the Romans
in around AD100 when the first written references to the creature can be
found.<br />
These days, with Dorking being less of a market town, only a few
places still breed the bird. But it stands proudly on many signs in the
area and is worn on the shirts of the football team, The Chicks. Now as
you enter the town, you can’t miss it.<br />
“The question I get asked most about the sculpture is, ‘why does it
face the way that it does?’” continues Neil. “And the answer to that is
that I asked the sculptor which way it should face and he said
south-east because then it greets the most people coming into Dorking,
either from Reigate or Holmwood or Leatherhead, and that cockerels
always face towards the rising sun.”<br />
The enormous effigy was created by sculptor Peter Parkinson of
Leatherhead’s Fire & Iron Gallery who were commissioned to produce
the bird. His previous town centre art work includes the Ivegate Arch in
Bradford, now used as the city’s logo, some decorative public seating
in Ringwood, Hampshire, and the ‘bridge’ roundels in Leatherhead’s High
Street.<br />
But even for a man of Peter’s experience, putting a giant cockerel on
a busy roundabout was no mean feat. Before work could even begin, a
special shelter had to be constructed to house the sculpture while it
was being made. Keen to get every last detail correct, he also began
investigating what made the Dorking cockerel so special.<br />
Fortunately, Headley-based breeder Lana Gazder happily offered one of
her prized birds as a model for the sculpture. ‘Glen Two’ proudly posed
for Peter in Lana’s back garden in Headley as Peter made dozens of
drawings of the spectacular creature.<br />
He particularly focused on the breed’s fifth toe. It is this that
makes the bird unique, and where people born and bred in Dorking get the
nickname ‘five-clawed ‘un’ from.<br />
“I liked the challenge of this commission,” says Peter, who lives in
Bordon, near Farnham. “I like doing things I haven’t done before. The
most difficult part of a job like this is the initial translation of a
two-dimensional A4 image into a three-dimensional 10ft high structure.<br />
“Setting out the framework and getting the shape absolutely right is
always the hardest part. I was conscious throughout that I needed to get
the sculpture right in terms of the Dorking breed.<br />
“I really wanted people who own Dorking cockerels to be happy that I had grasped its characteristics.”<br />
The main construction of the bird began with the base, which had to
be approved by engineers. Once this was completed, Peter began on the
legs and constructed a strong, cockerel-shaped framework.<br />
He then embarked on the lengthy process of individually hand-making
each feather and welding it to the framework. This was the most
time-consuming part of the whole project, taking many months of hard
work to complete.<br />
“Most of my other large public artworks have been pictorial and made
of elements,” he continues. “I have created other birds, but I have not
done a figurative piece on this scale.”<br />
When the making process was complete, just before Christmas 2006, the
steel cockerel took to the road – much to the bemusement of people
across South East England; it was spotted at several locations on the
back of a lorry.<br />
First, it was transported to galvanizers in Kent to be protected so
that it did not corrode once on the roundabout. The giant bird was
placed in a bath of molten zinc and according to eyewitnesses looked
more like the creature of the black lagoon than a cockerel as it was
lifted away by a crane.<br />
It was then moved back to the Fire and Iron gallery in Leatherhead to
be ‘fettled’ before it was primed and painted. This is the process used
to remove excess zinc from the surface of the sculpture to ensure a
safe, smooth finish with no sharp snags, seams or runs. The final colour
choice was a subtle silvery-graphite.<br />
The impressive statue, already nominated for a prestigious art award,
was finally unveiled in February when around 100 people, including the
chairman Councillor Valerie Homewood and chief executive Darren Mepham
of Mole Valley District Council, local business owners and residents,
turned out to see the culmination of two years work. The high sheriff of
Surrey, Adrian White, owner of Denbies Wine Estate in Dorking, and Neil
Maltby, had the honour of pulling off the white sheet from the bird’s
head.<br />
“I was really pleased that the high sheriff was able to attend the unveiling and I thought it was a lovely ceremony,” adds Neil.<br />
“I am delighted that it looks so good because it has been a long road from when I first had the idea back in November 2004.<br />
“It is the task of the chairman to raise the profile of the district
and to encourage people to talk about it and the fact that the cockerel
has been in the papers for so long you have to say it has done that.”<br />
As for the artist, who spent the best part of a year creating the sculpture, he is thrilled with the finished result.<br />
“It is always a relief to see a piece of my work safely installed and looking good,” adds Peter<br />“I’m really pleased with the Dorking Cockerel – I think it looks even better than I expected in situ.<br />
“In terms of what the sculpture will do for Dorking, I think it gives the town’s symbol the recognition it deserves.<br />
“I hope people will grow fond of it, and that it helps put the town and its history firmly on the map.”<br />
One thing’s for sure – it will certainly continue to raise a smile as
drivers go past. It has already had a giant balloon shaped like an egg
placed underneath it, had a learner driver label put around its neck and
had the privilege of a visit from his Royal Highness Prince Charles –
or at least a man in a Prince Charles mask.<br />
<h2>
FACTFILE: The Dorking Cockerel</h2>
Height: 10ft<br />Weight: Between one and two tons<br />Materials: Steel and zinc<br />Man hours: Around 10 months of work<br />Location: On the Deepdene roundabout at the junction with the A24<br />(London Road and Deepdene Avenue) and the A25 (Reigate Road)<br />
<h2>
There were traditionally five varieties of the Dorking cockerel</h2>
1 The very rare white.<br />2 The equally rare red.<br />3 The silver-grey, made popular as a show bird in the mid-19th century.<br />4 The cuckoo-a blue/grey bird with striped feathers and the once endangered dark. <br />5 And the silver-grey- the variety that has been adopted by the people of Dorking."<br />
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Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-70065049029084642202012-10-24T18:44:00.000-07:002012-10-24T18:44:00.203-07:00Does size matter? A tale of Jack ReacherSo, there's a new Jack Reacher book, <a href="http://www.dymocks.com.au/ProductDetails/ProductDetail.aspx?R=9780593065723#.UISaYVF5ffE" target="_blank">A Wanted Man</a>. Oh Reacher, how I love you (and thankyou Lee Child for inventing him)! For those who don't know him, Reacher is an ex-military cop, the hero of a wonderful set of thrillers where 'men want to be him and women want to be with him'. He's a modern day gunslinger, the guy who wanders into town to right some wrongs, then is gone when the job is done. Oh, and he's described as 6'5", about 230lbs, and built like the proverbial brick shithouse.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLBTbnfj2kk_sMwkd6IMINxOdO7ZfXEAMmu8WPiFfn969UpqlEREZR37XnobIbmdg8opBZTeNNrZYWHjNJ068XtrGtKmbmNRUDDU_QI9dzRQzNwKPocb4Tq76XbahfxyM9Prmk-A4Ituo/s1600/ray+stevenson.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLBTbnfj2kk_sMwkd6IMINxOdO7ZfXEAMmu8WPiFfn969UpqlEREZR37XnobIbmdg8opBZTeNNrZYWHjNJ068XtrGtKmbmNRUDDU_QI9dzRQzNwKPocb4Tq76XbahfxyM9Prmk-A4Ituo/s320/ray+stevenson.jpg" width="241" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
My perfect Reacher would be someone like <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ray-Stevenson-to-play-Jack-Reacher-from-the-Lee-Child-novels/156538997748180?ref=ts&fref=ts" target="_blank">Ray Stevenson</a>, rugged but not pretty, and not super young (Reacher is currently in his late 40s in the books). <-------- Here's Ray!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWOs5_OJY1z1PSK5TqK-FK5XJMk6GleHqoazcFC09w-0BRDYCzvgZyAgnWWNYDw-7yR6SgbnuaW6Pec76Eos1z480-lhRKgXKQ2oL-5XI6zeo8cCr1ILAr60dtlJsyFkYZhEquLTa5zjc/s1600/jack+reacher.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWOs5_OJY1z1PSK5TqK-FK5XJMk6GleHqoazcFC09w-0BRDYCzvgZyAgnWWNYDw-7yR6SgbnuaW6Pec76Eos1z480-lhRKgXKQ2oL-5XI6zeo8cCr1ILAr60dtlJsyFkYZhEquLTa5zjc/s320/jack+reacher.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
And Hollywood gives us this --------><br />
<br />
Yes, you recognise the face, it's Tom Cruise... He bought the rights, hired a director and took the role. Now my initial reaction was utter jaw-dropped horror. Which part of 6'5" was not clear to Mr Cruise?!<br />
<br />
Lee Child has defended Cruise, saying Reacher's size in the books is a metaphor for him as an unstoppable force, which Child feels Cruise can portray. Reacher himself comments that it's the small, whippy Special Forces guys (who could kill you with one finger) are the ones to worry about. <br />
<br />
So, like Anne Rice when Tom Cruise was announced to play the vampire Lestat in <i>Interview with The Vampire</i>, I'm horrified. BUT, I'm prepared to be persuaded, and I might even get a nice surprise, like Anne Rice did. She so loved Cruise's portrayal of Lestat when she saw it that she took out a <a href="http://www.angelfire.com/ri/cerat/AnneOnTom.html" target="_blank">full page ad in Variety</a> to retract her previous comments. <br />
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I loved him as Lestat, but hadn't read the books beforehand. I'll have to wait for Dec 21 to see how I feel about Cruise as Reacher. Let's hope he isn't Jack-shit!Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-34176243584234732092012-10-17T15:50:00.000-07:002012-10-17T15:50:00.752-07:00If I was a rich man (diddle diddle diddle diddle dum)...If I was a rich man (apologies to you if you now have the song from <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=244Str11YNA" target="_blank">Fiddler on the Roof </a> in your head) I'd be able to build a chicken coop like this:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7Y53Lkree4NA5ebb9juZLiL1K55v4Yoe9M17bcA7utMdgfbIt9_ZBCDOcnz6KhKrNFwBGQcNHfpd2KHUE8ZJEJJ0SUFA9B9T9BHoGL_b2j5nJ-5g_6H5iQ8g0CqXxqOvxsT5GpZxUMvE/s1600/Crispin-Odey-chicken-coop-008.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7Y53Lkree4NA5ebb9juZLiL1K55v4Yoe9M17bcA7utMdgfbIt9_ZBCDOcnz6KhKrNFwBGQcNHfpd2KHUE8ZJEJJ0SUFA9B9T9BHoGL_b2j5nJ-5g_6H5iQ8g0CqXxqOvxsT5GpZxUMvE/s400/Crispin-Odey-chicken-coop-008.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
This Palladian eggs-travangance is the proposed 130,000 UK Pound new home of City of London tycoon Crispin Odey's chickens, at his country estate. Commentators are calling it <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/26/fowl-extravagance-crispin-odey-chicken-house" target="_blank">a fowl waste of money</a>. <br />
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It's also reminding UK commentators of this cracking duck palace, claimed by MP Peter Viggers as an expense to the House of Commons:<br />
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<div class="bylineBody">
Although at only 1,645 UK Pounds, this seems like rather a bargain, and of course, I'm sure Sir Peter was able to worker harder for his constituents knowing that his <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5357568/MPs-expenses-Sir-Peter-Viggers-claimed-for-1600-floating-duck-island.html" target="_blank">ducks were safe from predator</a>s. </div>
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Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-55863788614134102552012-10-10T01:11:00.000-07:002012-10-10T01:11:00.521-07:00It's not me, it's miniature goatsSo, I've been chatting with friend C about her desire to own a miniature goat. And apparently you need to keep 2 because they get sad otherwise :-( so I had suggested I'd get one to be its friend. In a theoretical way, you understand.<br />
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Turns out it's C's birthay very soon, and she's been goat hunting on the internet.<br />
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<img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoch6qmfjaUYA63KURCyerB7oAYyCEC1iVLedIzCna_vt0QgATiGpwIP1wKIkho88UZWF4OtL7whoMX0YcwJ42PGyVizbKC-wMMaBZGQyj19i1TS7n7dXoXhoQhNLbpPAf0nlkJa6BlhE/s640/goat1.PNG" width="569" /><img border="0" height="516" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzL4WjZTuPnkaYV67EJEAX_b-k-SufT8Pdbh53hqxvWAz8ZGaHoVlA0zPVUP17vmbA6QZuOu105gMddnaPEA1Rulw0bpmgJiU4Jsz_BcCekRflEqusk4tGPjtHYfSOGf5mr2e0nzbEBxk/s640/goat2.PNG" width="640" /><img border="0" height="545" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJfn8uajDkoYmNtnwuZwko1L78Yj8cSSwV2gpWSnt3WBIqMYzvd25ij4_zd3Vi6Ocu280m8olRWUBqwx0_YWfSAuGs38uejBMo9JoOpVHkrXBMhLtfhvibjLyx4xmSGzUyIElAfFOqwLo/s640/goat3.PNG" width="640" /><img border="0" height="518" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbEopieQ9kSO7azdZ4758ZFT32pWO_v3yfVtdyNa_WNsTPw-eNqsKF-h4zsbl4MKc5Hj8MkUfJM8B38ZTpRtASFveoCiZh6h49FEx90c9p_Y8altZZN2Z5ir82SJHqFhW6saeD8SSJdDc/s640/goat4.PNG" width="640" /><br />
No, I didn't buy the $2800 quadricycle, but it was very tempting ;-) Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-78254432388901393182012-10-03T05:20:00.000-07:002012-10-03T05:20:00.655-07:00You've got to be yolking!<br />
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Sometimes me and B amaze ourselves with the comedy gold we come up with. This is one of our longer, funnier exchanges, with my favourite theme!<br />
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<img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvVYiZx7cLM6bIplw61qwVk08_Iq7Eu3hJTuS8qoeKLTNiuIM8NI8bu0gMGwnBoQuqS8wnaE1mNKskvk1Th30801sZWt-GuetAbkEauPDPurm61SfUpHGq-RNu1hKK4hPnGo1hyphenhyphenrIXF9w/s320/IMG_1100.PNG" width="212" /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJmYb21JpJLjzzQcIYJxGvPcHDC250GC93AnZugLi7emLNg3ypu9BL0arDJY4kudJece0ujDaoSlE46zgiNBFviZB5wyCrz9r7OzRw4KHeGFGYM2R5VZ4_WXBmMmqbCooveiDA6AM06ag/s1600/IMG_1099.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJmYb21JpJLjzzQcIYJxGvPcHDC250GC93AnZugLi7emLNg3ypu9BL0arDJY4kudJece0ujDaoSlE46zgiNBFviZB5wyCrz9r7OzRw4KHeGFGYM2R5VZ4_WXBmMmqbCooveiDA6AM06ag/s320/IMG_1099.PNG" width="213" /> </a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjATwVITCSQ-fJNkKv1NnizdtNKACev_KiR7ppCkNrzlQeLvFVswFhf0RZfHBC5t-4yAWYJu56PgOtMDraC-XV5UZx9uqTG6tYg4WjQWgTwaRsKXPToUNh9ss9pBhStWh8oVdz_uSW6fuk/s1600/IMG_1098.PNG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjATwVITCSQ-fJNkKv1NnizdtNKACev_KiR7ppCkNrzlQeLvFVswFhf0RZfHBC5t-4yAWYJu56PgOtMDraC-XV5UZx9uqTG6tYg4WjQWgTwaRsKXPToUNh9ss9pBhStWh8oVdz_uSW6fuk/s320/IMG_1098.PNG" width="213" /></a></div>
Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-40226405849817710942012-09-26T04:57:00.000-07:002012-09-27T03:53:02.492-07:00Dog-shaming<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSjtEc35_u5tikz5f23l2KzIDtTzW_2DbfA7v1Urtv_ICpI2Y70U4BkTS7NjLNjtNyKq3i2_Dv_pJ8NXbDnvpvTeAPMA1Uex3FVgfMutKptalorBxcVhUT-HqCmSsB2ELHr1VTRq-nCq4/s1600/IMG_0292.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSjtEc35_u5tikz5f23l2KzIDtTzW_2DbfA7v1Urtv_ICpI2Y70U4BkTS7NjLNjtNyKq3i2_Dv_pJ8NXbDnvpvTeAPMA1Uex3FVgfMutKptalorBxcVhUT-HqCmSsB2ELHr1VTRq-nCq4/s200/IMG_0292.JPG" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Exhibit A - brand new box of tissues</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibyIBryG63BhsanXtD5wPBbAI2oJojdNAhXI2T_W_GgVodt86osceS29D9nSE_ie7HrO4EcU-roqEaxu1Vukn3SArnIhgtQ1o0n7kq6XQ1cySGwOr5jvTUKRU-j-I1kJX6qBgowa6iSoc/s1600/IMG_1002.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibyIBryG63BhsanXtD5wPBbAI2oJojdNAhXI2T_W_GgVodt86osceS29D9nSE_ie7HrO4EcU-roqEaxu1Vukn3SArnIhgtQ1o0n7kq6XQ1cySGwOr5jvTUKRU-j-I1kJX6qBgowa6iSoc/s200/IMG_1002.JPG" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Exhibit B - She's a harsh critic of modern fiction</td></tr>
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Naughty Jenny-pup likes to chew things. A lot. Her go-to item is clothes pegs, as they're often to be found around the back garden. She also likes eating Lego, Bionicles parts, iPhone cable and/or headphones, a guest's slippers, DD's Crocs (2 pairs), the eyes from many many soft toys, the underside of the wooden kitchen chairs, my friend's tiled front porch, and boxes of tissues.<br />
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Oh, and she ate a hole in my favourite red Skechers, <br />
and has chewed up a copy of Mary Poppins (the book, not the DVD), several uni textbooks, a crime novel (Anne Perry), and a copy of a Terry Pratchett that I haven't even finished reading yet ;-(<br />
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She eats chicken poop, and wees on the back porch when it's cold so she doesn't get her ickle wickle feet cold when it's winter... She was even accused of being a penguin killer when we were on Kangaroo Island recently - NOT GUILTY, although she did refuse to get back in the car after a pit stop, causing us to delay the KI ferry as we boarded late.<br />
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Bad girl! She's gonna end up on <a href="http://dog-shaming.com/" target="_blank">dog-shaming.com</a><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCvFo8XFDk9EnP5ygWnCNZVDZ8fWUDTbz1g5Gnqd0iIM_TIyIHHUf9domFBRx0Fa_AOSXqwbf9GY5wQZeRL0OjgBPHT9u5zFHsU8obkBe120-YJdDqF7DXlk7kv2m8PGjSl1jOMufnyQI/s1600/IMG_0404.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCvFo8XFDk9EnP5ygWnCNZVDZ8fWUDTbz1g5Gnqd0iIM_TIyIHHUf9domFBRx0Fa_AOSXqwbf9GY5wQZeRL0OjgBPHT9u5zFHsU8obkBe120-YJdDqF7DXlk7kv2m8PGjSl1jOMufnyQI/s200/IMG_0404.JPG" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Exhibit C - Skechers</td></tr>
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Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3553154640158211989.post-83360217013619681862012-09-19T19:14:00.000-07:002012-09-19T19:14:00.705-07:00Running Chicken Nebula <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2WSEht33YBV6ZxoEypDjrsFhPtLerAawFAhnyv3REoClNTXbEX2b3Yg24OFc1eqkMrrSZt9ss-PjIfPmq60WvXM5ICC5DU8NO538RSJvXOVGqbs7PxtuQN4huIPZeXMpiEssAflLZpsg/s1600/chick2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div>
No, I didn't make it up:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRgCEkE_F4UYwlnvVD1tzw2MC6HhH965YhypKiFLkktICtkGPVG3ZlEw_t3CPjbv3BJ8L0NTuXK6izuirDcgV3eP4OwjoLnK5uU2MVRGSdGyEA-eMnT-C6Z2pWsV3-Tj-zcLQVwRP_XFU/s1600/running_chicken_nebula-300x271.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="289" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRgCEkE_F4UYwlnvVD1tzw2MC6HhH965YhypKiFLkktICtkGPVG3ZlEw_t3CPjbv3BJ8L0NTuXK6izuirDcgV3eP4OwjoLnK5uU2MVRGSdGyEA-eMnT-C6Z2pWsV3-Tj-zcLQVwRP_XFU/s320/running_chicken_nebula-300x271.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pic courtesy of <a href="http://earthsky.org/">EarthSky.org</a></td></tr>
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That really is it's name - the Running Chicken Nebula, also known as Lambda Centauri Nebula, also known as IC 2944. It’s a cloud of
hydrogen, illuminated by hot, bright newborn stars, in the direction of
the southern constellation Centaurus the Centaur, and some astronomers see a bird-like shape in its brightest region.<br />
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I sort of see it myself, and lots of people (including me) have tried to help by drawing on the photo. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td style="text-align: center;">A fun thread about this is on the <a href="http://www.backyardchickens.com/t/576668/running-chicken-nebula-telescope-images-from-the-eso/10" target="_blank">Backyard Chickens</a> has more pics like this one (I'm about a year late, it seems, lol)</td><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="162" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrCvSIyRrQQQPbPqlD23WU2rnYL0waoqV_RREoblcbroa5QqSSgmwFQN4Jvq9ujGqXavI4zsA7cBT1scD1e_aiPshiCd5EAA8jmre6gv5qcCXkGWw3BGikJnzVqDOWXMXVMschocgD15k/s200/3796_chicken_nebula_1.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="200" /></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKx-Ub80L8YWrDnle3WFJ7y8IXBRJnlU8bWrsIIQM9IT3A-i0rNus9IJ6FQc9SxEjA2ooydhoDTl0NDNZyvEtIyn5qJNRKx4YMTszhwaQ-rRHR48yvGUarzGFEPKpEHZOQgzF5K3-7F9I/s200/chick1.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="200" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Here's one of my tries!</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2WSEht33YBV6ZxoEypDjrsFhPtLerAawFAhnyv3REoClNTXbEX2b3Yg24OFc1eqkMrrSZt9ss-PjIfPmq60WvXM5ICC5DU8NO538RSJvXOVGqbs7PxtuQN4huIPZeXMpiEssAflLZpsg/s200/chick2.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="200" /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxach91qU3_mXQVexwltprXL1u6ThxHeXW47lb1m_BDsTWJfoxyD2VQrvdQWZbVQPhj0eBk0UlsIY_ieeZ-QoufWVcTku3c-p3ZzESqcGQMKkiprRWNN-yl7DhLTgBfSy-jhnSwMN6MIw/s1600/chick3.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxach91qU3_mXQVexwltprXL1u6ThxHeXW47lb1m_BDsTWJfoxyD2VQrvdQWZbVQPhj0eBk0UlsIY_ieeZ-QoufWVcTku3c-p3ZzESqcGQMKkiprRWNN-yl7DhLTgBfSy-jhnSwMN6MIw/s200/chick3.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">and another two! I won't be giving up the day job any time yet...</td></tr>
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<br />Cebahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17243937091353654875noreply@blogger.com1