Interesting rock, found in a river near Verona, Italy

I would have guessed that it was some sort of artifact, but according to the discussion thread at the whatsthisrock subreddit, it is fossiliferous limestone (tumbled smooth by the river).

Geologist here - Looks like you have a fantastic piece of Packstone / Biomicrite. Without being able to run the tests on it, the matrix (blue) is probably a calcareous mudstone, with the blue colour being formed from trace minerals in its composition. Like others have said, the white parts are cross sections of shells, and in this case they look like bivalves.

Very, very cool.  If I were at that river I would fill my pockets with these.

More on fossiliferous limestone (which does not typically have a blue matrix).

Preventive? or preventative?

I have tended to use "preventive" because there is no verb "to preventate", but I had to ask Merriam-Webster which is correct:

The shorter word, preventive, has meanings such as "something that prevents," when used as a noun, and "devoted to or concerned with prevention," when used as an adjective. Preventative means the same thing.

Of the two, preventive is slightly older, appearing in English at the beginning of the 17th century.

"So Philip of Macedon, and Atis the sonne of Croesus, found a chariot in a swords hilt, and an Iron poynted weapon at the hunting of a Bore, to delude their preuentiue wearinesse."

— Richard Carew, The Survey of Cornwall, 1602

However, preventative is no Johnny-come-lately, showing definite use for over 350 years now.

"Here follows the preventative: take a poor man, and settle him in a comfortable situation, making him pay (or secure) a reasonable valuation...."

— Christopher Love, The Strange and Wonderful Predictions of Mr. Christopher Love, 1651

It is not uncommon to find both of them used interchangeably by a single author within the same work... But the English language is not only rich with variation; it is rich as well with strife, and people who like to tell you that the thing you're doing is a bad thing to do... This was followed by another hundred years of language guides claiming that one of these words was proper and one was not.

I like their conclusion: "The question of which one you should choose depends much on your appetite for nit-pickery."

"Bad Sisters" season 1 trailer

I almost gave up on this series because the principal character (the one destined to be murdered) is so extremely and unremittingly repulsive because of his misogyny.  He combines the sinister characteristics of Fagin with the worst sliminess of Uriah Heep.  OTOH, all the characters (including the doomed man) are superbly portrayed by a cast that was unfamiliar to me, but who I will look forward to seeing again in season 2.  In the end, the series was enjoyable and thoroughly worth watching.

10 episodes, streaming on Apple TV; not yet on DVD AFAIK.

King Williams College Christmas quiz, 2024-5

Posted today in The Guardian - several weeks ahead of schedule and catching me completely off guard.  So I will be taking some time off from blogging to work on the quiz with friends.  I'm back.  I was only able to figure out three in the whole quiz without Googling (too tough (and too British)).

Here are questions from Section 13 (of 18 total)

1. What dish is a reticulum?

2. What Irish name describes an absence?

3. Which Australian sports a silver-grey coat?

4. What did the Dutch Lakenvelder create in south-west Scotland?

5. What has a lineback and markedly overdeveloped keratin-based protuberances?

6. Identify four stiff standers, four dilly danders, two hookers, two lookers and a wig-wag.

7. What hybrid was developed from red and dun in adjacent counties?

8. What came from Heck and Hagenbeck, one from each?

9. Who righted the females from Valencia?

10. What was sourced from Teeswater? 

"Goodbye to All That" (Robert Graves, 1929)

An interesting read, but not one that I will add to my blog list of recommended books.  I first learned about the book while doing my weekly listen to a BBC podcase of In Our Time.  Here's the blurb:

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the author of 'I, Claudius' who was also one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. Robert Graves (1895 -1985) placed his poetry far above his prose. He once declared that from the age of 15 poetry had been his ruling passion and that he lived his life according to poetic principles, writing in prose only to pay the bills and that he bred the pedigree dogs of his prose to feed the cats of his poetry. Yet it’s for his prose that he’s most famous today, including 'I Claudius', his brilliant account of the debauchery of Imperial Rome, and 'Goodbye to All That', the unforgettable memoir of his early life including the time during the First World War when he was so badly wounded at the Somme that The Times listed him as dead."

As a former English major I was chagrined to realize that except for I Claudius, I have read nothing by Graves, so I decided to give the book a try.  Herewith some excerpts, especially the things I didn't know...

I unfortunately didn't copy the citation or page reference, but Graves several times uses the phrase "half left" to indicate a direction of travel.  I found it discussed in Wikipedia as a drill command, meaning to turn 45 degrees to one's left.  I think it's an excellent term, now apparently archaic, useful when compass headings are unavailable or unknown.

"You'd be surprised at the amount of waste that goes on in the trenches.  Ration biscuits are in general use as fuel for boiling up dixies, because kindling is scarce.  Our machine-gun crew boil their hot water by firing off belt after of ammunition at no particular target, just generally spraying the German line.  After several pounds' worth of ammunition has been used, the water in the guns - which are water-cooled - begins to boil..." (109-110)

"Another story: 'Bloke in the Camerons wanted a cushy, bad. Fed up and far from home, he was. He puts his hand over the top and gets his trigger finger taken off, and two more beside. That done the trick. He comes laughing through our lines by the old boutillery. "See, lads,” he says, "I’m off to bonny Scotland. Is it na a beauty?” But on the way down the trench to the dressing- station, he forgets to stoop low where the old sniper’s working. He gets it through the head, too. Finee. We laugh, fit to die ! ’" (110)

"We officers spend a lot of time revolver-shooting. Jenkins brought out a beautiful target from the only undestroyed living-room in our billet-area: a glass case full of artificial fruit and flowers. We put it up on a post at fifty yards’ range. He said: "1’ve always wanted to smash one of these damn objects. My aunt has one. It’s the sort of thing that would survive an intense bombardment.’ I smothered a tender impulse to rescue it. So we had five shots each, in turn. Everyone missed. Then we went up to within twenty yards and fired a volley. Someone hit the post and knocked the case off into the grass. Jenkins said: "Damn the thing, it must be bewitched. Let’s take it back.’ The glass was unbroken, but some of the fruit had come loose. Walker said: "No, it’s in pain. We must put it out of its suffering.’ He gave it the coup de grace from close quarters." (116)

"The Red Lamp, the army brothel, was around the corner in the main street. I had seen a queue of a hundred and fifty men waiting outside the door, each to have his short turn with one of the three women in the house. My servant, who had stood in the queue, told me that the charge was ten francs a man — about eight shillings at that time. Each woman served nearly a battalion of men every week for as long as she lasted. According to the assistant provost-marshal, three weeks was the usual limit: ‘after which she retired on her earnings, pale but proud.’" (122)

"We’ve even got a polo-ground here. There was a polo-match between the First and Second Battalions the other day. The First had all their decent ponies pinched last October when they were massacred at Ypres and the cooks and transport men had to come up into the line to prevent a break-through. So the Second won easily." (125)

"Still, patrolling had its peculiar risks. If a German patrol found a wounded man, they were as likely as not to cut his throat. The bowie-knife was a favourite German patrol weapon because of its silence. (We inclined more to the 'cosh’, a loaded stick.) The most important information that a patrol could bring back was to what regiment and division the troops opposite belonged. So if it were impossible to get a wounded enemy back without danger to one-self, he had to be stripped of his badges. To do that quickly and silently, it might be necessary first to cut his throat or beat in his skull." (131)

"The Germans opposite wanted to be sociable. They sent messages over to us in undetonated rifle-grenades. One of these was evidently addressed to the Irish batt- alion we had relieved: "We all German korporals wish you English korporals a good day and invite you to a good German dinner tonight with beer (ale) and cakes. Your little dog ran over to us and we keep it safe; it became no food with you so it run to us. Answer in the same way, if you please." Another grenade contained a copy of the Neueste Nachrichten, a German Army newspaper..." (137)

"An Australian: ‘Well, the biggest lark I had was at Morlancourt, when we took it the first time. There were a lot of Jerries in a cellar, and I said to ’em: “Come out, you Camarades ! ” So out they came, a dozen of ’em, with their hands up. “Turn out your pockets,” I told ’em. They turned ’em out. Watches and gold and stuff, all dinkum. Then I said: “Now back to your cellar, you sons of bitches ! ” For I couldn’t be bothered with ’em. When they were all safely down I threw half a dozen Mills bombs in after ’em. I’d got the stuff all right, and we weren’t taking prisoners that day.’ (184)

"Executions were frequent in France. I had my first direct experience of official lying when I arrived at Le Havre in May 1915, and read the back-files of army orders at the rest camp. They contained something like twenty reports of men shot for cowardice or desertion; yet a few days later the responsible minister in the House of Commons, answering a question from a pacifist, denied that sentence of death for a military offence had been carried out in France on any member of His Majesty’s Forces." (240) [Graves indicates that families were never told of executions - only that the man had "died a soldier's death."]

I haven't categorized this book as "recommended" because it has way too much information regarding Grave's personal life and wartime activities.  I understand that it is classified as an autobiography, and thus is probably excellent reading for scholars or students studying the author's works and interested in understanding the background from which he writes, but both the contents of his meals and the minute details of his battlefield deployment eventually start to cloy, and I wound up speed-scanning much of the text.  But still, lots of interesting material, as summarized above.  [prob lots of typos above -  I haven't proof-read it yet]

An industrial trigger for snow

I should think every web-surfing reader of TYWKIWDBI is fully aware of the lake-effect snow blanketing areas downwind from the not-frozen Great Lakes.   A similar phenomenon occurred last week here in central Wisconsin.

An isolated but mighty band of snow whipped up Thanksgiving mischief for travelers in Wisconsin on Thursday. Over a several-hour period, a localized zone of occasionally heavy snow dropped a couple inches on places not far from Eau Claire — and the primary culprit was exhaust from a nearby glass factory.

While the band didn’t hit a large area, it had a relatively high impact because of its location, parallel to Interstate 94 across western Wisconsin. At one point, very low visibility as well as rapidly changing road conditions fueled accidents that closed the thoroughfare.

Meteorologists in the region got to talking about it as it unfolded. It turns out that a Menomonie glass factory was mostly to blame... Snowfall totals of about 2 to 3 inches have been logged from the event, according to the Weather Service. 

The glass factory chimney was expelling steam.  Similar anomalies have occurred from airplanes:

Details re the latter at The Washington Post (2021).

"Dead salmon hats" worn by orcas

It's something that orcas do, and of course orcas can do whatever they want, because who/what is going to tell them otherwise?  I saw the story at the CBC:

In what may seem like a call-back to 1980s whale culture, a resident orca off the coast of Washington state was recently spotted sporting a dead salmon on its head.  The phenomenon was first documented in 1987 when whales from three separate pods were seen wearing salmon on their heads, like a human wears a hat.

But scientists never understood why, and experts are still scratching their heads as they contemplate the most recent incident, documented in October.  The director of the University of British Columbia's Marine Mammal Research Unit, Andrew Trites, said there's no obvious reason for the behaviour.

Photo credit in the watermark, via.

Phytophotodermatitis - updated

It's exactly what the word says - skin (derma) inflammation (itis) caused by exposure to plants (phyto) and sunlight (photo).  My wife has experienced it after brushing against rue in our garden (which we raise for the Black Swallowtails).  Other plants capable of photosensitizing human skin are listed in the Wikipedia entry, and include wild parsnip (which we encounter frequently while hiking in our part of the Midwest), parsley, celery, lemon, and lime.

The photos above are from a report on a group of children burned after playing with lime juice.

What at first seemed to be overexposure to the sun blossomed into softball-sized blisters and second-degree burns. Her girls, Jewels, 12, and Jazmyn, 9, wound up spending several days in an intensive care unit, hooked up to morphine to manage the pain...

A neighbor had a large lime tree that grew over the fence into the backyard where the girls went swimming. They had picked some of the fruits and squeezed them out into imaginary tea cups in their play lemonade stand... She remembered the girls crushing the fruits, juice sliding down their arms, splashing their legs, hitting their faces. 

The tricky part is that even after initial clinical resolution, the victim has to minimize exposure to sunlight because the light can cause recrudescence of the lesions even without reexposure to the sensitizer.

Via Nothing to do with Arbroath.

Reposted from 2013 to add another case report:

In this case the man had manually juice a dozen limes, then attended an outdoor soccer game without wearing sunscreen.  The erythema and blistering persisted for several days during rx with triamcinolone, eventually progressing to  hyperpigmentation and scaling, then normality (not shown).

Details at The New England Journal of Medicine.

Women with monkeys as prostitutes - updated

We'll begin with the photograph above (credit here, via BoingBoing 2006):

"...the community of Beloit, Wisconsin came together on the banks of the Rock River to recreate George Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of LaGrande Jatte."

They are performing a tableaux vivant to reproduce the famous pointillist painting shown here:

One difference between the photograph and the painting is that in the photograph, the woman in the foreground does not have a monkey at her feet.  This apparently reflected unavailability of one in Beloit, Wisconsin - or it may have been intentional, since the monkey symbolically represents that the woman may be a prostitute:

Furthermore, the inclusion of symbols, most obviously a monkey on a leash and a woman fishing, is indicative of the painting’s satirical nature. In nineteenth century slang, ‘singesse’ (female monkey in French) meant prostitute. The wordplay of ‘pêche’ (fishing) and ‘péché’ (sin) was a pun often made in French cartoons with reference to prostitution.  Such symbols speak to the ability of “the proletarian woman [to] become superficially bourgeois through prostitution.”  Through this subtle imagery, Seurat adds another dimension to the comparison of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, noting the superficiality and immorality within high class society.

That was all new to me, so I searched the web for pictures of women with monkeys, and after discarding those with Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, Fay Wray, and Jessica Lange, I found this one by Aubrey Beardsley (source):

The Lady and the Monkey. c. 1897

and this one by Picasso:

- both of which presumably incorporate the monkey with woman = prostitute symbolism, as may this this depiction mocking an early American suffragette:

- both found at Infinite Thought, where there are other photos of women with monkeys (linkrot since 2010).

I got started on this topic because of a Reddit thread last month, where the best comment comparing the Beloit photograph and the Seurat painting came from UserNumber42:

"Oddly enough, both were created with very small dots, one just has better resolution than the other."

And finally, since I won't have another chance to blog tableaux vivant again, I'll close with this old but quite remarkable music video by Hold Your Horses:

The art works recreated in the video are listed at Blog of an Art Admirer and History Lover.

Addendum:  Reposted from 2010 to add this example from the 1920s:

Found at La balsa de la Nostromo.  Perhaps some Francophile can translate for us the title and captions.  (Hat tip to an anonymous reader: "Title: "With monkeys being in fashion this winter, we'll leave the antics to them." Caption: "C'mon, hurry up, lady, you're putting me in an awkward position." The text at the bottom is number/pricing info for the magazine issue.)

Reposted from 2014 to add this relevant video I found today at Kottke:

Reposted again to accompany the adjacent post about monkeys, and because I had forgotten about that clever tableau vivant video.

Pondering infinite monkeys

We've all heard the old adage about monkeys at typewriters, sometimes expressed as a million monkeys (as above, via Savage Chickens), or as infinte monkeys, or as a monkey for infinite years.  Recently, Australian mathematicians have reconsidered the Finite Monkeys Theorem, and calculated that "given the expected time until the heat death of the universe, we demonstrate that the widely-accepted conclusion from the Infinite Monkeys Theorem is, in fact, misleading in our finite universe."  Their data as applied to various works of literature -

- is available online at Science Direct.

Sadly, I have lost my favorite cartoon on the subject.  It depicts a monkey turning in his paper to the teacher, who reads "To be, or not to be, that is the glbiftza" and tells the monkey "Sorry, try again."

A tip of the blogging cap to John Farrier at Neatorama for the via.

Monarchs at the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, Michoacan, Mexico

An awesome sight, but the first reports I've seen from Monarch Watch is that the numbers are way down again this year, especially in the sanctuaries in California.

Photo by Jaime Rojo, who was the European Wildlife Photographer of the Year for 2024, via a gallery in The Atlantic.

Wolves as pollinators (therophily)

If one were to ask people which mammals serve as polllinators of plants, most would probably identify bats, but I have to say this report of wolves doing so is a bit of a surprise.  Here's an abbreviated excerpt from a report in the journal Ecology:

Up to 87% of flowering plant species depend on a wide range of animal species for their pollination. Among mammals, nectivorous pollinator species are principally represented by flying species such as bats and, to a smaller extent, by some marsupials, rodents, primates, and small carnivores. It has been pointed out that therophily, pollination by non-flying mammals, may however be more widespread and hold more significance than currently recognized. For example, in Australia, direct experimentation has shown that the brown antechinus (Antechinus stuartii) and the sugar glider (Petaurus breviceps) are important pollinators of native Proteaceae (Banksia spp.). The mammals involved in pollination are typically small- to medium-sized and often arboreal species, whereas nectar-feeding carnivoran mammals are much rarer, with only four species of Carnivora among the 343 mammals identified as potential and known pollinators in a 2015 review. However, examples of carnivore species foraging for nectar, and putatively involved in pollination, continue to be discovered, such as the masked palm civet (Paguma larvata), the Cape genet (Genetta tigrina), and the Cape gray mongoose (Herpestes pulverulenta). Here, we report the visitation to inflorescences of the Ethiopian red hot poker (Kniphofia foliosa) by a large carnivore, the Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis), in the Bale Mountains of southern Ethiopia. Wolves were observed foraging for nectar on K. foliosa flowers, which deposited relatively large amount of pollen on their muzzles, suggesting they could contribute to pollination.

There is good discussion of the subject matter at the source article and in the via at The New York Times. 

A sad statistic

I don't have time or interest in tracking down the source data compiled by Bankrate,  so I don't know how much of this "average debt" is amassed by wealthy cardholders and how much is subject to carryover interest, tho they do note that "44 percent of cardholders carried a balance from month to month in January 2024."  This is an insidious and malicious form of debt.  I'm profoundly saddened to see the levels this high.

Image cropped from the one at Visual Capitalist.

"Where's Wanda?"

I've just finished watching this eight-part series streaming on Apple TV, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  The storyline is quite straightforward: a young woman goes missing and her family are convinced that she was kidnapped by someone nearby, so they start investigating everyone in the neighborhood, in the process uncovering all sorts of odd and illegal behavior.  

I think the series is properly categorized as "black comedy," combining true comedy with dark elements of murder and endangered-animal trafficking.  The cast were all new to me, but presumably well known to continental viewers: "International Emmy Award nominee Heike Makatsch (“Love Actually”), German Comedy Award winner Axel Stein (“The Vault”), multiple award-winning actress Lea Drinda ("The Gryphon”), newcomer Leo Simon, entrepreneur, actress and author Nikeata Thompson (“How to Dad”), presenter and actress Palina Rojinski (“Welcome to Germany”), Kostja Ullmann (“My Blind Date With Life”) and rising star Harriet Herbig-Matten (“Maxton Hall”)."  All of them are excellent in their character portrayals.

Because of my German-as-a-second-language background, I enjoyed leaving the audio set up as the original German with English subtitles.  And I was pleased to note that in the closing moments of the eighth and final episode, just 15 seconds before the end credits started to roll, there was a totally unexpected out-of-the-blue plot twist which undoubtedly foreshadows a second season.  A quick search revealed that a second season has not yet been announced; presumably the creators are waiting to see the response to this first season in order to secure funding, but with a score of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, I should think a second season is guaranteed.

A modern-day land grab

I own some vacant land in northern Minnesota - not fancy lakeshore, just woods and scrub brush with some wetlands - inherited from my father forty years ago.  I sometimes go up in the summer to hike and clear some trails.  Some years I lease out the property to local deer hunters for the autumn.

And every year I get letters offering to buy the property.  These don't come from local residents, who can find much better land to build on, or from hunters who prefer to lease rather than buy.  The offers come from people in Alabama, Arizona, Montana etc - always with a ridiculous lowball offer.   The senders of these letters harvest public records which show ownership and tax-assessed value, and they try to find owners who are either ignorant or desperate for money.

This year one of the letters, from "Land for Heroes" at a Boston address, was different - it asked me to "join their mission to help U.S. military families needing assistance."  "If we can buy your property for cash, we will donate in your name an additional 10% of the purchase price to one of our chosen charities."  Enclosed with the cover letter was a real estate purchase agreement offering me less than a third of the tax-assessed value (which in turn is typically is less than retail value).

I'm always offended by these letters because I think of the widows and elderly demented owners who will fall victim to the offers, but this year I'm also totally pissed off that the offer is cloaked in the guise of fake patriotism.  I spent 30+ years working in the Veterans Administration, and I view crap like this as being a distant relative to stolen valor.

I'm not calling this a scam per se.  It is presumably a valid offer to pay real cash for real property.  But it's sleazy and I hope these people step on a thousand lego blocks in their bare feet.