Pink Floyd: Echoes (live at Pompeii)

YouTube link. 

Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves in labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant tide
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine
And no one showed us to the land
And no one knows the where's or why's
But something stirs and something tries
And starts to climb towards the light

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can
And no one calls us to move on
And no one forces down our eyes
And no one speaks
And no one tries
And no one flies around the sun

Cloudless every day you fall
Upon my waking eyes
Inviting and inciting me to rise
And through the window in the wall
Comes streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning
And no one sings me lullabies
And no one makes me close my eyes
So I tore the windows wide
And call to you across the sky.

Posted as a companion to the entry above, because once you start posting Pink Floyd videos, it's hard to stop.

Tarpaulins used to be tarred

This past week I quite literally wore out a tarpaulin, dragging hardwood mulch from its dump pile to a destination a hundred yards away.  While doing so, I wondered about the etymology of the word, and found the answer in a column at the Oxford University Press blog which also discusses the related "awning."

The famous sailor Captain John Smith wrote (OED): “Wee did hang an awning (which is an old saile) to… trees to shadow us from the Sunne” (1624) and “A trar-pawling; or yawning” (1626)...

Tarpaulin... “means tarred pauling or tarred palling; a palling is a covering, from the verb pall, to cover.” ...  tarpaulin seems to have been tarred, and the OED gives a 1725 citation to this effect. Equating pallin(g) with paulin is more problematic... suggested that paulin is the same word as Middle English palyoun “canopy.” Its cognate in all the continental Scandinavian languages is paulun, a popular variant of pavilion. Low German exhibits nearly the same form. Given this reconstruction, tarpaulin is half-English and half-Scandinavian (or German, though more likely Scandinavian).

So the tarred covering cloth would probably be similar to an "oilskin" used by sailors for waterproof clothing.  Wikipedia suggests that the use of "tars" to refer to sailors derives from their association with tarpaulins.

Pianos in the dumpster

“In winter time we burn them,” Mr. Demler, near left, said. “Ashes to ashes,” Mr. Demler added. “Dust to dust,” Mr. Williams, far left, said, unscrewing pins that held the strings.  Credit: Marcus Yam for The New York Times.

I've encountered two articles in recent months about the sad fate awaiting many current pianos.  First from the New York Times in July:

The value of used pianos, especially uprights, has plummeted in recent years. So instead of selling them to a neighbor, donating them to a church or just passing them along to a relative, owners are far more likely to discard them, technicians, movers and dealers say. Piano movers are making regular runs to the dump, becoming adept at dismantling instruments, selling parts to artists, even burning them for firewood...

With thousands of moving parts, pianos are expensive to repair, requiring long hours of labor by skilled technicians whose numbers are diminishing. Excellent digital pianos and portable keyboards can cost as little as several hundred dollars. Low-end imported pianos have improved remarkably in quality and can be had for under $3,000...

The average life span rarely exceeds 80 years, piano technicians say. That’s a lot of pianos now reaching the end of the line. Piano dealers also blame other changes in society for a lack of demand in the used-piano market: cuts in music education in schools, competition for practice time from other pursuits, a drop in spending on home furnishings with the fall of the housing market...

When owners ask where a cherished piano is going, he said, he tries to avoid the subject or tells them it will be put up for adoption. “The last thing they want to hear is that it’s going to a landfill,” he said. 

Similar sentiments are echoed across the pond in a BBC report:

A piano has thousands of moving parts, making restoration a very time-consuming, and specialist business. Just polishing a piano can take 70 hours. "It becomes a money pit," says Gist, and so often the best advice - and advice he doles out several times a day - is just to get rid of it...

"In the 1920s, they were made for the mass market. They were not made to last, they were made to sell," says Marcus Roberts of Roberts Pianos in Oxford. He says, much like a house, a piano needs to be built with good foundations if it is to last. "When you are making cheap pianos to sell, you are going to cut corners. Those pianos were never put together properly."..

But there is one market where the piano is booming - China.  Around 300,000 pianos were made in big factories in China last year, as well as a large share of the world's piano parts for repairs...

Because of the tension in the strings, it is dangerous to dismantle a piano if you don't know what you are doing - and a slow task if you do.  Loosening the strings, and separating the wood from the metal takes around 10 hours, says Hirschfelder. If a piano has really been neglected it might have attracted rats or mice, who like to eat the animal glue used to hold it together and nuzzle up to the felt, meaning that hantavirus - a deadly disease spread by rodents - is a danger.

The keys are made of ebony and ivory, which he has seen made into jewellery, artwork - even exclusive tiling around swimming pools.

More at the links.

Processionary caterpillars

Several British news sources posted the above photo of caterpillars crossing a road -

This incredible convoy is the ultimate commuter train - a trail of tiny caterpillars heading off into the bush. An amazing 136 caterpillars wriggled top-to-toe across a road on their migratory route in Kruger National Park, South Africa. The delicate insects were linked by a single thin silk thread which set their path out into the bush, where they will eventually turn into butterflies. Jamie Rooney, from High Wycombe, Bucks, was visiting South Africa for the World Cup when he snapped the crawling convoy.

They didn't offer any details about the biology, which took me a while to track down.  They appear to be "processionary caterpillars."  They are the larvae of moths (not butterflies), have nasty urticating hairs, and are capable of defoliating their host plants.  The silk on the trail is for grip, not for guidance, which is determined by pheromones and by tactile stimulation by the setae of the preceding caterpillar.  More info and pix at this link.

Photo credit.

Addendum: Found quite a bit more info at this Catalonian site, including this cautionary observation -

Veterinary services have many emergency calls at the time when the caterpillars are migrating to the ground as inquisitive dogs can get too close to the intriguing procession and may pick up the hairs onto their paws, these irritate and so they lick them. Once the hairs are on the lips/tongue it will induce itching, swelling and possibly vomiting. Look out for the symptoms of : small white spots in the mouth and on the tongue, excessive drooling and chomping. In some cases partial amputation of the tongue is the only course of action.

Addendum:  Reposted from 2010 to add this video via Nothing To Do With Arbroath.

YouTube link.

Urinals

The "She-Pee" is a public urinals for women designed for use where large crowds make speed and efficacy more important than privacy.

Female revellers at Britain’s outdoor Glastonbury Festival will be able to enjoy this year’s show without straining their bladders — courtesy of stand-up urinals.

Organisers have installed two sets of the urinals around the main Pyramid stage for the exclusive use of women, complete with “concierge” attendants to ensure a dignified experience.

Key to the arrangement is a special, anatomically shaped funnel to be handed out to each user. 

Photo from the BBC in 2004.  Text (and more details) at xes, via Grit in the Gears, where the similarity is noted to Victorian-era public urinals on display at the railway museum in Darlington:

There is of course more information on urinals at the relevant Wikipedia entry, including this tidbit:

Ernest Hemingway converted a urinal from Sloppy Joe's bar into a water fountain for his cats. The fountain remains a prominent feature at his former home in Key West, Florida, a popular tourist destination in the town.

Making use of "living architecture"

YouTube link. 

A segment from the BBC "Human Planet" series.

Trichome of a stinging nettle

From the Nikon Small World 2012 Photomicrography Competition.  Lots more fascinating photos at the link.  I chose this one because of my own too-close-encounter with stinging nettles.

Waste in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy

Men dispose of shopping carts full of food damaged by Hurricane Sandy at the Fairway supermarket in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn in New York, on October 31, 2012. The food was contaminated by flood waters that rose to approximately four feet in the store during the storm. 

I fully understand that the storm waters were contaminated by human and industrial waste, but it still seems to me that sealed jars of food could be cleaned and used.  Presumably there's insurance reimbursement, and a tax write-off, and a fear of litigation...  Sigh.

AP Photo/Seth Wenig, from an impressive gallery at The Atlantic.

"The Last Time I Felt Like This"

YouTube link. 

Sung by Johnny Mathis and Jane Olivor as soundtrack for the movie Same Time Next Year.  I enjoyed watching the movie this week and wanted to post the song, but all I could find was this dreadfully dark version.  In the movie itself, the song was entertainingly backed by interesting still photos of current events happening between the acts of the play.

Zipper tattoo

Scar enhanced with the addition of a "zipper."

Found at Cakehead Loves Evil, where there are several additional examples.

"Panem et circenses"

("Bread and circuses")

When you exchange money for a good or service, you’re telling people that the time you spent doing whatever job it is that you do is being exchanged for the time they spent doing whatever it is that they do. What we do as a society is place a value on how much that time is worth in relation to what you produce. Let’s look at how we value time in this country (if you want to find these numbers, just Google “median [job] compensation” — numbers are closest approximations I could find; I use median because average tends to skew the numbers higher).

Median CEO – $9.6 million a year
Median NBA player – $2.33 million a year
Median NFL player – $770,000 a year
Median Physician – $278,000 a year (specialties vary)
Median Farmer/Rancher – $60,000 a year
Median Teacher – $55,000 a year
Median Firefighter – $42,000 a year
Median Janitor – $22,000 a year 

So what do these numbers tell us? That for every one year a CEO works, a doctor has to work around 34, a teacher or farmer or firefighter has to work around 175, and a janitor has to work around 436.

This is ridiculous. We value the people who keep us healthy, fed, and educated far less than those who tell others what to do, or those who play a children’s game. You’re telling me that one year of my life spent kicking a football (I make a bit above the median) is worth almost four years of a doctor’s services? That what I do on a football field is more important than teaching classrooms of children how to learn for 22 years? That someone can spend six lifetimes cleaning up after people, preventing the spread of germs and disease, and still barely approach a year’s worth of shuffling stock portfolios and mergers, of making conference calls and speculating (wildly at times) on bonds and futures?

I say, “No”. While I spend a lot of time honing my craft, there is absolutely no way the time I spend comes even close to benefiting society as much as a doctor or a teacher or a janitor. I clean no floors, I cure no sick, I put out no fires. But we continue to pay me, and people like me, obscene amounts of money; you give us your time! We tell companies and con men, “We would rather be entertained and distracted than focus on building a better future. We would rather elect politicians who pass morality laws and tax cuts to help the rich get richer; we’d rather vote for a quick fix that makes us feel good now than address the root problems of our system.”..

p.s. Some may call me a hypocrite for being a part of the system, for entertaining rather than teaching. To you I say this: “Change the system. Put me out of a job. Pay the teachers and firefighters and doctors and janitors what you pay me, and I’ll gladly do those jobs instead. Value the useful, and not the merely entertaining or self promoting; give a voice to the currently voiceless. Unfortunately, as it stands, I can only operate in the framework we’ve all created, the society that millions upon millions of Americans erect every Sunday, every election cycle, with every bailed-out bank and golden parachute they fund while bridges crumble and schools shut down.”

Are you not entertained? 

The above is an extended excerpt from an entry in Out of Bounds - the blog of Chris Kluwe, punter for the Minnesota Vikings.  The blog was formerly published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press; Kluwe is withdrawing from that forum because of the newspaper's editorial policy on the pending marriage amendment in Minnesota.

Street party in Iran

YouTube link. 

Not a spectacular video in any sense - posted just as a reminder not to stereotype all the people of a country based on the character of the leaders of their government.

Although the source describes it as a "rave party," I wonder if it was filmed on Chahrshanbeh Suri, the eve of Iranian New Year celebration of the renewal of fire.

Via Reddit.

Poliosis

Poliosis is a condition in which there is a lack of pigment in the hair, eyebrows and eyelashes, which appear whitish, grey. The condition normally occurs in patches. It is often associated with vitiligo, alopecia and forms part of the Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada syndrome.

Image from This Mama Makes Stuff, which has an excellent discussion and comment thread re vitiligo, depigmentation, and how to help children and adolescents cope with the disorder.   

Via The Soul is Bone (whence the text).

These girls are not dwarves

It's an unintentional optical illusion created by the positioning of the members of the wedding party (they are sitting on the knees of the men). 

Found at Mighty Optical Illusions.

Soaker hose after a drought

The woods behind our home is classified as "xeric" (relatively dry, typically hosting drought-tolerant species like white, red, and black oak), but we wanted to have some underplantings of hosta, so for years I had left in the woods a "soaker hose" to use when the hosta needed watering. 

This year Madison had a record drought; we even stopped watering, to let the grass and various plants go dormant.  As I worked in the woods this week putting mulch on the walking paths, I had to lift the old soaker hose, and discovered the above segment.

Some critter was able to smell residual water inside the hose and went after it.  Judging from the size of the bite marks I would guess it to have been a very small rodent, which would make sense since the larger mammals (chipmunks, raccoons, squirrels, opossum, fox) are able to travel longer distances to find water.  We typically keep a couple "water features" (basins) in the woods to service the small ones, but I guess those had run dry.