Bernie Taupin wrote "Daniel" while inspired by the events of the Vietnam War. The lyrics (including a verse in the original draft that was cut from the final version) describe a fictional veteran who was blinded as a result of the war ("your eyes have died"/"but you see more than I") and travels to Spain to escape those around him back home ("do you still feel the pain"/"of the scars that won't heal?"), including his brother, from whose point of view the story is told.
"'Daniel' had been the most misinterpreted song that we'd ever written," explained Taupin, in the Two Rooms tribute project. "The story was about a guy that went back to a small town in Texas, returning from the Vietnam War. They'd lauded him when he came home and treated him like a hero. But, he just wanted to go home, go back to the farm, and try to get back to the life that he'd led before. I wanted to write something that was sympathetic to the people that came home."
17 June 2015
"Daniel" - Elton John/Bernie Taupin
Don't pick up a desert tortoise
"Because desert tortoise live in an arid climate where most of the rainfall occurs during the monsoons, it is able to store water in its bladder for use during drought. It can go over a year without drinking. One of its defense mechanisms when handled or disturbed is to release the contents of its bladder, which can deplete its water supply and can cause harm or death during a drought. For this reason, if you find a desert tortoise, do not pick it up."Interesting that it can harvest water from the bladder. Mammalian bladders have a transitional epithelium that is virtually impermeable to water. But I found an NCBI article that documents reabsorption of water from Gila monster bladders, so presumably the same adaptation has evolved in tortoises.
With a hat tip to the QI elves...
16 June 2015
"The present is their only shared realm"
What would happen if you combined a nursing home with a preschool?
Via ViralNova, with a tip of the blogging cap to Kirsten.
11 June 2015
Family first
Mid-June is prime time for graduations and other family and neighborhood activities. As always, those things come first, so I'm unplugging for a week of blogcation. Those desperate for TYWKIWDBI-type material can explore the old archives or dig deeply in the "categories" in the right sidebar.
10 June 2015
Poofreader needed
The headline of this newspaper story shows why a spellchecker is not the same as a proofreader.
Via the carefully-proofread Nothing to do with Arbroath.
This is why children should play outdoors
"Hand print on a large TSA plate from my 8 1/2 year old son after playing outside."
Prepared by Tasha Sturm and posted at Microbe World. Exposure to bacteria and other microbes is an essential element in the development of a healthy human immune system.
Via Neatorama.
07 June 2015
Divertimento
How do blind people clean up after a seeing-eye dog defecates?
An op-ed piece in the Washington Post is entitled "The double-standard of making the poor prove they’re worthy of government benefits," written in response to exposés of alleged food-stamp misuse.
A map depicts the most conservative and most liberal cities in each state (I don't see any advantage in having this presented as a map rather than a list).
Humorous one-minute video of a windy day in Iceland.
A New Republic article explores why white people like camping and hiking, while minorities don't. "Carol Cain, a 42-year-old New Jersey resident of Dominican and Puerto Rican roots, was apparently day-hiking in Washington's Olympic National Park when she told the paper, "We’ve been here for two days, walking around, and I can’t think of any brown person that I’ve seen.”"
Trypophobia is the term for a pathological fear of objects with irregular patterns of holes.
Debunking the bogus argument that the Iraq war was based on faulty intelligence. And the same subject vehemently expressed by Rachel Maddow: "The Bush Administration was not passively lied to. They weren’t duped by the CIA! They made the case that they thought would be most persuasive even when it wasn’t true.”
Impressive gif of a man feeding snakes. This guy is good at his job.
Sub fusc explained. The term (new to me) is from the Latin subfuscus, "moderately dark."
Mental Floss offers a map of the most popular breed of dog in each state.
Books and journals published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with full-text and images online. An incredible resource link for those interested in a wide variety of art.
"Supergrass is a British slang term for an informer, which originated in London. Informers had been referred to as "grasses" since the late-1930s, and the "super" prefix was coined by journalists in the early 1970s... The origin of the term "grass" being used as signifying a traitor, a person who informs on people he or she knows intimately, ostensibly can be traced to the expression "snake in the grass," which has a similar meaning.The phrase derives from the writings of Virgil... and has been known in the English language, meaning "traitor," since the late 17th century."
A riot in Minneapolis occurred when bicyclists used squirtguns to attack PedalPub users. Six of the PedalPub users were cops; arrests ensued.
A gloomy economic forecast in The Telegraph: "The world economy is disturbingly close to stall speed. The United Nations has cut its global growth forecast for this year to 2.8pc, the latest of the multinational bodies to retreat... Stephen King from HSBC warns that the global authorities have alarmingly few tools to combat the next crunch, given that interest rates are already zero across most of the developed world, debts levels are at or near record highs, and there is little scope for fiscal stimulus. "The world economy is sailing across the ocean without any lifeboats to use in case of emergency," he said."
A Norwegian sex-education video.
"Inside Bain's house, police found thousands of meticulously catalogued individual socks wrapped in sandwich bags with individual donors’ photographs attached. “They were everywhere and anywhere,” a police officer later testified. “They were all over the furniture, hanging from lampshades and even in the microwave, frying pan and cooker. It was like there had been an explosion in a sock factory and socks had blown all over the place.”... The master approached his slave-to-be at a spiritualist church and told him he’d been conversing with angels, who had told him that he had to collect 10,000 socks. So the promise of socks lured the sock gimp into subservience."
"A stretch of coast which is rich in wildlife and archaeology has been bought by the National Trust for more than £1 million as it launches a new vision for looking after the nation's coastlines."
"A comprehensive guide to YouTube’s dumbest and most dangerous teen trends." The Cinnamon Challenge, the Saltine Challenge, the No-Cry Challenge, the Condom Challenge...
Cory Booker: “When they told me I couldn’t sit on the Senate floor with an iPad—that the technology wasn’t even permitted—I breathed deep and knew that I was going to have to start pushing.”
The Margate Shell Grotto is an as-yet-unexplained mystery: "the 2000 square feet of mosaics, created from mussel, cockle, whelk and oyster shells have provoked a multitude of explanations none of which have been confirmed with any total surety... had the grotto been built in the 1700s then there would have been some vestigial local memory (or legend) of its construction. In order to get millions of shells in to this underground passage many local people would have to have been involved in their transport. Yet the discovery in 1835 was a surprise to all – no one stepped forward with any explanation... suggestion that the grotto was built by the Knights Templar or their associates sometime in the middle 1100s..."
A New Zealand sikh removed his turban to comfort a small boy who had been injured in an accident. Some members of the local community responded in a heartwarming fashion.
Why Swiss cheese has holes. "Agroscope scientists noted that Swiss cheeses had fewer holes over the past 10 to 15 years as open buckets were replaced by sealed milking machines which "completely did away with the presence of tiny hay particles in the milk.""
A brief (but incisive) comment on the latest revelations re Dennis Hastert: "If I understand the history correctly, in the late 1990s, the President was impeached for lying about a sexual affair by a House of Representatives led by a man who was also then hiding a sexual affair, who was supposed to be replaced by another Congressman who stepped down when forced to reveal that he too was having a sexual affair, which led to the election of a new Speaker of the House who now has been indicted for lying about payments covering up his sexual contact with a boy. (links at the primary link)
The "twenty most bike-friendly [large] cities on the planet." One of them is in the United States.
Reaffirmation that airport security is for show: "An internal investigation of the Transportation Security Administration
revealed security failures at dozens of the nation’s busiest airports... The series of tests were conducted by Homeland Security Red Teams who pose as passengers, setting out to beat the system. According to officials briefed on the results of a recent Homeland
Security Inspector General’s report, TSA agents failed 67 out of 70 tests, with Red Team members repeatedly able to get potential weapons through checkpoints.
"As Savchuk and other former employees describe it, the Internet Research
Agency had industrialized the art of trolling. Management was obsessed
with statistics — page views, number of posts, a blog’s place on
LiveJournal’s traffic charts — and team leaders compelled hard work
through a system of bonuses and fines. “It was a very strong corporate
feeling,” Savchuk says. Her schedule gave her two 12-hour days in a row,
followed by two days off. Over those two shifts she had to meet a quota
of five political posts, 10 nonpolitical posts and 150 to 200 comments
on other workers’ posts. "
"1865. "Cold Harbor, Virginia. Unburied dead on the battlefield of Gaines' Mill." Photographs from the main Eastern theater of war, the
Peninsular Campaign, May-August 1862."
"...the culture of growing giant vegetables to show off is decidedly British."
A little girl smiles at a baseball game (brief video at the link).
04 June 2015
American Lady butterfly caterpillars construct their homes
When I posted last month about the start of my "fritillary project," I included a photo of a segment of the garden that included a bed of Pearly Everlasting, planted for the Amerian Lady butterflies.
This past week I was out in the garden and noticed that some changes had occurred (see top photo). The uppermost (and most tender) leaves, which are normally surfaced with a delicate downy fuzz, showed evidence of "scrapes," where the surface material had been removed. Near the central stem in this image are a few strands of silk, and some black dots. The latter are tiny bits of "frass," evidence of the presence of caterpillars - though the protagonists themselves were well hidden in the folds of the plant.
I returned yesterday to check the progress and found some elaborate "homes" constructed on the plants:
A small leaf that probably fortuitously happened to overhang another has now been sealed to the second leaf by a network of silk. Bits of the "?epithelium" of the plant have been incorporated into the webwork to create basically a camouflage pattern. But the perpetrator hasn't carried away his/her frass. On another plant I found one of the caterpillars out for an evening stroll:
It's getting to be a pretty good size now. The first instars were teeny and only able to scrape a few cells off the surface of the leaf. This guy is capable of cutting some major defects in the leaves. It is also capable of constructing those "houses" -
This one is bridging the gap between two leaves with silk. I doubt it can pull the leaves together, but it will probably create a canopy over the space (like the area in the upper right) where it can dine at leisure out of the vision of birds and presumably with fewer worries about ants and spiders. Note also that for a still immature caterpillar, this guy has a formidable array of defensive spines encircling its body.
Those in a hurry to see what happens next can peek at one of my old posts about the life cycle of American Lady butterflies (2010 and 2013).
"Cuccu"
02 June 2015
Coloring books for adults
The bestselling title on Amazon in the US right now is not Harper Lee’s hugely anticipated second novel, Go Set a Watchman, or George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, or even Zoella’s much-mocked but much-bought young adult hit, Girl Online. Instead, Scottish illustrator Johanna Basford is topping the charts, with her colouring books for adults taking top spots on Amazon.com’s bestseller lists...I purchased an adult coloring book and a set of colored pencils for my elderly mother, who has quite advanced dementia. It has been received with some measure of success.
And it is not just Basford who is reaping the benefits of the hordes of adults who, it turns out, just wanted something to colour in. In the UK, Richard Merritt’s Art Therapy Colouring Book sits in fourth spot on Amazon’s bestseller lists, Millie Marotta’s Animal Kingdom – detailed pictures of animals to colour – sits in seventh, and a mindfulness colouring book sits in ninth. Basford’s titles are in second and eighth place - that’s half of Amazon.co.uk’s top 10 taken up by colouring books for adults.
At independent UK publisher Michael O’Mara, which has sold almost 340,000 adult colouring books to date, head of publicity, marketing and online, Ana McLaughlin, attributes the craze to the way the category has been reimagined as a means of relaxation. “The first one we did was in 2012, Creative Colouring for Grown-Ups. It sold strongly and reprinted, but it was last year that it all really mushroomed with Art Therapy, in June. It really took off for us – selling the anti-stress angle gave people permission to enjoy something they might have felt was quite childish,” she said.
Image from The Colour Therapy Colouring Book (Michael O'Mara Books), found in this gallery.
Rear gunners
Pointers named Tyree and Skeeter poke through portholes in a Plymouth. Notes accompanying the photograph—which was published in a 1958 National Geographic book about dogs—say the animals' owner, E. D. Todd of Victoria, British Columbia, installed the openings in the trunk "to give dogs light and air when he went driving."Photo credit: Margaret G. Zackowitz
Perpetual war?
Using somewhat subjective definitions of "at war" -- Korea counts but Kosovo doesn't in our analysis, for example -- we endeavored to figure out how much of each person's life has been spent with America at war. We used whole years for both the age and the war, so the brief Gulf War is given a full year, and World War II includes 1941. These are estimates.Orwell's 1984 had Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia in a state of "perpetual war."
But the beginning of the conflict in Afghanistan in (late) 2001 means that anyone born in the past 13 years has never known an America that isn't at war. Anyone born after 1984 has likely seen America at war for at least half of his or her life.
Some people... have inferred, insinuated, or suggested that entering a state of perpetual war becomes progressively easier in a modern democratic republic, such as the United States, due to the development of a relationship network between people who wield political and economic power also owning capital in companies that financially profit from war, lobby for war, and influence public opinion of war through influence of mass media outlets that control the presentation for the causes of war, the effects of war, and the censorship of war...
Thousands of new Scrabble words
A nightmare for prescriptivists:
A clever ploy by the publishers to make me replace my Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. Again.Thousands of new words - including slang terms lolz, shizzle and obvs - have been added to the latest Scrabble word list, its publisher has said.
About 6,500 words have been added to the latest Collins Scrabble Word List, including a number of slang terms used on social media and in text messages. New words include twerking, emoji, bezzy and ridic - short for ridiculous.
Other new words now acceptable in the board game include onesie, devo - short for devolution - vape, and shootie, meaning a fashionable shoe that covers the ankle. New words involving technology include facetime, hashtag, and sexting, while exclamations such as augh, blech, eew, grr, waah and yeesh have also been added.
It is the first update to the list since 2011.
"Marble run machine"
Big Marble Run Machine: 11 000 Marbles!!! (Kugelbahn, Knikkerbaan)Mesmerizing.
This Marble Run "Marble Tsunami" has 4 tipping containers holding totally more than 11 000 marbles. In this video you'll see the 10 000 marbles AND the 1000 marbles container will tipping together causing more than 11 000 marbles rolling down the giant tracks. The sound is deafening, because of the noise, it will be equipped with noise damping housing and glass panels on the front.
Specs:
- Number of marbles total: around 13 000
- Number of paths: 4
- Number of tipping containers: 4 (10, 120, 1070 and 10 600 marbles)
- Construction started: 20 april 2015
- Construction completed: Expected begin june 2015 (only need some finetuning)
- Dimensions: L= 10 m (33 feet) W= 1,2 m (4 feet) H=1,8 m (6 feet)
- Location: Monkey Town (indoor playground), Gouda (NL)
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