A drive down the Fjaerland fjord

YouTube link.

This 22-minute video takes the viewer for a ride down Norway's Fjaerland Fjord (which branches off at Balestrand from the larger and better-known Sognefjord).  The trip begins at the head (north end) of the fjord, proceeds for about 6 minutes south to the area of the Fjaerland "booktown," then turns back north, ending at one of the tunnels that opened this fjord to the vehicular traffic of the world.

The video holds special interest for me because one quarter of my genes (the Distad family ones, from the hamlet of Distad) emigrated from this valley to settle in Minnesota.  I visited this area in the 1980s, when the only access was by ferry, and met family members who gave me a copy of a family tree tracing various Olsons and Torsons and Ivarsdatters and Andresons and Distads back to the 1600s.

Posted mostly for my family.  Casual readers will not want to view the entire video, but it's worth sampling the first 4-5 minutes just to get a sense of the majesty of a real fjord.  Americans will notice a) the absence of advertising billboards, and b) that some people actually walk.

If you do watch, absolutely click on the full-screen icon in the lower right corner.  That's what it's for.

"But I wish Hercule Poirot had never retired from work and come here to grow vegetable marrows."

Flight 370 is still (presumably) on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.  To get a grasp of the "depth" of the problem of locating the craft, see this infographic.

In Germany, mini-drones are flown over fields before harvest to locate newborn fawns, so that they won't be killed by harvesters, which is "traumatic for the farmers and machine operators involved and, furthermore, polluted the cut grass, which was used as livestock feed, with shredded deer remains."

An op-ed piece in Salon remembers and bemoans the death of the middle class:

In our neighbors’ driveways, in their living rooms, in their backyards, I saw the evidence of prosperity distributed equally among the social classes: speedboats, Corvette Stingrays, waterbeds, snowmobiles, motorcycles, hunting rifles, RVs, CB radios. I’ve always believed that the ’70s are remembered as the Decade That Taste Forgot because they were a time when people without culture or education had the money to not only indulge their passions, but flaunt them in front of the entire nation. It was an era, to use the title of a 1975 sociological study of a Wisconsin tavern, of blue-collar aristocrats. That all began to change in the 1980s...

If you insist on always using "data" as a plural noun (based on its Latin origin), what do you do with "agenda" ??

Once again this spring a wall of ice moved off some northern Minnesota lakes, damaging homes of those who built them too close to the shoreline.  There are reasons why some local building codes incorporate setbacks from shoreline, and not just for riparian environmental preservation.

In nineteenth-century France, the Grand Guignol was responsible for presenting some of the world's first public "splatter movies."

"More than 100 people have now reported they got sick with suspected food poisoning at a national Food Safety Summit held earlier this month in Baltimore."

Video of a 6-year-old competing in the Asia Pacific Yoyo Championships.

Details about Soylent powdered food (it's not made from people, or from soy).

A ten-second television advertisement for a French bakery includes the moment a cat ran headlong into the glass door.

For a more cat-friendly link, see this gif of a cat greeting a human, then see the half-dozen variants posted below it.

This DNR link gives you access to maps of all public lands in Wisconsin (an excellent resource for outdoors enthusiasts).  I presume similar links exist for other states.

Wikipedia now has a (long) page detailing the 2014 Ukranian revolution.

How to make your own dragon eggs (photo at right).

A compilation of over a hundred college and university graduation speeches.  I've previously blogged (and recommend) the one by Ellen DeGeneres and the one by J.K. Rowling.

"The Lorain County Correctional Institution acknowledged Friday that pirated movies are being shown to prisoners there, even as inmates serve time for illegally downloading movies."

An interview with Matt Taibbi regarding his new book on income inequality.

Michael Jackson's Billie Jean performed at a high-school talent competition.

Various interesting facts, including that Mars is entirely populated by robots.

A group of high-school students take an eye-opening field trip to a local pawnshop.

A spelling test.

It is becoming more common for men to take their wife's surname when they marry.

A compilation of blogs by expats.

The Monarch in the top photo is the first one we have had this year raised from an egg laid on milkweed in our garden.  She eclosed about 0730 this morning and will fly away before noon.

The title quote is the last sentence of Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - one of her classic novels, but one that should NOT be the first Christie you read.  Get experience reading a dozen or two other ones first; save this one for later.

Skeletal remains of a "hellhound" found

It's real - but not from hell:

Since the middle-ages, legend has spread of a fearful beast once said to stalk [Suffolk's] coastline and countryside.

Despite tales of a fiery-eyed monster showing up in graveyards, forests and roadsides - and an account of claw marks surfacing on the door to Blythburgh Church - the giant dog’s existence has been reserved to the annals of folklore.

Until now, perhaps, as archeologists have revealed evidence of huge skeletal remains unearthed by a member of the public in the trenches at Leiston Abbey last year...

“The dog is huge - about the size of a Great Dane - and was found near where the abbey’s kitchen would have been.

“It was quite a surprise. We’re all dog lovers and we have a site dog with us on our digs, so it was quite poignant. “Even back then, pets were held in high regard.”

Here's more info on the legendary "Black Shuck":

Black Shuck, Old Shuck, Old Shock or Shuck is the name given to a medieval hellhound in England. This devil dog was said to have black fur, flaming eyes, sharp teeth and claws, and great strength. Locals described sightings of Black Shuck in graveyards, forests, and roadsides. Shuck’s most famous attack happened on August 4th, 1577 at two churches in Blythburgh
and Bungay in the English countryside, about seven miles from Leiston Abbey.

During a storm on August 4th 1577, Black Shuck reportedly broke through the doors of Holy Trinity Church in Blythburgh and charged through a large congregation. It was during this attack that he allegedly killed a man and a boy, right before the church steeple collapsed through the roof.  It was during this attack that Black Shuck left claw marks on the north door of Holy Trinity Church that are still visible today...

Though musing about the earthly remains of a legendary creature or cryptid is always fun, this giant skeleton probably belonged to an abbot’s faithful canine companion or hunting dog. At best the sightings of this huge, domesticated dog by superstitious people may have sparked the rumors about Black Shuck.

"Writhing time" at World Cup matches

From an article in the Wall Street Journal:

All too often during matches, seemingly fit men fall to the ground in agony. They scream, wince, pound the grass with their fists and gesture to the sidelines for a stretcher. Some of them clutch a limb as if it was just freed from the jaws of a wood chipper. But after a few moments, just as the priests arrive to administer last rites, they sit up on the gurney, shake it off, rise to their feet and run back on the field to play some more.

Fans of the world's most popular game know that this is just one of soccer's oldest and most universally despised tactics. Turning a small foul into a death performance worthy of La Scala can draw cards for opposing players, kill time from the clock or just give one's winded teammates a breather...

The study showed one thing emphatically: The amount of histrionics your players display during a match correlates strongly to what the scoreboard says. Players on teams that were losing their games accounted for 40 "injuries" and nearly 12.5 minutes of writhing time. But players on teams that were winning—the ones who have the most incentive to run out the clock—accounted for 103 "injuries" and almost four times as much writhing. 

Details at the link, via Reddit.

Blue

"Taken during "The Mayana Soora Thiruvizha" festival takes place every March in the small village of Kaveripattinam, the day after Mahashivarathiri (The great night of Shiva). The festival is devoted to Angalamman, a fierce guardian deity worshipped widely in Southern India."

Text and image by Mahesh Balasubramanian, via National Geographic Traveler.

Semen used as invisible ink during WWI

There are other choices besides lemon juice:

Though British counterintelligence spent a considerable amount of time trying to detect enemy secret ink, MI6, British foreign intelligence, experimented with its own recipes... Officers were especially interested in experimenting with bodiily fluids like blood, saliva, urine, and semen - all readily available substances.  An advantage of using bodily fluids is that possession of these substances is not proof of guilt... [spies had been convicted and executed based on the discovery of lemon residue on writing instruments].

Mansfield Cumming, head of MI6... thought "the best invisible ink is semen."  MI6 investigators thought they had solved a great problem, and the men started gleefully experimenting with the new discovery.  Obviously, the main way to produce semen at the office was through masturbation.  The agent who had discovered the covert use of semen reportedly had to transfer to another department after he was teased so much by other staff members.  One officer in Copnhagen took the new discovery so seriously that he "stocked it in a bottle - for his letters stank to high heaven and we had to tell him that a fresh operation was necessary for each letter." (p. 151)

Found in Prisoners, Lovers, & Spies; The Story of Invisible Ink from Herodotus to al-Qaeda, by Kristie Macrakis.

A compilation of presidential "executive orders"

This subject will be in the news this summer because...

In a memo addressed to his colleagues on Wednesday, Boehner officially announced his plans to introduce legislation in July that would authorize the House General Counsel to sue the Obama administration and "compel" the president to fulfill his oath of office to enforce existing law.

"If the current president can selectively enforce, change or create laws as he chooses with impunity, without the involvement of the Legislative Branch, his successors will be able to do the same," Boehner wrote in the memo. "This shifts the balance of power decisively and dangerously in favor of the presidency, giving the president king-like authority at the expense of the American people and their elected legislators."

While awaiting details of which orders will be challenged, I thought it would be good to post the Wikipedia page detailing all of the executive orders by the current and all the past presidents.  At the page you can scroll down to access the content of each order by each president.

CCC-constructed stone "Kiwanis Cabin" in New Mexico

Summer is the time for travel, and thus the opportunity for me and the readers of this blog to visit CCC-constructed stonework projects around the country.  These photos come to us courtesy of reader Christopher, who recently traveled to Albuquerque, and found this stone structure at an altitude of 10,000+ feet along the Sandia Crest Road.

A plaque embedded in the stone confirms the provenance of the structure.  It is classic CCC work in that it makes use exclusively of local stone.  The style obviously does not involve tight junctions, and the overall appearance of a partially-collapsed "ruin" is clearly an artistic endeavor.  I found this explanation online:

The trail starts out along the crest and then wanders into the woods for a while, before skirting the edge of Kiwanis Meadow and winds its way back towards the crest and to the Kiwanis rock house. In the 1920's the Kiwanis Club of Albuquerque built a log cabin on the site which was destroyed by fire a couple of years later. A second log cabin was destroyed by high winds. In the 1930's the Kiwanis Club asked the Civilian Conservation Corps to build them a new cabin, which they did in the summer of 1936. The CCC constructed the cabin out of local limestone, and in the style known as "Rustic Aesthetic."

Inside, the structure seems to follow the general pattern of other state- and national-park CCC buildings, serving as a shelter from inclement weather, with a basic fireplace? for cooking.

The Albuquerque Journal had this additional information in 2007:

To clean a year's worth of graffiti off the Kiwanis Cabin at Sandia Crest, it takes three archaeologists, a truck with a pressure washer, someone to drive the truck and someone to use the washer in a way that doesn't damage the cabin...
 
The cabin had windows on three sides, a fireplace and a door, but the fireplace was sealed and the windows and door were removed.  "Beginning in the '40s the windows started being broken," Hudson said.

So sad to hear about the graffiti and vandalism performed by mindless cretins.

A quick search this morning produced a detailied pdf about the role of the CCC in the New Mexico park system.  I also found these notes about the CCC in New Mexico in the Forestry Service's website:

In the span of eight years, from 1933 to 1941, 54,585 Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees in New Mexico built hundreds of roads and rails, 795 bridges, 472 lookout towers large dams and reservoirs, installed millions of rods of fences and planted millions of trees for reforestation and to prevent gully erosion.  When these New Mexico men joined the corps, along with 3.5 million other Americans, the country was in desperate straits. Close to 25 percent of the population was unemployed. Hunger and despair had become a way of life.  A group of local corps alumni want to see a memorial CCC museum of national stature built on the site where CCC Camp 814 F-8-N Sandia Park once stood on a piece of land just off NM 536, the Sandia Crest Road. They want people to know what they accomplished in youthful days during the Great Depression. And they want today’s youth to know that youth are a major asset to this country, just as the CCC men were when they were boys. The CCC was the greatest-ever conservation effort in American history.

I have a variety of pleasant memories of the Sandias, dating from the time I lived in Dallas and visited family in Grants and friends in Albuquerque.  But despite hiking and playing frisbee in the mountains, I don't remember ever having encountered this cabin.

Again, a hat tip to reader Christopher for sending me the photos; if readers in the Albuquerque region have photos of other stonework along the Sandia Crest Trail (bridges, stairways), please feel free to send them along.

4-year-old exposes the criminality of her "bad babysitter"

YouTube link.

Details from the Bellingham Herald (but it's better to listen to the girl tell the story):

A teenage babysitter and two young men were arrested Wednesday, June 18, when the babysitter made up a story about two armed, black men breaking into an apartment east of Ferndale to throw deputies off the track of the real thieves, according to the Whatcom County Sheriff's Office.

The 17-year-old girl had been watching three kids from 1 to 4 years old at the apartment in the 5400 block of Northwest Drive. She reported two black men in their 20s or 30s - one with a gun, one with a knife - had barged in through a back door around 4:20 p.m. and told her she should leave if she didn't want to get hurt. None of the children were hurt as they fled from the apartment with her.

A SWAT team, a U.S. border helicopter and dozens of law enforcement personnel - many of them on call, working overtime - responded to the scene looking for two armed men with backpacks...

Cody Oakes, 25, an operations manager for J.P. Morgan, had been ready to walk out the door with a duffel bag in his hand to go to football practice. (He plays quarterback and wide receiver for the Bellingham Bulldogs, a semi-pro team.) He'd noticed heavily armed police in camouflage marching down the road.

One of his roommates got in touch with a detective and found out what was going on. Through her, deputies ordered Oakes to come outside. He did, once the detective agreed to come in and escort him out. A sniper stood about 25 yards away with his sight fixed on Oakes. Deputies handcuffed him, pulled his shirt over his head, and sat him in the back of a patrol car...

Eventually, the teen admitted she'd made up the story about an armed home invasion to cover for how she'd let her 16-year-old boyfriend and a young man, Ruben Jerome Benjamin, 18, into the apartment to steal electronics, said Sheriff Bill Elfo.

The burglars briefly got away with a gaming system, laptops and a piggy bank, stuffing a total of $1,500 in stolen goods in their backpacks.

More the link.

"Kentucky Fried hoax"

The news report that a little girl whose face was scarred by pit bulls was asked to leave a KFC establishment because her disfigurement was disturbing the customers... is a HOAX.  A fundraising hoax.

They originally said the child and her grandmother were asked to leave a KFC that turned out to have been closed for years. Victoria’s aunt Teri Rials Bates, who maintains the page, later said it happened at another location on Woodrow Wilson Drive near the Jackson hospital where Victoria went for treatment.

Security camera footage from that KFC and another near the hospital does not show children matching Victoria’s description going into either restaurant on May 15, according to sources interviewed by the Leader-Call. Nor did any orders taken that day include both sweet tea and mashed potatoes – what Mullins claimed she ordered for her granddaughter...

People touched by Victoria’s story have reportedly sent in more than $135,000 in donations as surgeons offered their services for free... The fast-food restaurant had already committed $30,000 to help pay Wilcher’s  medical bills; a spokesman told the AP they would pay regardless of what the investigation into the incident found.

More details from the local Mississippi newspaper investigation.

After it went viral, employees and managers at both Jackson locations have faced death threats, have had drinks thrown at them through the drive-thru window and have faced constant verbal harassment, the source confirmed...

National and world media such as CNN, Nancy Grace, Huffington Post and The Today Show jumped on the story, lambasting the employees, KFC and YUM! Brands, KFC’s corporate owners...

Rufus: biologic control of pigeons at Wimbledon

YouTube link.

This is a no-kill video, btw...

Here's an ask-me-anything from Rufus' handler at the stadium.

Milkweed - the first week

Anyone who has read this blog on a regular basis knows that I have repeatedly decried the sad situation facing Monarch butterflies in the United States.  There's little I can do to alleviate the loss of their winter habitat in the mountain forests of Mexico or to stem the widespread use of Roundup herbicide, but perhaps with a series of blog posts I can inform the public about some of the nuances of growing milkweed - the Monarch's host plant (the only plant its caterpillars can feed on).

At our latitude (southern Wisconsin in the Upper Midwest), spikes of milkweed emerge in early May.  These are growing from deep and well-established root systems that are well-protected from surface freezing temperatures in the winter.  I presume the trigger for cell division is some threshhold temperature or some accumulation of degree-days.  When that limit is reached, the growth is rapid.  The top image shows asparagus-like spears that had not been present the day before.

With an deep-underground branching root system, the spikes can emerge in what appears to be totally inhospitable microenvironments.  This one is coming through an old (probably deteriorated) piece of landscape fabric and past a layer of gravel.  And the early growth is rapid:

This photo was taken one week after the first two.  It's already 6" high and ready to accept Monarch eggs and tolerate the depradations of several caterpillars (Monarchs typically lay their eggs singly, but sometimes two oviposit on the same plant).

In the next installment I'll comment on the perception of the "weediness" of the plant.

Note:  the milkweed shown here is Asclepias syriaca - the "common milkweed."

A Nepalese "living goddess"

She's worshipped by both Hindus and Buddhists in Nepal, who believe she's a reincarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga.

I got to know the mother of this Kumari - Nepal has a few of them - after several visits to her house. How did it feel when her daughter, Samita, was chosen to be a Kumari, I asked?

"I felt both happy and sad," she says. "On one hand, I felt happy because when your daughter becomes god, having a god in the home is a delightful thing. But I also got scared because I wasn't sure if we would be able to follow all the rules."

There are many rules. For one, Samita's mother has to apply special makeup to her daughter's face in intricate designs. The girl isn't allowed to go outside except for festivals. On those occasions, her feet must not touch the ground. That means someone has to carry the young goddess...

I expect we'll do the interview in Nepali, but when I ask her a question, she starts speaking fluently in English. She tells me that she learned the language by reading newspapers during her Kumari days.

"When I was a goddess, I used to peek through the holes of windows," Chanira says. She's now a 19-year-old business student, and looks like any ordinary teenager in her fashionable green T-shirt and black trousers. She became a Kumari when she was just five years old...

This divine life ended abruptly when Chanira was 15, on the day she first menstruated. Suddenly she was no longer the Kumari. She says the transition was difficult. "When I had to step out of my house for the first time, I didn't know how to walk properly," she says. "My mom and dad, they used to hold my hands and teach me how to walk."

Photo and text from the BBC.

A baby with two faces (craniofacial duplication)

YouTube link.

The brief video excerpt has some details.   For more information on the condition, see the Wikipedia entry on diprosopus.  The twins featured in the video died at age 19 days.

A Scandinavian megacity?

[The Oslo to Copenhagen] corridor is the most densely populated stretch of Scandinavia, home to 8 million of the region's 20 million people. An ambitious plan aims to link up its cities, medium-sized by global standards, across three different countries to form a single megalopolis - '8 Million City'.

The glue that will hold this megacity together? A high-speed train link that should reduce rail travel time between Oslo and Copenhagen from 7.5 hours today to 2.5 hours by 2025.

More at Big Think, which notes that expansion with a side link to Stockholm would create a 12-million-person megalopolis.  Personally, I would argue with the hypothesis that "next-level development is hampered by the demographic dispersal in small, relatively isolated urban centres," but obviously there's big money at stake here.