Steve Aylett's LINT for World Book Day - Every vote counts

LINT by Steve Aylett is in the top ten shortlist of World Book Day's "Spread the Word" competition, thanks to those who voted —no back rooms or judges with taste better than yours in this competition!

So now, no matter where you live and no matter what species you are, if you can stomp on keys, even YOU can vote and make that final difference.

And you know you can believe me when I tell you that only for LINT (a book I've raved about before) and only in honour of Jeff Lint's immortal tackiness would I ever put an animated anything on my oh-so tasteful site.

Magnificent insignificant

Postscript: Budak has commented, Are these a grass or sedge? I see them here too, and some have loads of aphids on them.

So I have added this picture to show that it is a grass, though I must again parade my ignorance. What type of grass? I can only say expertly that it is a common type (and free of aphids).

I'm sure that anyone who posts pictures like these should have at hand Van Klaphake's Guide to the Grasses of Sydney (Fourth edition). I don't.

But Budak's comment gave me the opportunity to say that the annotated budak is my far-and-away favourite site on the web. It is not only intelligent about the natural world and our species in it, but witty in a way that is never cruel but is so often hilariously true. The thing about Budak is that it doesn't matter which posting one looks at. They are all so delicious. This, from Crab goes *crunch*, is just the latest:

The second specimen he worked on was gravid. Each hack stirred up a juicy splash of yellow roe from the book gills that spilled out onto the rock. The elderly pakcik who purchased the crabs remarked that the portions are prepared with assam pedas to make a meal that rivals the flavour of true crabs. I wanted to tell him that I didn't like the taste of crabs anyway, be they true or false, but my daunted duck thought better of arguing with a guy with a sharp object who probably prefers to mince more than just words.

Democracy as spectator sport

It's blow-by-blow coverage here — America's Super Tuesday, complete with countdowns to poll-close — on Australian TV and in our newswires.

Will today clinch the title for each Party's contestant, though many Americans have had as much chance to make that choice as Australians do? Or will the race continue to other states, and then on to the conventions' back rooms?

Whatever happens, the way the choice is made is utterly idiosyncratic, which is pretty weird, considering how the process is commentated as top-level democracy-in-action.

See for instance, Washington State.

Political parties in every state have their own peculiar way of nominating presidential candidates. But over the past two decades, Washington's role in the nomination game has evolved beyond peculiar and now borders on bizarre.
- Caucus? Primary? Voters here can do both, Ralph Thomas, Seattle Times

Pelz calls the primary a “beauty pageant” because it will have no effect on the number of Democratic delegates.
- Niki Sullivan, quoting Dan Pelz, chairman of the Washington state Democratic Party,
We'll Pick Candidates Our Way, Thank you!, The News Tribune, Tacoma

This post is not to say that our democracy is better, especially in our state of New South Wales where the ruling party's headquarters is "the home of Tammany Hall in Australia."

Desiccating caterpillar

Some specks of colour on a forest path –

"See my before picture."

getting closer to the Four-Spotted Cup Moth
Doratifera quadriguttata

It's rash to get too close.

How do you say 'thunderation' in Turkish?

EŞİK CİNİ 13

Nurduran Duman* has translated two stories of mine
(The tiger and the mice and Sweat, Joy, and Thunderation)
and also interviewed me and translated that for the current issue of this Turkish magazine.

I usually frown on interviews of creative types - all kinds of artists and interpreters such as actors - because interviews make the person the interest, and worse. Interviews implant the interviewee with the urge to explain the 'work', thereby killing the 'work' while the interviewee, that clear-eyed parasite-ridden zombie, lives on to explain again.

However, and of course, my interview is delightful, especially as it's so exclusive (only a hundred million people might be able to read it). Nurduran Duman's questions were so thoughtful and unexpected that she got me saying things I never thought I would - and my creations didn't even utter a squeak. But I might kill one of those stories now by explaining it to you in confidence. Please don't tell Nurduran. I don't want to spoil the interview.

The tiger and the mice, posted earlier on this blog, was written to respond to a certain privileged person from another country. He complained to me about the repressions his country puts himself and his family through (those who haven't escaped to a land-of-the-free) but he also bombarded me with his government's "right of reserving any military means to smash" those they want to keep from the freedom that he complains he doesn't have. I am particularly pleased that Nurduran chose this tiny fable to translate. The wish for freedom is as universal as the determination to kill its very thought.

The real of course about all this is the amount that Nurduran Duman taught me about what I not only don't know but never thought about, such as Turks and haiku; and the spelling, Turkey, being "a 'bad joke' by some English people in the past. Especially it bothers us in December."

So -
TÜRKÝYE or TURKIYE, please - but which one where?

As for the language,
Turkish ... is a member of the Turkic family of languages, spoken by well over a hundred million people ... Anyone interested in languages should enjoy seeing how Turkish speakers clothe the ordinary human thoughts and feelings in a completely new garb.
- Geoffrey Lewis, Teach Yourself Turkish, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1989

Finally, I hope someone comments on the title of the magazine, which is much more intriguing than anything about or by me. It's time that many more works in Turkish were translated into other languages. And although some tales have been translated, Turkish folklore is long past-due to be part of well-known worldlore, for it's so rich.

* Nurduran Duman is a pretty fascinating character. A prize-winning poet, fiction and non-fiction writer, editor, radio personality, and naval architect and ocean engineer.

Scenes

First, there were those surface tensions.

Then things hotted up.

Fine illustration – The Heron's Nest haiku magazine

I've always considered illustrators to be the finest of fine artists, though the really great illustrators are proud not to call themselves 'artists' and actually like being called 'illustrators'.

Their work must complement. Is it because of the non-self-related thought inherent to the job, that great illustrations not only complement – but transcend?

The Third Annual Heron's Nest Illustration Contest is a fine example.

ILLUSTRATORS:
Jamie Edgecombe
C. Avery
Natalia L. Rudychev
Doris Thurston
Ruth Yarrow
Sandra Simpson
Christopher Patchel

A mistake to fly in the face of nature—a frog may wear galoshes, but I don't hold with toads having beards or wigs.
– Beatrice Potter

What 'ordinary' really means

Unnoticed.

That was in the morning,
and this is in the late afternoon, from another view —

Those are butterfly eggs.

Goose barnacles, voters and drift

Goose barnacles often look as if they're gregarious, but a group isn't necessarily a collective. These two individuals settled poles apart in their infancy and then could only do the goose-barnacle wave when their lushly forested home turned out to be only a pebble anchored to nothing, and was beached.

Although goose barnacles aren't known for existential choices, it is surprising how often the word drift comes into play when one puts it together with voters and decisions.

Read, for instance, this thought-provoking column in The Jamaican Gleaner.

The drift of public opinion these days is disturbing. Most commentaries and editorials seem to want the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader to sit down together in private meetings. They seem to want them to arrive at a consensus on the way forward. This is ludicrous. These are not merely opposing political parties, but under any reasonable system of government, they represent separate and different views from which the public are asked to choose. That is the basis of democracy.
– Dawn Ritch, Political correctness gone mad, 6 January 2008

And this column in The Daily Yomiuri.

...victory or defeat in upper house elections might hinge upon the drift of public opinion.
– Tetsuya Harada, Political Pulse, 8 January 2008

Goose barnacles are sometimes called simple, but they have baffled great minds and have given rise to much romantic myth and confusion. They are, for example, no more barnacle geese than they are clams with long necks.

See The Secret Life of Barnacles by Phil Rainbow of the Natural History Museum, London.

Wild sorrel

Every year sorrel grows here as if it's been planted — but no.

Better than that, all over our lawn and fields. It grows, to be precise, with the vigour and health of a weed.
And every year that Rosie was alive, we'd spend time every day picking these burrs out of her coat. How I miss those times!



















When A____, a girl of 12 and her sister L_____, 7, first came here on holiday, they wanted only to stay indoors, but that didn't last long for without a TV, their smothered curiosity that I hated to think was just barren fields – now topped with a fertiliser of boredom, grew a rampant crop of adventuresomeness.
Soon they were exploring the creek, collecting stones and bones and unidentifiable things they treasured. And when A____ saw me picking and eating that strange weed, she tried some too. Her face made me laugh, and then she decided she loved it.


They began to beg their parents to come here every year, and one year A_____ brought her first boyfriend along, too. The first thing she did after unpacking was to look for sorrel to pick for him.

Sorrel often weaves circles of itself.

I like to eat sorrel leaves under the sun, fresh-plucked, but there is so much more you can do with this green that anyone who loves sour will find irresistible.



Schav is one of the great soups and childhood memories, told about beautifully by Food Maven Arthur Schwartz in Cold Schav.