Worm fishing and double-headed worm tempters

This is worm-fisherman-spotting season, and I'm sorry I missed the w.f. who dropped this homemade amphisbaena, for he used a different worm-catching method than usual (though evidence points to him being an electrician without the wife).

One of Australia's most unusual and least touristed sights, the worm fisherman fascinates me and, by strange coincidence, Angela, co-star of Spotted Lily (my great Australian novel—the only one guaranteed to make you laugh about our censorship laws and to teach you about w.f.'s—or your money lost). I don't know if I would call worm fishing profound, but Angela has pondered.

As Angela explains to the Devil (aka Brett Hartshorn):
‘Do you know Australian fishermen?’

‘Uh?’ He must have been preoccupied, or thinking about the three men, for he wasn’t one to grunt.

‘I didn’t till I visited the coast. They hang out on sandy beaches. Old blokes with bandy legs sticking out of floppy shorts. They wear knee-high socks in footy team colours, and they keep their shoes on. The fisherman dangles the wife’s nylon stocking in the shallows where waves lap the sand. In the foot of the stocking is rotting fish.’

He was listening.

‘The old bloke wafts the fish in its stocking through the shallow water, and just as the waves draw back and all the little holes are exposed in the sand and they bubble and pop dry, he feels something tug at the toe of the stocking. I’ve never done it, but it’s what they say. Anyway, he’s got this pair of long-nose pliers, and he reaches down, and quick as your fingers pulling a string of spaghetti from a boiling pot—’ A ghost of an expression flitted across Brett’s face, so I stopped.

‘Please,’ he said.

‘Well, the fisherman nips his pliers in between the toe and the sand, and the pliers grab hold of the snout of the worm, he yanks up those pliers in one fast long swoop, and up comes a long worm. Night crawlers, they call them. He puts it in this little case he wears at his waist, and bends over the surf again, waving that stocking. He spends half a day there, sometimes with a mate. All the hours of low tide, catching worms with fish.’

‘What do they do with them?’

‘I wondered, too. They sell them for beer and smokes.’

NOTE: I admit to leading you astray. The scene tempted me. I don't really think any worm fisher would be daft enough to wave this lot of spines and teeth in the surf if he has ankles. So what probably happened was that an electrician on holiday fished on the beach and caught these, strung them on electric line and filleted them using the line as a convenient hold. Then he just dumped the lot in the sand and in a few days will be home again, far from the pristine beach he likes to visit. Most fishermen clean up their messes and don't leave things like hooks, fishing line, plastic bags and such on the beach—and the ones who fish for worms are the cleanest of the lot. I've never found an abandoned stocking with a rotten fish head in its toe. The worm fisher probably takes it home and puts it in the wife's freezer.

Fishing for Fruit

Just when you thought you couldn't stomach another shrill, depressing, stilted and self-righteous "environmental" book, Tristram Stuart puts out Waste. This is a highly entertaining, deeply informative, and refreshingly positive look at how we live, with many recommendations that make sense. His extensive footnotes are a good part of the book, a very good part of the book, if only for the entertaining stories.

Do you also get unaccountably excited at the individuality of a forked carrot, an apple that slouches, a cucumber twinned at its side?

Any specimen the camera spots which fails to match its pre-programmed ideal of carrotness is marked down as condemned, a jet of air is fired at it with infernal precision, and the misfit is blasted down into a chasm below . . .
- Tristram Stuart, in Waste

All this reminds me of an incident so perfectly romantic that I tried to report it in a poem, but the poem is so imperfect, I left it to rot. I've pulled it out of the bin for those of you who aren't squeamish.



FISHING FOR FRUIT

There had been so much rain that the sea was brown in the curve of harbour
where watchful eyes of blue boats nod.

We had been driving in the forests above; stone walls, cork trees,
acorns littering the earth like pebbles on a beach back home.

Now, down in the little village, no people visible
but the stones ringing with running.
Water clattaputting from terraces above,
rivuletting down through gardens old as folktales,
sluicing around knotted roots knocked raw
by ancient donkey hooves, and wooden sabots and bedroom slippers
of gardeners whose hard and corded limbs all curve like ancient grapevine trunks.

The curve of sea
still tossed, wetter than itself.
And on its waves there bobbed a harvest
orange yellow green bruised-ruby
swollen splashes of bright, awning-striped -
vegetables and fruits torn from the earth above.

We fished with a colander, omelette pan, long wooden spoon,
herded our school of edible buoys -
and feasted for days on citrus pumpkin moons of melons
marrows big as gumboots regal aubergines
apple windfalls tart as disapproval.

We burst the cells of sea-soaked
grapefruit against our teeth,
ending our festival in sighs.

Our next fruit-fishing harvest
will be nigh when
parrot-fish shoot sunwards
spattering cumulus,
their rainbow-ribboned bodies
arching through an oxygen-drenched sky.

Untouched up beauties

Amateur photographers are being taught that to leave an image alone is to destroy its potential. So nature is being distorted, to the point that one "Dear Expert" letter in a photography magazine asks about a photo showing a flock of birds flying in V formation. Two birds are out of order, so close that they look like "a squashed bug".

The shooter asked whether it was right to leave the image as it is or to clean it up. The answer was that all photography is distortion, so to get over the prejudice against creating digital fiction.

Ah, reality. I wish it weren't so easy to take things out of photos and to distort them, because what's in them naturally is often so surprising. The pictures below are what I saw — only somewhat crisper than what my eyes noticed at the time. I never clean up pictures because I think that the chaos of nature is its own beauty, and thus, the wonders are even more wonderful. That doesn't mean these are technically wonderful. I'm still not good at that, and admire many others such as the brilliant Taylor Lockwood who are excellent photographers and knowledgeable teachers, too.

Asimov's June 2010 issue out now

Read selections on Asimov's site

TABLE OF CONTENTS
NOVELLA
"Earth III" by Stephen Baxter

NOVELETTE
"The Emperor of Mars" by Allen M. Steele

SHORT STORIES
"Petopia" by Benjamin Crowell
"Monkey Do" by Kit Reed
"The Peacock Cloak" by Chris Beckett
"Voyage to the Moon" by Peter Friend
"Dreadnought Neptune" by Anna Tambour

POETRY
"Human Potential" by Geoffrey A. Landis
"Crushed" by Susan Abel Sullivan
"Of Lycanthropy and Lilacs" by Sandra Lindow

DEPARTMENTS
Editorial: "Do Androids Dream of Electric Zhu Zhu Pets?" by Sheila Williams
Reflections: "Satan, Get Thee Hence!" by Robert Silverberg
On the Net: "The Price of Free II" by James Patrick Kelly
Next Issue by Brian Bieniowski
On Books by Peter Heck
The SF Conventional Calendar by Erwin S. Strauss

The cover art is by Michael Carroll.

Celebrating rare damp days

Giles Watson paraphrases Dafydd ap Gwilym

Something to celebrate today: Giles Watson's launch of his online book, Dafydd ap Gwilym: Paraphrases and Palimpsests, a collection of modern English paraphrases of the works of the fourteenth century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. It contains paraphrases of 52 poems by Dafydd, and an elegy by Iolo Goch. Watson has also illustrated the book with paintings, drawings and photographs. As he says, "The paraphrases have been prepared by comparison of existing prose translations with the original texts, and the aim has been to echo some of the rhythms and cadences of the Welsh verse. I am not, alas, a Welsh speaker, and the project has been merely a labour of love, but I do know Welsh speakers who have enjoyed them. I do not intend to stop paraphrasing Dafydd but it seemed like a good time to put out a “first edition”. It is currently available here (for free, of course)."


Gahh!
This all sounds sounds horridly daunting, if not physically painful, especially those palimpsests.
I assure you that Dafydd ap Gwilym: Paraphrases and ... is a treat.

Watson is what a scholar should be, not to mention a poet, artist, and historian. An addict of the curious, and a passionate perfectionist of sensuality and meaning. This book is both fun and lush. The poems are surprisingly contemporary. Read, for instance, the damning one about one of those newfangled mechanical clocks waking the sleeper from a sexy dream, and the impotent rage the ex-sleeper feels.

I have previously told you how much I love Giles Watson's poetry. I nagged him privately to write more, hopefully a book, and to make sure it contains his wonderful footnotes. This is a treasure that he has produced. I'm so glad that it's probably too fine a work to go the rounds of publishing house rejections.

Australia's funniest science prize: The Eureka Ethics Prize and the Vatican

Holy Galileo! Last year when I told you the Joke about the Vatican and the Science Ethics Prize I didn't expect it to get funnier, but this year it passes satire into silliness.

For yea, this year the Australian Museum's ACU Eureka Prize for Research in Ethics will again be sponsored by Australian Catholic University.

This is the year we in Australia have been granted the "honour" of getting our "first saint", Mary MacKillop, who achieved two miracles ("intercessions with God"— or in lay terms, getting God to stop torturing and killing in an untimely manner. What she had to do to get this is a mystery, as is the proof that she did this or he did that) from her grave.

The comments following this announcement about the saint and the miracles in the Adelaide News show Australians' healthy sense of humour, as well as the scepticism and demand for proof that is the basis of science itself.

Last year when I brought up the outrageousness of the Vatican-cozy Catholic University having anything to do with a science ethics prize, the comment from the Australian Museum (the host of the prizes) was "We're always after new prize sponsors." From the evidence, this means that an anti-science sponsor can continue to use the prestigious "Australian Nobels" like tobacco companies have, "research".

I suggest instead, that the Australian Museum look to the recently instituted policy of PLoS (the Public Library of Science) Medicine. Not wanting to continue to be a venue used by the tobacco industry to justify itself, PLoS Medicine has decided not to publish any tobacco-industry funded studies. New Scientist interviewed Ginnie Barbour, the editor of PLoS Medicine, who said:

There is a huge problem with all corporate funding of clinical trials: it's like asking the coach of the football team to referee the game. But unlike pharmaceuticals, the tobacco industry's products are never useful, they only harm human health.

Leaving out the current scandal of insufficient recognition by the Vatican of the ethics of the Vow of Silence that the raped were made to take, leaving out the history of the Church's claims to scientific knowledge about how condoms work (and the numbers of fatalities caused by this Church teaching) the very procedure of saint-making, its secrecy, its claim to determine proof with no proof and no outside scrutiny—if the scientists wear this silently and cheerfully, then they deserve not respect, but derision. Even the Latin liturgy that this Pope wants to spread shows that he thinks glories are best respected when they are not understood by those gathered to give awe.

The list of winners and runners-up for this Ethics prize reads curiously, to say the least. People like:

Rev Dr Norman Ford SDB
Caroline Chisholm Centre for Health Ethics, Victoria
The Prenatal Person. Ethics from Conception to Birth

If this science "Ethics" prize stands and the Australian Museum does not excommunicate the Catholic Church from sponsorship and judging, then I suggest other deep-pocketed sponsors pile in. As things stand, the message the Eureka Prizes send is that scientists don't examine evidence, don't change opinions based on facts, and don't give a damn about ethics, provided the money's there. That isn't true for Australia's many brilliant and often brave scientists such as Nobel Laureates Barry J. Marshall and R. Robin Warren. So in their honour, I hope the Australian Museum acts like good scientists do.

or
Coming soon? The Church of Scientology Eureka Prize for Astronomy.

Today's magnificent insignificant

Bursting fungi

The recent rain we've had has been a boon for countless families of fungi. This example I'll just call an unspecified mushstool because I'm no mycologist and can't find it, even in my most recently purchased guide to Australian fungi.

Mushroom or toadstool?
Like toads and frogs, these have slippery definitions, depending on the human who uses the term. The most commonly understood meaning for "mushroom" (see the CSIRO's answer) is a fruiting body (of a fungus—the bulk of the growth is below ground or in wood or other substance) that looks like a mushroom (cap centred on stem) and is edible. But there are other definitions that get finer, and Peter Valder has put together a list that includes factors such as "The base of the stem of a true mushroom is narrower or at least no thicker than the rest of the stalk while most of the poisonous mushrooms and toadstools have a noticeably swollen base." (see "Mushrooms and Toadstools" in Burke's Backyard).

The above pictured has an extravagantly bulbous base, so perhaps I should have called it a toadstool. But I'll go by the definition that many animals use out here. Although insects feast, the mammals only taste a little bit of the fruiting bodies of many fungi. A typical mouthwatering boletus will have only a chunk bit out. Often the torn flesh of the mushstool shows wtoothmarks.

An Alice moment
Only yesterday I watched a wallaby sample several toadrooms or mushstools. At one point she had both hands full, and was looking from hand to hand, obviously thinking whether to take another bite. Suddenly she dropped both white chunks, and sluffed off to eat grass.

This isn't someone's sick.

This is a fungus, and one of my favourites. There's a lot of it around here now, and I think it is a corticioid. If I'm wrong, you won't go down a dead-end road learning about these fascinating fungi. Read more about them here, with beautiful pictures by Philipe Mateo and Christina. And Tom Volk's ever superb site features three beauties in his Fungus of the Month, including the winner, Pulcherricium caeruleum. There are well over 100 corticioids, small to humongous.


This is very pleasant to the touch, rather like microvelvety wax.

Boletus minus a bite

What do you see and taste?

Tiles as clean and sky-touched as white sheets drying on wild sage.


The saliva runs. Great trays of the "cake-by-many-names" shine in the window, all sandy with semolina, some strandy with coconut, some scented with rosewater and/or orange-flower water, some scented and tinted with cinnamon, others fragrant from cardamom and patterned with almond slivers and pine nuts—and all the best cakes buzzing and redolent with the golden-work of bees.