timepiececlock | Entries tagged with nature

8:37 pm PST

EARTHQUAKE!

Very short, only about 3 seconds. A little rumble, then a jerk, then rumbles again. Faint aftershocks. Probably about a 4....I hardly ever feel it if it's a 3.

That makes three in three summers, by my experiences. Though the one last August felt much stronger than this, and lasted nearly 8 seconds.

ETA: Apparently, it was a 5.0 quake! The epicenter was about 40 miles from me, in the LA area.

The Universe

Everybody lives on a street in a city
Or a village or a town for what it's worth.
And they're all inside a country which is part of a continent
That sits upon a planet known as Earth.
And the Earth is a ball full of oceans and some mountains
Which is out there spinning silently in space.
And living on that Earth are the plants and the animals
And also the entire human race.

It's a great big universe
And we're all really puny
We're just tiny little specks
About the size of Mickey Rooney.
It's big and black and inky
And we are small and dinky
It's a big universe and we're not.

And we're part of a vast interplanetary system
Stretching seven hundred billion miles long.
With nine planets and a sun; we think the Earth's the only one
That has life on it, although we could be wrong.
Across the interstellar voids are a billion asteroids
Including meteors and Halley's Comet too.
And there's over fifty moons floating out there like balloons
In a panoramic trillion-mile view!

And still it's all a speck amid a hundred billion stars
In a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
It's sixty thousand trillion miles from one end to the other
And still that's just a fraction of the way.
'Cause there's a hundred billion galaxies that stretch across the sky
Filled with constellations, planets, moons and stars.
And still the universe extends to a place that never ends
Which is maybe just inside a little jar.

It's a great big universe
And we're all really puny
We're just tiny little specks
About the size of Mickey Rooney.
Though we don't know how it got here
We're an important part here
It's a big universe and it's ours!

You might think that you're essential
Try inconsequential
It's a small world after all!

Current Music: The Animaniacs

I want to read a fic crossover with Bones and Doctor Who. I think this would make me very, very, happy.

(I saw Body Worlds today.)

On Thursday I went to Santa Catalina Island with my family on our sailboat (36'), which might get sold this year. Catalina was pretty, with a very cute little tourist town, and apparently an enormous herd of buffalo, though I can't say I saw any from the harbor.

I saw dolphins on the way to the island. Big, fast, gray ones; a pair of them fishing. They swam under the boat and dove in and out of the water off to the side of us for a minute or two, before swimming away. This made my weekend; I haven't seen dolphins since sailing in Monterey Bay, at least 5 or 6 years ago.

It's hard to be anything but stupidly happy when looking at dolphins. They really are as cool as you expect them to be. By logic, there's no wild animal whose mere proximity should bring you unencumbered joy and the potent urge to jump up and down and squeal like a child one quarter your age, but dolphins can do that to you. I'm of the opinions that dolphins would do that to most people, if they ever got close enough. Even hard-bitten criminals would be forced to shoulder their semi-automatics, flick their unfiltered cigarettes, and mutter, "Jolly good show, eh? Anyone got bread or somm'at we can toss?"

And they would talk that way, too. Around the dolphins.

I've been fascinated by the number three for a long time. It's not my favorite number (that'd be 12), but it's always held a bit of a mystique for me. I learned the rule of 3 and 5 when I first took art class, and it has lasted in my mind longer than most of the other things I learned in high school.

I love phrases that come in three words, I love lists of three, I note that the first essays they make you write in school have three body paragraphs, and there's three primary colors, and all great stories have three characters, even if the third character is just a place or an idea. The three main characters for ATLA, for example, are Aang, the Avatar, and Zuko. The three main characters of The X Files are Mulder, Scully, and the FBI. The three main characters of The Little Mermaid are Ariel, Ursula, and Eric.

Three nights of moonlight for werewolves to transform, three promises to seal it, 1-2-3-GO!, rock-paper-scissors, getting your steak done to well, medium, or rare.

Clovers have three leaves, I'll give you three guesses, three sirens, three fates, three warnings, three colors on the stop light, three medals to win at the Olympics, and the linguistic conjugation of good, better, best.

It's a great number to play with, and it holds a unique place in our culture, structurally and linguistically. After all, nobody ever wrote a song called called "Bizzare Love Square."

Giant Salamanders! Holy Shit! SIX FOOT LONG GIANT SALAMANDERS! I didn't even know such things existed! THEY FRIGHTEN ME. Look at that one just swallow a fish... what if it were feet?! What if I went wading in a river in Japan AND MY LEGS GOT EATEN BY A GIANT SALAMANDER? How do you explain that to Grandma? "Uh... my legs got eaten by giant salamander. PASS THE SYRUP!"

Aaaawwwww bear cubs!

I want a pack of otters. I want to have a river in my backyard, and have a pack of soft-fur otters live on it, so they can play and fish and defend my house from gators! Swell.

The river scene of the crocodiles attacking the wildebeasts... I've never seen anything like that. How often can I keep saying "amazing"?

Eliza Brock

Nantucket Girl's Song

Then I'll haste to wed a sailor, and send him off to sea,
For a life of independence, is the pleasant life for me.
But every now and then I shall like to see his face,
For it always seems to me to beam with manly grace,
With his brow so nobly open, and his dark and kindly eye,
Oh my heart beats fondly towards him whenever he is nigh.
But when he says "Goodbye my love, I'm off across the sea,"
First I cry for his departure, then laugh because I'm free.

Picked up my brother's copy of In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Wahleship Essex, and finding the first 20 pages to be well-written and interesting. I don't usually go in for non-fiction, but the cover caught my eye, and my brother was intending to lock it away in the attic anyway. I practically rescued it. It opens with general history of the island of Nantucket, MA---which I'd never heard about before---the whaling capital of the world for the 18 and 19th centuries.

I fell in love with this odd little verse, written by one of the local women to describe the 3-years-away, 3-months-home marriage cycle of whale hunters, and how the women of the community, in the absence of the men, adapted to the lifestyle of being the primary governing forces of the town.

I keep picturing the Tenth Doctor, on the TARDIS bridge, hunched in front of his little monitor screen watching Planet Earth and getting orgasmic over it like the little science-loving schoolboy that he is.

Doctor: Rose, look at this! Come on, lookit!
Rose: What is it now? *has been called over 6 times already*
Doctor: Look at all the penguins marching single-file across the ice! Look at them, with their little wobbly feet! Ooooh, we have to go see them! Let's go see the penguins, Rose.
Rose: Um...
Doctor: Don't want to see penguins? Right, course, very cold in Antarctica. How about alligators then? Alligators are brilliant!

This episode was slightly less breathtaking than the ice or oceans episodes, but it definitely had some fantastic photography and film going on. The scenes of the flat lizards leaping up to catch flies.... way cool!

Living in America, I think we don't get to see kangaroos very often, so we just don't appreciate how weird they are. SERIOUSLY. A kangaroo is a weird, weird looking animal. Especially when its jumping and bounding over land.

The stuff with the elephants was neat. I felt so sorry for them! How hungry they must be, to survive out there.

In the portion that talked about Utah (which, in my opinion, was too brief) I recognized rock formations from Capitol Reef National Park, which I drove through the week before Thanksgiving. Gorgeous! Utah has the best rocks. It may have crazy cultists, but many does it have awesome rocks. I'm surprised the video didn't show the Grand Canyon, though, or even Bryce. I mean... Bryce is unlike anything I've ever seen before in nature, and of course the Grand Canyon is the Grand Canyon. Over Thanksgiving my cousin and I teased my brother mercilessly because we'd both seen the Grand Canyon and he hadn't. Everytime he countered with "Well I HAVE seen..." or "But I've been to..." We'd look at each other, then look back at him, and say "Sure. But have you been to the Grand Canyon?" It was fun to torture him.

Is Death Valley really the hottest place on Earth? I didn't know that. I knew it was pretty hot, but I didn't know that. Cool. For some reason I always thought the hottest place on earth was in Northern Africa or something. ... I did some googling, and apparently there are a couple of places that vie for "hottest place on earth", depending on what year was the record-setting temperature. I think I'm going to go wiht what the show tells me, though, because a) I trust the Discovery Channel, and b) when I have the guts to go swimming with man-eating sharks, then I'll begin to question them.

Now.... onto fresh water episode!

I've been watching the reruns of Planet Earth on Hi-Def Discovery Channel, and it's pretty awe-inspiring. I've never been so intrigued by an animal/nature film series before. The photography is breathtaking, with videos that been sped up or slowed down to show incredible imagery. So far I've seen: Shallow Seas, Oceans Deep, Deserts, Ice Worlds, and Caves.

In this episode, Shallow Seas, there is one of the most amazing video scenes I've watched: a Great White shark leaping at least 6 feet out of the water--completely out of the water-- to catch a seal in its jaws. You watch that, and you're like "MOTHER FUCKER THAT'S A HUGE SHARK." The camera crew had to film it with a special high speed motion camera designed for observing car crashes. Just watching it in slow motion is about 10x scarier than watching Jaws.

I found the clip on Youtube, but it looks like its taken from BBC, with a different voice-over than the Discovery Channel series, which uses Sigourney Weaver. It seems to use the same script, though, which is weird. I checked and apparently it was originally aired on BBC, and they re-cast the narrator for the American version. That seems silly to me; I understand British just fine thankyouverymuch. Anyway, here it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9L4Mwn6wu0

The best clip is about 1:10sec into it, that's the one I'm talking about.

I've mentioned this before, but I don't get brain freezes. When I eat something really cold, I get a stabbing pain between my shoulder blades. Like a pre-chilled knife in my back.

Scientists have discovered that when something cold touches the roof of your mouth, nerve endings shoot up warnings to other nerves that are in charge of protecting your brain. These other nerves work instantly to get your brain back to a normal temperature of 98.6ºF by stretching the blood vessels in your head, eventually causing the headache after 30 to 60 seconds of eating or drinking.

Tadeusz F. Poplawski, M.D.
Child & Adult Neurology and Durham Regional Hospital
http://www.durhamregional.org/healthlibrary/kids/brainfreeze

I knew it! You know what this means? This means the nerves that are supposed to be sending warnings to my brain are sending them to my spinal cord. Or back muscles, or something. But the main point? I'm wired wrong. I always suspected this (indeed the kids in grade school warned me of as much, the little buggers.)

Every doctor I've ever asked has shrugged me off, probably on account of it happening for years and not having any adverse effect except weirdness. I figure I'm either an alien (nobody but me likes that theory, them folk of little imaginations!), or just wired a bit differently. Either way, people look at you oddly if you go "GAAH!" and arch your back like a seizure when you drink a smoothie.