Well, I again have a number-sorceror on retainer, but I still don't have much of interest, except some really great pictures of sharks. Some fantastic video of these breaching attacks may be found here.

Sorry for the silence, readers, but our computer is currently dead, possibly very dead indeed. In any case, I have little to report, save that the phrase "unseasonably cold temperatures" is highly irritating to hear on the radio in January.

The following manually type-written letter was on my desk this morning, with a note from my boss:
[Odious],
Please see me about this.

All was sic.

The 90th Birthday made L- the Queen of Queens, and I was happy to share this appreciative Wonder of the World so that it was doubly fun to make for the Employees some Barbecue Pork Ribs (nice Jewish goodies) my annual thank you.

As M- would tell you, I'm looking for a copy of recipe, the one which was name 'L-'s Recipe' which called for a certain type of Stewed Tomatoes from (so they said was in Washington State)raised. And having been a study of qualities of foods in my initial Wholesale Grocery, I called to ask "What particular area in Washington is it?" THEY WOULDN'T TELL ME until I sort of tempted them to be a special so that I didn't complain and guess what, It is going to be given to me to keep out of trouble, and I believe the [Grovery Store] is going to be honored so you all will become famous if M- finds the Soup*which your group called 'L-'s Soup'. *recipe.

Sincerely,

[redacted]

Megan McArdle provides the definitive food quote of the month (yes, I'm aware it's only the 3rd):

I abhor fake meat. If you really want anonymous grade-z vegetable matter pulverized into tiny pieces, assaulted with various chemicals, and then processed into something that at least superficially resembles a chicken muscle, I suggest you have the processing done by a chicken.

Indeed. And, mildly apropos, we are eagerly anticipating the impending delivery of our half a pig, from just a few miles down the valley. And to flaunt again without shame the agrarianism of our environs, Mrs. Peculiar recently noticed the following (paraphrased) on the wall of our bank:

Dear ________ Bank,

Thank you for buying my 4-H pig _______. She is very nice and smart. I hope she tastes good.

I'm sure she did, darling, no doubt she did. And no doubt ours too will attain such glory.

And the first of 2008: The canyons of far western Colorado, yesterday morning, with Utah's La Sal Mountains behind.

Be sure to enlarge the first two. Even large, Blogger compresses the detail.

The Last of 2007

And one last for the year: sunset ice on the Gunnison river. Happy New Year!

Year's End Outing with Rock Art

Here are some scenes of my last hike of the year, yesterday, in a very fine, moderately isolated canyon in western Colorado (the diligent can surely deduce the location, but my current stance is that nowhere needs any publicity whatsoever). First, the context, with frozen waterfall. The bedrock is basement metamorphic schist, overlaid by some odd red granitish stuff I couldn't place, followed by cliff-forming Wingate sandstone:

Unsurprisingly, the Indians liked this place. Inhabitants included Desert Archaic culture, possibly the Fremont and certainly historic Ute. One sees hand prints pretty often, but I was pleased to find one that strikes me as a bear print:

Some abstracts, in their spectacular gallery:

The same up close:

Historic Ute presence is clearly visible here. I hesitate to identify the beastie. The first thing that leapt to my mind, somehow, was horny toad, but it seems hard to justify any taxon with close examination:

An elegant pecked herbivore body, reminds me of the graceful forms of Old World rock art:

Another panel in splendid context:

Detail of above. Again, hand prints are common enough, but the unusual inclusion of the arm here conveys a reaching, grasping which is highly evocative. Though hardly objectivly warranted, thoughts come to the mind of desparation, clutching at the stone:

Finally, what can this engraving evoke save hunting magic? The bighorn sheep, perched in a high place, surveying the territory; likewise the artist/hunter, eulogizing his prey in stone as he too scans the canyon for another animal.

And so the author, high against the cliff, crouching and looking at the canyon, red stone, frozen stream, the tribes gone, the sheep still here.

Long time gone.

Well, I've got about an hour left of my twenties, but birthday presents are already open. Quite worthy of display are the following gifts, courtesy of the Querencia household: plush pathogens!

Click to enlarge: that's Typhoid, a very recognizable shepherd's crook Ebola and Salmonella in front; and Giardia in the back. Giardia definitely gets to come on my next commercial river trip, to the general edification no doubt. Hell, I've harboured him three times, I may as well be candid in my status as vector!

Things to which I look forward in 2008:

Update: Apologies: video is gone. It was the trailer for Life in Cold Blood, the upcoming BBC series with Attenborough on (at last) reptiles and amphibians.

Christmas has debauched our armadillo.

Happy New Year to all!

Christmas Linguistics: The word eggnog has recently been substantially antedated, by an impressive 51 years from its earliest citation in the OED.

Fog-drams i' th’ morn, or (better still) egg-nogg,
At night hot-suppings, and at mid-day, grogg,
My palate can regale

--A Glossary of Provincial and Archaic Words, Jonathan Boucher

It is also interesting that the earliest citation jumped a continent. The post cited asserts that a recipe for eggnog was found among Washington's papers at Mount Vernon.

Via Bradshaw of the Future, a blog which will of interest to those entertained by Indo-European roots.

Update: If you're truly interested, here's more.

Merry Christmas!

A bold new sport: Yak skiing, skiing uphill powered by ravenous yak via pulleys. If that's not a thrill, I don't know what is.

Rod Dreher reports that the always execrable Time magazine hoped to depict Vladimir Putin, their Man of the Year, iconographically on the magazine cover. Happily, they were apparently unable to find an iconographer willing thus to debase his craft.

Why has no one told me about this?

"OCW is a free publication of course materials used at MIT. Get lecture notes, problem sets, labs and more. Watch lecture videos and demonstrations. Study a wide variety of subjects."

And on to other things. I've still got a good many books, and one of them that I've been meaning to mention is the Art of Courtly Love, by Andreas Capellanus. It's a tongue in cheek handbook on Love, from getting to keeping to increasing. What struck me reading it was how perfectly applicable to high school romances it all was. Capellanus touches with a needle when he "say[s] and insist[s] that before his eighteenth year a man cannot be a true lover, because up to that age he is overcome with embarrassment over any little thing...." Tarkington's Seventeen might have been written with that maxim in mind.

Capellanus also is the first source I have encounter for the "base" system: the division of the advance of Love's player on the corners of the baseball diamond. He, of course, doesn't mention the game itself, but he does say that "[f]rom ancient times four distinct stages have been established in love: the first consists in the giving of hope, the second in the granting of a kiss, the third in the enjoyment of an embrace, and the fourth culminates in the yielding of the whole person." I was never quite clear what second and third were, but now I have a 12th century authority.

The Art of Courtly Love's worth reading just for the odd power system it espouses, in which the lover must do whatever his beloved--or indeed any woman--commands, and the woman is free to choose whichever lover she finds most admirable; but she must choose. A woman who never chooses a lover is, in one elaborate allegory designed to unlace a pretty bodice, doomed in a strange afterlife to wear fox skins in burning heat while riding in Love's train, then to sit upon thorns and been jounced by men much to her discomfort. Whereas a woman who takes a lover may therefore much improve him, and thereby win great renown. It's a strange book, and even as exaggeration points to a perturbed state of things. I shall close with Love's rules, as won by an unnamed knight (I think Lancelot) from King Arthur's court.

I. Marriage is no real excuse for not loving.
II. He who is not jealous cannot love.
III. No one can be bound by a double love.
IV. It is well known that love is always increasing or decreasing.
V. That which a lover takes against his will of his beloved has no relish.
VI. Boys do not love until they arrive at the age of maturity.
VII. When one lover dies, a widowhood of two years is required of the survivor.
VIII. No one should be deprived of love without the very best of reasons.
IX. No one can love unless he is impelled by the persuasion of love.
X. Love is always a stranger in the home of avarice.
XI. It is not proper to love any woman whom one should be ashamed to seek to marry.
XII. A true lover does not desire to embrace in love anyone except his beloved.
XIII. When made public love rarely endures.
XIV. The easy attainment of love makes it of little value; difficulty of attainment makes it prized.
XV. Every lover regularly turns pale in the presence of his beloved.
XVI. When a lover suddenly catches sight of his beloved his heart palpitates.
XVII. A new love puts to flight an old one.
XVIII. Good character alone makes any man worthy of love.
XIX. If love diminishes, it quickly fails and rarely revives.
XX. A man in love is always apprehensive.
XXI. Real jealousy always increases the feeling of love.
XXII. Jealousy, and therefore love, are increased when one suspects his beloved.
XXIII. He whom the thought of love vexes, eats and sleeps very little.
XXIV. Every act of a lover ends with in the thought of his beloved.
XXV. A true lover considers nothing good except what he thinks will please his beloved.
XXVI. Love can deny nothing to love.
XXVII. A lover can never have enough of the solaces of his beloved.
XXVIII. A slight presumption causes a lover to suspect his beloved.
XXIX. A man who is vexed by too much passion usually does not love.
XXX. A true lover is constantly and without intermission possessed by the thought of his beloved.
XXXI. Nothing forbids one woman being loved by two men or one man by two women.

The White Tiger left, and the Black Tortoise showed his usual abominable character. We were lucky, when the floods came: our house was on a hill and it only covered the road in front of us. Neighbors would reach the puddle, get out of their cars, and tromp up the driveway in enormous boots to find out if they could get through. Pick-ups, yes. One remarkable woman in a minivan, barely. Anybody in a car, nope.

A flood may be the most boring natural disaster I've ever witnessed. Water rises without the drama of a good fire or the howl of wind. It doesn't have a barren beauty to it the way a blizzard can. It's brown, dull, and kills more people ever year than any other act of nature. The town up the highway from us, Vernonia, had more than half its houses flooded and three-quarters of its businesses. Like I said, we were lucky--we only lost the things we had in a storage locker outside of town.

Unfortunately, those things included many of our books. Most are replaceable, but the sight of my signed copy of Tam Lin lying in muddy sewage was a wrench. My wife lost her correspondence from childhood: over twenty years of pen pals, kindred spirits, and her magazine for girls. The Principia Dana gave me for proof-reading it is gone.

These are replaceable things, mostly. They were solid memories, and we still have the ideal ones to treasure. But for the first time I understood Xerxes. If I'd had an army, they'd have been lashing the Nehalem.

Since Boreas has at last graced us with his icy breath, sadly putting our Thai Mouse Shit chili plant on its last legs, I thought I'd follow up last month's winter poetry and art. I was reminded of the following by Steve; I hadn't thought of it in quite some time:

October Dawn

October is marigold, and yet
A glass half full of wine left out

To the dark heaven all night, by dawn
Has dreamed a premonition

Of ice across its eye as if
The ice-age had begun to heave.

The lawn overtrodden and strewn
From the night before, and the whistling green

Shrubbery are doomed. Ice
Has got its spearhead into place.

First a skin, delicately here
Restraining a ripple from the air;

Soon plate and rivet on pond and brook;
Then tons of chain and massive lock

To hold rivers. Then, sound by sight
Will Mammoth and Saber-tooth celebrate

Reunion while a fist of cold
Squeezes the fire at the core of the world,

Squeezes the fire at the core of the heart,
And now it is about to start.

--Ted Hughes

Provided with the happy excuse of books to review, biologist Tim Flannery rhapsodizes about the wonders of the deep. Excellent passage:

To understand the full extent of the constraints that the abyss places on life, consider the black seadevil. It's a somber, grapefruit-sized globe of a fish—seemingly all fangs and gape—with a "fishing rod" affixed between its eyes whose luminescent bait jerks above the trap-like mouth. Clearly, food is a priority for this creature, for it can swallow a victim nearly as large as itself. But that is only half the story, for this description pertains solely to the female: the male is a minnow-like being content to feed on specks in the sea—until, that is, he encounters his sexual partner.

The first time that a male black seadevil meets his much larger mate, he bites her and never lets go. Over time, his veins and arteries grow together with hers, until he becomes a fetus-like dependent who receives from his mate's blood all the food, oxygen, and hormones he requires to exist. The cost of this utter dependence is a loss of function in all of his organs except his testicles, but even these, it seems, are stimulated to action solely at the pleasure of the engulfing female. When she has had her way with him, the male seadevil simply vanishes, having been completely absorbed and dissipated into the flesh of his paramour, leaving her free to seek another mate. Not even Dante imagined such a fate.

A very different age of nature documentary: Frank Buck's film of tiger vs. python. If you read the article, you'll see that the python was at a very unfair disadvantage. The film is here. This is as good a time as any to point out: Per their fallback editorial policy, Odious & Peculiar make no strict claims regarding the veracity of anything.

Also: documentary filmmakers vs. python. Ha!

Sigh. I always neglect to keep up on the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, and when I do check in I feel woefully inadequate as a blogger. What can one do but link?

Extensive subterranean cities of Cappadocia, much vaster than I was aware.

Monastic self-mummification in northern Japan.

The Legend of Belovodye, the Russian Orthodox Shangri-La, often alleged to be located in the Altai Mountains. It's not hard to see why. Of course, this sort of thing is no less problematic in Russian Orthodoxy than anywhere else.

Tipped off by SummitPost, which provides the following, though without a source, alas:

The roots of this myth go back to the violent schism of Russian Orthodox Church of XVII century. The Old Believers were persecuted and their prisoner labor has been widely used in Czarist Russia since late XVII century. An imperial decree of 1737 ordered their use at the Factories and Mines of the Treasury in Siberia. In 1762 another decree offered Old Order refugees in Poland assistance to resettle in Altay. Although escapes from the mines were severely punished, by early XIX century the secret villages of Old Believers abounded in the taiga of Altay.

About the same time, Arkady Belovodsky, an impostor "envoy" from the Hidden Kingdom of Bolovod'ye, started preaching among the European Old Believers about his mystical, powerful country in the East, somewhere beyond China. The White Waters Land of Arkady's sermons retained pre-schism Antioch [sic] Orthodoxy, with seven hundred churches on a huge island. It had a distinctly Shambhala-like quality in that only the truly enlightened people could reach the White Waters.

Also about the same time, a splinter Old Order group formed the Community of Truly Orthodox Travelers, better known simply as the Runners. They moved from a safe house to a safe house using hand-written route charts.

By 1830s, these three developments crystallized together into the Old Believer quest for Altay Belovod'ye. Believers were trickling from all over Russia, guided by their route-scripts. Some sought the Hidden Land up in the highlands, where all the peaks where called, indeed, Whites. Other continued up Bukhtarma Valley and crossed the border with China. The Old Believers' searches for White Water Land did not abate until 1910s. Today's folk wisdom in Russia pretty much equates White Water Land with the White Peaks of Altay.

Old Believers, incidently, are alive and well. Mrs. Peculiar relates a story of one of her goofy, earnest Orthodox convert friends who noticed a picturesque Orthodox church somewhere in the upper Midwest and knocked on the door. He was answered by a harried, bearded fellow, who, after his visitor had tried to engage him in chat about contemporary American Orthodoxy, burst out, "Why must you yet be persecuting us?" And there are a fair number of them in Alaska. When I spent a stormy January week at a (non-Old Believer) monastary in the Kodiak Archipelago, we saw a fishing boat venturing toward the open sea in atrocious weather one morning. "Old Believers," the monks informed me, "They're always the ones heading to sea when no one else would set foot on a boat."

Speaking of successful upstarts, we saw a fantastic show a week ago in Montrose, Colorado by our classmate from St. John's, Eilen Jewell (warning: sound), who I'm happy to say is doing quite well:



The sound quality in the video doesn't do her justice, but there are several good samples on her web site. Think Gillian Welch with the benefit of some uppers, or maybe June Carter. And her guitarist is a serious, razor-sharp Rockabilly man. Here's a performance of her most upbeat radio hit, and here's her eulogy to Boundary County, Idaho (her native and my favorite state). I'm very glad that old-fashioned country and Rockabilly is gaining popularity and that performers with taste are able to thrive; it's one of the few happy trends to be found in pop culture.

And if you're in a musical mood, definitely don't miss this number, courtesy of 2 Blowhards, with Guy Clark and Emmylou Harris:




Guy Clark's songwriting is increasingly one of my favorite things going, and he and Emmylou together are magic. Another from the pair: Black Diamond Strings.

Via Instapundit, a nice discussion of the stifling effect regulatory burdens place on small businesses and small-scale entrepreneurs. The whole point is well encapsulated in the final paragraphs:

Those who push for federal regulations to rein in "big business" often don't realize that the biggest of big businesses don't mind heavy federal regulation at all. They have the resources to comply with them, not to mention the clout in Washington to get the regulations written in a way that most hurts upstarts and competitors.

Big businesses know that a heavy regulatory burden is the best way to make sure small- and medium-sized businesses never rise up to challenge them.

This has been on our minds lately. Mrs. Peculiar has lately stumbled into a fair bit of demand for a certain home-made product. But to make her enterprise legal would require a $15,000 piece of equipment (and likely much else besides), to do $50 worth of business weekly. It should come as no surprise that chains are dominating our economy when would-be upstarts are subject to hurdles no sane family would choose to inflict on itself for highly dubious rewards. Who wants to attract venture capital just to make some extra beer money on the weekends? But surely that's how a lot of innovative businesses got their start.

On the other hand, it is a pleasure to live in one of Colorado's (and probably the nation's) least regulated counties. It shows. It would take us forty minutes to get to a fast food restaurant, two towns away, but the number of small business owners, entrepreneurs and random folks with pet projects is highly encouraging.

For any readers who, like me, don't generally happen across media coverage of such things, Odious is referring to this (check out the slide show). They're a few miles down the road. It's good to hear from him.

We're not underwater, but it was a near thing. Everyone is fine; more information when I'm sure the phones won't go out.

It's been quite a while since we've changed the current pick in the sidebar, so here you are: the truly excellent mammoth of last year's holiday season from the brush of Olduvai George. The gentleman's blog is currently idling, but his site linked above is full of excellent biophilic art, with an emphasis on the prehistoric and extinct. A perusal is well worth your time.

Dork.

This is very nice. I'll try to post a verse translation in a week or so.

Pictures of puddings, in Patrick O'Brian style, glistening and faintly translucent (though not puddings in the true nautical sense).

Or there's this.

Have you all made note of the (formerly) secret underground Italian temples? Though the content is rather too hippy for my taste, I have to grant that the style and technical execution are bloody fine. It's good to know that humans can still produce quality and intricacy on a large scale; by modern standards it probably does indeed qualify as a wonder of the world.

Also inspiring is this unassuming fellow. I love the looks of pessimistic resignation and contempt from the judges and audience before they are blown away by secret talent and Puccini.

Even for a serious fan of world music like myself, Chinese music is a tough nut to crack. Pentatonic scales and vocals in tonal languages are simply not a winning combination for western ears. Farewell My Concubine is one of my favourite movies, but that's not due to it's scenes of Peking opera. As has been remarked, "When it comes to Chinese composers, I prefer Puccini."

So I was all the more delighted this evening to hear a wonderful NPR interview with Ma XiaoHui, an erhu virtuoso. You really owe it to yourself to listen to the story and appreciate this woman's music. It sounds like a cross between Yo-Yo Ma and Tuvan or Kazakh tunes. They open with Ms. Ma playing Elegy, a "concerto for erhu and orchestra," though they do not trouble to specify the composer, nor if and where a recording can be obtained. I'd get it in a second. She also adapts western violin classics to her instrument, with fine effect. And her Horse piece which closes the interview is not to be missed: sounds like H.I. Biber and his Sonata Representativa (samples) reincarnated in northeast Asia!

Also in the realm of Asian music, I just ran across Smithsonian Folkways' new six-disc collection Music of Central Asia (lots of samples via link). I am now hoping that Christmas morning in the Peculiar household will exalt to Kirghiz and Tajik strains.

The nice thing about having friends stay with you is staying up late sorting philosophers into the four houses (Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, Slytherin), and then eating cinnamon rolls in the morning.

Also re. poetry: if you're in a Sinophilic mood, you may derive some hours' amusement on Mountain Songs, an online collection of Chinese poetry having anything to do with mountains (Warning: front page has sound). They obligingly allow you to search poems not only by title and author, but also by mountain and temple, if such names mean anything to you. A nice reference, though I think the translations could have a little more vim. Also, Li Po seems to be romanized as Li Bai these days.

Let it snow. Let blue skies fade to steel.
Let the wind gust, then pick up, flat light creep in.
Let clouds arrive, pile up, grow dark, conceal.
Let the weather service issue a bulletin.
Let the first flakes fall like the kiss in a seduction,
Full of promise, tenderness and danger.
Let them whisper imminent destruction,
Then unfurl their fiery love and anger.
Let evening fall, let freedom ring, let things
Break down berserk, dark spirals burst out big,
And flake on flailing flake sculpt thickening rings
Of snow beyond what any plow can dig.
The ground is bare, the flowers dead. Let's go:
It's winter, time for blizzards. Let it snow.

--David J. Rothman

A couple lines' meter might have been done more elegantly, but I like it, and damned if it isn't apt right now. 20% chance tonight; I'm not holding my breath.

Before I return the book to the library, I might as well post another of Mr. Rothman's sonnets:

Resurrection of a Mouse

What full, sad sounds, the noise that you were making,
Clenched in our cat's jaws, pierced by a tooth,
Inevitably cought forever, shaking
And squeaking like a man who's seen the truth.
Sneaky pest who shit all over tables,
Vermin, host to rabies, hanta, louse,
I'm undeceived by all the mousy fables.
I'm glad you're gone, I'm pleased our cat can mouse.
Still, I cannot forget your empty death,
Prey to the satisfied play of calico.
Years later I start awake, hearing your breath
Cry life as far as any voice can go.
Confidently soaring, writing with my wing,
Beyond all praise and blame, you sing, you sing.

And here's one for Steve:

From the brush of Emperor Hsüan-tê. Here he is depicted by an anonymous artist:

Click to enlarge. From China: A History in Art.

Just for fun, while we're on the subject, here are Mrs. Peculiar and Myself in Alaskan waters:

All right, I can't hide any longer. I have Internet at home again, and while Odious has held down the fort very well, it's time I contributed something. I have an ungodly number of photographs from the last seven months, some of which will doubtless be inflicted in due time. But for now I shall fall back on that standby of all bloggers: what I've been reading.

You should all rush out right now and procure a copy of Where the Sea Breaks Its Back by Cory Ford, subtitled The Epic Story of Early Naturalist Georg Steller and the Russian Exploration of Alaska. Mrs. Peculiar and I spent much of the summer devouring (re-devouring, in my case) Patrick O'Brian novels, and the transition to Mr. Ford's book was utterly seamless, like picking up a work of non-fiction which O'Brian would surely have penned had Ford not beat him to it. Nautical exploration, harsh elements, shipwreck, the resourceful desperation of sailors, and above all natural philosophy: it's all there. And Mr. Ford's pen does excellent justice to all (he had a long-running column in Field & Stream; ah, for the days when outdoor sporting magazines cultivated writing of a caliber that can no longer be found in National Geographic). From the introductory chapter describing the Aleutians, the author's own experience:

The sun was setting; we watched it poise on the horizon and then slip out of sight as deftly as a conjurer's coin. A queer chuckling sound caught our ears, and we halted. A small dark-bodied bird, with white eyes and a crested topknot like a California quail, marched out from a crevice in the cliff and regarded us owlishly for a moment. Then he fluffed his feathers-- I could have sworn he shrugged-- and walked to the edge of a projecting rock, and pitched in a power dive toward the water. Through my glasses I saw him spread his wings and level off at the bottom of his descent, only a few inches from the surface of the ocean, and shoot out at right angles like a projectile from a gun.

He was followed by a steady succession of other birds, each in turn stepping out onto a rock and hurtling down in the same breathtaking leap. Some were crested auklets; some the absurd-looking least auklet, its big eyes surrounded by a few white bristles, giving the effect of plucked eyebrows; some the rare rhinoceros auklet with a tuft of feathers sprouting from its bill like a horn. The air was full of acrobatic birds, forming single lines and moving in long undulating ribbons below us, crisscrossing each other's paths, weaving in and out in graceful patterns, alternately light and dark as they turned in the air. Abruptly the show ended. At some inaudible signal, the ribbons wound upward to the top of the cliff, and with a roar like a waterfall the entire flock disintegrated overhead and landed all about us. One by one the gave us the same owlish look, shrugged again, and trudged back in to their burrows for the night.

Naturally, the narrative revolves around Steller. A young, ambitious man, a brilliant naturalist, he is very sympathetic while being frequently as insufferable as a Stendhal protagonist. The man had the enviable yet heartbreaking distinction of being the first trained naturalist to set eyes upon the northwest of the American continent, on Vitus Bering's epic voyage in 1741. Americans will most likely recognize his name in the Steller's Jay; he also lends his name to an eider, a sea lion and the spectacular Steller's Sea Eagle. Even more intriguing, he observed two highly unusual species which were never seen by a scientist again. Steller's Sea Cow was an enormous manatee dwelling in Alaskan waters, up to 35 feet long, 25 around and four tons in weight. Steller measured a specimen and found that its heart weighed 36 1/4 pounds and that its stomach was [Steller's words] "of amazing size, 6 feet long, 5 feet wide, and so stuffed with food and seaweed that four strong men with a rope attached could scarcely move it from its place and drag it out." Operating in a very different tradition of scientific observation than today's, and also under trying circumstances, to say the least, Steller also gave the following description of the animal:

[The fat was] glandular, firm, and shiny white, but when exposed to the sun takes on a yellowish tinge like May butter. Both the smell and the taste of it are most delicious, and it is beyond comparison with the fat of any marine animal... Melted, it tastes so sweet and delicious that we lost all desire for butter. In taste it comes pretty close to the oil of sweet almonds... The meat, when cooked, although it must boil rather long, is exceedingly savoury and cannot be distinguished easily from beef. The fat of the calves is so much like fresh lard that it is hard to tell them apart, but their meat differs in no wise from veal.

Small wonder that, after they had sustained Steller and his companions through an Aleutian winter, the sea cows were devoured every one by Russian fur traders. Steller's writings are the only record of the animal.

More mysterious still is Steller's Sea Monkey. In the naturalist's own words

"It was about two Russian ells [five feet] in length... the head was like a dog's, with pointed, erect ears. From the lower and upper lips on both sides whiskers hung down, which made it look almost like a Chinaman. The eyes were large; the body was longish, round and thick, tapering gradually toward the tail. The skin seemed thickly covered with hair, of a grey color on the back, but reddish white on the belly; in the water, however, the whole animal appeared red, like a cow. The tail was divided in to two fins, of which the upper, as in the case of sharks, was twice as large as the lower. Nothing struck me as more surprising than the fact that neither forefeet (as in the marine amphibians) nor, in their stead, fins were to be seen."

He was particularly impressed by "its wonderful actions, jumps, and gracefulness. For over two hours it swam around our ship, looking, as with admiration, first at the one and then at the other of us. At times it came so near to the ship that it could have been touched with a pole, but as soon as anybody stirred it moved a little farther. It could raise itself one-third of its length out of the water exactly like a man, and sometimes it remained in this position for several minutes. After it had observed us for about half an hour, it shot like an arrow under our vessel and came up again on the other side... in this way it dived perhaps thirty times. There drifted by a seaweed, club-shaped and hollow at one end like a bottle, toward which, as soon as it was sighted, the animal darted, seized it in its mouth, and swam with it toward the ship, making such motions and monkey tricks that nothing more laughable can be imagined. After many funny jumps and motions it finally darted off and did not appear again. It was seen later, however, several times in different places of the sea."

No one has any idea. The thing was never seen again, and were it any other observer one would question the account's reliability. But Steller was a seriously good observational scientist. All his other accounts of marine life hold up in retrospect, and he seems to have gotten quite a long and close look at the animal. What's a cryptozoologist to think? If the Russians ate them all, it was never deemed worthy of mention.

Of course, voyages of exploration are not generally lacking in Sturm und Drang, and Bering's voyage ranks high in the annals of human misery. Indeed, it's progress is emblematic of the phrase Worse things happen at sea. After sighting the sea monkey, the St. Peter was harried by desperate weather until it was finally wrecked on a desolate island, with a crew deep in the throes of scurvy. Despite all that had just happened at sea, what then happened on land is intensely harrowing:

...three sailors died as they were brought up on deck, and a fourth succumbed on the way to the beach... Conditions were not much better ashore. Driftwood for the underground huts had to be dragged a considerable distance, and the handful of men still able to work had not yet completed the shelters. The sick lay on the open beach under rags and bits of canvas, sometimes half buried by the drifting snow. When a man died, his comrades were too weak to remove the body, and it remained alongside the living. A night they could hear the foxes gnawing at the corpse.

"Everywhere on the shore there was nothing but pitiful and terrifying sights," Steller sympathized. "Some sick cried because they were so cold, others because hungry and thirsty, since the mouths of many were so miserably affected by the scurvy that they could not eat because of the great pain, as the gums were swollen like a sponge, brown-black, grown over the teeth and covering them." His previous contempt for his Russian shipmates was forgotten. Now, in their adversity, he worked tirelessly to minister to the needs of the crew, bringing them warm soups and antiscorbutic herbs and roots which he dug from the frozen ground.

From this situation, as hopeless as any in which humans find themselves, comes not only survival, but the irreplaceable scientific tour de force that is Steller's description of the sea cow. Why can't we make movies as amazing as this? Steller's biography puts any number of Hollywood epics to shame.

Also, his De Bestiis Marinis is available online.

My other recent read, which I will discuss at much shorter length, is Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides. Revolving around the biography of Kit Carson, it is also an account of the American settlement of the southwest and the Navajo experience of that settlement. Kit Carson is easy to vilify for his role in rounding up the Navajos, but the man was hardly a racist. His three marriages, for instance, were to an Arapaho, a Cheyenne and a New Mexico Spanish woman. Sides does an excellent job of not shying away from the brutal aspects of the American conquest while also avoiding excess of sentiment and hand wringing. What I like best about the book is Sides' ability to reveal the full strangeness of history, especially parts of American history which we too often take for granted. For instance, I had no idea that after Stephen Watts Kearny and his dragoons traveled from Santa Fe to invade California, they were met and nearly slaughtered by mounted Californians wielding nine-foot lances.

More regular blogging to come, I hope!

From Peculiar comes LOLTHULHU. My buttons are duly pressed.

What I really want, tho', is a LOL History of Rome.

IM IN UR ASSEMBLY/ CLUBBIN UR TRIBUNE

O HAI iz u brutus

I CAN HAZ SABINE WOMIN PLZ KTHNXBI

And how.

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Lord Odious the Surreptitious of Giggleswick under Table Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

Peculiar! We forgot Archimedes!