Merry Christmas!

More hanging coffins, this time in Sagada, Philippines. Nice to know there's a Christian precedent for the practice. I have some cliffs in mind (this one would do nicely, for instance).

Sweet justice! Do not tease the batrachian:



Watch it to the end. Via Steve, who adds, "They [african bullfrogs] have teeth, you know."

Photo gallery: 2011 in Volcanic Activity

Siegfried Act III Prelude. This Wotan is pretty damn good for looking like he might work at a Santa Fe Jiffy Lube.

Kinds of rainbows you've probably never seen: twinned (very cool), multiple supernumerary (really bitchen) and reflection (seriously awesome). More here on the science of twinned rainbows.

I went out to photograph yesterday's lunar eclipse in the New Mexico badlands, with some success. Enjoy!

The hanging cliff coffins of the Bo culture: I must say, this would be pretty much my ideal form of interment.

Bravura fishing skills 42,000 years ago east of Wallace's Line

Fermentation projects still working:

'Katy's Brown Mark 2', the second attempt to create a beer my wife will drink without wincing. Lots of malt, and a fair bit of hop bitterness (Chinook) and aroma (Hallertauer).

Now bottled:

Rosehip Saison: tried this last night and loved it. Comes off almost like a wheat beer (and all these are mit hefe) but with a citrusy, honey finish.

Christmas Beer: a cute idea--the malt is the gold, the spices the frankincense, and the honey the myrrh (on account of those wacky Georgian beys) that utterly flopped. Star anise is not to be played with lightly. Tastes like black licorice scrapped from the bottom of a movie theatre after a week.

Stout: Good enough that only four bottles are left.

Oracular Ale: same recipe as last time, only with dried nettle added in hopes of preventing kidney failure. So far so good!

Hawthorn flower mead: No idea. It'll be another three months before we taste this one. Lots of spiders went into it.

Strawberry wine: See hawthorn, minus spiders.

Spiced red currant wine: I got the spices right for this one--they're background rather than PCs. Still, we won't really know for six months.

Blackberry wine: The old standby. Hot (28-30 proof), sparkling, tasting of jam gone bad, yeast, and diesel fuel. I had to make five gallons this year to meet increased demand.

Surely someone will see fit to make this a reality in print? We have an infant who will soon need it!

Thanks to Chas.

My new favorite resource: Find online versions of geologic maps (warning: huge time sink). Use the interactive map and limit your search to "Maps in NGMDB Library". Here, for instance, are all of New Mexico, all of Nevada, and Dinosaur National Monument. Smaller scale maps are available.

New jaguar sighting in Arizona

European Union forbids claim that drinking water can prevent dehydration

Written? Kitten.

Hence. Now we need "Written? Crytozooid."

More research on the Gamburtsevs, the range of Alp-sized, glacier-carved mountains that lie buried beneath miles of Antarctic ice. Includes a cool fly-through animation!

Do cows stand about in line with the earth's magnetic field? Maybe. Certainly an interesting use of Google Earth as a research tool.

Hat tip: Instapundit.

Girls in Trouble: Rubies



They also have a song about Jael, wife of Heber.

Caganer:

Statuettes of well-known people defecating are a Christmas tradition in Catalonia, dating back to the 18th century. Catalonians hide caganers in Christmas Nativity scenes and invite friends to find them. The figures symbolise fertilisation, hope and prosperity for the coming year.

If you say so. There's a picture, possibly NSFW. Hat tip Chas.

Another video well worth a couple minutes of your time: A Murmuration of Starlings

The fact that one is not krill would be dubious comfort here:

Oh, a small Venn overlap for this one: Revolutionary Girl Utena Texts from last night.

The destruction of Condit Dam on Washington's White Salmon River: Ed Abbey is smiling today!

New modeling indicates that the Chicxulub meteor probably did not cause the eruptions of the Deccan Traps. Still a hell of an impact, though, 2 million times an H bomb!


HT: Instapundit.

If philosophers were cooks
I was always a lackluster philosophy student, so this is a challenge better suited to Odious' talents. I'll merely note that the, oh let's say, chile relleno greater than which no chile relleno can be conceived obviously exists, inasmuch as an existent relleno is clearly greater than a non-existent one.

Sailor eaten by Polynesian cannibal? As they say, worse things happen at sea, but we'll see how this shakes out.

HT: Adventure Blog.

In which Odious, Proclus and I visit the Truchas Peaks:

The world's oldest museum, in 6th Century B.C. Ur.

A successful first ascent of the Shark's Fin on Mt. Meru in the Gharwal Himalaya: looks like quite a route! Jimmy Chin, probably the world's best climbing photographer, was on the expedition, so it'll be worth looking for more images of this one.

Were the corpses of Nevada ichthyosaurs artistically arranged by an enormous cephalopod? No, seriously:

"It became very clear that something very odd was going on there," said McMenamin. "It was a very odd configuration of bones."

First of all, the different degrees of etching on the bones suggested that the shonisaurs were not all killed and buried at the same time. It also looked like the bones had been purposefully rearranged. That it got him thinking about a particular modern predator that is known for just this sort of intelligent manipulation of bones.

"Modern octopus will do this," McMenamin said. What if there was an ancient, very large sort of octopus, like the kraken of mythology. "I think that these things were captured by the kraken and taken to the midden and the cephalopod would take them apart.....

Even more creepy: The arranged vertebrae resemble the pattern of sucker discs on a cephalopod tentacle, with each vertebra strongly resembling a coleoid sucker. In other words, the vertebral disc "pavement" seen at the state park may represent the earliest known self portrait.

I've enjoyed a couple visits to Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park over the years, but the next trip will be seriously enlivened by the possibility that it's a fossilized kraken lair.

Update: In the unlikely event the exercise is beyond any of our readers, National Geographic and Pharyngula take some Occam's razor to this story. They focus on the self-portrait idea, though, which is pretty damn out there, but don't much mention the the notion of the midden, which seems much less bonkers, even if it's not overly endowed with evidence.

I just pre-ordered Moro Rogers' upcoming graphic novel, and so should you.

Elisha Joseph Frishman

I'm not sure O&P has any readers who don't also read the Querencia blog, but on the off chance such a person exists, here is my son Eli, born October first (his actual due date!) at a whopping 9 pounds 12 ounces. We were trying for a home birth, but it eventually became clear that the western medicine safety net was warranted, so he came via C-section in St. Vincent's Hospital, the same place I was born. A second generation honky native of Santa Fe is a fairly rare thing.

Here he is with his state-of-the-art baby monitor:


He's named after Eli Tripp, my departed and much-missed best friend from my Montana years. Steve posted an excellent tribute to Eli a while back, and I'm not up to matching it. Joseph is a family name from his mother's side, and also a nod to Steve, who shares it as a middle name.

Eli and daughter Phoebe, sharing her father's wicked grin:

And for good measure, here's the last picture with our Eli on the inside, two Mondays ago in our local mountains:

"A dog bitten by a snake fears sausages."

I.e., "once bitten, twice shy" in Portuguese. More foreign idiom equivalents, courtesy of Lonely Planet.

Man inspired by 127 Hours lives the dream

Apparently my English (at least when I produce it in quantity) is 84% Shakespearean. Give it a go.

Great moments in advertising copy:

Colon hydrotherapy is the river of life...

Yah, it's the sacred bleedin' Ganges, mate. Glimpsed in the Santa Fe phone book.

A cool map of generic American nomenclature for streams. My typical haunts are definitely fork, wash and arroyo country, no surprise. I'm a little surprised by the prevalence of sloughs in the northwest, and even into the Great Basin.

One interesting obscure term along these lines is "prong," (which doesn't make it on the map). The only examples I am aware of are in southern New Mexico's Black Range.

Via Strange Maps.

Even more terrible was the Palden Llamo, one of the divine protectors of Buddhism but also a devouring mother who sacrificed her own children. She rode upon a lake of entrails and blood, clutching a cup made from the skull of a child born from incest, her thunderbolt staff ready to smash the unbelievers and her teeth gnawing on a corpse. Her horse's saddle was made from the flayed skin of her own child, who had become an enemy of the faith, and snakes wound through her hair. Like many gods, she bore a crown of five skulls and a necklace of severed heads. Her ostensible purpose was to defend Buddhism against its enemies, and in particular to guard the Dalai Lama, but she must have terrified many true believers as well. The Tibetans considered Queen Victoria to be one of her incarnations.

Emphasis mine. Of all the sentences not to have an end-note! From The Bloody White Baron, a biography of the appalling Baron von Ungern-Sternberg: as Steve put it, "one of the most disturbing minor figures of history.... be glad that he is minor."

Handy advice for dealing with anachronistic vocabulary in historical fiction.