One trouble with these many collages I shoot is narrowness of monitor.
“English taxidermist Jonathan McGowan has made roadkill his sole diet for the past 30 years. At the age of 14, he tried a dead adder and while it didn’t taste very good, it made him curious to try other roadkill finds.
The taxidermist lists fox, venison and deer among his favourite meats – but he has eaten everything the countryside has to offer over the years.
With thousands of animals being found dead at the roadside every year, Mr McGowan has varied if – on the face of it – slightly unedifying pickings.
He has eaten mice, moles, hedeghogs, squirrels, rats, foxes, badgers, hares, rabbits, deer, stoats, weasels, polecats, otters, wildcats, pheasants, finches, thrushes, ducks, geese, pigeons, owls, crows, gulls, blackbirds and cormorants.
He says many animals taste much better than people would expect.”
From: https://laughingsquid.com/english-taxidermist-chooses-to-live-on-exotic-roadkill-diet-for-30-years/
Thanks to Kevin Kelly
Here’s Mt. Tamalpais with the 2-days-from-new moon from a parking lot near Sushi-Ko in Larkspur Wednesday night.
Went off on bike yesterday in search of sunshine. It’s been the foggiest summer I can remember. When I got back down to the bottom of the hill, 2 friends came along on their bikes. As we stood there, the sun came out, and we rejoiced.
Tuesday afternoon I cleared out the back of my truck and took off with my chainsaw. Earlier that week I’d spotted a bunch of recently-cut eucalyptus by the side of the road in Mill Valley. I enjoyed the change of pace, from the computer and office stuff to a straight-forward physical chore. A relief. It reminded me of when I quit building domes in the ’70s, good riddance to all the mathematical precision and caulks and plastics, and I got a used Ford pickup truck and started scrounging for used lumber and other building materials in debris bins on the streets of San Francisco. More like it!
The wood was still there and was straight-grain euc and still wet, so easy to cut. I loaded up the truck to max, then headed home. The sun was out high up on the mountain (months of fog at beach this summer), so I parked and took off down a trail lined with manzanita bushes, the 6PM sun shining through the green leaves and red-bark branches. I got to my favorite watershed, and took off down a steep faint deer trail along the edges of the creek. Lo and behold here was a deep pool I hadn’t remembered. Cold yes, but once out, all bodily systems are on GO. A high without a letdown. Made my way downstream, hopping rocks and at one point nervously traversing creek on 30-foot-long redwood log. Got down to road, ran back to truck, then on home at sunset.
Blossom of flannel bush where I dumped firewood. Going to rent my neighbor Mark’s homemade splitter and will end up with maybe 2 cords of firewood for coming cold months.
Great article in August 8 2011 New Yorker by Stephen Greenblatt on “On the Nature of Things,” an epic poem by Roman poet/philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus (99BC – 55BC) with special relevance in this era of religious bigotry:
THE ANSWER MAN
An ancient poem was rediscovered—and the world swerved.
“…at its heart, ‘On the Nature of Things’ persuasively laid out what seemed to be a strikingly modern understanding of the world. Every page reflected a core scientific vision—a vision of atoms randomly moving in an infinite universe—imbued with a poet’s sense of wonder. Wonder did not depend on the dream of an afterlife; in Lucretius, it welled up out of a recognition that we are made of the same matter as the stars and the oceans and all things else. And this recognition was the basis for the way he thought we should live—not in fear of the gods but in pursuit of pleasure, in avoidance of pain.…”
“To people haunted by images of the bleeding Christ, gripped by a terror of Hell, and obsessed with escaping the purgatorial fires of the afterlife, Lucretius offered a vision of divine indifference. There was no afterlife, no system of rewards and punishments meted out from on high.…”
https://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/110808fa_fact_greenblatt Note: this is only an excerpt from the full article.
I just ordered the version of the poem translated by Martin Ferguson Smith, as recommended by Greenblatt (Hackett Classics Series). Lucretius nailed it over 2000 years ago.
For some reason, whenever I see something in the natural world that just knocks me out, I think of Ricky, the kid in American Beauty with the video camera, who said:
“…when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude…”
I know I’ve posted this before, but darnnit it’s good.
I just walk up to this flower and look what it’s doing.
After being thwarted in our canyon descent, Tomas and I drove into the hills to an isolated dammed-up pond. A week before I’d made a path through the cattails to the water. (I waded out and when it got too deep, just lay on the cattails and they bent over to make a path.) We went swimming, it was very beautiful, pond ringed by cattails, swallows dipping to nab water-skimming insects… At left, I’m coming back in; that’s my bald head a little above the middle, pulling myself along. I felt like a muskrat.
Gathered nori fresh off rocks at low tide. Washed it, dried it, now to roast it. Can’t believe I haven’t done this before. Essence of the sea, you know it’s good for you.
Two photos from the beach, below the turkey buzzard posing artistically, such a choice of perch, such style! When still, these guys aren’t handsome devils like the hawks, but when airborne, they’re magnificent, floating on air currents, tuning direction by adjusting wing ailerons, soaring, floating…A few years ago I had a series of dreams where I was flying. I wasn’t just up in the air, I had to take off. I’d run along, flapping my arms and pretty soon I’d be airborne. It really felt, well…real. Still gives me a thrill to remember how it felt to fly.
Below a dead pelican. Another magnificent bird. Surfers all have watched them skimming waves, seemingly never flapping wings, just gliding along on the wave updraft, in group formation. I’m gonna leave this on the (remote) beach for another few months, so all the flesh is gone, and I’ll take the head and bleach it out for my collection of bird and mammal skulls.
I talked one of my adventurer friends, Tomas, into exploring a coastal canyon with me last week, said canyon with a full creek, descending to the ocean and having, at one point a 200′ steep drop and waterfall to the creek bed below. Tomas is a rock climber and brought his climbing rope. We walked down the fern-filled deep canyon until we got to the cliff. I showed him where I wanted to tie the rope (to a metal post on an old concrete dam) and he said, “No way!” Everything was wrong. You need 3 points of attachment, he said, plus if we tied up to the dam, line-of-sight gravity would not allow a smooth descent down the side (to the left in below photo), but would rather pull the climber back over into the waterfall, and who knows what would happen then. It’s not the first time in my life I’ve been saved by friends from doing something dumb.
It rained bigtime Tuesday. 1½” here, real late and unusual for this time of year in California. After running along the coast a ways Tuesday night (solo these days), then splashing along in the surf on the beach, running back to the inn and jumping in all the puddles on the way hee-hee), I ducked underwater in the creek, then had a Guinness on tap with the boys, a Gemütlichkeit night in the pub, celtic music playing softly. The rain had stopped and on the way home north along the coast, the fog was so thick it was like crawling through a tunnel. Having grown up in San Francisco, the fog is a friend.
