Sunday bird blogging

Brrr.

Out of nowhere, the beautiful fall weather gave way to bone-chilling cold. And my body clock is completely turned around because I had to get up in the middle of the night and spend two hours testing critical systems after an upgrade. And I just spilled my pasta dinner all over my duvet. Disgruntled is a very mild term for how I'm feeling.

So here's a souvenir from one of the perfect moments of my life: sitting on the beach at Gardner Bay in the Galapagos, listening to the waves and the sea lions and watching finches hop around the sand, completely unconcerned with my presence once they figured out I wasn't something to eat.

Saturday reflections

Windows on the waterfront, in Seattle.

Street photography

I took so many pictures in Alaska that I never quite finished going through the Seattle folder.

Here's one I missed. I love how completely unimpressed this man looks, standing in front of the beautiful window display and that gorgeous red dress.

Urban poetry

Evening light on the terrace of the Explorers Club a few weeks ago.

You can't really call anything on the Upper East Side of Manhattan a hidden gem, but there are gardens and parks and terraces behind the facades of those snooty townhouses that you wouldn't know are there unless you happen to be invited inside. You could live here forever and never see this hidden city.

I'd never been to the Explorers Club, but Russell Gammon, our wonderful tour director in Africa, had been invited to talk about David Livingstone. Russell is a brilliant storyteller and Livingstone is a story that I suspect he tells better than anyone, and I was thrilled to have a chance to hear it again. The video is below.

Every time I'm tempted to think my life is hard, I should remind myself of Livingstone going to work in the factories in Scotland as a child, balancing a book on the machines so he could teach himself Latin while he worked.

 

Public Lecture Series feat. Russell Gammon from The Explorers Club on Vimeo.

Astronomy Tuesday

This is the romantically named NGC 660, a so-called polar ring galaxy 20 million light years away in Pisces. This is a rare galaxy type, and astronomers aren't sure how they happen. There's a substantial ring of stars, gas, and a variety of space dust in orbit around the galaxy, but not in the same plane as the galactic disk, which is what you'd expect. Instead, as you can see in the picture, the galaxy tilts one way, and the ring another, almost perpendicular to its parent.

This image is from the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea, which seems appropriate because that pink ring reminds me of a rope of flowers, swinging in rhythm while the stars dance a hula. (I also like the variety of galaxies in the background, including the one in the bottom right that appears to be balancing on its edge.)

Image Credit: Gemini Observatory, AURA, Travis Rector (Univ. Alaska Anchorage)

Sunday bird blogging

A male downy woodpecker.

This is one of the most common birds in Central Park (apart from pigeons and house sparrows, of course) and you see them all year round. I love the great big feet on those tiny bodies, perfect for hopping around vertical tree trunks without losing one's grip, but I'm used to them, and don't even bother to take pictures unless they're posing in plain view like this fellow.

But what's commonplace to me can be an astonishment to a stranger. When I was in the park a few weeks ago, a woman from England excitedly showed me a photo of a bird on her phone and asked if I knew what it was. I told her that it was a male cardinal, and I pointed out a female that was hopping around not far from where we were standing.

She was surprised when I told her they were fairly common. “But it's so beautiful!" she said. And they are. A reminder that we are lucky to live in a world that has bright red birds poking around in it, color even in the darkest days of winter.

Saturday geometries

Well, sort of. There are angles enough here, against that washed out sky, but it's not the first thing you would notice about this picture. I want to call it “The Lighting of the Lamps", which makes me think of “Prelude":

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

That's T.S. Eliot, always good for a chuckle and a bit of cheer when you could really use it. Many years ago, I went to a reading by Stephen Spender, and he talked about Eliot, and said that the voice in his poems was the way he actually talked. He imitated him saying, “I don't like bread and butter, and jam's too much trouble," in a deep, ponderous drawl, and suddenly idle tea table chatter sounded like something out of “The Waste Land."

Urban poetry

A slice of the many levels of infrastructure making up elevated tracks in Chicago.

Astronomy Tuesday

I am always fascinated by photos of the Earth from space, but I especially love this one, with the battered body of our moon in the foreground and our beautiful planet just a blue wink in the distance.

The Chinese Chang'e 5-T1 spacecraft took the picture last week.

Image Credit: Chinese National Space Administration, Xinhuanet

The Cream

;

Many people linked to videos of Cream after the recent death of Jack Bruce, but this was my favorite. I like the sign identifying “The Cream" of course, and the way there's no real attempt to pretend that all of the vocals are live, with Mr. Bruce singing one part and then, apparently randomly, another.

Mostly I like the way Eric Clapton looks like a stand-in for Michael Cera in Juno. He's so adorably dorky.

Sunday bird blogging

This is the female purple finch. With that spotted breast she could be any of a number of sparrows or other female birds.

Birders identify her by the white stripes on her face and the notch in her tail. And, in my case, by the very useful fact that she was hanging out with male purple finches.

Saturday reflections

Some seasonal reds, on a day when it's pouring rain out of pitch black skies in New York and there's very little color to be found.