Tasmanian Devils have had a hard time of it, having been made extinct in Australia 3,000 years ago and now suffering from a contagious cancer which has wiped out 95% of affected populations. Conservation efforts have been ongoing, and the Tasmanian Devil was re-introduced in the wild in Australia last year.
Now there's the exciting news that "just months after their release, the creatures have successfully reproduced -- and conservationists have identified the tiny marsupials, which they say are the size of shelled peanuts, inside the pouches of the mothers."
Here's a 1-minute BBC video showing the tiny babies:
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway is a collection of sketches of the author's life in Paris in the 1920s, a sort of memoir of the time and place. It can be read online. It begins,
Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside. It was a sad, evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness. The men and women who frequented the Amateurs stayed drunk all of the time, or all of the time they could afford it, mostly on wine which they bought by the half-liter or liter. Many strangely named apéritifs were advertised, but few people could afford them except as a foundation to build their wine drunks on. The women drunkards were called _poivrottes_ which meant female rummies.
There are plenty of drink references throughout the book, but alas no pictures. I'll share some coffee for T Stands for Tuesday, though:
If you'd like to join me, the patio is inviting:
I got a few photos of some of the birds that come. Blue Jay:
Cardinal:
The cardinals can hold their own at the feeder, but so can the sparrows:
Carolina Wren:
The Mockingbird is the Tennessee state bird:
I wish I could get better photos, but these will just hafta do... The birds don't stay still long, and my cell phone and my inability to hold it steady enough limit what I can do.
Others sin on the right hand. They are much too rash and reckless, tempting God and disregarding everything which might counteract death and the plague. They disdain the use of medicines; they do not avoid places and persons infected by the plague, but lightheartedly make sport of it and wish to prove how independent they are. They say that it is God’s punishment; if he wants to protect them he can do so without medicines or our carefulness. That is not trusting God but tempting him. . . .
No, my dear friends, that is no good. Use medicine; take potions which can help you; fumigate house, yard, and street; shun persons and places where your neighbor does not need your presence or has recovered, and act like a man who wants to help put out the burning city. What else is the epidemic but a fire which instead of consuming wood and straw devours life and body? You ought to think this way: “Very well, by God’s decree the enemy has sent us poison and deadly offal. Therefore I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid persons and places where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me, and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others.”
Give that some thought when you decide not to wear a mask.
Here's what a face mask can do:
It's not about keeping you safe but about the health of those you come into contact with. My store-bought masks have come, and I wore one of those at the grocery store yesterday. I'm glad I can retire the bandana. I felt like I was 8 years old playing cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians when I wore it. Fond memories, but I doubt it was doing much good.
Feed is a young adult book by M.T. Anderson, read because the book challenge I'm engaged in directed a young adult book for March and this is the only one I could find free online that I hadn't already read. I got lucky and enjoyed this. It's is a strange story. You can read it online here. It begins,
We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.
We went on a Friday, because there was shit-all to do at home. It was the beginning of spring break. Everything at home was boring. Link Arwaker was like, “I’m so null,” and Marty was all, “I’m null too, unit,” but I mean we were all pretty null, because for the last like hour we’d been playing with three uninsulated wires that were coming out of the wall. We were trying to ride shocks off them. So Marty told us that there was this fun place for lo-grav on the moon. Lo-grav can be kind of stupid, but this was supposed to be good. It was called the Ricochet Lounge. We thought we’d go for a few days with some of the girls and stay at a hotel there and go dancing.
We flew up and our feeds were burbling all sorts of things about where to stay and what to eat. It sounded pretty fun, and at first there were lots of pictures of dancing and people with romper-gills and metal wings, and I was like, This will be big, really big, but then I guess I wasn’t so skip when we were flying over the surface of the moon itself, because the moon was just like it always is, after your first few times there, when you get over being like, Whoa, unit! The moon! The goddamn moon! and instead there’s just the rockiness, and the suckiness, and the craters all being full of old broken shit, like domes nobody’s using anymore and wrappers and claws.
The thing I hate about space is that you can feel how old and empty it is. I don’t know if the others felt like I felt, about space? But I think they did, because they all got louder. They all pointed more, and squeezed close to Link’s window.
You need the noise of your friends, in space.
*******
It's getting quite nice, with sunshine and highs in the 70s, and it's perfect patio weather. Please join me for T Stands for Tuesday, and we can enjoy a cup together:
I'll show off the flowers I have right now. Pink Dogwood:
and native honeysuckle:
My little Eastern Redbud tree is beginning to leaf out:
If it weren't for my patio, and screaming into the void on Facebook, and exploring new-to-me Twitter I think I might go mad!
After Trump tweeted about how proud he was of the ratings he was getting for his briefings I quit watching them. I do watch as much as I can of Dr. Fauci and other folks who know what they're talking about, but honestly I don't want to be part of any ratings boost he's bragging about *sigh* I leave you with a couple of coronavirus images for these dark days:
Truth hurts. Maybe that's why so many people won't accept it.
Spring has come to Memphis. I cut back all the wild coleus I had let stand through the winter so the birds could use them for the seeds and for perching. I pulled out the dead leaves so the black-eyed susans, bee balm, and wild sunflower could get the warming sun. It's been rainier than usual, but we've had a couple of days of sunshine with a high reaching up even into the 80s F one day.
On the patio I have native honeysuckle:
and pink dogwood:
The dogwood is in a pot:
Last week on my way to the grocery store I got photos of the tulips planted at the corner outside the Dixon Gallery and Gardens:
and the cherry trees on the road that leads to the Memphis Botanic Gardens:
When It Changed is a 1972 award-winning science fiction short story by Joanna Russ. You can read it online here. It begins,
Katy drives like a maniac; we must have been doing over 120 kilometers per hour on those turns. She’s good, though, extremely good, and I’ve seen her take the whole car apart and put it together again in a day. My birthplace on Whileaway was largely given to farm machinery and I refuse to wrestle with a five-gear shift at unholy speeds, not having been brought up to it, but even on those turns in the middle of the night, on a country road as bad as only our district can make them, Katy’s driving didn’t scare me. The funny thing about my wife, though: she will not handle guns. She has even gone hiking in the forests above the forty-eighth parallel without firearms, for days at a time. And that does scare me.
Katy and I have three children between us, one of hers and two of mine. Yuriko, myeldest, was asleep in the back seat, dreaming twelve-year-old dreams of love and war: running away to sea, hunting in the North, dreams of strangely beautiful people in strangely beautiful places, all the wonderful guff you think up when you’re turning twelve and the glands start going. Some day soon, like all of them, she will disappear for weeks on end to come back grimy and proud, having knifed her first cougar or shot her first bear, dragging some abominably dangerous dead beastie behind her, which I will never forgive for what it might have done to my daughter. Yuriko says Katy’s driving puts her to sleep.
For someone who has fought three duels, I am afraid of far, far too much. I’m getting old. I told this to my wife.
“You’re thirty-four,” she said. Laconic to the point of silence, that one. She flipped the lights on, on the dash—three kilometers to go and the road getting worse all the time. Far out in the country. Electric-green trees rushed into our headlights and around the car. I reached down next to me where we bolt the carrier panel to the door and eased my rifle into my lap. Yuriko stirred in the back. My height but Katy’s eyes, Katy’s face. The car engine is so quiet, Katy says, that you can hear breathing in the back seat. Yuki had been alone in the car when the message came, enthusiastically decoding her dot-dashes (silly to mount a wide frequency transceiver near an I. C. engine, but most of Whileaway is on steam). She had thrown herself out of the car, my gangly and gaudy offspring, shouting at the top of her lungs, so of course she had had to come along. We’ve been intellectually prepared for this ever since the Colony was founded, ever since it was abandoned, but this is different. This is awful.
“Men!” Yuki had screamed, leaping over the car door. “They’ve come back! Real Earth men!”
Of course robins are year 'round birds here, but we still set up a cry of "First Robin of Spring" every time we see one on a pretty day. It's a family tradition that predates me.
Here's my pour-over morning coffee. Please join the T Stands for Tuesday blogger gathering where we share a post with a drink in it and visit with one another. All are welcome.
Bloodchild is a science fiction short story by Octavia Butler. You can read it online here. It begins,
My last night of childhood began with a visit home. T’Gatoi’s sister had given us two sterile eggs. T’Gatoi gave one to my mother, brother, and sisters. She insisted that I eat the other one alone. It didn’t matter. There was still enough to leave everyone feeling good. Almost everyone. My mother wouldn’t take any. She sat, watching everyone drifting and dreaming without her. Most of the time she watched me.
I lay against T’Gatoi’s long, velvet underside, sipping from my egg now and then, wondering why my mother denied herself such a harmless pleasure. Less of her hair would be gray if she indulged now and then. The eggs prolonged life, prolonged vigor. My father, who had never refused one in his life, had lived more than twice as long as he should have. And toward the end of his life, when he should have been slowing down, he had married my mother and fathered four children.
But my mother seemed content to age before she had to.
*******
The rains came back Sunday night and are still adding to our unusually high rain amounts. The patio suffered from the recent sudden freeze (not the snow, because it didn't get cold enough to hurt anything, but the actual hard freeze before that). My poor hydrangea!
The honeysuckle is showing signs of blooming:
The mint is coming back nicely:
I'm hoping the Dogwood tree (left below) survived in its pot. It wasn't happy being moved. The rosemary has over-wintered well this year.
I'll be happy when it's dry enough and warm enough to have morning coffee out on the patio, but for now I'm enjoying my view looking out at it.
Because this blog does not consist of a single focus topic I chose the name Divers and Sundry where "Divers" means being of many and various kinds, and "Sundry" means consisting of a haphazard assortment of different kinds.
Posts
