I saw a couple beautiful bicycles at the Portsmouth Farmer’s Market yesterday – sauntered over and struck up a conversation with their riders. Turned out one of the folks I was talking to was the guy who built the frames – Andrew Watson. His bike:
(embiggens maximally)
*
The cephalopodelic head badge:
*
And something that’s a must-have on my dream bike – the travel flask:
*
Absolutely gorgeous craftsmanship.
Just unloaded the camera – here are some pix that may not have justified a post on their own, but taken together are a nice slice of life.
Blueberry picking with my partner in berrycrime at Sturgeon Cove:
*
*
The cove is in the background (and yes, there are sturgeon in the main river – or at least there were 10 years ago).
*
My Utricularia humboldtii bloomed! First time!
*
Two styles of rabbit dogs. The kind that come from Kearsarge Mountain Teckels:
*
And the kind that come from Popper’s Sausage Kitchen:
Rabbit hot dogs … are locally raised New Zealand White and are seasoned with sage, white pepper, garlic and ginger.
Damn good, too.
Each piece is an artist’s interpretation of a one-line episode summary from the DirecTV program guide (full list of titles artists could pick from). Like the series that inspired them, they are sometimes straightforward and sometimes offer a twist; sometimes they contain no easy answers, and sometimes they are just plain goofy.
*
Radiation Kills a Tormented Scientist
*
Death Links to Ultimate Fighting
Notable addition to the bogroll – Pirate Anthropologie.
I’m an anthropology student studying creative uses of technology, alternative intellectual property, and music.
This blog will also be space for experiments in sound studies, pirate studies, and ethnography as I conduct my fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro.
Thanks @sullivanbc!
One teaser pic to get you to click through to an awesome trove of greatness.
Porsche 917 in Gulf colors with a lounging McQueen. ‘Nuff said.
STEVE McQUEEN | LE MANS & BEYOND GRATUITOUS 1970s RACING GOODNESS « The Selvedge Yard.
*
Via a Kickstarter email – click through and check out the trailer.
credit: Kenn Munk
Kenn got this shot in London and notes: “Took this photo Saturday – today (Wednesday) it’s been buffed – none of the other graffiti had been touched.” Go figure.
-or-
“In our time — which is a rather stupid time — hunting is not considered a serious matter.” *
This is the picture that planted the seed:
The figurine is described at Super Punch as a Falconer Predator. My first reaction was excitement – what would a Predator fly? How big (Haast’s Eagle size maybe)? I pretty quickly segued into thinking about Predators as hunters – especially with an eye towards fair chase – after all, the movies have been telling us since version 1 that Predators are hunting.
Before I embarrass myself further, a couple points. First, and most important, I realize the Predator is essentially a MacGuffin – horror/thriller subsp.: the nameless, implacable threat element. The alien is there to serve the story; it’s not reasonable to expect a consistent Predator backstory or even consistent behavior from movie to movie. Second, I doubt any of the writers thought very deeply about hunting. My guess is that the original pitch was more like, “It’s The Most Dangerous Game! With an alien! And Arnold and Jesse ‘The Body”! And a mini-gun!” Thus the die was cast – man-hunting became the central narrative element. In spite of these caveats, I just couldn’t leave it be – the more I thought about it, the more interested I became in figuring out what the action really revealed.
So – by way of inquiry, I netflixed Predator, Predator 2, Alien Vs. Predator, went to see Predators in the theater and re-read my copy of Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Hunting. Aliens Vs. Predator – Requiem has yet to be viewed – the Design Student tells me it’s the worst of the lot – I may choose to remain blissfully ignorant. Things I noticed:
The overwhelming feeling that I had watching the movies was that what I was seeing wasn’t hunting. Way too much general slaughter, WAY too much hand to hand combat and a weird confusion of military fighting, honor fighting/dueling and the chase.
I thought about it for a while before I dropped back to my copy of Meditations on Hunting, knowing that Ortega y Gasset thinks hard about what hunting is and isn’t. On page 47 of my edition I found a paragraph that clarified things immensely:
If the hunted is also, on the same occasion, a hunter, this is not hunting: it is combat, a fight in which both parties have the same intention and similar behavior. Fighting is a reciprocal action. The gladiator in the arena did not hunt the panther that had been let out of the cage; he fought with it, because neither found himself in a natural situation. In the course of hunting a fight may occur, as in the case of the wild boar which, when cornered, turns and attacks the hunter; but this fight has only incidental significance within the hunt, and whatever grave consequences may result, it is only an anecdote embroidered on the main tapestry of hunting. If the hunted animal were normally to fight with man, so that the relationship between the two consisted in this fight, we would have a completely different phenomenon. For this reason, bullfighting is not hunting. Neither does the man hunt the bull, nor does the bull, upon attacking, do so with hunting intentions.” *
Bingo! Predators are gladiators/bullfighters. Human skulls are like bull’s ears. Which leads to an obvious question. Every ‘exhibition’ fight I can think of is done for an audience. Are the Predators instrumented and cam-ed for an audience back home? There’s a backstory that could provide some consistency – Hollywood big-wigs, I’ll be waiting for your call.
[other notes]
Slight spoiler – there was no falconer in Predators. I don’t know if it got cut, or if I’m supposed to accept an autonomous reconnaissance drone that happens to mount to a Predator’s shoulder weapon rack as falconry – it ain’t.
One of the key plot points in AvP is nutty. I’m supposed to accept that the Predators leave all their weapons stashed in lasertag pyramid between ‘hunts’? What, they have draconian gun laws back home? (And we’ll ignore all the evidence to the contrary from the first two flicks.)
In the future, Lance Henricksen will be ubiquitous.
Two books came off my nightstand and hit the to-be-shelved pile – both great reads – that are united by their subject matter and [full disclosure] because the authors are friends of mine.
If you don’t have a renewed and deepened appreciation of birds after reading Sy Montomery’s Birdology,you’ve either been thinking pretty hard about birds already or are as numb as a post. We see birds every day and often take them for granted – Sy does an amazing job explaining why we shouldn’t – birds are different. Someone who might get excited about seeing a snake will look at a starling without really seeing it; looking through a starling is less likely after reading Sy’s book. Each chapter in Birdology emphasizes one aspect of difference – Birds Are Dinosaurs (cassowaries)/Are Made of Air (hummingbirds)/etc. I’ve been looking at birds with purpose for over forty years (I attended a lecture by Roger Tory Peterson when I was 10 – a birdwatcher already) but after reading this, I’ll never see them quite the same way again.
There are – believe it or not – more than a few falconry memoirs out there. It’s a tough genre – giants of the sport have written of their experiences, some authors have mixed how-tos with anecdotes and there are, of course, the one-damned-thing-after-another stories. In my reader-side experience, one of the most interesting and productive approaches is to use one’s falconry practice as a candle shining back on the author. Rebecca K. O’Connor takes this approach in Lift, and as far as I’m concerned, does a fantastic job of it. I’m deliberately not going to give much away – if you’re at all interested, you ought to read her words – but Rebecca knits together a narrative of her first season flying her first peregrine (properly, her first tiercel), who she was at that point in her life and vignettes from her (eventful? interesting? read betw the lines here, people) childhood. She doesn’t take the easy way out – Lift confronts some difficult situations and, to her credit – and to the book’s benefit – the childhood stories illuminate but don’t always obviously reinforce what’s happening in the falconry narrative.
Two good books – read ’em.
