Diary of a Mad Natural Historian

Welcome – make yourselves comfortable. The results of a blog search on ‘motorcycle’ are here, there’s some cosmonaut/astronaut (female) art here and a post on Hedwig Kiesler (aka Hedy Lamarr) here. Finally, four recent shots off the phone that will serve as an overview of me & mine.

Worldbuilding.

Messing around with unusual plants.

Hunting/gathering.

Nom.

Two other good place to browse are the ‘Greatest Hits’ and the ‘alt.tentacles’ buckets in the blogroll. Hope you find something interesting/enjoyable!

Beausage.  A nice word printed, less felicitous spoken, but the phenomenon it speaks of is the best – the marks of wear that come to good materials through use. Worn bluing where a shotgun is handled. Work boots well treated with bar oil and oak sawdust. And this:

Silent history. Wear your scars and dings proudly, people.

The International Carnivorous Plant Society comes to New England next August. For carnivorous plant nerds like yrs truly, this is a BFD. Expect reminders and indicators of excitement as the date draws nearer.

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Click the flyer or here to go to the main New England Carnivorous Plant Society conference page.

I’ve popped up on a couple other web sites recently and wanted to link out for readers that hadn’t seen these posts. First, way back in May (wow, time is flying this summer) I did a Five on Falconry post with Rebecca K. O’Connor over at her Operation Delta Duck. More recently, the Biodiversity Heritage Library featured me in their BHL and Our Users series of posts. I don’t know if this is my 15 minutes or 15 people, but it’s fun.

Tangentially – I received an email from a photographer who is doing a series of falconer portraits. He was in the area and wondered if I’d sit for some shots. The answer was yes and although the weather wasn’t great, shoot we did.

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A small world note on the second photograph – as I wrote to peacay (of BibliOdyssey),

…he spent a lot of time on shots of my peregrine on the fist. When we were all done, he told me that he was trying to replicate a picture his roommate had shown him on the internet. Yes, you can see it coming – he pulled up BibliOdyssey (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bibliodyssey/5765177031/sizes/l/) – I laughed – told him we correspond.

Hmm… Worth thinking about. Perhaps in the fall when the weather and fall-off in tourist traffic would make the walk even more pleasant.

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!

IS Parade – feed it a twitter ID or keyword and it generates a silly/fun parade of avatars:

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Got the new bars swapped in. Molto comfortable so far. Next upgrade – enhance the engine so that it can average 15mph and not be sweating at the end of a ride (street clothes theory of bicycling).

Years of blogging, that is. Hasn’t gotten old yet, so on we go!

Some additions I’d like to call your attention to.

Two new links under Sensory stimuli:

Hunter/Gatherer – Stephanie Brown’s blog. I’ve mentioned Ms. Brown’s work before – obviously, I like what she does.

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Annie Wu – discovered a while ago (via KdeM, maybe?).

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And an addition to the Pages section – my Awesome stuff for sale! page – it’s pissah! Go! Buy!

If you look at the Monthly: box over in the right margin, you’ll notice that posting frequency has dropped by about 50% for the past 6 months. Some of it has been because I’ve been busy, but another factor has been what I can only describe as dilution. With so many ways of emitting signal – Facebook, Wave and especially Twitter – and some finite number of things to say, my attention has not been focused on posting. I read this entry by Eliza Gauger with interest; I’m not willing to go as far as Bruce Sterling and declare blogging dead, but it has taken a bit of a hit. While I was looking at the bookmarklet Eliza is using, I discovered that there’s similar functionality built into WordPress called Press This. I’ve started using it (‘sproke and the two Lottes were posted via Press This) and am going to mix a lot more Tumblr/Soup-ish quick links into the blog stream. Expect the blog to be – at least until I go off on another tangent – a mix of ‘ooh, shiny’ quickies, stream-of-experience pictures and bog standard pointless ruminations.

A pretty little granddaughter appeared last night as if by magic. I can call it magic, since I wasn’t in the birthing room with my laboring daughter. Frances Mae M. (Frankie – though Scout may be used as a nickname, too) weighed 7 lbs. 2 oz. and is gorgeous.