“One should not talk to a skilled hunter about what is forbidden by the Buddha” -Hsiang-yen
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A gray fox, female, nine pounds three ounces.
39 5/8″ long with tail.
Peeling skin back (Kai
reminded us to chant the Shingyo first)
cold pelt. crinkle; and musky smell
mixed with dead-body odor starting.Stomach content: a whole ground squirrel well chewed
plus one lizard foot
and somewhere from inside the ground squirrel a bit of aluminum foil.The secret.
and the secret hidden deep in that.– Gary Snyder
Two essential internet tools
First, a status checking site: Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the Earth Yet?
Quickly followed by the essential sound effect.
(Check the source html on the LHC site.)
(more than) A couple links
Signor Poletti puts up a kaiju Fickrset. Worth a look or two or three (also – check out COOP’s vinyls in comments).
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Bookride runs down prices on one of my top ‘want it, but can’t afford it’ books – Ricky Jay’s Cards as Weapons. Sigh.
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Peacay, at the always excellent BibliOdyssey, posts one that’s right up my alley:
The book’s [Topographische und naturwissenschaftliche Reisen durch Java] author was an enigmatic character by the name of Franz Junghuhn (1809-1864). He overcame depression and a suicide attempt as a medical student, a prison sentence following a pistol duel (he escaped), and a stint in the French Foreign Legion on his path to becoming one of the foremost naturalists in 19th century Indonesia.
This plate reminds me a bit of a much later artist – O’Keefe:
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Click over and read – beautiful illustrations and a fascinating character.
Solms/AZP
I spent an enjoyable and exhausting weekend helping (gunner, bird boy, gofer) at the Northeast NADKC Solms/AZP test. Solms is a test for young dogs (done in the fall after a spring Derby); the Alterszuchprüng is for older dogs. The same test is run – AZP dogs are judged to a higher standard. It was a good learning experience for me – reading the rules gives you a sense of what’s going on, but working the test really drives home just how important retrieving is.
Saturday was overcast for most of the day as Hanna came up the coast towards us. A good thing – even though it wasn’t really hot (high 70’s, maybe low 80’s) the humidity was so high that your body couldn’t dump any heat. One dog doing the rabbit track found the rabbit, lay down next to it to pant and recover for 5 minutes, then picked the bunny up and returned to the handler. I don’t know whether she got dinged for it, but if she were my dog, I would not have begrudged her the lie-down.
Sunday saw all the ponds full to overflowing in the wake of Hanna’s 3+ inches of rain overnight. Cool, dry and delightful – half as many dogs to test – a walk in the park.
Rather than my usual slide show, I’m just going to post a few (mostly off-topic) favorites; the whole set is here.
Heron rookery where we did the duck search. A funny contrast – we were a mile or so from a drag strip and every few minutes you could hear the cars staging and then running. Not as loud as our occasional gunfire, but plenty startling if you were woolgathering.
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Juvenile form of the official NH State Amphibian.
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On point.
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PUPPIES!
