Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen

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Rock Me Amadeus

The music I like to listen to is all over the place, as you are about to see… We spent some time driving around this morning (laundry, donut shop, groceries, Bitter Lake NWR) and I’ve figured out that a semi-obsessive diet of news is not doing my head any good. So Maisie and I listened to the Aria Code podcast. The latest post is a throwback: a repost of season one’s “Mozart’s Queen of the Night” . I find opera quite enjoyable – having no idea what is going on most of the time is no barrier. I just let the sound flow over me. I like Aria Code, though; it’s good to get some insight into the stories, the history and the musicology.

We got to the point in the podcast when the featured singer performs the aria and yes, it was Sehr schön. But as it started… “Hey waitaminnit!” I recognized the passage from a very different context. Another fave genre is soul music and a staple podcast is Mr. Fine Wine’s “Downtown Soulville“. The podcast, as delivered to my player anyway, is a rip of the radio show and it never ends exactly when the radio show does. One always gets a couple songs from Nate K’s “Burn It Down“. It’s a good show too – I can’t find it in podcast form, so my listening is restricted to back at camp when i think of it (not often enough). The Burn It Down intro is very familiar to me – I don’t know where the monologue is from (though i probably should) but I can now positively ID the aria in the background. Yay me! Here’s the Dec 8 2023 show – you only need to listen for a minute or so to get it.

And yes, I’m listening to the entire Magic Flute at the moment.

Godzilla Minus One

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Even here in southeastern New Mexico, land of cattle and oil, the echoes of The Bomb, WWII and the Cold War continue to reverberate. Seen in the checkout line last Sunday:

Roswell Daily Record

My friend S told me about a small museum at the airport devoted to the history of Walker AFB. Seemed like a perfect prequel to a Godzilla movie and boy howdy, was it ever. Walker AFB was where the 509th CG was based after WWII – the 509th dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Enola Gay cap

After the war, the 509th participated in Operation Crossroads – they were the first post-Trinity tests and took place at Bikini Atoll. You’ve seen footage of Baker (the second test), I’m sure. There was a photo of Baker in the museum; I didn’t realize at the time that there’d be a direct through-line to the night’s movie. Speaking of through-lines, I lived with the 509th as a neighbor during the Reagan years. They were flying FB-111s out of Pease AFB in New Hampshire and between a SAC base on one side and the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard on the other, I took grim comfort in knowing that if Ronnie managed to start a nuclear war, I’d likely never know.

Then it was off to the movin’ picture show. Godzilla Minus One is, imho, really good. I’m not going to offer any criticism or analysis – when I watch a movie I’m fully engaged (at least the first time). If I can stand back and look at the movie as a movie, it’s either something I don’t like or it’s a “so bad it’s good” MST3K kind of experience. GMO was neither of those; it’s an excellent re-telling of the origin story (spoiler: Operation Crossroads did it) set in WWII, devastated post firebombing Tokyo, and finally Japan as the country was just starting to get back on its feet. Strong recommendation!

Ky?sh? J7W Shinden model

Oh, no reason…

 

Roadrunner once…

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A confession: I’ve had a series of roadrunner posts rattling around in my head for a year and a half or so. Did I acually write them? We all know the answer. Just now I was about to post some pix to Instagram and realized that I had a post’s worth of captioning, so here goes. Not what I’d planned as the 1st roadrunner post, but perhaps this will break the logjam.

Roadrunner public art

The Word of the Day is zygodactyl. Most bird feet are three toes in front, 1 in back; they’re anisodactyl. A few, including many woodpeckers, owls, parrots and cuckoos, have two in front and two behind: they’re zygodactyl.

This is a left foot I salvaged from a roadkill roadrunner yesterday (not to worry, legal eagles, I disposed of it after taking a couple pix). The X – and thus the very distinctive roadrunner track – is obvious.

Left foot of a roadrunner

After looking at the foot for a bit, I had a question. Does the same toe rotate back in all zygodactyl birds? Is there zygodactyl chirality?? Turns out the answer is yes, same toe always. BECAUSE THERE’S A DIFFERENT WORD IF THE OTHER TOE GOES BACK!

zygodactyl/heterodactyl

In the above diagram (yanked from this Wikipedia page) we’re looking at right feet, 4 is the outer front toe in anisodactyl birds and 2 is the inner toe. From that same Wikiped page, “heterodactyl arrangement only exists in trogons.”

New goal: see a zygodactyl bird (roadrunner) and a heterodactyl bird (elegant trogon) in the same area. If there are still a couple trogons hanging around far southern Arizona this January (there were last year), it might be possible after Christmas.

Subterranean islands

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Greetings from southeastern New Mexico, on the edge of the Permian Basin. Maisie, the birds, and I are well into the ’23/’24 Southwest Peregrination and we’re all having a very nice time. Yesterday was forecast to be very windy – not a good day for flying the birds – so I traveled down to Carlsbad Caverns N.P. to take a walk underground.

First things first. The cave system was gorgeous and HUGE. The entrance was familiar – I’m positive it was the background for the freetailed bat illustration in my childhood Mammals: A guide to familiar American species Golden Guide.The shape? Yes. The scale? Yikes!

cave entrance from above

From the surface, it’s a 1.25mi/2k hike down switchbacks until you are 750’/245m down at the Big Room. The walk around the Big Room is a similar distance, but flat. A single chamber that takes about an hour to circumnavigate on paved paths. Big.

Part of the Big Room

As I was walking, I couldn’t help but compare Carlsbad to Kartchner Caverns. I visited Kartchner last winter – it’s in southern Arizona and was discovered and opened as a show cave more recently than Carlsbad. There are obvious similarities: humidity, temperature, formations, but they felt different. I’m putting it down to what I’m calling metabolism (I’m sure there’s a real term of art for this). Kartchner has a higher metabolic rate – more dripping, more wet surfaces, more of a feel that things are growing – still on a very long time scale, but… Cave systems are unique – I knew this intellectually, but feeling the difference between 2 pretty similar systems was striking.

The other thing that I’ve been thinking about since yesterday’s hike has been the “island” aspect of cave ecosystems. Kartchner Caverns is in the Sky Island region of southern Arizona – a desert with mountaintop ecological islands. It makes for fantastic hiking and biking – moving through very different kinds of habitats as one climbs. Similarly as one descends below the surface, the parameters change. Temperature and humidity stabilize and light disappears. Something that has adapted to Carlsbad (below the twilight zone) is not going to be able to pull up stakes and migrate to the next cave system along. I’m thinking primarily of microscopic critters – bacteria and pals – but big respect to cave crickets and salamanders and all the other macro beasts, too.

I’ll be back in Sky Island country after the holidays – I plan on going back to Kartchner Caverns (note to self – look at their calendar for cameras-allowed special tours) and will definitely be rolling this stuff around in my head as the squad and I go exploring aboveground.