Variations on a Vegetable

By: | February 5, 2020
Romanesco: My dinner, my muse, my photo

Tonight I contemplate this head of Romanesco broccoli, soon to be cut up, slathered in olive oil, and roasted. As you can see, its edible flowers, weirdly known as curds, form a pyramid of identical, spiraling turrets. It’s a classic example of fractal geometry: a shape that, like a fiddlehead fern or lightning bolt, can be broken down over and over again into smaller parts, each a miniature version of the whole.

“Beauty brings copies of itself into being,” writes aesthetics scholar Elaine Scarry in her 1998 essay “On Beauty and Being Just.” “It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.”

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The many languages of Dog

By: | February 4, 2020

When I return home from a trip, or really from any absence longer than 15 minutes, my dog Taiga greets me with the canine equivalent of pyrotechnics: Leaping, writhing, twirling, lip curling, a quiver full of hyena sounds. Once, after a 13-day visit to Alaska, she reached my face in a single bound from the floor, her nose making high-speed contact with my mouth. Proof once again that love can draw blood—mostly metaphorical, sometimes literal.

Each time her affections explode into uncontrolled demonstration, I imagine what it would be like if humans greeted each other this way. The teenager who bags groceries jumping and singing at the sight of a familiar customer. The host of a dinner party flinging a saucy spoon into the air at the arrival of his guests, spattering the ceiling with a Jackson Pollack arc of pureed tomatoes and olive oil. Friends, upon unexpected sight of each other from opposite sides of the street, sprinting into an intersection to embrace.

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Technically, the Moon is a Boulder

By: | January 31, 2020

This happened the other day not far from where I live. Boulders fall all the time around here, highways regularly blocked. This time, the wording is what stuck.

The local sheriff’s post went viral when this fallen obstacle was described as a “large boulder the size of a small boulder.” With those words, this 10,000-pound rock sprung to greater fame than the pair of multi-million-pound sandstone monuments that fell a thousand feet onto a highway the next county over last spring, rectified with dynamite and a change in the highway’s course.

This new one, of lesser size than its greater self, was scraped to the side with basic road equipment, yet it has become celebrated, appearing on the the Colbert Report, a bit of fame for our corner of Colorado. It is a roughly roundish hulk of what looks like limestone, the size, I’d say, of two polar bears hugging. 

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Below the Snow

By: | January 29, 2020

It’s not snowy here, but it certainly feels like winter: we’ve had a winter cold circulating through the house since the holidays. The subnivium, which I first wrote about in 2013, sounds very appealing right now as a refuge from all that the season brings.

When I think about winter, I mostly think about all the fun things that take place on the snow’s surface. Or all the fun things that take place inside: hot chocolate, eating, reading by the fire. Once spring comes, when the world outside is buzzing (and boing-ing), there’s no excuse to stay inside with a good book.

I’m not the only one who needs a winter retreat. In snow-covered spots food can be scarce; the wind-chilled open air is brutal. But for creatures that aren’t able to curl up with cocoa, the snow itself forms the insulation for a shelter under the snow.

This below-snow retreat is such a wintertime ecological haven—for everything from freeze-resistant invertebrates that can supercool their own bodies to martens and weasels that stalk prey and snooze in this space–that a paper in this month’s Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment proposes that it should get its own designation: the subnivium. Jonathan Pauli and Benjamin Zuckerberg at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and their colleagues have gotten interested in the dynamics of this sub-snow world—and what will happen to it as winters warm up.

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Parasite Is Great Cli-Fi

By: | January 28, 2020

An opinion that I often share at social functions, usually without provocation, is that Snowpiercer is one of the best movies of the 21st century. Most people seem not to share that view. Most people are wrong. 

If you’re among the benighted millions who’ve never experienced Bong Joon Ho’s masterpiece, I suggest you rectify that shortcoming immediately. (It’s on Netflix — no excuses!) In the meantime, here’s the wild premise. It’s 2031. A desperate stab at geoengineering has backfired catastrophically, entombing the world in ice. The few survivors — Chris Evans and Octavia Spencer among them — are trapped on a train, a “rattling ark” that, y’know, pierces the snow as it circles the earth. The dirt-smudged hoi polloi rot in steerage, locked down by armed guards, while the über-wealthy (led by Tilda Swinton, playing a creepy mashup of Hitler, Gaddafi, Thatcher, and, um, Silvio Berlusconi) frolic in opulence at the train’s head, waltzing through cars filled with orange orchards and saunas and party drugs.

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The Sun in January

By: | January 27, 2020

This morning, mid-January, sandwiched between the past few days of fog and rainy gloom and future days of cold and snowy mix, the sun did this. I’d been having the flu, not getting 5 feet away from the couch, and the sun was so stunning I walked out on the porch and stood in it. I swear it’s like, the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you peace. I’m not even religious.

Sunlight has beneficent effects on all kinds of diseases and hoo boy, on all kinds of depressions and disorders of mood. But we already knew all that, didn’t we, we just hadn’t done the science. When there’s a puddle of January sunlight in the corner of a room, even the dog knows to go lie down in it.

You can’t see in that picture a detail, a tiny glory, so here’s the closeup.

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Swan Songs

By: | January 24, 2020

It is crushing to see my dad in the nursing home. Life is so small there, the food so terrible, the residents so…out of sorts. One woman continually calls for help—a tiny voice in some faraway room, ignored for crying wolf; one man walks the halls with glazed eyes and drool dripping down his chin. Another guy slumps in a wheel chair, hand working himself under a blanket. It’s a hard place to make friends.

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