Dip, Dip and Swing

By: | July 3, 2015

shutterstock_21842599Another Canada Day has passed, eclipsed in my part of the country by the festivities of Aboriginal Day, which falls just a week beforehand. Bizarrely, it was the Google Doodle this year that most roused my patriotic spirit on July first. In the image, a woman kneels up in the bow of a canoe — possibly scouting some rapids ahead – while a man steers in the stern.

It’s quite a beautiful scene. Trouble is, neither of them seems to know how to hold a paddle. Their top hands are wrapped around the shaft instead of clasping the grip, and the paddles themselves are outlandishly outsized, in an otherwise realistic painting. That might be a minor quibble, but it doesn’t sit right with me. Nothing says Canada to me like paddling, but much more than that, nothing marks a Canadian more than paddling expertise. There is a certain kind of competence you can only display in a canoe. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Waiting Out the Latter Days

By: | July 2, 2015

Steven Smith — a photographer who grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormon church, and whom I’ve known a long time — sent me a book he’s just published.  It’s called Waiting Out the Latter Days.  It’s almost entirely photographs which I love but am incapable of reading, so I asked him to explain it a little.  His full answer is in the following post but his first answer was:

“I have been thinking about how to talk about this book but it is so personal, I get self-conscious. The book has a catchy, almost clichéd, title but I mean the phrase in every sense possible. The Mormons viewed the nuclear apocalypse as the Bible’s promise of the end of days. That was when Jesus was going to come back and take every one to heaven. I did this book because I was so curious to investigate the world that did not meet its armageddon.”

– Ann

03_Lehi_ShadeParadeBoyFourth grade was the last time we practiced diving under our desks and turning our faces away from the windows. In middle school, we were sent down into the basement from time to time for what our teachers told us were earthquake preparedness drills. We knew the drills were for atomic bombs. The looming nuclear attacks were all part of God’s plan. Our job was to remain faithful and wait.

While waiting, we saw the TV programs on Nuclear Armageddon and When the Russians Invade that aired right before Saturday morning cartoons. Then in Sunday school, we found out how Satan and the Communists were conspiring together against us. The Cold War was escalating, the Russians were going to attack soon, and we had better stop touching ourselves. I didn’t really have any hopes or dreams then. I just wanted to live long enough to get married and have sex before God called us Home. Continue reading →

The myth of the breastfeeding diet

By: | July 1, 2015

shutterstock_162325934Breastfeeding is often sold to new mothers as a bulletproof way to lose the baby weight. The promise is the same whether you’re getting advice from lactation experts, mummy blogs, Unicef, midwives, or official medical sites such as the NHS in the UK and the National Institutes of Medicine in the US: feed your baby the natural way, and you’ll burn about 500 calories every day.

The prospect of effortlessly melting away the baby weight will be attractive to someone who is probably still too sore and exhausted from labour to even consider going for a run. It’s also an awfully nice carrot to dangle in front of a person who is on the fence about breastfeeding. But 500 calories is a very specific number. So where did it come from? And is there any truth in it? Continue reading →

Fired Up

By: | June 30, 2015

3368841720_f6ddbcfe97_zI quit glassblowing because it pissed me off too much. It’s been ten years since I’ve done it, so I don’t remember much about how to make a goblet or a vase or a Christmas ornament. What I do remember is the bright eye of the furnace, the relentless heat, and the crazy dreams that I had after late-night sessions in the shop. My nights were filled with color, with people transforming into animals or into each other, with rainbow storms and trippy blobs that looked like moving Rorschach tests.

In the dreams I was often angry. In the glass shop I was often angry, too, because I found it so frustrating and I was so terribly, terribly bad at blowing glass, at shaping it on the bench, at doing much of anything at all besides staring into the fire and, later, having the circle of it burned into my dreams.

Continue reading →

The Urge to Go

By: | June 29, 2015

shutterstock_261653681I couldn’t have been any more than 7 or 8 years old when I told my mom I was running away. Her response was, “Take me with you.”

I grew up with her, just the two of us. She was a wanderer, not happy unless she was going somewhere. Her restlessness had us moving once every year or two or three. Everything was an adventure, every weekend a journey. Out of Denver, she’d take me up into the Rockies to camp in a tent along cold, tumbling streams. We ate out of foil packets and climbed mountains until we could see everything, a continent disappearing over the edge of the earth all around us.

To live is to move. Any species will tell you that. Genes require frequent stirring and new niches must found. Tendencies toward novelty seeking and risk taking have a chromosomal expression. Some of us are just more struck than others. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | June 27, 2015

Rafe_Blue_Marble-June 22 – 26, 2015

Wouldn’t you like to know how to work for clicks and not cash?  Guest Bryn Nelson collects the wisdom of the online media in list form, and you absolutely won’t believe #73.

Michelle profiles/remembers/learns from the biologist Rafe Sagarin, who died too young and who had the choice of moving upward but moved outward instead.

You know how in journalism, if you’ve got three things, you’ve got a trend?  Journalist Helen saw bugs on her window three times and now some kind of bug is crawling up my window right this minute.

Craig went into an anechoic room so quiet he could hear earthquakes in China, and when he left the room and got his senses back New York City was a reassuring river of noise.

I’m pretty sure you don’t want to know the content-per-unit volume of insects that are allowed in your canned tomatoes and peanut butter, but if you do, Jennifer is happy to help.

~

And not to change the subject, but in form and content and perfomance this eulogy is a gold standard for all eulogies.

 

 

 

Meal, Worm

By: | June 26, 2015

shutterstock_108198206I eat meat. Most kinds. Beef, pork, chicken, bison, turkey.* Dark meat, white meat, legs, breasts. I’m not big on lamb—too much flavor, or perhaps too fragrant. Same goes for goat and venison. And I say no to veal, no matter how delicious it may be. Not that other farm animals aren’t treated poorly, but those little lambs immobile in those tiny crates…I can’t stand it.

Even if we promise to be cruelty free, those of us who are carnivores think little about carving away parts of animals to gobble down the protein and fat and vitamins disguised within. And yet, when we think about another kind of meat, insect meat, we cringe in disgust.

Of course, it’s all about what you’re used to. People who grow up with insects (and their insect-like relatives) for dinner don’t consider them unpalatable. But those who shriek bloody murder at a spider sighting or own the long-handled “bug vacuum” (try SkyMall) to avoid close encounters are less likely to order grasshopper tacos, if given the option. Give us our ground up cow or shredded chicken any day.

I’ve asked around. Part of what turns some away from entomophagy (insect eating) is the idea that you are eating the whole animal then and there. A baking sheet in the oven with rows of caterpillars—full bodies, lots of legs, and eye-topped stalks intact—is somehow harder to stomach than the wings of a bird on a grill (which don’t really look like what they are at that point). And there’s the “ick” factor of bugs to begin with. Other than spidery basements or mothy pantries, most modern houses are pretty good at keeping insects out. And when bugs do find gaps and sneak in, we are willing to spray noxious chemicals rather than spoon a weevil out of our oatmeal.

We’re fooling ourselves, though: Continue reading →

Bugs on My Window

By: | June 24, 2015

Here’s a thing that reliably brings me delight: seeing a bug on a window.

I don’t know how this love started. But it’s real.

Here’s what happened when I was walking to the water cooler at work the other day. I saw a dark spot on the glass. A step or two more and wings came into focus. I speed-walked back to my desk, put down the glass, picked up my camera, and set the dial to manual focus while I rushed back to the window. Continue reading →