Galápagos Monday: World Within Itself

By: | July 2, 2012

This is the third installment of a six-week series about my recent trip to the Galápagos. You can read the first post, about tortoises and donkeys, here, and the second, about eerie mounds of black coral, here.

Magnificent frigatebird: native or endemic?

If you go to the Galápagos, and even if you go, as I did, in a herd of clumsy American tourists, you will at some point feel like a field biologist. Regulations dictate that you be accompanied by licensed guides, and ours reminded me of my favorite college professors: authoritative and rhetorical most of the time, with sudden bursts of passion when they get a whiff of their pet topic.

Within an hour of my arrival, one of the guides launched into the difference between the islands’ endemic, native and introduced species. Endemic species arrived naturally but struggled to survive in the strange environment. Over many generations, they gradually adapted and are now found, in their modified form, nowhere else on earth. Native species also came naturally, but didn’t struggle as much and didn’t need to change. So they’re found in the Galápagos as well as other places. Introduced species did not “naturally” arrive, but were brought in by people.

My guides seemed to be obsessed with these definitions, mentioning them dozens of times over the course of my eight-day visit. When discussing endemic species — such as the marine iguana or Galápagos tortoise — they beamed like proud parents. But introduced species were the shameful family secret. “What are those trees?” someone asked guide Jason while hiking in the highland swamps of Isabela. “Those are cedars,” he said with a long sigh and a sad shake of his head. “Introduced.”

I rolled my eyes. I understand the concept, professor, really I do, now can we please move on? But, like most of the other times I’ve been annoyed with a good teacher, I was wrong. Several weeks and a lot of reading later, I’m finally beginning to get it. If you understand endemism, you understand the value of the Galápagos.
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Last Word Not Forthcoming

By: | July 1, 2012

Sally, who usually posts the week-end summary, had a massive failure of an unspecified nature.  And Ann, who does the backups, had a massive failure of modern conveniences due to excessive heat and no power for the foreseeable.

We’re sorry.  We doubt that this concatenation will happen again.

TGIPF: Iceland’s Phallological Museum

By: | June 29, 2012

This is the second installment of the occasional series Thank God It’s Penis Friday. Cassandra wrote the first one on banana slug sex.

Stunned.

It’s not every day you get an assignment to cover the Icelandic Phallological Museum. So when Richard emailed us, saying that through the magic of Facebook he had spotted that we were in Reykjavik, who were we to turn down such an offer? Off we took ourselves to Laugavegur, which on its western end is one of the city’s prime shopping streets but towards the east peters out into a drab sprawl of graffiti-marked concrete. This, naturally, is where we found the world’s premier penis museum.

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Summer of Smoke

By: | June 28, 2012

June 8, 2012, Cedaredge Colorado—It was an ordinary Friday afternoon. I was at my desk writing when I looked out the window and saw an enormous plume of smoke billowing from the back of our property. It was the kind of moment when you’re supposed to remain calm and remember all the wise things you learned in first aid class or girl scouts. (Stop! Drop! Roll!)

Instead, I panicked.

I threw open my office door and ran out to the garden where my husband was working, oblivious to the smoke behind him. “Holy shit! There’s a fire!” I waved my arms frantically, pointing to the smoke as the wind blew hot, dry air in my face.

“What kind of idiot burns weeds on a day like today…” Dave started. Then he turned around and saw the smoke. It was black and ominous. This was no routine slash fire. Continue reading →

The Bomb Was the Easy Case

By: | June 27, 2012

Science is known to be fatal; it kills people — this is all but a cliché.  World War I was the chemists’ war: chemists developed chlorine as a bleach and a disinfectant, then turned it into chlorine gas, which flooded (along with other gases) into enemy trenches.  World War II was the physicists’ war: physicists studied atomic fission to understand the constituents of matter, then turned it into the atom bomb.  World War III has several possible scientific sponsors, but the current frontrunners seem to be biologists.  Among other things, while trying to fight infectious diseases, they’ve just published the mutations by which a lethal virus could be spread more widely.  What is it that we haven’t learned? What’s so hard about this? Continue reading →

Brave New Worlds

By: | June 26, 2012


I remember the day the horses arrived. It had been raining, and for two kids cooped up inside, the afternoon seemed to stretch into years .

And then there were horses. Some were dark as thunderclouds, some roan, some palomino. There were wild mustangs and Icelandic horses with manes like clouds. My best friend and I picked each name—there was Stormlight, that one’s Mackintosh—as they came down the hall.

There was also one with a rainbow coat. Another had an eggplant-colored mane. A few could even fly. Continue reading →

Galápagos Monday: Southern Inhospitality

By: | June 25, 2012

This is the second installment of a six-week series about my recent trip to the Galápagos. You can read my first post, about tortoises and donkeys, here.

An eerie walk through what was, 70 years ago, underwater

At dawn on June 6, more than 30 years after Lynn was chasing tortoises at the top of Alcedo, our boat anchored near the volcano’s base in Urbina Bay. By 8 a.m., I was fully breakfasted and eager to begin the scheduled 2-mile hike, on which we were likely to see giant tortoises and land iguanas.

My mood dampened after disembarking on the beach. Even at this early hour, and even doused ear-to-toe with 100-SPF sunscreen, I felt an unrelenting solar assault. (Turns out it’s hard to concentrate on nature’s glories while obsessively imagining your skin cells morphing into irregularly shaped cancerous moles.) The beach was narrow and surrounded by foreboding gray rocks. Maybe this, I thought, is what Darwin meant when describing his first visit to these islands: “Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance.”
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The Last Word

By: | June 23, 2012

June 18 – June 22

“Don’t expect to get a penis every Friday, because you won’t.”

Thus spake Cassandra, introducing occasional penis Fridays, a new LWON effort, so to speak. The introductory post in the series concerned banana slug sex, which is even grosser than the sum of its parts, and that’s saying a lot.

A slightly more refined series also started this week: Galapagos Mondays. To kick it off, this week Ginny told us what donkeys and tortoises have in common with a one-woman nudist colony.

Guest Poster Meagan Phelan told us about smart clothes engineered to see and hear.

Jessa excavated the igloo; can it be reclaimed to help us adapt to climate change?

And finally, is there a better name than Rosemerry? There is not. But lest I get too envious, Christie’s post about envy reminded me that I’m barking up the wrong tree: “I’m making fun of myself and the ego’s longing to be more, to do more, to have more, more, more.” Imagine the possibility of envy as nurturing instead of toxic.