I saw one of these once at a garbage dump near
our cabin. Biggest, dopiest fly I’ve ever seen. It flew slowly round and round
in circles and tried to land on me but missed my arm and smacked into a wall.
Not the smartest of flies.
Will you look after my eggs?
I took a photo of MegaFly because I’d never seen anything like it before in BC. It was close to an inch long and jet black with a fetching steel blue iridescence and massive eyes.
A ten minute search on the internet webpipes threw up the name Wood Rat Botfly. This particular fly leads a charming life, leaving its maggots to feast on live host animals, usually rodents. I’ll let the website bugwood.org explain…
Life History and Habits: Rodent and rabbit bot
flies develop as parasites of mammals. Adult flies lay their eggs near the
entrance of rabbit or rodent burrows or runways and other sites frequented by
their animal hosts. The eggs hatch in response to the warmth of a potential
host and the maggots enter natural openings, such as the nose or mouth. Initial
development usually occurs at these areas but later migrate. Ultimately they
settle under the skin in sites typical of the species (neck, abdomen) and as
they grow they appear as large swellings known as warbles.
The rats and squirrels often die from the ironically
named warbles.
If you’re really really curious, the gorey details are captured in glorious technicolour here. But I wouldn’t recommend clicking the link just before supper or bedtime for that matter.
So now you know. Stay away from garbage dumps
near Pemberton and you won’t get maggots.
I’ve been involved with kids’ football.. sorry I meant soccer (my English side coming out again) for over 10 years. I coached my eldest son’s team, the Pistons, until they aged-out after U18 and now I’m doing the same with my youngest son’s team, the Cobras.
Footie season in Vancouver always goes the same
way.
September. Glorious weather. The kids and
coaches a few pounds over weight and happy to see their buddies at practice.
Terrible scrimmage game with no team cohesion. Trying to figure out where the
news kids fit it.
October. Autumn rains starting. The reality of
school starts to bite. A few injuries
and the odd player drops out. Games get better and we figure out who plays best
in what position.
November. Weather starts to turn to shit. Rain affects practice attendance for kids and coaches. Full match fitness back and we start to get the measure of the teams in our league and figure out if we’re competitive.
December-January. Cold wet hell-on-earth practices. Freezing fucking games, coaches and parents wrapped up in strata of thermals, water proofs and gloves. Miserable frozen wet goalies permanently on the verge of hypothermia. Hopefully we have a winning record which keeps the kids turning up to games.
There have been days like this…
February. See above.
Late February / early March. Last game. Season done. Over and out till September.
Except this year is different. That last game is really my last game.
I’ve always
thought Herr Bach was a particularly ballsy composer. So much of his catalogue was
written for solo instruments; his violin partitas or the cello suites for
example. To my simplistic mind, composing for solo instruments puts the composer
and the musician out there for all to hear. There’s nowhere to hide if the
composition or musicianship is weak.
Bach’s best known instrumental works are probably what we now think of as his solo piano pieces, like the Goldberg Variations. What I didn’t know until today though, is that many were originally written for harpsichord; the Variations is a case in point. It was transposed for the piano after his death.
Cheer up.
My personal Bach favourite pops up in the middle of his Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin. Officially titled the Partita in D Minor for solo violin, it’s also known as the Chaconne or Ciaccona. If I had to make a top 10 list of classical music, actually all genres of music for that matter, the Chaconne would be top 3 for sure. I never tire of listening to it.
Written around
1718 give or take a year or two, it forms the fifth movement in a series of five
pieces in Partita No. 2, each representing popular dances of the time. Most of
the pieces are 3-4 minutes long but then, just as you’re getting used to the
format, here comes the Chaconne in all its stunning 13 minute-long glory; a
full on symphony played on one instrument.
People have
speculated that he wrote it while grieving for his wife who’d recently passed
away. Other speculate it’s the bottled up emotion that comes from losing 10
children. Yup, Bach lost 10!
Whatever
drove him to write it, it’s fostered a deep reverence amongst classical musicians
and composers. It’s almost impossible to play for anyone but true virtuoso
violinists. Fiendishly difficult double and triple stopping (with chords thrown
in for good measure) add incredible texture to the piece, which is in 3 parts moving
from the minor key to the major and then back to minor again.
No less
than the great Yehudi Menuhin went as far as to call it “the greatest structure
for solo violin that exists.” Brahms said of it:
“On one
stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest
thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created,
even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and
earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.
Quite.
I screwed around on the violin as a kid for 5 years at high school. I never really progressed beyond vaguely tuneful scrapes and cat howls. But I was left with enough appreciation for the instrument to know when someone’s doing something truly special with it. The link below is to a great performance by Bulgarian violinist Viktoria Mullova. The real fireworks go off around 5-6 minutes in. So go take a listen. Not just once. Go back and listen a few times and you’ll begin to see what a marvel the Chaconne is. If you only have one piece of classical music to listen to on your phone, let it be this.
Seriously. I hate gardening. Aside from growing vegetables, the rest of it I detest. Our back yard is a case in point. Nothing we do to it has any effect on the paucity of grass. We mow. We spread seed and from time to time we dutifully resoil with that foul smelling muck the City sells but it always looks shit.
Be careful where you tread.
Part of the
problem is bad drainage. The patch closest to our house is underlain by an old
sloping driveway into what used to be a parking spot beneath the back porch.
The driveway was filled in back in the day with concrete rubble which means lots
of subsurface cavities. The net result is any rain or hose water that falls on
that part of the lawn instantly fucks off downwards leaving a parched scrap of
dead lawn that doesn’t bother even trying to growing anymore. Other parts of
the lawn have been taken over by moss. Still more has been invaded, conquered
and settled by a marauding army of lush, leafy weeds.
If we do
pluck up the courage to take it all on, there are the doggy land mines to deal
with. Nothing attracts the canine arse more than cool inch-long grass, or in
our case, inch-high weeds, which are remarkably good at hiding turds. Any attempt
to mow the jungle has to be preceeded by a UN-style mine clearing operation wearing
protective suits and a systematic grid search for hidden poo.
My wife tells me some people enjoy gardening; they find it relaxing. Our neighbours across the road do, bless them. They’re always out tending their pristine bloody lawn, and they’ve got all the gear to throw at it. Electric weed wacker, fertilizer spreader, weed digger-upper, an edger.. the full arsenal of lawn care products. If gardening was war Point Grey would win.
Last night was our fortnightly choir practice; something I really look forward to and as close to spiritual as this avowed Darwinist will ever get. We’ve been working on a short piece called “Adoro Te Devote” linked here. The recording –done inside a church most likely- is not the best. Actually, it sounds like the choir is inside a sewer pipe. No matter.
“La la la Adoro te devote la la bloody hell it stinks in here.”
The
all-knowing Wikipedia tells me…
“Adoro
te devote” is a Eucharistichymn written by Thomas
Aquinas.
It is one of the five Eucharistic hymns, which were composed and set to music
for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, instituted in 1264 by Pope
Urban IV as
a Solemnity for the entire Roman Catholic Church… The opening line literally translated means “I
devoutly adore you, o hidden Deity”
Sounds quite grandly religious when you put it like that doesn’t it?
On a more mundane level, the opening three notes of the main theme are the same as the Beatles’ song Ob La Di Ob La Da. A bit slower, and a bit more ethereal, but the same. A climbing pattern of third intervals.
Our teacher Colleen uses musical cognates like Ob La Di to help the less-musical members of our choir improve their sight reading skills; essentially she turns it into an exercise in pattern recognition. And we all know that a pattern is easier to remember than being told it’s another melodic theme based on opening climbing thirds.
The header should
really say “Crows Can Count-ish.” Or they can at least tell when one group of
objects has more objects than another group of objects, if you see what I mean.
This according to an interesting blog post from Scientific American which begins onimously:
“Crows hold a somewhat eerie status in our folklore. Perhaps inspired by their black plumage and coarse caws, stories and legends depict these birds as ominous creatures, messengers between the realms of the living and the dead, harbingers of death and misery. Crossing paths with a crow can be an unsettling experience, not least because it feels as though these highly attentive birds are scrutinizing us with their deep, penetrating gaze.”
I promise to count to 10 if you don’t stick wires in my head. Photo from Scientific American
The post dispassionately sums up the findings of a series of experiments where scientists stuck wires into crows’ heads and made them do counting-related stuff. It’s all about the Corvids’ ability to compare quantities. “I’ve got more cheese than you” kind of stuff presumably. How on earth a crow can do anything, let alone count, with wires stuck in its head while rotting in a lab beats me.
It’s Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend. So best wishes to all and have a great weekend. Unless you’re a Brussel Sprout. In which case this will be your fate.
Half a day south of the N40 highway in Pakistan, the main road heading west to Iran through the Baluchistan desert, lies the Ras Koh mountain range. Steep, rugged mountains with little or no forest cover cut by deeply incised “nallas” or dry stream beds which you don’t want to be stuck in when it rains. Not that it rains very often. I was there in 1997 prospecting for porphyry copper systems, hot on the heels of BHP’s massive Reko Diq discovery in the Chagai Hills.
Getting there was a 2 day drive from Quetta along the N40 dodging Iranian and Pakistani trucks. The driving was some of the worst I’ve ever experienced; if you ask me it’s a bloody miracle any trade ever makes it across the Iran-Pakistan border in one piece. Once you left the road to head south, you might come across convoys of armed pick up trucks smuggling opiates to the Makran coast. And then there were the delightfully named Camel Spiders; hairy orange buggers with huge jaws that may or may not eat camels.
A camel spider. Don’t even think about it.
With only a very basic map and a GPS, accompanied by a dignified elderly Pakistani geologist, Naseem (who spoke Baluchi) and 2 government soldiers, I was trying to find a way in to the centre of the Ras Koh range. Detailed satellite image processing in head office had flagged a large area that looked like it might be a porphyry system and which had to be checked. But after 2 days hiking we gave up. There was simply no easy way in that didn’t involve some pretty extreme camping and we weren’t equipped for it. So, Naseem recommended visiting the local governor to find out if there were any tracks or roads that we hadn’t tried and off we went to find him in Dalbandin.
Dalbandin. best seen from the air.
Dalbandin is a particularly unpleasant little truck service town. Dirty and hot, with –back then- only the cockroach-infested government hostel to stay in. What followed was a typical Middle Eastern tea-and-cake session with the Gov’ to honour the foreigner (me). Any excuse for a nice slice of jam sponge. After a couple of hours reminiscing about the glorious legacy of the British Empire (I kid you not) he looked at our map and drew a large triangle around the area we’d been trying get into and said in perfect English “Stay out of here” with no explanations given. On the way out, Naseem told me we should forget about that particular target and move on.
We headed west to Fort Saindak to chase different
targets out on the westernmost point of Pakistan where the Iranian, Afghan and
Pakistani borders meet.
Six months later the Pakistanis detonated 5 atomic bombs at their top secret test facility in the middle of the Ras Koh range. Our satellite photos had picked out the spoil heaps from the underground tunnel excavations. I’d been trying to hike into a nuclear test facility: a westerner with a digital camera and a GPS. Hello… Is that the Darwin Awards?
The Ras Koh ranges, shaking sedately in the evening sun.
In the
mid-1990s I spent the best of a year in the province of West Azerbaijan in northern
Iran, based in the small farming town of Takab. The area, about a day’s drive
from Tehran, is populated largely by Turkic and Kurdish people and Zoroastrianism is still practiced there. The day-to-day
language is Turkish. Rural and fairly remote, life for the villagers goes on as
it has for thousands of years.
Me (left) at 33.
I was
running an exploration program at a project called Zarshuran (“the place of the
gold washing”) working a 6 weeks in / 2 weeks out rotation with Budapest as my
home base.
The routine
in Iran was pretty simple. Get up. Eat breakfast: flatbread with honey, eggs and
yoghurt. Spend the day at the project. Come back to the Hotel Ranji in Takab.
Eat dinner: chicken or beef kebab, yoghurt and grilled tomato. Sleep. Repeat
for 6 weeks.
One day in
1996 or ‘97 my daily routine was pleasantly interrupted when a Dutch traveller
turned up at the hotel. In Iran for his friend’s wedding, he was on his way to
visit an archeological site near Takab: Tahkt –e Soleyman (the name means
Prison of Solomon and legend holds that King Solomon used to imprison monsters there.)
Zarshuran village, northern Iran
In need of
English-speaking company, I persuaded him to travel to my project for the day.
It was a 45 minute drive from Takab through small farming villages where he got
a chance meet the locals and photograph the hard-scrabble life of Iranian subsistence
farmers. As a bonus, I took him underground at a small but spectacular arsenic
mine to collect world-class samples of bright yellow orpiment (arsenic sulphide) from the ore pile.
Orpiment: Arsenic Sulphide
Twenty
years later, out of the blue, I got an email from him. He’d tracked me down on-line
using an old business card I’d given him during his visit. And attached were 20
scanned photos from his day on the project which he said was the highlight of
his trip to Iran. I was totally blown away. All the photos I’d taken at the
project were of rocks, drills, and general technical stuff with a few scenery
snaps thrown in. But here were photos of me, at 33 years old, looking vaguely
like a geologist on a day I’d long since forgotten about… being all earth
sciencey and authoritative at the Zarshuran project, which is now Iran’s
biggest gold mine.
It’s not a formal membership-fee type of club,
more a casual once-a-year gathering of 20-25 mining people at a steak restaurant
in downtown Vancouver. We meet in late January to contemplate the state of the
industry, drink good red wine and pick stocks.
The rules are simple. Everyone gets to chose 1
mining stock with the caveats that it can’t be a company you work for and it
can’t be halted or private. At the dinner, whoever chose the stock that went up
the most over the year is declared the winner.
Everyone who attends has to bring a $100 bottle of wine except for the winner, who eats and drinks for free. We run it like a fantasy hockey pool with the overall loser picking first for the coming year, but last place also gets to run the club for the next 12 months (which is why yours truly is running it this year. Thanks for nothing Volcanic Gold…)
This is where it gets a bit more interesting, because we also track the overall performance of the portfolio of stock picks, naively believing a) that we’re somehow smarter than the average resource investor and b) that we represent an experienced and deeply knowledgeable group of mining insiders who should know what they’re doing. Yeah right.
Waddya mean the portfolio’s down? Pass me the wine…
Two years ago we thought we were the bees
knees. Our portfolio was up an astonishing 250%. In fact, our record was so
good, if we were a proper hedge fund we’d have ranked almost the number 1 resource
fund in North America. If you’d invested $500 in each stock we picked, you’d
have made close to $32k profit. Not bad for 12 months.
For the last 24 months, reality has bitten. The
market has put us firmly back in our place while lustily kicking our butts down
the sidewalk, up the alley and into the back yard. Year-to-date our portfolio
is down 26% and, tellingly, 22 out of 25 stocks we picked are in the red. To be
fair on us, this is a reflection largely of the “nobody gives a fuck” state of
the resource sector which is veering dangerously close to a 10-year low.
On the bright side, I’m leading the pack. My pick,
Evrim Resources, is up a gratifying 196% which means I’m currently on track for
a nice free wine tasting. Chin chin!
