I-hate-soccer time has arrived early this year. An old friend, it normally knocks on my door in late November when we have our first underwater practice in the winter rain, and my fellow coaches have all skipped town for the tropics or developed life-changing man-colds.
Continue reading “I Hate Soccer”The Bustards
Washuk is a very small town in central Balochistan, Pakistan. Remote, hot, dusty and very unpleasant in an “I’m-going-to-get-sick-and-die-here” kind of way.
Are you Sexually Dimorphic?
We all know that some birds look spectacular. And we all know that some sing like angels. But did you know that the two usually don’t go together?
Beautifully coloured birds with ostentatious feathery outfits can’t sing worth shit, while small brown jobbies that look like pointy spuds with wings sound wonderful. In short, the prettier the bird, the worse it sings. This is partly intuitive I suppose but now it’s been proven by an in-depth study from the University of Oxford.
Continue reading “Are you Sexually Dimorphic?”The Municipal Elections
A few nights back, my wife and I went to a candidates’ meeting for the looming Vancouver municipal elections. In our neighborhood that means only one thing: A large crowd with an average age close to70 and one of the increasingly rare occasions where I still feel young and mentally on top of things.
Continue reading “The Municipal Elections”MegaFly
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.
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.
A Game For All Seasons
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.
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 Like Bach
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.
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.
I Hate Gardening
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.
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.
Adoro Te Devoto
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.
The all-knowing Wikipedia tells me…
“Adoro te devote” is a Eucharistic hymn 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.
Crows Can Count
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.”
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.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/counting-crows/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sa-editorial-social&utm_content=link-post&utm_term=biology_blog_text_free