Summer break

While I'm waiting for the semester to begin I ve been going through some of my old pics. I need to get into the closet where the transparencies are and rescan them all.

Machu picchu.

A shipwreck in the Straits of Magellan.



Adelie peguins at Cape Royds, Antarctica. This was the site of Shackleton's expedtion camp.



Minke whale 'spyhopping'. There were actually two of them and they stayed for quite some time watching the ship.

Events in Eldorado, Texas bring to mind Mark Twain's comments on polygamy in Roughing It.
"Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter. I had the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here—until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically "homely" creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, "No—the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure—and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence."

Cuzco, Peru

Christchurch, New Zealand (They thought I looked weird.)

Orca, Ross sea, Antarctica

Black Browed Albatross, Ross sea, Antarctica

Polar bear, Arctic ocean

Ruminations

Rudolfo the Red-Nosed Llama, Calloa, Peru

I’ve been thinking about the readings of the past several weeks and I’ve concluded that I have a ruminantary brain. That isn’t a misspelling of rudimentary, although that’s quite likely also. A ruminant is an animal with multiple stomachs that chews a mouthful of food, swallows it, partially digests the food, regurgitates it and chews some more, then repeats the process through all the stomachs. My brain seems to work like that. Chew. Swallow. Ruminate. Regurgitate. Repeat. Even to the point that anything not assimilated gets passed as b.s. and gas…

Yi-Fu Tuan’s Surface Phenomena and Aesthetic Experience becomes a little more meaningful after reading Wallach’s Sheep Ranching in the Dry Corner of Wyoming and The West Side Oil Fields of California. Wallach gives a detailed description of the geology underlying the areas but the focus is on the observable surface. The depth, to a large extent forms the surface, but the surface is what is observed. Both depth and surface exist but surface is what humans interact with. I realize that the resources are under the surface, but there is no interaction until it reaches the surface, either by being pumped up or the surface stripped away.

On one of the blogs, someone asked “Is Florida considered part of the South?” and my response would be “Partly.” I’ve lived all over the South and I see anything north of Orlando as Southern and anything south of the city as Northern. North Florida is more Southern than south Florida. Northern Florida shares language/accent with the South, and food and religion are similar. Southern Florida is more urban and urbane. Urbane meaning they serve cheese with a toothpick instead of with a grilled hamburger patty and a couple of slices of bacon as would be proper.

I’ve been thinking about the theme “region” and I realize that I don’t have a definition that really works. Why is one place a region and another not? Why are two regions not the same thing? Ideas?