Tattered-upon-Avon

Last Sunday I woke up in Bristol, England and went to bed in California.  What happened in between is not that interesting — basically I woke up late, missed my bus, had a panic attack, wound up taking a cab from Bristol to Heathrow (which was I’m afraid, not cheap), called my wife and woke her up to get my flight info, got laffed at by the driver ‘forgot about the time difference did you?,’ heard about his more notable fares (François Fillon and some British celebrities I’d never heard of), charmed my way through the ticket counter (they wanted to bump me to another flight), barely made my plane, watched some of this Morgan Spurlock show (decent, kind of boring), listened to “Well You Needn’t” about a million times, ate some kit-kats, I dunno I guess that was about it.

POINTLESS SEMIOTIC DIATRIBE FROM THE BACK OF THE CAB: The sign on the back of this British lorry which we are rapidly overtaking inquires: “Well driven?”  Effing brilliant.  Really breaks down the metonymic (synechdochic?) chain summoned by the American version: “How’s my driving?”  Lets you damn the driver without directly insulting the truck.  Blah blah blah dyadic v. triadic sign relation schemes blah blah blah différance recursion representamen, whatever.

MUSICAL INTERLUDE:

Would have loved to catch Maximum Joy, but I guess I was about three decades too late.  Pity.  Also, I didn’t catch nearly the volume of Banksy I was hoping to–in fact only ever saw this one: though from various angles and lights and states of relative insobriety.

Bristol, as Jeffrey Martz observes, has a decidedly Escherian feel, each time I tried to take a short-cut I wound up in interesting places far from my intended destination.  I very nearly missed the Attenborough lecture this way.  This is also how we spotted the fox in a back alley, ’round midnight.  It looked like this,

but with a fox.

THE MOST SURPRISING THING I HEARD AT SVP:

, considering the source–a University of Chicago grad student (name withheld for fear that he might be expelled or worse).  We were admiring at these artiodactyl accouterments

“Animals are not equations,” says he.  “Can I quote you on that?” says I.

SOME MORE PICTURES OF PEOPLE, SINCE I CAN’T TOP THAT:

Here is a photo of @cromercrox I took with my phone:

And here is a photo of @microecos (and assorted internet celebrities including the folks behind Dinosaur Hunting by Boat in Alberta, the Ethical Paleontologist, the Open Source Paleontologist, the SV-POW boys) taken with his:

And of course, there is an interesting story attached to this,

but it involved diacritical maneuvres far beyond my skill set which makes this as good a place as any to stop.

Thanks, and apologies, to all.

Faces of Death 2

Last time, we looked at various portraits of a weak-ass minor planet getting effed up by our atmosphere before getting royally bitch slapped by our lithosphere.  Anyone with a passing interest in dinosaurs will know that strike of the space-junk, while widely accepted (though see recent meso-profile critiques), is but one of countless etiologies proposed for terminal Cretaceous bummer days.

You might think that protracted catastrophes like pestilence, climate change and famine offer less in the way of dramatic potential than a body of a certain mass rapidly attempting to occupy the same space as a much more massive body.  If so, you should probably read more.

At all points the dinosaurs that had trampled the earth till the grasses grew, the most superb of all vertebrates, the creatures that fix the imagination above all others, are seen to fail. The growth forces and the responses to environment were no longer in adjustment. Eggs were few, their loss from attack devastating, life slow. The young were the prey of their own kind, and the race had lived long enough for reptiles lower in life’s scale to threaten. If new enemies were needed they were at the jungle-edge. Geologic change that once would have meant mere fluctuation in habitat affected the declining numbers disastrously, and what such change and the reptiles soon to rule in the forests of the Eocence may have failed to accomplish, senility did. That long dinosaurian day was done. Its sun was sinking beneath the horizon forever. (Wieland 1925).

15 years later Disney took a stab, note that it anticipated Bataan by at least a year.  Talk about zeitgeist.  While drought and desertification deal the fatal blow (with some help from miring), major geologic upheaval kicks in as an epilogue. We can talk about this and Lyell, and Agassiz some time.

Now, assuming you are are as sick of asteroid porn and dinosaurs as I am you will want to hear about the mass dysphoria induced by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring courtesy of radio lab.

Faces of Death

Chris Norris recently deployed the term “asteroid porn” for a certain gratuitous style employed by those writing about meteoric catastrophe:

Here is a brief summary of a typical piece of asteroid porn. Dinosaurs are peacefully grazing (or browsing, or doing whatever) on a warm sunny day (or at sunset, or some other time of peacefullness) when they see a big fireball fall out of the sky. It hits the Earth so hard that larva comes out, like a big bursting geological zit. The larva shoots up hundreds of miles into the air and comes down, setting fire to, like, the whole planet. All the forests are on fire, and all the dinosaurs are on fire as well. Then there’s this big blast wave, and it’s so big it goes round the world, like, 5 times at the speed of Concorde, and when it hits the burning dinosaurs they all get blown into burning pieces…

You’ll want to read the entire post.

Not all porn is so literate though.  Books, television, film and, most especially the internet abound with visual artworks that operate in the same vein.  One well-worn style adopts a “dinosaur-eye view,” typically peppering the foreground with a tyrannosaur, hadrosaur or ceratopsian or some combination thereof.  A few enterprising artists even manage a nod to Charles Knight.

The players in these epic finales span a comical range of emotive reaction to the impact, from “wha?” to “HOLY EFF!” to “screw extinction–I’M GOING TO EAT YOU!!!” A few contemplative dinosaurs, cast in silhouette, even appear rather philosophical about their impending demise.

And of course, it’s a nearly irresistible vehicle for a one-liner:

Large pterosaurs offer a convenient excuse to adopt an aerial perspective that permits a more graphic celebration of “the junk” (the bolide that is).  Plus there must be a sense of clever satisfaction tat comes when you work Quetzalcoatlus into a painting of Mesoamerican Armageddon.

Another popular technique takes yet another step back to show what the hypothetical Troodon cosmonauts would have seen.

This view shifts the victim role from the dinosaurs to the planet itself. It also lends a certain historical anonymity to the event–this could be a catastrophe in the distant past, or the not-so-remote future.  In fact, some even depict an anachronistic geography that necessarily implies the latter to the careful observer.

It’s tempting to speculate that this orbital perspective might not have occurred to an artist working prior to the advent of satellite photography.  A similar argument has been made regarding the link between the Victorian “aquarium craze” and the subsequent proliferation of artworks adopting an underwater perspective (Clary and Wandersee 2005).

With their melodramatic flair, stereotyped compositions and limited pool of motifs, these images might easily be regarded as derivative at best and sure, pornographic at worst.  Much like metal album art.  However, these depictions will also afford ample fodder for a future, likely poor, overeducated and underemployed, generation of science/art historians interested in the cultural impact of late 20th Century neo-catastrophism.  Unless we are all wiped out by an asteroid first.

Coming up: Stravinsky, climate change and the Bataan march

postscripto: Huh, look at that.  300 microecos posts in just over 3 years.  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

A note on the images:  All are thumbnails gleaned from Google Image searches of “asteroid impact”, “dinosaur extinction” etc.  They are reproduced here for the purposes of discussion only.  This is a cultural studies blog.  Deal.

Bear Flag Republic

Don’t know about you, but I find it terribly difficult to stay on task while visiting museum collections.  Sure, I’ve got the 20 page print-out of specimens I’m supposed to measure.  And, sure I deeply want to look at Lobodon and Kogia and Lissodelphis and Hydrodamalis. I mean, truthfully, I really want to bring the sea cow skull down to the table and well, you know, cuddle for a while.

All of which I did, except for the whole sketchy sirenian molestation bit.  But…I also, of course, peeked at the babirusa and popped open the giraffe braincase (hey, it was already sectioned man).

And I couldn’t help but admire the shelf of California grizzlies, several of which had interesting dates attached to them but that’s another story.

Note the bullet hole.  See you after the wedding.

The Idles of March

Looks like another slow march around these parts, well, more of dirge really.  Hence the carrion which seems as reasonable a metaphor for the rancid stench that’s been lately gathering on the blog (except for the jumping spider of course, that was delightful!)

Believe it or don’t there is some inspiration here actually: Dr. Vector’s hilarious post about the curious case of a snapping turtle carcass, which in turn was inspired by Darren’s incredibly informative tutorial on the fine art of skeletonization.

All of which recalled this large Geochelone (probably G. sulcata) tortoise I stumbled upon last year in the hills above greater Los Angeles.  How the poor bloke wound up like this I suppose I will never know although most likely somebody dumped it, hopefully post-mortem.  It would have been nice to salvage the thing (Matt’s suggestion of strapping it to the university van roof would have made for an entertaining spectacle), or perhaps I could have buried it on the spot and retrieved it later but, no such luck.

C’est la mort, I suppose.

Wakarimashta ka?

Wakarimasen.  Name the cucurbit:  Winner recieves an Afrothere t-shirt! (Christopher Taylors need not apply).

Gracious God, what a jaw! how many animals have been crushed by it?

Mammoth Snack – by the inimitable Unforgivable Realness

Mastodon, Mammoth, and Man By John Patterson MacLean

Because sometimes, ZooBorns just can’t satisfy one’s primal thirst for unicorn blood.  Also, be sure to check out in the future, war is more humane and centaur solution … to a raptor problem (a diptych!).