Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

Tundra Swans, which winter on both U.S. coasts, are at serious risk from climate change, according to Audubon's report on birds and climate change.

Nearly half of the bird species in the United States and Canada, including the Rufous Hummingbird, are severely threatened by global warming, and many could go extinct if we do not act quickly.

Fly Like an Eagle. Experience the Southwest’s most important bird habitats through the eyes of an eagle, thanks to a new digital Audubon project called FlightMap. Soar like a bird over mountains and through river valleys, learning about critical ecosystems and the threats they face as you go. FlightMap is more than just fun. It’s the newest tool in the fight to save some of America’s most vulnerable habitats. Take FlightMap for a spin.

"Cape Cod Mystery: A Surge of Stranded Turtles."

The stranded turtles, typically 2 to 3 years old and each of them between the size of a dinner plate and a serving platter, have stretched the abilities of the veterinarians and volunteers who rescued them, and the capacities of aquariums as far away as Texas to care for the survivors until they can be released.
    Bob Prescott, the director of the Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, who has been saving turtles for 32 years, said he had never seen anything like it. When he started walking the beaches, he said, he would find one or two turtles a season, warm them up and drive them to the Boston airport himself. “I would go to Logan and give turtles to the pilot of an Eastern Airlines jet,” he said. The pilot would keep the turtle in the cockpit and hand it off to a turtle expert in Florida.
    Not this year. “One day, 157 came in,” he said....
    “A normal year would be 70 to 90,” said [Connie Merigo, director of marine animal rescue and rehabilitation at the New England Aquarium in Quincy] last week. “We’re approaching 700.” Those are the live turtles. The Wellfleet sanctuary has hundreds that did not make it. The bodies are stored to study over the winter....
    ...Cold-stunned turtles that seem to be dead often recover, however, so every turtle gets 24 hours during which it is presumed to be alive, even if does not look it, Mr. Prescott said.
    After weighing and measuring one unmoving turtle before placing it in a banana box, he insisted that revival was still a possibility.
    “We don’t know that one’s dead until tomorrow,” he said.

Capitalism vs. the Planet. Some environmentalists wish Naomi Klein would stop using the C-word so much. In her new book, This Changes Everything, she argues that a complete overhaul of our "savagely unjust" economic system is the only way to fight climate change and chastises many environmentalists for being too timid about it. "We have so little time," she says, "and the idea that we can just leave this to market forces is reckless."
    Read Sierra Club's interview with Klein about grassroots movements, green- and brown-energy billionaires, and her shifting opinion of the Sierra Club. Excerpt:

The environmental movement is not like other movements. For the most part, it's not a movement of outsiders, like the civil rights and labor movements were. Those movements were made up of people who'd been excluded from power and who had to organize to get access to power. In contrast, for instance, look at the origins of the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club was created by men of privilege who wanted to go camping and hiking with other men of privilege. It's tricky to have that history and negotiate a political moment that requires as much contestation as this one does....
    When I talk to people about why there's reason for hope about climate change, I point out that renewable energy is already just as cheap as dirty energy in many areas. And I say, "Imagine what will happen when the free market realizes that and we see the same processes in place for renewables that have made the oil and gas industries so powerful." After reading your book, I wonder if that's a naive idea.
    There's no doubt that there's a thriving market in renewables, and that it's just going to keep growing. The problem is, we have so little time, and the idea that we can just leave this to market forces is reckless. There's no other issue with such high stakes where you'd say, "Oh, let's see what the market can do to fix this for us."

Another striking road. Denali Highway, Alaska:

    Denali Highway (Alaska Route 8) is a lightly traveled, mostly gravel highway in the U.S. state of Alaska. It leads from Paxson on the Richardson Highway to Cantwell on the Parks Highway. Opened in 1957, it was the first road access to Denali National Park (then known as Mount McKinley National Park). The Denali is 135 miles (217 km) in length.

China's Guoliang Tunnel Road, which you featured last Friday reminded me of a similar road carved out of a steep cliff lining Lago Garda in northern Italy. It is now a dramatic bicycling and hiking path slowly going up a couple hundred meters on the cliff and in it via a series of short tunnels. The path provides a wonderful panorama of the lake, towns, and mountains. We discovered it a couple of years ago.

"A Plan to Limit Cars in Paris Collides With French Politics." Interesting facts:

The World Health Organization has said that diesel exhaust causes lung cancer, and some experts say it is more carcinogenic than secondhand smoke. A 2005 European Commission study cited by City Hall said an estimated 40,000 people in France die prematurely from fine particle air pollution each year.
    France has one of the highest concentrations of diesel cars in Europe, where they have been popular because of their high fuel efficiency. According to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, 53.3 percent of new car registrations in Western Europe in 2013 involved diesel power....
    ...The promotion of diesel fuel has been especially notable in France, where it is less expensive than unleaded gas.

I checked out Rolf’s columns ["On an irony of the creation of something from nothing: Its paradoxical aesthetic asymmetry," "Growing up in America: Two years at Shaw High," & "Que sera, sera"]. Wow, what a genius! I love this stuff.

After Senator Elizabeth Warren famously told Citigroup the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill "should have broken you into pieces," she said this:

A century ago, Teddy Roosevelt was America's trustbuster. He went after the giant trusts and monopolies in this country, and a lot of people talk about how those trusts deserved to be broken up because they had too much economic power. But Teddy Roosevelt said we should break them up because they had too much political power. Teddy Roosevelt said break them up because all that concentrated power threatened the very foundations of our democratic system.
    And now we're watching as Congress passes yet another provision that was written by lobbyists for the biggest recipient of bailout money in the history of the country. And it's attached to a bill that needs to pass or else the entire federal government will grind to a halt.
    Think about this kind of power. A financial institution has become so big and so powerful that it can hold the entire country hostage. That alone is a reason enough for us to break them up. Enough is enough.

Ralph Nader: "Where does your tax money go?" The US federal government continues to use taxpayer-funded research and development as hand-outs for private industries. Excerpt:

At the state and local level, companies and their consulting firms put the location of new factories, warehouses or large retail stores up for bidding by the states and municipalities. It becomes a race to the bottom by states and municipalities competing against each other to create the most "business friendly environment" with incentives like tax breaks, cash donations and other subsidies to convince companies to locate to a community called corporate welfare or crony capitalism. These deals amount to governments paying companies to make money while depleting their public tax base that pays for schools, public works and other public services.

Quotes believed to be from Albert Einstein:

• A human being is a part of a whole, called by us "universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
• Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." [At least this was on a sign hanging in his office at Princeton.]

John Dewey: Ultimately there are but two philosophies. One of them accepts life and experience in all its uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and half-knowledge and turns that experience upon itself to deepen and intensify its own qualities—to imagination and art. This is the philosophy of Shakespeare and Keats.

Richard Rorty on John Dewey: There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.

This is how Jehan George Vibert envisioned Daphnis and Chloë in 1866.

    In 1912 Ravel’s ballet treatment was premiered in Paris by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (the same company that would introduce Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring a year later). The Second Suite from Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloë dazzlingly depicts sunrise.

"Hot off the press": As the paper goes through the rotary printing press friction causes it to heat up. Therefore, if you grab the paper right off the press it’s hot. The expression means to get immediate information.

Sung to the tune of "Green Acres":
She:

California is where I want to be
Family ties are very strong for me
Morro Rock and ocean far & wide
Sunshine in winter is really the place to bide

He:

In Sandpoint's where I want to be
Great Lakes & Mountains beckon me
Tall pine trees and Eagles to see
Fishin' in the lake for Kokanee

She:

California just keeps pullin' me
Aging parents keep a callin' me
All my grandkids seem to grow so tall
Sometimes I think I'll just have to bawl

He:

North Idaho is the place to be
Circle and Swing really welcomed me
Friendlier people you will never see
Forget California this is the place for me

We went to Florida last March and we still don't like Florida. There have to be better places to go for golf than the big resorts we seem to land in, but we haven't found them yet.

Images of wild December:

This picture of Brazilian beauties/mermaids with Santa red hats depict a frivolous aquatic Christmas in São Paulo.

"The X in Xmas literally means Christ":

In Greek, the language of the New Testament, the word Christos (Christ) begins with the letter "X," or chi. Here's what it looks like: Χριστός.
    So how did that word get abbreviated?In the early fourth century, Constantine the Great, Roman Emperor from 306-337, popularized [the X] shorthand for Christ. According to legend, on the eve of his great battle against Maxentius, Constantine had a vision that led him to create a military banner emblazoned with the first two letters of Christ on it: chi and rho.

Limerick of the week:

Christmas trees should stand up perpendicular
and never go leaning slantindicular;
    so if you've not yet got to it,
    when you do set out to do it,
position your tree straight-up-n-dicular.

Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean