Went to the private view last night of Jonny Boatfield’s show in a converted church in Cambridge. The subjects, inmates of an old peoples’ home, are depressing; but the pictures are very fine indeed, and well worth seeing.
Had he been slightly more efficient, I’d have scanned in more pictures here.
An Angler’s Etymology by the Irishman J.R. Harris, is one of the classic books for a fly fisherman; “Classic” in this context, as in others, means “I’ve never read it”. It concentrates on Ephemeroptera, which are the prettiest trout food, though less important than the sedges, Trichoptera and midges, Chironomidae. My copy of the book has all the colour plates reproduced in black and white, which reduces still further its usefulness.
But then you come across a passage like this, which bring back the golden age of obsessive naturalists.
Then purchase a copy of Mr. Kimmins’ Keys to the British Species of Ephemeroptera with Keys to the Genera of the Nymphs, which is published by the Freshwater Biological Association, Wray Castle, Ambleside, Westmorland, and costs only 2 6d.
This is an excellent publication and it contains drawings of the genitalia of the male spinners of all British and Irish species of the Ephemeroptera. It also has illustrations of the wings, and, where necessary, other parts of several of the species. All of the species can be identified by the genitalia, although descriptions of additional features may make identifications more certain.
Every species of ephemeroptera may be distinguished by its genitalia. There are two penes, sometimes fused into one; claspers, and large, curved, pseudo-penes called styli, whose purpose escapes me.
That these differ between species suggests vast Darwinian perspectives. It’s really extraoridinarily difficult to tell the difference between some similar species of tiny ephemoperoptera unless you have a microscope. It’s much quicker, for another fly, to try to mate with them. Since different species tend to share the same environment, I think this bizarre genital elobrations must have evolved primarily as a means of species differentiation. They are the ephemeropteran equivalents of theology.
Whatever their motives, they have been astonishingly successful. Because the winged and sexually active stage of a mayfly’s life, as a spinner, lasts only a day, we think of them as fragile and short-lived insects. But they can live for a week in the preceding stage, as winged, asexual duns; and before then, some live underwater for two or three years as nymphs. This four-stage lifestyle is unique among insects. It is also very old. The Mayflies have been around for 500,000 years. They are extremely fragile. Yet the brief wisps of life you sometimes see hatching are older than the river that they float on.
I didn’t post much last week because I was working on London, making a radio programme on the police. It’s not utter crap. It may even be better than that. In any case, it goes out on Thursday evening at 8.30 GMT on Radio Four, and can be heard over the web for a week after that from here.
Soon as I have a moment, I will post some hot news on mayfly genitalia.
yesterday, on the train from Stansted to London, a teenage girl describing to another an experience on holiday: “I was like – I wasn’t like – I was just like oh my god”. There’s a theologian struggling to get out of that girl.
I just had a phish addressed to “Dear Fleet Bank valued customer”. I have, of course, never heard of Fleet Bank.
It goes on in the usual style: As part of our ongoing commitment to protect your account and to reduce the instance of fraud on our website, we have introduced a new special FraudAction Detection Program.This program should provide an earlier awareness of potential fraudulent activities with your account.We have already enrolled your account in this Program. Membership is free, however, in order to authenticate your enrollment please confirm your account details below
Not only have they got the English a bit wrong, though no wronger than corporations often do; the address to which you are invited to click has been mistyped. The link goes to http://21099.217.3/sys/fl/, which Sam Spade can’t resolve at all. Presumably, they dropped a full stop.
Oh, and the time stamp on the letter is set two hours ahead of GMT. That would be, hmm, yes, somewhere in Eastern Europe. Who would have thought it? And the date is Monday 12 Jan 2004.
On the other hand, if you bank with Egg, they have passwords that are not case sensitive and don’t allow punctuation. It’s hard to work out sometimes just who of the people pretending to be a real online bank has money in their vaults.
One of the less finished, potentially useful bits of Openoffice is the Navigator. It ought to let you move and link multiple documents to your heart’s content, showing the structure of each one as it does so, with headings, bookmarks, notes, and so on.
It almost does; and almost works as an outliner. Here are the tricks I use when assembling radio scripts from eight different interviews, put here partly so I remember them next time I make a radio programme.
Interesting posts resume shortly.
Thanks to Danny O’Brien, I have lost a whole morning looking at ancient maps. This is a truly fantastic site, though regrettably biased towards the USA. If you download the Java viewer, you can examine and save maps from most of the last two centuries at very high resolutions: I saved a map of Stockholm at about half the maximum level of detail and got a 2.5 MB jpeg.
What I wanted to look at was the place where I lived as a child for a couple of years: one of the nicest addresses and finest views in the whole world, and Strandv
Brad Choate’s Textile plugin for MT does something that the real thing can’t: definition lists.
comes out as
I try to resist the temptation of taking the piss out of the Independent’s religious coverage. But the long John Walsh interview with Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor contains some really horrendous examples of ignorance and prejudice on the part of the subs. The fact box has a quote about the church’s finances from one “Avro Manhattan”, which is more or less equivalent to using Radio Riyadh as your source for facts about the Jews. Avro Manhattan really did exist: I came across his works in a rabid Protestant bookshop in Belfast, and he has a thriving presence on the web, from which you learn that his books included
It’s interesting to know that Zondervan, regarded as the respectable end of evangleical publishing, was prepared to print this kind of thing in 1965 (two years after the assasination of the Catholic JFK). But whichever intern Googled for this should really have been reprimanded. It shows what gets lost when newspapers no longert have proper libraries.
This was the wormseye I wrote off the back of various comments on an earlier post. Thanks to Quinn and Billmon for facts and ideas.
If there was one thing which everyone knows, it is that Americans have grown richer since 1970. When I was told that average wages have actually declined since then, when adjusted for inflation, I did not at first believe it. But the figures, from US department of Labor, are quite unambiguous. Measured in real dollars, most workers in the US are now paid worse than they were in 1970. Measured in constant (1982) dollars, the average weekly wage in June 1970 was about $312 ; last month it was about $275.
