Tuesday, November 3, 2009

I’ll See Your “Monday Moment of Zen” and Raise You...

Old friend Jay Lake offers a “Monday Moment of Zen” photo this week, and, for a change, I think I can get in on the action.... Consider this your “Tuesday Moment of Zen.” © 2007, 2009 by Chris W. Johnson.

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Monday, November 2, 2009

Weekend Links

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Sunday, November 1, 2009

Drought Plus 10 Inches, Minus Barbecue

I was out at the Bamberger Ranch Preserve this evening for their annual volunteer appreciation gathering. Arriving with the sun low in the sky, but with a little time before sunset, I quickly found the legendary J. David Bamberger and asked for permission to head up into High Lonesome to re-photograph the tanks I showed in my Drought with a Side of Pig posting, early in September. He agreed, and I dashed out of the party just as the food was beginning to show up.

I borrowed a friend's truck (having bummed a ride to ranch), drove out along the ranch's main road, took a right at the misleadingly named Hes' Country Store (it's half museum, half bunkhouse, and not one bit a store), there leaving pavement behind, then bumped and juddered my way up a pair of well-worn, rock strewn, tire tracks into High Lonesome, and eventually parked in my usual spot, halfway up a valley wall. Shouldering my 40 pounds of photographic equipment, I started hiking toward my favorite valley as fast as the terrain would permit. My interest was in in seeing how the tanks had changed after at least 10 inches of rain had fallen in the last month or so.

Regular readers will recognize the photo above of the drought-stricken tank cooking in September's hot afternoon sun. The photo below was taken by twilight this evening. Leaving aside the gentler lighting, though still far from full, the tank is transformed. The bare, burned ground with a shrinking pool of sickly orange water at its center is now a decent-looking body of water, and every bit of grass and other ground cover has surged back to life.

That tank has looked a lot better in the past, for example in April of 2007, as seen below, but the rains have made a huge difference, nonetheless.

Unfortunately, in order to a make-up for the drought's damage, we need even more rain than the latest photo suggests. As you may recall, the tank in a neighboring valley had dried-up completely when I visited it this September:

This evening, seen below from a different angle, that tank is still dry. More than ten inches of rain simply vanished into the bone-dry soil. In exchange, there's a lot more vegetation, but still not a drop of available water.

So, wish us more rain, world. Central Texas is far from recovered from its drought.

* * *

Those pictures turned-out to be more expensive than I expected, by the way. The camera and tripod took a tumble from my shoulder to the ground as I struggled to simultaneously untangle a leg of the tripod from both the branch of a bush on the trail, and one of the little bungee cords on the back of my camera gear backpack. The camera wouldn't power-on after that fall, and only a methodical disassembly and reassembly of all the bits and pieces led to the discovery, to my relief, that the problem was confined to the camera's battery grip. Removing that and going back to single-battery operation brought the camera back from the dead.

Adding hunger to injury, by the time I made it back to the volunteer appreciation party, all of the barbecue, side dishes, and even the cake had been eaten. I had to settle for a plate of beans, and the last fragment of cake – so sad a remnant it was that nobody else had been willing to touch it.

Alas, trying to take a beautiful photo can be an expensive undertaking in a lot of ways, and, while you can bet on the expense, the beauty has a way of being elusive.

* * *

As it happens, my best photo this evening was of the XXXXXXXXXXX, shot hours later by moonlight, but David has embargoed that image until he's ready to announce the XXXXXXXXXXX at some unspecified, future date on his blog.

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Sunday, October 25, 2009

Weekend Links

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Sunday, October 18, 2009

Weekend Links

From a book I happen to be reading at the moment:

The prevailing theory as to why, as a species, we left off hunting and gathering is that we had ruined that perfectly good lifestyle by overdoing it, killing off the megafauna on which we depended. Otherwise, it's hard to explain why humans would ever have traded such a healthy and comparatively pleasant way of life for the backbreaking, monotonous work of agriculture. Agriculture brought humans a great many blessings, but it also brought infectious disease (from living in close quarters with one another and our animals) and malnutrition (from eating too much of the same thing when crops were good, and not enough of anything when they weren't). Anthropologists estimate that typical hunter-gatherers worked at feeding themselves no more than seventeen hours a week, and were far more robust and long-lived than agriculturalists, who have only in the last century or two regained the physical stature and longevity of their Paleolithic ancestors.

—The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, pg. 279.

And Now, The Links

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Sunday, October 11, 2009

Weekend Links

From a book I happen to be reading at the moment:

[...S]ince the human desire for sweetness surpases even our desire for intoxication, the cleverest thing to do with a bushel of corn is to refine it into thirty-three pounds of high-fructose corn syrup.
That at least is what we're doing with about 530 million bushels of the annual corn harvest—turning it into 17.5 billion pounds of high-fructose corn syrup. Considering that the human animal did not taste this particular food until 1980, for HFCS to have become the leading source of sweetness in our diet stands as a notable acheivement on the part of the corn-refining industry [...]

—The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, pg. 103.

And Now, The Links

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Sunday, October 4, 2009

Weekend Links

From a book I happen to be reading at the moment:

[....] McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients, quasi-edible substances that ultimately come not from a corn or soybean field but from a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. [.... Including] “anti-foaming agents” like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during the fry. The problem is evidently grave enough to warrant adding a toxic chemical to the food. According to the Handbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector; it's also flammable. But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to “help preserve freshness.” According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause “nausea, vomitting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.” Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.

—The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, pp. 113-114.

And Now, The Links

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