Virginia rail

Red-breasted sapsucker

Chestnut-backed chickadee

I don’t look for them particularly. I’m not what you’d call a bird ‘watcher.’ I’m more of a bird finder. I seem to come across them everywhere; injured, panicked or hopelessly lost. I’ve pried them from the jaws of cats, carried them quivering out of the buzzing labyrinths of shopping mall food courts and plucked them from windowsills where they have been battering themselves against their own reflections. Trembling, nictitating and bedraggled, the world’s birds are in trouble. Populations of many previously common species are now in free fall both in Canada and around the world. We stand on the threshold of a bleak new age of summers where barn swallows no longer course through the warm evening air and the haunts of meadowlarks lie extinguished beneath strip mall parking lots.
And then there is the case of the crested myna. This jaunty, subtropical bird resembles a chunky starling with white wing patches. The mynas were brought to Vancouver at the end of the nineteenth century by Chinese immigrants who kept them as cage birds. Inevitably some escaped or were deliberately set free and they managed to survive the clammy West Coast winters by holing up in attics and under bridges. Back in the early nineteen-nineties, I used to see mynas pretty often, hopping across the roof of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre or schnarfling up discarded pizza crusts between the trolly buses in front of Golden Boys’ on Commercial Drive. Now the mynas are gone. The last known pair died out in Vancouver in the winter of 2002. Of course there are theories as to why. Perhaps these dreamy tropicalists couldn’t compete with the more aggressive and numerous European starlings, or maybe they found themselves excluded from their favoured attics by an epidemic of aluminum siding. It is hard to say. Whatever it was, I miss the mynas. Vancouver just isn’t same without them. My local pair used to nest inside the Spotlight Custom Collision sign on Clark Drive. In the midst of this industrial wasteland, devoid of vegetation, the mynas clung to life, incubating their precious eggs by the warmth of the humming fluorescent tubes, gazing out over the six lanes of howling traffic. One day as I was walking by, I happened to snap a picture. It was 1993, the first of June. I didn’t think much of it at the time. There was some high cloud, but the sun was shining. A glossy black bird sat high above me, surveying its asphalt domain. It was a day like any other. Back in the age of mynas.

Crested Myna in its habitat. Vancouver, June 1st, 1993.

Crested Myna close-up. Vancouver, June 1st 1993

burprestid 1

buprestid 2

He falls asleep in the woods one day.
Spent twenty years of his life that way,
Rip Van Winkle, Rip Van Winkle, Sleep, Sleep, Sleep.

And so go the words of an old and wacky song. Yet sleeping for twenty years is de rigeur for certain insects. In scientific terms this is called extended diapause. Every once in a while, I find one of these surrealistically beautiful, golden buprestid beetles crawling out of the floorboards of my house. They belong to the jewel beetle family and start out their lives as eggs laid in freshly fallen Douglas-fir logs. Now our house is mostly made of Douglas-fir, but it was built in 1979, so the wood isn’t exactly ‘freshly fallen.’ A little research turned up the fact that buprestids can diapause for up to 51 years, making them the Rip Van Winkles of the bug world. The larvae just keep sleep, sleep, sleeping, even while the log they’ve been living inside gets milled into lumber and incorporated into a building. Eventually, something (and it’s hard to say exactly what) tells them it’s time to wake up. I’ve noticed that firing up the wood stove, after the house has been cold for a while, can serve as a trigger for their emergence. The buprestids are sluggish when they first come out; a little dazed perhaps by the burden of their new responsibilities or the first rays of light they have ever seen, reflecting off their iridescent exoskeletons. Now that they are adults, time has lost its viscosity and they are launched into a frenetic trajectory of mating, laying eggs and dying, soon after. Their long, quiet decades of dreaming behind them, the buprestids crawl stalwartly toward their fate.

parking garage

tropical hammock ecology

What is it about Florida? As a kid, waiting out the long Toronto winter in my parents’ rec room, I often wondered what it might be like. I’d seen a picture in a book somewhere, of a down-at-the-heels, roadside serpentarium, where burly men in pompadours would wrestle alligators in a dusty yard. It was somewhere in Florida, the book said. I wanted desperately to go there. But it was not to be. Not until well into my adulthood anyway. And I never did find that serpentarium. So I had to settle for a kind of Florida of the mind. The television programs of the time were saturated with images of a fantastically exotic, subtropical America, where smiling swamp rangers skimmed across the Everglades on air boats, at the beck-and-call of puffy-faced little boys, who had winsome animal mascots like Flipper, the dolphin who just wouldn’t shut up and Gentle Ben, a toothless, overweight bear. During the commercials, the über-creepy Anita Bryant (soon to reign as America’s Queen of homophobia) warbled from a sound stage citrus grove, shilling genuine Florida ‘oinj’ juice to the pallid northern masses. So despite never having set foot in the place, Florida had pretty much colonized my young subconscious. So when I eventually visited there, sometime in my mid-twenties, things seemed strangely familiar, like the spectres of a remembered imagination.

This March, I returned again, to give a talk at a community college in suburban Broward County. Broward is part of a vast conurbation called the South Florida Metropolitan area that runs along the state’s Atlantic Coast. I met many kind and generous people there and it was great hanging out with the students, especially at their poetry slam, where I witnessed some of the most moving spoken word performances I’ve seen in years. Many of the young poets performed work addressing their daily struggles of life and in love in an increasingly polarized America. A young, African-American single mom did a piece about her struggle of trying to put herself through college, to give herself and her kid a better life. A young white guy gave a long, free form soliloquy about his feelings of political alienation, living in a state from which the presidency of his country had been stolen.

Florida is a complicated place. Oh, sure there are still beaches where you can sit in the talc-soft sand and stare out at the sea. This is the post card Florida of tasteful condominiums and toney ocean side eateries. But much of Florida, like the rest of North America, is imbued with a kind of Ballardian placelessness - its vast, flat expanses re-skinned with low-rise exurbs that ooze into a grid work of freeways. Except for the groves of palm trees, the landscape looks pretty much like the one in which I grew up, in Southern Ontario, having followed a similar trajectory of environmental liquidation. Occasionally you might see an ibis wading in the ditch water beside the interstate, but there really isn’t much else to remind you of where you are. This being America, there is an enormous gulf visible between the rich and the poor. Prowling the upscale shopping malls are legions of aged ladies who have had so much plastic surgery done that their heads look like they’ve been taken out of the spare parts cupboard of the Thunderbirds. Seeing these silicon injected marvels of taxidermy bobbling on the shoulders of geriatric bodies takes a little getting used to. But I suppose it is a logical outcome of a society where ‘the pursuit of happiness’ is defined as an inalienable right. Outside of the air conditioned confines of retail-land, in the ubiquitous palmetto scrub that grows on the sides of the roads and in the median strips, lives a ghost army of the homeless. Many are military veterans who have found themselves on the losing side of the class war. Perhaps the warmer climate makes being homeless in Florida a bit easier to bear. But happiness for these people still seems a long way off.

homeless man on traffic island

Yet shoehorned between the freeways and the golf-themed retirement developments, a few fragments of the original Florida still cling to their existence. Thanks to the kindness of an instructor at the college, I was able to spend a few hours amid the vegetative splendor of the last intact tropical hammock ecosystem, left in Broward County. ‘Hammock’ is a name given to little islands of self-perpetuating forest, which, because they are a few inches higher in elevation, manage to escape the worst of the seasonal flooding and fires that afflict the surrounding landscape. The result, as in the case of Broward’s 254 acre Fern Forest park, is a lush canopy of exotic trees such as gumbo limbo, strangler fig and surprisingly, red maple, a tree species I grew up with in eastern Canada. In the wetter spots of the forest, the roots of cypress trees form delightful ‘knee’ structures to cope with anaerobic conditions in the sediment. As I strolled beneath the dappled shade of rustling sabal palm fronds, watching the zebra butterflies sipping moisture from the swamp mud, I was able, just for a little while, to tune out the traffic drone of the nearby highway. It was as if I had been given a little window into the Florida of my boyhood mind.

Rules of Six by Benjamin Aranda et. al

DNA origami by Paul Rothemund

Sometimes an event comes along which manages to encapsulate emerging trends that in the future will be identified as defining our time. MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind show is one of those instances. The exhibition has so much on offer that it is easy, when walking through the galleries, to get zoned out by over-stimulation. You pretty much have to avail yourself of the adjunct, on-line materials to provide enough context and detail to understand what you have just seen. But this is a small price to pay. ‘Elastic Mind’ highlights the great ‘re-biologizing’ that is taking over human thought, as we gradually abandon the mechanical world views we have held dear since the days of Newton, back in the seventeenth century. The clockwork metaphor of the universe is being replaced by that of a swarm, whose components self-organize and dissipate in concordance to the opportunities created by ubiquitous connectivity. Not the kind of show to make huge pronouncements, Elastic Mind, promotes the notion of ‘thinkering,’ encouraging its viewers to reconnect and remix the ideas it presents, in new and interesting ways. I’m not generally a huge fan of Flash-based web sites, but Elastic Mind’s site uses its animation to show the relationship ecologies that emerge between catalogue items, as we browse through them, offering us a whole other level of opportunity for serendipitous exploration.

crocuses/croci??

Viburnum bodnantense

Spending winter on the west coast of Canada is like living in a giant car wash with all the lights turned out. Spring however, comes relatively early, with the pussy willows and hazel catkins often making their appearances already by the end of January. By the time February is over, the crocuses have usually poked up their cheery little heads. Viburnum bodnantense is another extremely early shrub. Its pink flower clusters have a scent that reminds me of vinyl doll heads dipped in sugar.

old plum

old plum

Though it is one of the world's most rapacious consumers of wood, Japan worships trees like no other place I've been to. Where else would such love and attention be lavished on a couple of four hundred year old plum trees, which, left to their own devices would have up and died ages ago? There is something intensely poignant about these venerable plums, brought from Korea back in 1609, to Matsushima's Zuiganji temple. To keep them alive, the rotting trunks have been heroically patched with cement and the saggy, senescent branches propped up with poles. The trees are like ancient pets tended to by generations of Zen Buddhist monks, who are born and die in the span of time it takes the plum tree to accumulate a few infinitesimally thin growth rings. And the payoff? What is it exactly? A few ephemeral blossoms, pink and white, to herald the end of a long winter. It is heartening to know that despite the hundreds of years of turbulence, of typhoons, fratricidal wars and pestilence, an unbroken line of caregivers has thought these trees to be worth their attention. To be sure, the Japanese sense of duty must have had a lot to do with it, but there is something else too: a kind of appreciation of the fragile that in my mind has no equal anywhere else in the world.

Ginkgo protuberances

more protuberances

One of the great things about visiting Japan (for a tree geek like me) is being able to see some of the many old Ginkgo trees that are growing here. The Ginkgo, as some readers of this blog might recall, is a kind of living fossil, the last remaining species of a genus that was once widespread. Everything about the Ginkgo tree is strange. No one knows exactly when, or even if, they actually ever really went extinct in the wild and there is some evidence to prove that all the ones alive today are descendants of a few trees rescued in antiquity by early Buddhist monks. Ginkgo is one of the few trees that produces sperm that actually swims. And then there is this matter of the chichi or Gingko nipples, which form on older trees. Their function isn't clear but it seems to be a kind of aerial root; an upside down version of the 'knees' one sees on the bald cypress trees (Taxodium) that grow in the swamp lands of the south-eastern United States. I photographed these wooden wonders that were dangling from a few of the Gingkos lining the approach to Tokyo's controversial Yasukuni Shrine. Outside Asia there aren't too many Ginkgos old enough to show this curious morphology. The term 'nipples' just doesn't seem adequate to describe such girthy protuberances.

round worm

dolphin brain worm

According to Wikipedia, parasitism is a relationship between organisms in which one, the parasite, benefits from a prolonged close encounter with the other, the host, which is harmed. One could be forgiven then, for wondering why it is that the Meguro Parasitological Museum has become such a popular date spot for young Tokyo couples. The museum's theme is not exactly an auspicious harbinger for nuptial bliss yet when we visited, the place was packed with twenty-somethings holding hands and staring intently at the contents of the grisly vitrines. I was a little surprised when, in front of a display of pickled tape worms, a stream of brown liquid started to run down the pant leg of a young man, who was chatting animatedly to the girl next to him. Neither of them seemed to notice and they just kept talking. "Sumimasen," I interrupted, pointing to the puddle expanding on the floor around his feet. He looked a little shocked and extracted a leaking cup of take out coffee from his coat pocket. I was quite relieved when I found out that was all it was. And that love in the company of parasites could still be that distracting.

moe

kawaii

Our first morning in Tokyo: we wake up bagged, fragged and jet-lagged having spent the night in a fifteen square metre apartment with nothing but a futon the thickness of a panty liner between us and a cold wood floor. But it's delightful. Because outside there are some *cute* cats sleeping on a Coke machine, bathed in the golden winter sun. That's all that matters. What is it about Tokyo and cats? They seem to be everywhere, glowering from windows and bunched up like lost fur hats in the middle of the pavement of Ueno Park. Haruki Murakami used to run a jazz club in Tokyo called Peter Cat. Chris Marker always seemed to have a cat or two in his films. He described this city and its cats so beautifully in his (1982) Sans Soleil

He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo, there's a temple consecrated to cats. "I wish I could convey you the simplicity , the lack of affectation, of this couple who'd come to place an inscribed wooden slat in the cat cemetery so that their cat Tora would be protected. No she wasn't dead, only run away. But on the day of her death, no one would know how to pray for her, how to intercede with death so that he would call her by her right name. So they had to come there, both of them, under the rain, to perform the rite that would repair the web of time where it had been broken."

Jetée

In Marker’s honour, we stop in at Jetée, which the owner Kawai san has decorated with cat figurines. We chat with her for a while over drinks and she tells us about Marker’s most recent film; ‘Chats perchés,’ which, sadly, we haven't yet seen. But time is out of joint. It is the coldest winter in years and I am telling the story out of sequence. It doesn’t really matter. I'll rely on photography. Again I think of Marker:

"I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather, I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory."

The Japanese have many words for cute. ‘Kawaii des ne?’ might cut it for cats but it isn’t the right flavour of cute to describe a Maid Café. So we head down to Akiba to investigate. Six stories above the street we join a queue, waiting for a tables in the At Home Café. The place is a seething madhouse of pink, with bevies of maids scurrying around, giggling and serving cupcakes and omelettes that have cartoon smiles drizzled onto them with ketchup. Every twenty minutes or so a floor show starts, where customers play games with the maids and have their pictures taken flanked by maids holding plates of cupcakes. This is the epitome of moe (mo-eh) cuteness, quite distinct from the kawaii. When she finishes pouring my tea, our maid shows me how to jiggle my arms and make a heart shape with my thumbs and forefingers, while I coo:
“o-o-o-o-h . . . . mo-e !” appreciatively at my cup.
“It makes it taste better,” she says.
How could I argue?

YVR theme park

It’s hard to know just what to make of these artificial rain forest dioramas that have been put in beside YVR’s international arrival and departure gates. The sound of running water is certainly soothing and the humidity sure helps juice up one’s sinuses after a dry flight. But what is *up* with those fake vine maples, sword ferns and salal ? If the intention here was to do ’green’ design, then surely they would have used living plants. Live plants after all, would have helped clean the air by absorbing giga-litres of stressed-out passenger breath and turning it back into sweet, breathable oxygen. And hey, they’re alive!, which would have offered a nice balance to the sterility of the built environment. But BC salal and vine maples wouldn’t have survived long in the season-lessness of central heating and constant artificial light. Tropical plants would have been more suitable. But that would have been ’off message.’ And therein lies the rub. These displays aren’t about green design. They’re about theme park. At YVR, the temperate rain forest is part of a brand identity with which British Columbia gets marketed to international tourists. Never mind that the real forest continues to get logged, flogged and fragmented with many of its dependent species, like the mountain caribou, spotted owl and Vancouver Island marmot, on the fast track to extinction. None of this need trouble us as we enjoy our lattés under the plastic groves of this ecological simulacrum. While the synthetic brook babbles and the last school of rock cod roils inside the art-directed confines of its 100,000 litre aquarium, we can be sure that, at least at the airport, nature will always there for us. YVR: Your Virtual Rainforest.

cousteau

archelon

Well I'm off to Japan for a couple of weeks. But before leaving, in honour of the Japanese tradition of cleaning house on New Year's, I decided to change the swamp water in the aquarium that currently takes up most of our living room. This is the home of Cousteau, a fifteen-pound Florida softshell turtle, who has lived with us ever since she was a hatchling the size of an Oreo cookie.
"Well, if she gets too big you can always eat her," was the kindly warning from the Chinese proprietor of the East Vancouver fish store where we bought her, over a dozen years ago. At that time we laughed it off. Now, I'm not so sure.

tank cleaning time

Cousteau is increasingly resembling a small dinosaur and if her growth rate doesn't slow down she might start taking after her late Cretaceous cousin Archelon whose remains I once photographed at Yale's Peabody Museum. Even some of Cousteau's non- extinct relatives are known to reach enormous size. The highly endangered Asian species, Rafetus swinhoei, attains a weight of over 140 kg. There are only six individuals known still to be surviving. An enormous specimen inhabiting Hanoi's Hoan Kiem Lake is regarded by the Vietnamese as a living god, reappearing from the murk from time to time, during periods of great import to the Vietnamese people. As for Cousteau, she has appeared again from the murk also. Now that her view, for the time being, is once again unobstructed, she is pressing her nose against the glass in the direction of the television whenever we watch the nightly news. While her sad reptilian eyes appear to be taking it all in, I wonder what she is thinking?

take a look at those cakes!

At times, walking around New York can make me feel like I'm a little piece of metal hovering in the air between two electrically charged plates-- one labelled: 'old' and the other: 'new.' It is a delightful state of limbo that can, at any given moment, collapse into either direction.

The new New Museum is certainly about as 'new' as it gets, rising up over the Bowery's facade of restaurant supply stores like a wobbly stack of supermarket cake boxes. Although undeniably imposing, the building somehow avoids the 'stuck up' materialistic feeling that so characterizes the new MoMA. The interior spaces are utilitarian to a fault and the building's exterior skin plays peek-a-boo with the street through an expanded metal scrim that looks like its made from scaled up Home Depot plaster lathing. Though the building cost a ton of money, it was witty of the curators to fill the opening show, entitled 'Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century,' with an exhibition of creatively rearranged garbage. While some of these assemblages were quite delightful, for me the highlight of the visit was seeing the documentation of the Museum as Hub project, displayed on the building's top floor. The work coming out of Seoul's Insa Art Space was particularly intriguing. Sangdon Kim's Discoplan is an amazing, interventionist piece where the artist collaborates with residents of a Korean neighbourhood to build home-made flying machines that deliver clover seeds into the fenced off grounds of a former American military base. During its period of operation, the base had a traumatic relationship with the surrounding population, especially after a soldier stationed there brutally murdered a local woman. The U.S. army left the base's soil badly contaminated and the artist-inspired seed bombardment of its grounds will help phytoremediate it.

reading room

stacks

With the Disneyfication of Times Square and the obliteration of iconic cultural landmarks like CBGB's, it can seem at times that old New York is disappearing. It's still there though, if you know where to look, peeking out coyly through the palimpsest of more recent development. A case in point is the New York Society Library, which has been in operation since 1754. Our pal Larry gave us a tour of its cosseted reading rooms on East 79th St. The place has a mystical, out of timeness to it, small yet somehow limitless -- reminiscent perhaps of Borges' Library of Babel. I could easily imagine a secret sect of bibliophiles inhabiting this place, spending their nights on little cots folded out between the tightly spaced shelves, so they would never have to be separated from their beloved volumes. After the perusing the stacks we stumbled over to the Metropolitan Museum to marvel at the exquisitely lustrous panels of the Ghiberti Gates, each one sealed in its own nitrogen-filled vitrine to protect the fragile gold leaf from our corrosive twenty-first century atmosphere. We wound up the evening toasting Borges and eating our dinner under the motorized windmills and Sancho Panza statuettes of El Quijote on West 23rd St. Pierre Menard would have been proud.

panorama 1

panorama 2

panorama 3

With considerable alarm Ruth and I had to jump on a plane recently to tend to my father in Mississauga, who had suddenly grown gravely ill, after what was supposed to have been routine surgery. We sat with him for a week, as he lay unconscious in the ICU, viscous fluids bubbling in and out of him through a maze of clear plastic tubing, his life rhythms governed by an army microprocessors and chirping screens. He is recovering, albeit in the slowest of increments, having recently regained consciousness. As one might expect, being around a critically ill parent brings up a lot of emotions around one's own childhood and I found myself oddly nostalgic for the terrain vague of my youth. This rather unremarkable looking shopping plaza figured prominently in the psycho-geography of my family. I trekked across its windswept parking lot for seven years on my way to and from school. My mother and I each spent long hours working in its 24 hour grocery store; she for many years as an afternoon shift cashier and I, for a shorter stint, working nights as a meat room clean up attendant, pressure hosing blood off the white tiled walls and extracting balls of gristle from the clogged floor drains.They weren't the easiest of jobs but the money was good and they helped us survive. I spent a lot of time working by myself in the loading dock, where I would prepare yellow plastic buckets of offal to be sent to a pet food factory. Sometimes, with the corrugated steel doors rolled open and the residual rumbling of a Great Lakes thunderstorm still ricocheting off the nearby apartment towers, I'd look out onto the glistening tarmac of the parking lot and think that life was magic. Perhaps it really was.

Japanese Mountain Yam

Ambassador Bridge, Windsor, Ontario.

Well OK. It's been a long time in coming. And as usual life has been full of endless distractions, all of which have been convenient as excuses that have kept me from posting to THE SHOW SO FAR. Frankly, I had been thinking I would give the whole thing up. Then the e-mails started coming in. It seems that some people actually *read* this thing and want me to continue. Yet still I resisted. What ultimately brought me back here was the discovery of this winsome little tuber. The Japanese mountain yam had been a kind of holy grail for me, resisting all of my previous attempts at its cultivation, here on this damp, cold little Canadian island. But I just hadn't been patient enough. I planted this one from a little sliver over three years ago and then completely forgot about it. One day in early October, I was weeding my cold frame--And there it was! Perfect. Wonderful. It had been growing underground all this time. The mountain yam or yama-imo is unusual among yams because it is traditionally eaten raw. We ate ours sliced with a little plum paste and shoyu. It tastes deliciously cool and a little slimy. If you click the above link you will no doubt be *amused* by its surprising non-food uses!

There have been so many things I wanted to share with you, dear readers from my various forays this year such as: the ethereal photographs of Taryn Simon's American Index, the enigmatic, cut apart reverse architecture of Gordon Matta-Clark, and Tacita Dean's haunting film about a film factory about to close forever. These things and many more besides have burned themselves into my visual cortex and are now resurfacing, as the cold winter rain starts to pelt my tin roof, here on this remote island outpost.

As part of that project, I have proposed a plantation of hickory trees to be installed near the Ambassador Bridge; the conduit that funnels the immense traffic flow in and out of America, and all the attendant noise and pollution problems that go with it. The trees, which are native to the area, will help purify the air, act as a carbon sink and furnish the occasional crop of tool handles, which will be harvested using the ecologically sustainable technique of coppicing. The handles will be used for garden tools like shovels and picks, the business ends of which will be forged from scrap automobile parts using guerrilla blacksmithing techniques.

In case you missed it, Rebecca Solnit wrote a beautiful piece called Detroit Arcadia: Exploring the post-American Landscape in the July 2007 Harper's. In it she describes the devolution/evolution of the Motor City from model American metropolis (and the the birthplace of Fordism) into its present state, where large parts of the former industrial heartland have become a post industrial, ruin ecology. Stephen Vogel, Dean of Architecture at University of Detroit Mercy painted a similar picture in his amazing presentation at the Windsor conference. He described Detroit neighbourhoods where the street lights don't work anymore and 911 service is no longer available. Large areas of the downtown are reverting to savannah-like ruderal ecologies, inhabited by flocks of urban pheasants. Paradoxically, these ghetto pheasants are now being trapped by the crashed recently, threatening the area's lucrative hunting economy. Apparently the inner city pheasants are doing fine in their new rural environs, a good deal cannier no doubt then their country-born predecessors.

Oh, and I've still been living the 'writing life,' only my stuff is starting to get published on (can you believe it?)---paper! Check out my short story 'Overpass' in the new issue of the Vancouver Review and a non-fiction thing called 'I Love Turtles' in the latest Knock Magazine.

komodo ago-go

Better late than never. This was supposed to be a Christmas posting. It's been a long time, but I'm back for a moment from the murk.
Since November, this land of ferns and frogs has been beaten down by an endless conveyor belt of raging Pacific storms, keeping electricity and my attention span in rather short supply. When the wind stops howling, the sky hangs over the dripping forest like a grey flannel quilt and sunlight, on the rare occasions that it appears, comes as a shock, like a shard of glass on a dark sidewalk.

But another year has ended and another begun, so some stock-taking is in order and I will try to play a bit of catch-up for my readers in the next couple of postings.

Ruth and I spent the holiday worshipping paper and started to build what will become a bestiary of Japanese papercraft insects There are is a seemingly endless selection of PDF's available online, enabling you to build anything from a laptop, to a yellow-footed tortoise to fully functioning cog and gear machines and even a V-8 engine. To get us in the mood, we sat down to a multi-day, marathon session of Read or Die-The T.V. that depicts the animated girl-on-girl exploits of a gang of paper masters who use their talents for superhero origami in a battle for global supremacy between a metastasized, technified incarnation of the British Library and a shadowy Chinese publishing conglomerate known as Dokusensha.

Despite my new found appreciation for the spirituality of paper, I haven't given up on virgin birth or anything. I was delighted by the sensational pre Christmas announcement of parthenogenesis in a Komodo dragon, the largest lizard on earth. The dragoness, named Flora, had been hovering over her self-fertilized eggs since the end of May, at England's Chester Zoo, and indications were that hatching was imminent. (I am still waiting for an update) Interestingly, due to the arcane Komodo dragon genetics, Flora's offspring will all be male. Apparently, parthenogenesis is a survival strategy that allowed single female dragons to colonize remote Indonesian islands, where they eventually mated with their parthenogenic sons to further increase the population. The next generation, conceived sexually, would have the usual proportion of daughters, who, if they decided to swim over to the next uncolonized island could then repeat the process. With a trick like that it's amazing the Komodo dragons haven't taken over the entire South Pacific. Sadly, they have become quite rare.

Oedipal proclivities notwithstanding, Komodo Dragons are truly worthy of worship— great awe inspiring mounds of amygdala driven reptile flesh, who can take down a pig, a goat or even a human if they want to. Their powerful jaws are lined with backward pointing, serrated teeth, which infect the bites they inflict with a cocktail of lethal bacteria. If the prey isn't brought down in the initial attack, the dragon continues to stalk it, biding its time until the victim drops dead of septicaemia. Perhaps there is already a cult forming to worship Flora— Virgin Queen of the Lizards. Sign me up!

In the deserts of the American southwest and northern Mexico, Flora has a little cousin, the Desert Whiptail Lizard which has a different approach to parthenogenesis. The whiptail has done away with males altogether, existing as an entirely unisexual population; mothers only giving birth to daughters. Yet there still is a lot of sex going on, or a what the biologists term pseudo sex. The whiptails alternate between male and female sex roles every 10-14 days The lizard temporarily adopting the male role, stimulates ovulation in its partner in an amorous embrace known as "the donut position." With both parters capable of reproducing, whiptails seem to have a strategy for survival that almost unique among the vertebrates. I guess they haven't got the word out yet to too many other species. If it catches on, males could be rendered (gulp) obsolete or perhaps relegated entirely to the function of entertainment. . . . .