my boss takes bees home in his trunk from work

"Finds the queen bee, puts it in his trunk. All the other bees follow her. He shuts the trunk and drives home to Ohio."

Or so R tells me.

There's a lot of corn in Illinois. This is the password. Don't forget it. It will become very important as the weeks wear on. Trust me.

So I have thusly returned from my circumnavigation of the upper midwest, or at least the portion that I was interested in. I suppose I actually circumnavigated some spot in NW Indiana. From Bloomington to Lafayette to Chicago to Madison to Dodgeville to Fennimore to Coon Valley to Madison to New Glarus then south through Bloomington ILLINOIS and east to Indy finally arriving back in the liberal bias of southern Indiana around 10:30 your time last night. I'll be honest with you, it was touch and go at times. When I accidentally put skim milk in my coffee in Lafayette I almost called it all off right then and there to flee back to my Bloomington cocoon.

But I perservered and it was well worth it.

I will here recount only small bits and pieces of the 6 day adventure because I am writing a three part piece for Indianabeer.com to which I shall dutifully link when they are posted on aforesaid website.

OK then. Chicago was great. Tracy is the hostess with the mostess and the little buddy Mia. I should have taken pictures of that little buddy. We drank a lot of beer and saw a lot of things to see including a really sweet Marching Band of street performers. I have video of it and will hopefully post it soon. I like Chicago a lot. My first trip there. Tracy is so urban.







Then I went fishing in the driftless region of Wisconsin. This place is called driftless because the last continental glaciers never touched it and thus never left glacial "drift" there. The driftless watersheds are tributaries to the Wisconsin River east of La Crosse. Kind of superficially looks like central PA what with the ridges and the farm land and the trout, but it is actually very different. All the relief is caused by erosion not acutal mountain building. Also, while all the excellent trout streams in the area are limestone spring creeks, like central PA, they have a much much lower gradient, flow through very large, flat bottomed, intensely farmed valleys, and have mostly silt, sand, and mud bottom substrate. They are also narrow, deep creeks. There is a TON of plants and algae in the stream as well. They are very hard to fish. The wading is difficult because of the soft bottom, deep water, and tangly aquatic plants. The casting is difficult because the rivers are narrow and the grasses and plants come right down to the water; no nice rock banks. The water is also crystal clear and the wild brown trout are wary and very selective so a perfect presentation and fly choice is necessary. This is very technical fishing.

But very good fishing if you can hack it.

I fished Mt. Vernon Creek, Big Green River, and the Coulees area. I only fished for an hour or two on the Mt. Vernon and Big Green. I spent most of my time on the Timber Coulee and it's tribs. The trout populations are very large in the Coulees. I saw more trout than I've ever seen anywhere. 50 trout a hole. Big trout too. Saw some 20" inch fish. The biggest one I caught was probably 14 or 15". The vast majority of the fish I caught were between 8-10". But I caught a lot of them. They are beautiful wild brown trout. I also caught one big brook trout the first night on the Coulees.



The big brook trout:



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This is all for now. The first Indianabeer piece will hopefully be posted in the next day or two.

the anatomy of a snort

I seemed to have developed a snort. The ends of my laughs are now infected with a distinct up-sucking of breath simultaneously through nostrils and mouth. This vigorous inhalation seems to be so far regularly accompanied by the rapid, staccato flap-flap-flapping a lacquered slick back passing of soft palate through nasopharynx.

Or perhaps my uvula is involved. It's hard to tell. I'll use the mirror here in a few minutes to really give it all the once over. Get this thing figured out. Solve the mystery. Hard the puzzle. Answer the question that's been burning a hole in my brain for days and days of restless sleep will wear a hole in one's head if one is not careful one may learn something one may not want to know the best way to incapacitate an attacker Bas Rutten style with the magic of Pancrase grappling technique! For only $9.99 learn the secrets of Muay Thai masters Bas Rutten and Ken Shamrock!

BUT WAIT.

That's not all!

We'll also throw in a 45 minute Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu workout DVD by none other than Royce Gracie himself which includes a detailed explanation of his finishing moves from UFC 1, 2, 3, AND 4!! At no extra cost! This deal is just too good to pass up!

DOMINATE YOUR OPPONENTS NOW.

I'm not sure how permanent this whole snort thing is going to be. I'm not even sure how I feel about it right now. But have no fear, I'll keep you posted.

misdirected affection

Up early this morning. 11am. Days upon days of sloth and pot, good for nothing lay-about lout. Get my act together today. Gonna go to Encore. Gonna do some work.

I’m on Myspace a lot. It’s not so much that I’m addicted to Myspace as I’m addicted to the interwebs. Myspace is just one more thing to do on the interwebs. Anyway, in this young woman’s “Who I’d like to meet” section she writes “henry miller in 1920s paris”. Well, honey, Henry Miller didn’t spend so much time in Paris during the 1920s. Apparently a couple months. With his wife. Most of Miller’s time in Paris that is chronicled in, for example, Tropic of Cancer, was during the 1930s. The Paris that made Miller’s themes so unique was the Paris of the 1930s.

The case could be made that had Miller been in Paris in the 1920s he would have never written the kind of books he did write. Tropic of Cancer is about poverty and a kind of perverted asceticism, irresponsibility, and bed bug ridden malaise. All of Miller’s friends are incompetent, weak, and disgusting in some form or another.

Paris of the 1920s was Hemingway’s Paris. Post war Paris was a very happy city. Everyone had enough money. Everyone had enough food. There was more absinthe than they knew what to do with. All of Hemingway’s friends were talented, famous, and powerful. There were no “gutters running over with sperm”. Hemingway could never have written A Moveable Feast in 1930s Paris.

At least this is my untutored assessment.

resplendent shiny foil, flicker in the night
hands so tight do toil, brave but mundane knight
altogether now we go, along the fields so brown
a wavering malicious beast, looking king a crown

their king a naked head for now, a naked head no cause
a naked head no cause for fright, great metallic jaws!

great metallic jaws descend, upon the party’s line
“seek not your glory now, your king for feast is mine!”

the wavering malicious beast, with middle section gone
draws bows to arms and takes good aim, let loose the arrows fly

clinking off the cold steel jaws, falling back to earth
cold steel jaws no right thing for pursuits pure amorous

rocketboom

Being that I am now ensconced in my native interwebs browsing environment, I have once again been taking Rocketboom regularly. The new host, Joanne Colan, is, um, very attractive. More attractive than Amanda Congdon I must say. I think it's the accent and the slightly more polished but still somewhat amateurish performances. She is apparently a former MTV Europe VJ. She is much more polished than Amanda Congdon. But she is not nearly as quirky or creative. But I don't think Rocketboom has suffered. the only thing missing is Congdon's quirkyness, which I guess is fine. I guess Rocketboom is going to go more "mainstream" and that's fine. I think Rocketboom wil continue to grow and find easier access to traditional media with Colan as the host. But then they won't be able to say whatever they want and be as creative as they could be, but such is life. Life is shit, you do what you can.

Editor's note: this Joanne Colan episode is fairly creative. I like it. This one too. And oh my good lord, they did an episode with Tiki Bar TV. That is fucking awesome.

the now slightly more common double posting: "I can go anywhere!"

"Take a look, it's in a book - Reading Rainbow."

I have discovered a very excellent website. It's called Weatherbase.com and it rules. They have a whole slew of weather data for cities all over the earth. Average monthly temperatures, precipitation, days with x amount of sunshine, etc. It further confirmed my belief that Columbia MO is a bit hotter than Bloomington IN and both are much hotter than West Chester PA.

I have also discovered another very excellent website called xkcd. The comics are pretty funny. I like them a lot.







And finally, these are some images I got from Google Earth today. Google Earth has added a lot more high quality images in the last 6 months or so. These two images are from the Amazon Rain Forest. They can both be enlarged by the click.

weather in the middle or not

106°F. Humid. The long gray road looks rubbery in the heat. Burnished, pliant metal; two portions rolled out elastically and equidistantly from St. Louis and Kansas City. They meet in marital tolerance beneath the firey haze of Columbia. Brown, dormant grass along the shoulder gives way to scrubby trees, more grass, and perhaps another road.

Downtown was mostly devoid of pedestrain activity. The few people that did brave the heat seemed to be choreographed: slowly, but rhythmically pacing from one spot of shade to the next. As little loitering as possible.

The diner was a real diner. A very small, low profile but bulging building perched on the very edge of a very large parking lot, isolated; across the street and across the parking lot, larger buildings loomed against the orange heat. Michael and I each had two eggs, hashbrowns, sausage, and one biscuit with gravy (I had coffee as well). We argued over breakfast for sport. Mike is hard to argue with because he oozes persuasion from every pore. I never quite know how he has convinced me, but I am typically convinced. We talked about the usual upbeat stuff, you know, human population growth, the impending crash? how? when? ebola? asian bird flu? nothing new? under the sun?

CAN TECHNOLOGY SAVE THE HUMAN RACE!?

Everyone at the diner was very nice.

Beatrice was a skinny, tiny, wirey, 65 year old, white haired woman who got very excited about things and laughed a lot. She had a warm, melodic, wide ranging, crackly southern voice and beautiful wrinkly, milk chocolate colored skin. Beatrice was the janitor in the Biology Department at one of the local colleges who whistled a lot. She drove a giant 1978 Dodge Ram. Beatrice was a very bad driver. It was a good thing she worked nights when the lot was mostly empty: Beatrice took up two, sometimes three parking spaces.

She would often pop into the lab to "get the trash", which really meant, "talk to you for 20 minutes when you should be working." But Beatrice was a very cool lady. She had learned enough about science to have a good sense for how knowledge is produced. Beatrice would say things like, "What's your null hypothesis? Are you shooting for a tier 1 journal? Data analysis is the worst!" She wanted to be a scientist very badly, but Beatrice had a learning disability which made reading hard for her. Beatrice still took physics and biology classes now and then, just for fun: "Wheeeel, it is free, so I like to take advantage of that, you know."

She was also very fond of robots. She never married, had no kids, one sister in the next town, but her house was filled with robots. For a while she made robots that were like remote control cars but were robots instead. They actually moved around and what not. For the last couple years, however, she just made robots because they look cool. She had a couple displayed at the library in an exhibit called "Science and Art: Bridging Boundaries: the In Between: Space".

They are mosaics of discarded scientific accoutrement, these robots. Orbital shaker base, 10 empty petri plates, bits of autoclave tape as well. She asked me for two 1ml pipette tips so I gave her four and a couple 100μl tips for good measure. She said they would look very "coooool" on her new robot.

Beatrice lived in a trailer in a bad part of town where there was, for some reason, a lot of sand in the road. Her trailer was not air conditioned. Beatrice died while we ate our biscuits and gravy at the diner.

LIVE FROM BLOOMINGTON...M.B. Pell weighs in on a beer

D. Carnegie & Co. Stark-Porter, Argang 2004

As dark as the African continent in the 18th century. Voluminous head a surprisingly light color. Sweet Sassy Molasses in the nose. Big nose. Big flavor. Camp fire cooked marshmallow, sweet but burnt.

Perfect for pumpkin pie or autumn time dessert.

"This is a damned good beer."

It's so rich for 5.5% abv.

the heat, the horse, the hat, the hot

It's 11:45pm and 86°F. I'm swimming in humidity.

Somewhat miraculously, the FDIBS budget worked out today. Never co-organize a conference. It's a lot of work. Although I am getting reimbursed for the six stakes. We bought the secretaries flowers.

And in other Indiana HPS news, Prof. Bill Newman makes the NY Times today in an article about a conference on alchemy at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Pretty cool. Cesare Pastorino gave a talk at the same conference, but is not mentioned in the article. Also, I met a historian from the Chemical Heritage Foundation at FDIBS. He is from Newfoundland. He was a very nice guy.

"Claude would even ask you to turn your face away when she squatted over the bidet. All wrong!"

Things have been very busy. I've accumulated a type of tired heretofore unfamiliar and uncharted yet obviously eventually obligatory territory:

I took my sorry over the water and toward the dorry.
I said "Quick man! Ferry me across!"
The swift river never quicker, taste of fear metallic flavor.

Dorryman a surly bloak, a bloody bad taste in my mouth.
Again I flee along the road, carry always a burdensome load.

And so it was that I came to watch The Libertine, a movie starring Johhny Depp that was good. It's a period piece which is well done, except they're always drinking wine not beer. In London. In 1675. This is very unlikely I must say. Anywho, a very good movie otherwise. Reminded me a lot of Henry Miller, at least Tropic of Cancer (hence the title of this post). Lots of sex. Lots of graphic sex. Not necessary nudity; just very graphic. But John sure does pull it off.

I'm living completely by the seat of my pants; there is no hope for the cuffs of my pants.

Scienceblogs.com is pretty slick. They are part of the online presence of Seed Magazine, a new and apparently popular science magazine. Scienceblogs.com does the hosting, homogenizes, and clutters up with ads, many of the net's best science blogs. For instance, Pharyngula is there.

Anyway, I wonder how much money they make from all those bloggers and I wonder how much they pay. I'm pretty sure they pay for hosting and support etc., but I doubt they pay salaries? Well, just looking at their new front page I noticed how they're doing a better job making use of the blogs' content in a more traditional webpage format. They even have a "top 5 emailed articles section". Pretty slick. I'm not sure I think the authors are being taken advantage of. I'll have to think about that some more. But I am very curious about how much ad revenue comes from clicks on Pharyngula, a very popular blog.

FDIBS is now over. It wore me out something bad. But that's ok. I had a great time, learned a lot, met a lot of people, talked about a lot of stuff. Good. Tired. This is my favorite picture from the workshop, from Joe Cain's talk on the social cement of scientific disciplines.



Here are some pictures from the family reunion. I used to ride the shit out of that four wheeler. It was my grandfather's now it's my uncle's. My family is local. That is a picture of my other grandfather in Tibet in 1943 (they both owned all terrain vehicles). My Uncle Kurt both piloting the cart and the paper airplane. My dad, the coolers, uncle Joe. Chris and Jama and Elena. Jama and Elena.



CLICK TO ENLARGE:



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And now for the rest of the non-enlargers:






And finally, my father stayed a couple days after the family reunion last week to hang out with his mom and do some work around her house, but also to go fishing with "Cousin Ricky", one of the local Fish and Game guys up in Elk County. He also happens to be the guy who manages the Wolf Run pond which I mentioned here. He also happens to be the guy who took several of the pond fish and put them into Wolf Run.

They are thriving. Cousin Ricky feeds them fish food a lot so they get really fat. Not necessarily my type of fishing, but that huge rainbow trout my dad pulled out of a very small stream on a #14 Adams is pretty nice. I also don't endore my father's method of handling that large fish, but whatever, they are stocked there. My dad with a large and rotund brook trout. And then, the monster 'bow (with patented Dunn-tongue).

blueberries and brook trout no more

Things are a touch stressful here in good ol'Indianer. It is stupidly hot. Stupidly humid.

Abundantly clear that the stress in the air just isn't around in the mountains.

The trip home was going great. I stopped into Rich O's, one of my top 5 favorite bars, to drop off some canned (gasp!) beer for the good Dr. Baylor. I also managed to have a large pizza with 4 toppings, a half pint of New Albanian Brewing Company's hoppy, cask conditioned "red ale", and an imperial pint of, get this, Monk's Flemish sour ale.

Thank the good fucking lord.

If they have it at Big Red here in B-town I might just collapse into a puddle of orgasmic joy right there on the floor, good for nothing salespeople crowded around my sticky mess of a meltdown.

"Clean up, aisle 5."

Anyway, I purchased a growler of the NABC Elector Ale and literally skipped out through the 100 degree swelter to my car. I was very pleased with myself. Only a quick 1.5 hour trip to Bloomington from here! I sang along with Tony Furtado the entire way home.

Pulled into the driveway. Weeds had pretty much overtaken the back yard. The recycling bins were filled to the brim with foul water filled to the brim with foul larvae wriggling and squirming, as if they could already smell my fat, juicy, blood filled body, as if they were already the bloodsucking pests they had not yet become.

Brian sure did a great job taking care of the house while I was gone. The inside was spotless too.

But that don't confront me. As long as I get my money next Friday. Now next Friday come I didn't have the rent. Out the door I went.

What did confront me, however, was when I dropped my cool, dew covered growler of Elector Ale. It shattered. The driveway slowly soaked up the precious nectar. I cried a little bit.

Eh. C'est la vie and all that nonsense.

I did get to go to Upland with Grant and Megan and Catherine and Emily and Joel so that was cool. But today has been hectic time doing stuff for the conference that I am now officially a co-organizer of.

And tomorrow it's off to the Family reunion in northern PA! Then back on Sunday for more FDIBS things, then the conference starts on Wednesday.

You only live once. Pack as much shit into that life as humanly possible and hope you don't have a breakdown. That's my motto anyhow.


At least I have the memories from the short, 3 day backpacking trip in Panthertown last weekend to dull my busypains.


Forgive me father for I have sinned. It has been 6 days since my last backpacking-fishing trip.

I hiked in from Salt Rock Gap. To the top of Little Green. I didn't bring much food. Some nuts. Some granola bars. A bit of beef jerky.

After I urinated on the rather rare granitic dome lichen community I supplemented my meager rations with blueberries. Lots of them. I ate them 10 at a time, pulling the bunches to my mouth, biting them off the bush. There were pangs of guilt, I'll admit. What will the bears eat? I don't need these berries. The bears do. Those buddies need all the energy they can get. They don't have nuts and granola in their pack.

But then I realized, about 500 berries in, that I was probably going to get the shits something fierce. Serve'em right them goldang humans. (Editor's note: the editor is happy to report that he did not, in fact, get the shits.)









The extreme headwaters of the Tuck. Potholes and all.





A front done come through. Bigger for click.



Little Green. Bigger click for.




Panthertown Valley is called "the Yosemite of the East", and when I was out there last week I was thinking, this does remind me of a spot in Yosemite backcountry. But then I looked at the picture from the Yosemite and it turns out that, well, not so much. For bigger click.




The obligatory Schoolhouse falls picture:



I hiked down the river. Into the bowels of Panthertown, aka Devil's Elbow, where even the brook trout are mean. For click bigger.




Blick for cligger.








A beautiful buddy. Flick cor bigger.




The beautiful buddy in his natural habitat. Click bor figger.




The sunset was fixin' to be pretty nice, then there was that one damn cloud. But it turned out ok I suppose so low go flow know Bo knows bono's my least favorite Irishman.

You can view a larger version of this digital image by clicking on it.




There was this guy up on Little Green Sunday night. At dusk. I saw him twice. He was maybe 20 years old? I don't know. Younger than he was old. Whatever the hell that means. Anyway, he was wearing a shorts, a t-shirt, and some yellow throwback Saucony sneakers with blue socks. A Jansport book bag that looked empty. It was dusk. It's at least an hour hike to the nearest trailhead from where we were. At least. And he's up there in my way on the trail talking on a cell phone.

He stops. "Hey, hey, hold on a sec yo. Hey man, how are you? I get reception up here, isn't that crazy?"

"Ummmm, yes."

"Hey, do you know what these blue berries are?"

"Those are blueberries dude."

"Oh, cool. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't killing myself."

So I says to him I says, "I just saw a big bear back there."

(Editor's note: the editor likes to think that the punk got the shits somethin' fierce.)

into the grand holler

The Bradley Fork watershed starts high up above 6000' on the crest of the Smokies between Charlie's Bunion and Peck's Corner. It drains a sizable chunk of land, maybe 4 miles between ridges at it's widest (10 miles along the ground? You know if you ironed West Virginia flat it would be bigger than Texas?), and joins the Oconaluftee river at Smokemont. The lower parts of the valley were certainly occupied by early white settlers and the Cherokee before them, but pockets of the area were never logged and while it's a longish hike to get away from most human sign (~5 miles), it's a fairly easy climb (just less than 1000 vertical feet) and most of the hike is on an old road bed.

And the upper reaches of the creek are as beautiful as anything I've seen in the park.

The access to the heart of the Bradley Fork wilderness is the Cabin Flat's campsite (there aren't actually any cabins).

The trail stops there.

Last Sunday I only made it about 1/2 mile up the creek above Cabin Flats, but that was far enough. No foot prints. No trash. No trails. There are probably some other fisherpeople and park service folk who venture up this way, but probably not too often.

The forest is shockingly beautiful. The stream is shockingly clear. A much richer forest than I saw in the Raven Fork watershed. This might be because we were at almost 4000' on Raven Fork and I was just over 3000' on Bradley Fork. And of course it was pretty much winter on Raven Fork when I was there. The two creeks are very close in size. Raven Fork is certainly more remote. Much harder to get to. But once I was up a good distance from Cabin Flats it felt just as wild as anything on Raven Fork.

I caught more Rainbow trout than Brook trout. No Brown trout. I saw many beautiful Rainbow trout. I don't hate them so much anymore.

Yet I persist in my view that, beside the Brook trout, they are dull.





I think Brook trout and Rainbow trout epitomize the difference between eastern and western wilderness in the U.S. The Rainbow trout is blankly metallic; galvanized against the harsh western environment. The Brook trout is dark, soft, and mysterious; sheltered in pockets of rain forest. The western mountains are wide open, sterile, and intimidating. The eastern mountains are closed, fertile, and nuturing.

I'll work this all out soon and get back to you.

Be can of these some made bigger by on them clicking.