Color their Jurassic world

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Artwork by Chuang Zhao and Lida Xing
Reconstruction of two Sinosauropteryx
sporting their orange and white striped tails, borrowed from here

Hi. It's time to color dinosaurs. Woohoo!




First off, there was an exciting discovery by a team of Chinese and British paleontologists and earth scientists reported in Nature. You can read about fossilized melanosomes, pennaceous feathers and integumentary filaments at that article, OR you can do like I did and read the Dinosaur Colors for Almost-Dummies at the NYTimes.

The upshot is that all the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and any other illustrations you've ever seen were painted out of someone's imagination. Fossils are white or gray or brown, not the color of the original obviously. So there would be no way to know what colors dinosaurs actually were.

Until now!

These scientists made connections over the last four decades that birds have microscopic sacs of pigment in their feathers called melanosomes, and that fossils of extinct birds have the same melanosomes. Paleontologists in the 1970s had started believing that birds evolved from two-legged theropods - dinosaurs. And this led to more studies and evidence of feathers on dinosaurs. And so on.

By analyzing the shape and arrangement of the fossil melanosomes, they were able to get clues to their original color. They determined, for example, that a 47-million-year-old feather had the dark iridescent sheen found on starlings today.

Isn't that crazy?

So I say, let's celebrate and color some dinosaurs! Not that I am going to be limiting myself to the iridescent sheen of starlings. I found this enchanted web site where you can pick from brachiosauruses and megaraptors and dozens of other dionsauruses and color them virtually - any colors in their palette.

See, this is mine. What can I say, I'm not too wild. But you can be as wild as you want, although it does not let you color outside the lines, drat.




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gold

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Even in poverty ~ with passion and perseverance ~
a lot can be accomplished.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948

January 26 is Republic Day in India
~ A day the whole world celebrates
the power of non-violent civil disobedience.

~ ~ ~

Permit me to synchronize that with
a poor artist's rich sunflowers
on a postcard my daughter sent from Amsterdam some time ago.
You don't need a lot of money to create something beautiful.
In fact you might be very poor financially.
You might not ever make a living at what you do best.

Vincent van Gogh

Sunflowers, repetition of the 4th version (yellow background)
Oil on canvas, 95 × 73 cm
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

~ ~ ~

And a winter field clipped of its corn
looking "like a man's badly shaved beard"*
might be where power waits under a white winter sky
that will come to life under the heat of the summer sun.
Just a plow, soil, seed, sun, rain ~
and a new field of corn will rise up ~
Just like that.

With the right combination of elements
an impossible alchemy is possible.

Golden.

Don't forget it.
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* simile borrowed from Guy de Maupassant's Miss Harriett
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"Don't think about getting off from work" (and I don't think he means my 9-5 job)

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my office window

The Sunrise Ruby


In the early morning hour,
just before dawn, lover and beloved wake
and take a drink of water.

She asks, Do you love me or yourself more?
Really, tell the absolute truth.

He says, There is nothing left of me.
I am like a ruby held up to the sunrise.
Is it still a stone, or a world
made of redness? It has no resistance
to sunlight. The ruby and the sunrise are one.
Be courageous and discipline yourself.

Work. Keep digging your well.
Don't think about getting off from work.
Submit to a daily practice.
Your loyalty to that is a ring on the door.

Keep knocking, and the joy inside
will eventually open a window
and look out to see who's there.


- Rumi

So. What is "the work"? Somehow (apologies to non-American friends who don't follow our political soap operas) I don't think it's trashing and bashing Martha Coakley for being an idiot or Scott Brown for being the male version of Sarah Palin or John Edwards for being a slimy bastard, or any other number of my responses to the frustrations of the last week. Maybe Haiti has brought out the work in a lot of us. But I think that work is far away - as good as it is and present in my heart - and still not what Rumi is talking about. How to bring it closer to home? When he talks about lovers, is he talking about sexual love? I don't think so, even though that's the language he uses. You have to get even closer than that intimacy. He's talking about quarrying out divine love inside, through the rock of the ego. When I manage to dig, listen, knock, and see the joy look out, that's when I stop seeing the difference between me and someone else, when I stop saying in my head, "Oh I would so not have done what you just did." I can think I am so much better than a lot of people. But when I stop saying and feeling that, tension and exhaustion just disappear - becoming one, like the physical act of lovers, but on the inside.

This digging isn't for sainthood. It's not applying for doormat status. It's not la·di·da·ing oblivious to evil and stupidity. I think it's realizing that I am capable of everything I see behaved by humans - from the top of the chain to the bottom - as the parade goes by. Not seeing someone else as the other. That's the work. If it weren't hard, we'd all be there. But when you see joy look out to see who's there, it's ecstasy, and worth digging for again.

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eggs & eggplant

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Some husbands give their wives flowers. Or Cadbury Kraft chocolates. Some get robin's egg blue Tiffany boxes enclosing something shiny. I watched old movies when I was little where tuxedoed men gave mink stoles to their wives, who then twirled round and round, diaphanous gowns flaring at their calves as they buried their lipsticked smiles in fur.

Happily for me, my husband gives me photo ops.

Like ornamental chickens with Samuel Beckett hairdos (see Honey on my sidebar). A weather vane named Carl the Cutter. A row of heavy bent sunflowers left for chickadee feeders and corn stalks that radiate the January sun. Gifts that are stealthy and still life-y, such as veggies in September just off the stem resting on the turquoise metal garden chair where I can see them when I pull in the drive. Or gourds and pumpkins lined up on fence posts.

Sunday it was the day's just washed eggs arranged by color on a dish towel showcase. Better than jewels. He said he was really just seeing how many he had of each color.




So what does the wife offer the leaver of egg art? His favorite vegetable that happens to have egg in its name, in a winter-warming soup: roasted eggplant with garlic. Even I who am not the #1 fan of eggplant's texture loved it, because it was pureed and super yums. Why do you suppose they're called eggplant? Sometimes Don's hens lay long eggs shaped this way, poor things. Well, apparently some cultivars of eggplant in the 18th century looked like hen's or goose eggs and were yellow or white. And, who knew? They originated in India, where they are known as brinjal, and that sounds something like the name I think is most beautiful for them: aubergine.

eggplant roasted with mashed roasted garlic mixed with Herbes de Provence

Eggplant-Garlic Soup


Ingredients:
1 cup roasted garlic
1/2 cup Herbes de Provence (available bottled, or dried herbs of your choice)
Drizzle of olive oil
Kosher salt and black pepper to taste
2 large eggplant
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 cup minced onions
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 1/2 quart of vegetable (or chicken) stock (I added more stock to leftover soup the next day and liked the thinner consistency better)
1 cup coconut milk (or heavy dairy cream)
Cayenne pepper to taste

Directions:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. In a mixing bowl, combine the garlic, herbs and drizzle of olive oil together. Season with salt and pepper. Mix thoroughly. Split the eggplant in half, lengthwise and smear the garlic mixture over the top of each eggplant half. Place the eggplant on a baking sheet and place in the oven. Roast the eggplant for 30 minutes or until the eggplant is tender.

Remove from the oven and cool. Using a spoon, remove the flesh of the eggplant and discard the skin. Heat the oil in a 2-quart saucepan. When the oil is hot, add the onions. Saute for 2 minutes. Add the roasted eggplant and garlic and continue to saute for 2 minutes. Stir in the stock and bring the liquid to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes. Using a hand-held blender (I don't have one, so I just put it in a regular blender), puree the soup until smooth. Stir in the coconut milk or cream and continue to simmer for 3 minutes. Season the soup with the salt and the cayenne.

Modified from a recipe found here.
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from Texas to Turkey to Haiti

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Special post script note: I want to sincerely apologize for posting incomplete information about Turkish rescuers in Haiti. After the news program seeing Turks in the rescue effort, I searched online, even at the Hurriyet Turkish newspaper, for information about a Turkish contingent. I found many references to the Armenian group, and since many Armenians live in Turkey, I came to an imperfect conclusion that this was the Turkish contingent. I was unable, unfortunately, to find anything at that time about the Turkish group. I should have been more thorough and clear about that process in the paragraph about it. I have nothing but respect for Turks, who clearly in the last decades have come to the aid of not only their own who have suffered, but to those in other countries as well. In this post I have conveyed a personal story that reminds me that the Haitian tragedy, while massive, is about individual suffering and individual aid.

Here is the Hurriyet article posted 6pm today, about Turkish rescuers and the generous ten tons of goods donated to Haiti. Clearly in 2010 our friends Cemal, Hassan, Dilber and Ali would have something different to say.

"In Turkey, she would die."

We looked over at Cemal (pronounced Jeh-mahl) in the blue TV light. Hassan, Dilber and Ali all nodded in agreement.

"If a child fell into a hole here, no one would try to rescue her. We don't have the technological resources, and besides, we would just consider it her fate."

I don't remember how far the emergency team was into the 58 hours spent rescuing 18-month-old Jessica McClure after she fell 22 feet into a well in 1987. She was just a few years younger than Lesley and Peter. We looked like lemurs in our Istanbul apartment staring at the television news footage of Midland, Texas workers at night under floodlights leaning over her far below, talking to her, passing food and water down the narrow hole. She was still a baby, crying, the only word she said was "Mommy." They drilled a rescue shaft next to the well and dug over to where she was. Even cavers came in to help.* I don't know how many worked on her rescue, I couldn't find the total. I'm guessing dozens, maybe a hundred, or hundreds. The whole community around Midland donated time, equipment, tens of thousands of dollars, food, diesel fuel, and more for the effort of saving one child.

Fast forward 22 years, 3 months. On the news Friday we watched a Turkish rescue team with a Haitian man trying to find his missing wife who was trapped under a broken cement building. They had been tapping, and she had been tapping back. But the last tap they heard was an hour before. The Turkish rescuers and the husband weren't going to leave until they removed all that cement rubble and found her. They knew from experience that it might not be too late, and they had to find out. In India, after the 2004 tsunami, those Turks had rescued a woman - alive - after 7 days. Today is the sixth day since the earthquake hit Haiti.

From what I could find, it seems that the Turks who were sent by air across Africa and the Atlantic to Haiti were 52 Armenians. At least 30 countries have sent rescue and relief teams.

A lot has changed in 22 years. And a lot hasn't.

18-month-old Jessica McClure

Haitian boy - Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty Images

*NOTE: Scanned newspaper image from the Amarillo Daily News found at caver.net, on their page devoted to Jessica's rescue.
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the color of water

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There have been countless messages of water in the last week. Garlic and sapphires in the mud (T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets), silence, or music, and the river - the Blue Nile, the Tigris, to name a few -

Every object and being in the universe is a jar
overfilled with wisdom and beauty, a drop of the Tigris
that cannot be contained by any skin. Every jarful
spills and makes the earth more shining,
as though covered in satin.

.................................................- Rumi, from The Gift of Water

I think we don't believe it, those words. Or many don't, and that's why we're in such trouble. But you know what? I believe.

It's just so hard to see sometimes. Like now, in a ravaged island in the Caribbean. Water water all around and not a drop to drink. But look how the water flows from every direction toward that point, to cover it with love and healing.

Anyway, the water flows, but still Nature and men rage, do wild and destructive things, we say stupid things.

GO WITH MUDDY FEET

When you hear dirty story
wash your ears.
When you see ugly stuff
wash your eyes.
When you get bad thoughts
wash your mind
and
Keep your feet muddy.

.....................................- Nanao Sakaki

I made a short slide show of water images. I took all the shots, except the last one - I don't have that capability.

Have a good weekend.

All images but the last "marble" image taken by the Galileo, courtesy NASA, are mine. Music in the video provided for free use by musopen.com - Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg performed by Free Tim with symphonic pieces on a professional Yamaha Midi board.

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The Blue Nile

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If you go at last to the Ethiopian restaurant nearby, remember this post, or google a bit before making an ethnocentric fool of yourself.

Most of us remember the 1980s when famines turned Ethiopia into one of the poorest countries and starvation was real for 8 million people. One million people died of it. Food is not something we associated with this country - more like the lack of it. But Ethiopia is now one of the fastest growing economies in Africa, and there seems to be at least one Ethiopian restaurant in most good-sized U.S. cities.

At our Ann Arbor Blue Nile, our waitress was a white American, so at least when we goofed and asked for small individual plates and used a fork to scoop up the wat, it wasn't in front of an Ethiopian. Yikes. Oh wait, the owner saw because he brought us more bread, he's Ethiopian. Such humiliation.

In the shot below Don has figured out the technique of tearing off a piece of the stretchy injera bread to scoop up some stew with his fingers. But see, he still has a little plate. And there is that blasted fork. Duh. Individual plates were my idea actually. "Could we get some small plates please?" They had so neglected our needs.



But the thing is, if any person in the world would not make you feel stupid for ignoring the whole point of Ethiopian cuisine - a way to bond by sharing food from the same plate and eating with your fingers - it would be an Ethiopian. I have never met more gracious and genteel people in my life. My sister Nanny's best friend is Elsabeth, from Ethiopia. "Hello Rootie, how are you? How is Don? How is Lesley? How is Peter?" she asks after not seeing me for maybe ten years. I happened to be squeezed in next to her surrounded by thousands at the outdoor Obama rally when he came to campus during his campaign in the summer of 2008. Elsabeth's daughter Kalcadon looks a lot like the painting of a face in the restaurant, top photo.

The table in that same photo, with chairs intimately circled around? That's a mesob - authentically it would be made of straw too, like the conical cover, which you leave over the food until everyone's ready to plow a furrow in the wat with their rolled injera. I am the worst kind of blogger. I research after the experience.

The spices used for wat are similar to Southwestern chili spice and the mix is called berbere, with chile peppers, ginger, cloves, coriander, allspice, rue berries, and ajwain (in Amharic, it's netch azmud and it's a type of caraway seed. By the way, I discovered a spice information page of a German Professor Gernot Katzer, including history and different names of spices in various countries and languages. Brilliant!)

Is every Ethiopian restaurant in the U.S. named The Blue Nile? Almost, I think. I don't know if they are connected, I didn't find out. But it's a good name for an Ethiopian restaurant, of course, since of the Blue Nile's miles - 900, about 560 are inside Ethiopia. The Blue Nile meets the White Nile in Khartoum (Sudan), which means "the place where two rivers meet."

In the next two photos are appetizers, which I liked a bit better than the main course wats. I'm not proud of that, because I'm pretty sure the appetizers are Westernized creations for morons like me. These rolls made with the injera bread are an ingenious way to make me happy though, with fresh veggies inside. Using that stretchy bread for wraps is a good one - easier than sticky rice California rolls, says me.



And crostinis with humus and roasted peppers and onions. I think that's feta on top. Super delicious.



Of course now I find a youtube, How To Eat Ethiopian Food.

Melkam Megeb!



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