Redux: Kill the Sprickets, Kill Them All

By: | August 27, 2018

This first ran on March 14, 2016.  We may run it again another time, maybe even a few more times, maybe a hundred times. It can’t be said too often.  

304068392_f7cc464f13_bHELEN: I like bugs. I started a Ph.D. in ants (and quit, but still think ants are awesome). I have blogged in this space about butterflies. I think the coming of the 17-year-cicadas is one of the most exciting things that happens in the world. My record is quite clear on this: me and bugs, we have no dispute. But I make an exception for camel crickets. They are horrible. Just horrible.

ANN:  They’re horrible.  They’re poop-brown, have way too many legs, and they jump exactly whatever height you are.  They jump on your body, you make involuntary noises.  They were in my basement, hordes of them.  I used to love finding them dead in the bucket of plant fertilizer or drowned in the basement toilet.  Wikipedia says they live in damp, dark places and in Japan they’re called toilet crickets.  In Baltimore, we call them sprickets.  Do they call them that in DC too?

HELEN:  I haven’t heard them called sprickets down here in DC, but it’s possible that I just haven’t had enough conversations about them. Which is why I’m so glad we’re doing this.

CASSIE: I never saw a spricket or heard of a spricket until I moved to Baltimore. I rented this awesome apartment on St. Paul Street. The first time I went into the basement to do laundry, there they were. I hated them immediately, but it was months before I realized that they are a real thing with a name that exists places other than my basement. A real species.

It’s their stupid leaping that gets to me. Footsteps make them explode into the air like leggy popcorn kernels in a too-hot pan. But often as not, they would crash into me, not leap away from me. WTF, evolution. Go home. You’re drunk.This might not sound like such a grievous offense, but try walking into a dimly lit cement room where insects are ricocheting off every surface, including your body. It’s the stuff of goddamn nightmares.

JENNY: We’ve always called those basement beasts hunchback crickets, and I would like to drop them one by one into an active volcano. Their collective screams would bring me peace. I’m also a buggy-creature lover, but I draw the line at things that leap on me without my permission. Plus, something about that hunched shape…they look like they’re plotting something evil.

ANN:  They’re like Richard III, the one who murdered the little princes in the Tower.  They’re like hunched evil popcorn.
Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | August 25, 2018

August 20-24, 2018

Remember last year when, for a moment, we took a break from earthly concerns and looked up at the sky? Helen returns to her eclipse post from last year, written from the backseat of a car during the I-95 traffic jam. The sun’s last rays shone bright, then winked out, and there it was, just like in the photos—a dark circle with a light ring around it, a dark gray sky. Face turned up, mouth hanging open, I made ecstatic, non-word sounds as tears streamed from the outside corners of both eyes. The other 30 or so people in the park sounded just as excited. 

Rebecca explains planets in retrograde over brunch. I know astrology is a lark, as my mom might say. And yet for some reason, I want to know all this detail. . . I think it’s fine to seek meaning among the stars. Actually, I’ll just come out and say it: I think it’s totally appropriate.

On a reporting trip to Cambodia, Michelle saw an image of a woman that stuck with her. She was beautiful, with clear eyes, a proud posture and a stylish haircut. But even more striking than her beauty was the way she’d raised one eyebrow in what looked like defiance, and set her mouth in determination instead of fear. She must have known her fate — only seven people are thought to have survived Tuol Sleng — and she’d chosen to meet it with this face.

The summer heat is getting to Craig, so he reduxed a post from a deep winter night. It turned out to be one of the worst nights I have ever experienced, frigid and uncomfortable. Any colder and I’d have lost digits. I was clearly the dumb Holocene guy trying out the Ice Age.

Guest Jill Adams went to Scotland this summer. It rocked. (It’s Friday and I’ve devolved into weak geology puns. Quick, cleanse your palate with something from Jill.) Picture me, standing atop a shelf of rock. It’s easy to imagine how that structure was lifted at an angle from deeper down in the Earth. The striations on the rock sides match the angle of the lift. I’m looking westward, with my right arm bent to match the angle, low toward the sea, high towards the land. I move my left arm to take an opposing angle and my eyes scan the shoreline for a match.

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Photo of a rock cairn on Arran Beach by Jill U. Adams

Guest Post: Geology 101

By: | August 24, 2018

My husband and I went to Scotland to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. We walked on footpaths in the Highlands and noticed all the ways the landscape  differed from our favorite hiking trails in New York.  My naturalist skills extend to birds and plants. It was hard to ignore the rocks, but I did my best.

I could handle the random boulders, likely erratics left alone in a field by a retreating glacier. I can go 14 thousand years back. But geologic time? It’s overwhelming. Except that time I reported on some fossils from the Devonian period. Evidence of Earth’s oldest trees were discovered near Gilboa, New York, less than an hour’s drive from my home. I loved reporting the story and I came out with a toehold in geology. Continue reading →

Redux: Hard Times in the Younger Dryas

By: | August 23, 2018

 

 

Lake superior with arrow

Summer’s been long and hot. Usually, I’m still enjoying it by August, but this time, winter is looking sweeter than ever. This post originally ran in January 27, 2015, and is about being colder than I ever had before, and about a time North America was colder than it had been in thousands of years.

This time last year, most of North America was buried in an unusual cold period. The jet stream had hemorrhaged in early January and the Polar Vortex that usually sits atop the hemisphere like a halo came pouring down. Known as the 2014 North American Cold Wave, temperatures plummeted, particularly in the Northeast and Upper Midwest where double digits below 0 °F appeared for weeks. Lake Superior froze more solidly than it had in decades.

That’s when I went to the Superior shore of northern Wisconsin where nearby temperatures had reached -37 °F. If I wanted to get the feel of a cold spell, I figured this was my moment. At the time, I was writing about the Younger Dryas, a cold anomaly that hit the Northern Hemisphere 12,800 years ago and continued for a thousand years. The world at that point had been gradually warming, the Ice Age coming to an end. Suddenly, within the space of a decade, ocean currents reversed in the Atlantic, probably triggered by cold, meltwater flows coming off the shrinking Laurentide Ice Sheet. This reversal sent the world back into the Ice Age, and brought the end of the Clovis tradition in North America, the climate upheaval speeding up megafauna extinctions.

I don’t like writing about events without witnessing them, so I set off across frozen Lake Superior out of Ashland, Wisconsin, pulling a sled behind me with enough gear to last several days. I wanted a taste of the Younger Dryas. Continue reading →

Redux: The Flower of Dangerous Love

By: | August 22, 2018

Between 1975 and 1979, an estimated 2 million Cambodians — 20 percent of the country’s population at the time — died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime. Some 17,000 victims were held in the regime’s most notorious prison, a former high school known as Tuol Sleng (“Hill of the Poisonous Trees”) or S-21. Today, the building is called the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Tucked into a busy neighborhood in central Phnom Penh, it’s a carefully preserved nightmare.

Visitors walk through blandly macabre classrooms-turned-torture-chambers, and into tiny brick-and-wood cells where prisoners were held for weeks and months. But their silence is heaviest before the rows and rows of faces — the thousands of black-and-white mugshots taken by the maniacally efficient wardens of Tuol Sleng.

When I visited Tuol Sleng during a reporting trip earlier this year, I took pictures of some of the faces, trying — like everyone around me, I imagine — to see the people within the overwhelming numbers. Later, when I looked at my camera, I saw I’d taken several photos of the same young woman. She was beautiful, with clear eyes, a proud posture and a stylish haircut. But even more striking than her beauty was the way she’d raised one eyebrow in what looked like defiance, and set her mouth in determination instead of fear. She must have known her fate — only seven people are thought to have survived Tuol Sleng — and she’d chosen to meet it with this face.

Who was she? It didn’t take long to find out.

Continue reading →

Rejoice, For Mars Retrograde Is Finally Almost Over

By: | August 21, 2018

Taurus
The other day at brunch, as two of my friends and I were commiserating about things varied and universal, we agreed about the sluggish pace of our brains. What an injustice, I ventured, that our sluggishness is so out of sync with the blistering pace of this summer and of 2018.

“Someone was telling me that it’s because Mars is in retrograde. What? When is that over?” one of my friends said.

“August 27,” I replied instantly. “Mercury is retrograde right now, too, and actually so are Saturn and Uranus. I know Mercury’s ends on the 18th but I’m not sure about the giant planets.”

My friends blinked, and asked what this meant, for them and for the cosmos.

“Uh, nothing,” I said. “That’s astrology. Astrology is not based on any real science.” They nodded. They know this. They were still curious.

“Astronomically, it means Mars seems to move backward in the sky from night to night, as viewed from Earth.” I orbited my fists around a coffee cup to demonstrate the apparent motion of the planets. I have patient friends who humor me. “Astrologically, it means … nothing real. But people say it means things are slow, and kind of backward.”

They nodded. This sounded right. It even felt right to say out loud. It’s the dog days of summer; we can blame our sluggishness on the stars.  Continue reading →

Redux: On the Path of Totality

By: | August 20, 2018

Remember this time last year, when we were all so excited about the eclipse? And then it really was as good as everyone said it would be? Here’s the post I wrote on my laptop in the back seat of a car in the massive I-95 traffic jam on August 22, 2017.

 

drawing of traffic jam on interstate

I’m writing this from a traffic jam on I-95.

When we were choosing days on the schedule for Eclipse Week, nobody wanted the responsibility of writing a post the day of the eclipse. Because I have an overactive sense of duty, I signed up for this post, then joked that I’d be writing it on I-95, from the world’s worst traffic jam, on my phone.

Well, the joke’s on me; my phone died.

Surely no one can expect anything coherent from me, from the right lane of an interstate somewhere south of Fayetteville, NC. Instead, I present some eclipse impressions.

1. Traffic. The drawing that starts this post is from the worst traffic we hit on Saturday, on I-95 between Washington, D.C., and Fredericksburg. Here’s the thing, though – I think that may have been normal August weekend traffic. Apparently taking 2.5 hours to go 30 miles is not that unusual. (It was many hours after that traffic jam that my phone gave up its fight. Fortunately, I also brought a laptop.)

 

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | August 18, 2018

August 13 – 17, 2018

Except for Cameron, beginning and ending the week with sweet cheer, LWON seems to be having trouble getting through it all ok.

Cameron grows zucchini and like anyone else who does, knows she need friends.  And friends aren’t necessarily those guys on social media, they’re the guys who take zucchini.

Christie was sad about Aretha’s illness even before her death.  Sisters doing it for themselves — shouldn’t that have happened already?  Christie is sad about that too.

Erik just moved back to the U.S. after years in Mexico.  He hasn’t a clue what we’ve done to the country in the meantime and he’s right, God, it’s awful.

Cassie looks around her, adds it all up, and thinks, “Fuck humans. The planet would be better off without us.”  Now, what to do about her little kid?

Street names are called odonyms — who knew?  They give us a sense of identity, of way of belonging.  Cameron would prefer they loosen up a little.