Guest Post: When Everything Good Is Also Beautiful

By: | May 23, 2016

sea pic 8 gradoFor the better part of 30 years, my head was firmly stuck in English. But when I moved to Italy three years ago, I also started my first genuine effort at picking up a second language.

My barely remembered high school Spanish prepared me for some things about Italian, like the gendered nouns and overwhelming conjugations. But the most difficult lesson was a basic one: Definitions of words just don’t line up into easy translations across languages.

Meanings can shift into false-friend territory. For example, if I want to tell someone not to worry, sometimes I dig up the word “fret” from the English in my head and I tell them not to have “fretta”. Only later do I remember that “fretta” in Italian actually means hurry.

Words also don’t always exist in the same form, such as “need.” There is no common verb for “need” in Italian. It’s just the noun: bisogno. So I have to think “I have need of” in English and then say “Ho bisogno di” in Italian. And then, only if I want to be kind of rude.

But most maddeningly, definitions can expand and contract in ways that don’t seem natural to an English-stuck brain. Of those, there was one word I struggled with in particular: Bello.

Bello and variations like “bella” and “bel” mean beautiful. Learning the word was simple. The problem was how it rolled off Italian tongues with an ease that startled me. Bello is the Italian go-to word for everything from beautiful, to pretty, to handsome, to pleasant, to wonderful, to cool, to nice, to neat.

So it sounded to me like Italians thought everything good was also beautiful. The sunset is bello. This car is bella. That dog is bello. Your jacket is bella. Someone might call you bello or bella, and depending on the context that could mean they’re either happy to see you or hitting on you.

I just couldn’t handle it. I needed an English word that was somewhere between beautiful and cool that I could transfigure into bello in my head before letting it out my mouth. I wound up settling on “lovely” as something with similar flexibility. Emotional yet gentle, it’s a word I’ve since come to appreciate, and it has crept into my casual English. We could all stand to be a little more lovely.

But over time I started to think that the Italian use of bello was more than just a linguistic quirk. What if it’s a fixation on beauty itself? Just maybe, to Italians, everything good is also beautiful. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | May 21, 2016

WIlder Square

May 16-20, 2016

In the hierarchy of correspondence forms, nothing beats a physical letter, writes Christie, particularly for their superior ability to be stumbled upon.

Cassie threw up her hands in despair about climate change – and her intractable fatalism about it – and LWON’s trusty commenters took the ball and ran with it.

Wherever rivers get sucked underground, the sinkholes act as a kind of time capsule, capturing things like mastodon tusks and harpoons, then preserving them.

Guest Ivan Amato is a like birder, but his prize sighting is the moire effect – the phenomenon that emerges from overlaying two patterns and moving your point of view.

And finally, the diary of a bird poop magnet, by Helen Fields.

Photo courtesy of Joanne Mattera Art Blog

Update: On Getting Pooped On By Birds

By: | May 20, 2016

I originally wrote about getting pooped on by birds on October 23, 2014.

Recent events call for an update.

I know you're planning something, bird

1. Washington, D.C., 2004 or so

A bench around a circular planter, with a tree in it. I was eating my lunch. I felt something on my arm.

We call it poop, but the stuff that comes out of birds’ behinds is more complicated than that. Birds, like most vertebrates that aren’t mammals, have a single all-purpose exit called a cloaca. From that hole they expel eggs, the leftovers of their meals, and the products of their kidneys.

I assume that’s why the waste is two-toned.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Moire in the Wild

By: | May 19, 2016

Wilder Disc

My first sighting of one of life’s everyday astonishments was as a little fellow in the 1960s, sitting unbuckled in the back seat of my family’s ’57 Chevy. Whenever we hit the highway on our way to the Jersey shore or the Lower East Side of Manhattan where my grandparents lived, we would approach and then zoom under overpasses, some of them flanked with metal fencing like two sides of a cage. Yep, I am talking about gritty transportation infrastructure here. But I coveted these drive-by encounters with highway overpasses, because I knew all I needed for a wide-eyed moment of wonder was to pay attention from the comfort of my 60-mph, backseat sofa.

It would begin when we were a few hundreds yards from the overpass. Even from there, the two-tiered fencing above the overpass would take on a roiling character, as though the heavy-gauge, chain-link mesh might be more like churning water than the stand-still metal I knew it was. In the next few seconds, as the angle between the paired fences and my ever-shortening line of sight subtly changed, a vignette of visual verve would silence my breath. In a way that surely must have seemed hallucinogenic to my kindergartner self (because it seems so to me now with a half-century under my belt), a morphing and increasingly tight diamond metapattern of black lines would overlay and slide across the fence faces like a liquid-geometric ghost. This would last a few seconds until we had passed the Goldilocks window in which the dynamic of fence-fence-eyes-visual cortex had been just right to elicit this optical effect. If I was quick enough to look out of the back window of the Chevy, I could sneak in a second morsel of eye candy as we raced away from the overpass.

I later learned these emergent visual surprises are known as moire patterns. The word moire likely derives from Arabic and then French words for mohair, which suggests a biological anchor for what now is an entire category of moire effect fabrics. Continue reading →

Going Paleo in Florida

By: | May 18, 2016

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The Florida panhandle got some big press this week, yet another early human find confirmed in North America, people entrenched along the Aucilla River south of Tallahassee 14,550 years ago. This came from an underwater excavation where archaeologists have been plumbing a sinkhole through which the river flows. Artifacts and megafauna remains have gathered in the hole. A mastodon tusk shows clear butchering marks while it was fresh, and stone tools were collected in the vicinity.

When you hear news of these finds, what picture comes to mind? What kind of landscape are we in? It’s an important question to me. Archaeological finds are not what is seen in collection drawers and display cases, not photos in textbooks. They lose their color and context when they leave a place. They lose the sounds of the night, the burble of water. These objects are more than themselves. They tell a story of the earth around them, which in turn tells the story of the artifacts.

I visited the Aucilla River a few years ago in the lowland pine and palm forests of Florida’s Big Bend country. The river disappears holes; I’d never seen anything like it. It would come up again in a quarter mile, where it traveled a short distance through crowded palmettos and ferns, and went under again. Like stitching through fabric, the Aucilla flows in and out of a chain of sinkholes and skylights in dark and karstic earth. This is what preserves the archaeological and paleontological remains. The sinkholes act as time capsules. Archaeologists go down with SCUBA gear and spotlights, swimming into the underworld to find the past. Continue reading →

Environmentalism Lost

By: | May 17, 2016

Somewhere there is an old recording of me. I can’t find the tape, but I’ll tell you what I remember.8692671353_af139441fe_z (1) I’m young — maybe sixth grade — and inexplicably wearing a burgundy blazer. My school is holding some sort of an event for Earth Day. The local TV reporter asks me why I’m participating. “I think it’s important to save the Earth for my children and my children’s children,” I say, my voice shrill and shaking.

Ok, I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I remember the feeling. I was full of righteous indignation. Grownups seemed intent on fucking up the planet, the planet I was destined to inherit. And I was pissed. “Screw the humans,” I remember thinking. “We have to save the dolphins.”

Back then, environmental issues seemed solvable. Stop throwing trash on the ground. Stop using hairspray in aerosol cans. Stop cutting down the rainforest.

But now I’m the grownup who is fucking up the planet. And the concrete, tractable problems that I remember from my youth have been overshadowed by the mother of all environmental catastrophes — climate change. Who has time to worry about gum wrappers or dolphin-safe tuna when we’ve pumped enough greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere to alter the fate of every being on the planet? Continue reading →

Redux: Lost in the Cloud

By: | May 16, 2016

This post first ran on September 26, 2012.My mother sent me an old letter recently. It was a handwritten note scrawled across two pages that she’d written to her sister more than 30 years ago. My family had just moved to West Germany, where my dad was stationed in the Air Force, and in the letter Mom describes for her sister the tiny Eiffel village where we’d taken up residence. The letter’s contents are interesting in their own right, but its three-dimensional nature is what struck me first.

The letter was a physical object — a piece of paper that she’d scribbled upon and then neatly folded into an envelope and sent across the ocean to her sister in Kansas. It was a relic from a bygone age. In the age of email and text messaging, most correspondence no longer lives on scraps of linen that you can feel in your hands, but in the “cloud,” that nebulous modern ether. In fact, the letter Mom sent me was not the object itself, but a scan of it. I read it first on my phone, though I felt compelled to print it on paper for the second reading. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | May 14, 2016

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May 9-13

This week, Richard set out to prove, unscientifically, that slow readers are slow language learners. When he failed, he realized his method was scientific after all — just not in the way he expected.

Jennifer discovered she was just fine with being woken up in the wee hours by hysterical laughter, so long as it was coming out of a particularly charming Australian bird.

Science fiction writer H.G. Wells was a bit less charming, Michelle writes, when working with “Darwin’s Bulldog.” But at least his writing critiques came in the form of a poem.

Meanwhile, drinking water treatment is essential when people pack tightly together, even in the remote Peruvian jungle. But the fix that saves kids’ lives doesn’t have to be techy and expensive, reassuring news for mom and regular guest poster Emma Marris.

The secret to the happiness of a one-eyed amphibian in a mayonnaise jar? Maximize her frog existence — by finding her some, er … friends, says guest poster Chris Arnade.

Kookaburra image from Shutterstock.