September 26, 2007
September 23, 2007
Sunfish at Monterey Bay Aquarium
The Wikipedia entry on ocean sunfish says baldly, "The ocean sunfish resembles a fish head without a tail." I hope this unobjectionable observation stirs no controversy over in the wiki's disussion page, being about as nuetral a way of describing the beast's form as might commonly occur to the most excruciatingly disinterested observer.
Viewed from the side the ocean sunfish does look like a fish head without a tail, the creature terminating in an odd florescence of rows of bulbous growths instead of the culminating tail of the fish as commonly concieved. I would only add that the ocean sunfish is a very large and widespread and relatively recent addition to the world's oceans that resembles a fish head without a tail. Its kind arose in the late Eocene, about 50 million years ago. Ocean sunfish now occupy tropical and temperate waters in every ocean. Ocean sunfish grow to enormous size. Two of them are on view at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
From the front of the creature to its matched dorsal and anal fins, the sunfish follows the general plan of body parts of a fish. The head of the sunfish does look like a head in profile, and it has all the forward parts of the head, the mouth and nose and eyes and gills, right up front where they're expected of a fish.
My wife immediately recognized J. Edgar Hoover's profile here:
The eyes of the ocean sunfish are perched in little pods of flesh outside the beast's skull, which give them uparalleled range of motion at the risk of being snipped right off by some passing other creature, of which the seas are known to abound.
The whole eye-on-a-stalk design in general would seem to suffer from this everpresent probability of passing blindness as a tradeoff for the best possible view of its surrounds, which is presumably why the eye design that hugs closer to the skull, willingly trading the valued acuity of eye-on-a-stalk for the more highly valued persistence of vision afforded its recessed postion is the fashion even among the common run of fish. Continuity of sight slightly trumps acuity of sight here in the race to put the eye somewhere or other on the fish. But, still, there it is the eye of the ocean sunfish, out there in its little cup of flesh, the cup capable of waggling the eye around to get the full view if needs be.
Just past the jutting fins atop and below the creature, just behind what up until then follows in the main the sequence of segments given for a fish's shape, with the head accounted for and then the midpart coming along just there behind it with its fins and all being well disposed of, and, but then …, some profoundly different segment pops up to terminate the thing: the unique truncated remainder of the ocean sunfish instead of the valued tail as given almost everywhere else for the regular ending of a fish.
Viewed from the side the ocean sunfish does look like a fish head without a tail, the creature terminating in an odd florescence of rows of bulbous growths instead of the culminating tail of the fish as commonly concieved. I would only add that the ocean sunfish is a very large and widespread and relatively recent addition to the world's oceans that resembles a fish head without a tail. Its kind arose in the late Eocene, about 50 million years ago. Ocean sunfish now occupy tropical and temperate waters in every ocean. Ocean sunfish grow to enormous size. Two of them are on view at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
 |
| Ocean Sunfish at Monterey Bay Aquarium |
From the front of the creature to its matched dorsal and anal fins, the sunfish follows the general plan of body parts of a fish. The head of the sunfish does look like a head in profile, and it has all the forward parts of the head, the mouth and nose and eyes and gills, right up front where they're expected of a fish.
My wife immediately recognized J. Edgar Hoover's profile here:
 |
| J. Edgar Fish |
The eyes of the ocean sunfish are perched in little pods of flesh outside the beast's skull, which give them uparalleled range of motion at the risk of being snipped right off by some passing other creature, of which the seas are known to abound.
The whole eye-on-a-stalk design in general would seem to suffer from this everpresent probability of passing blindness as a tradeoff for the best possible view of its surrounds, which is presumably why the eye design that hugs closer to the skull, willingly trading the valued acuity of eye-on-a-stalk for the more highly valued persistence of vision afforded its recessed postion is the fashion even among the common run of fish. Continuity of sight slightly trumps acuity of sight here in the race to put the eye somewhere or other on the fish. But, still, there it is the eye of the ocean sunfish, out there in its little cup of flesh, the cup capable of waggling the eye around to get the full view if needs be.
 |
| The whole of the fish |
Just past the jutting fins atop and below the creature, just behind what up until then follows in the main the sequence of segments given for a fish's shape, with the head accounted for and then the midpart coming along just there behind it with its fins and all being well disposed of, and, but then …, some profoundly different segment pops up to terminate the thing: the unique truncated remainder of the ocean sunfish instead of the valued tail as given almost everywhere else for the regular ending of a fish.
September 22, 2007
Down in Monterey
Had Monterey been founded by the Greeks, back in the day when they were colonizing the wide Pontus or populating Sicily with their kind and looking for a likely spot to settle, they would have predicated its continued success on its attachment to a wide regional network of boat traffic already transporting back and forth every sort and manner of human material between neighboring outposts of urban doings elsewhere in the Pontus and now to and from this newly established "Monterey" of theirs, from the freshest of produce possible to the most forceful of portable politics such boatmen might regularly choose to carry along with them.
What the internet now carries was transportable by ship or not transportable at all in those times. Most of what the internet now carries couldn't be and wasn't carried by the crude tools available for passing information along in those days, but such boats as there were, rude vessels they might seem to us, were apt enough vehicles not only for the crass cargo of physical objects ping ponging around the Pontus, but also the limited yet ever significant cargo of humans themselves bearing all their entailed mischief of accompanying written messages and pronounced speech, each boat in effect equal to a discreet packet of information readied to be spilled out on that shore, whatever other goods it might bear, the information of whatever value it might prove voyaging along to its alloted port in the reports and retorts of arriving humans and there stitched together as neatly as needs be to the continuously arriving other packets of information from other boats berthing there to form some provisionally useful semblance of the world on which the new place of Monterey must depend.
Monterey, as it turns out, was not founded on the bounded Pontus by colonizing Greeks. It was made by wide-wandering Spaniards on the far distant coastal shore of California, wide-wandering Spaniards who made Ulysses' travels look like a suburban commute. There was nothing regional for Monterey to connect with, no net of near relations in the Spanish world to fully engage. Such California settlements as San Diego had their small traffic with Monterey, but the closest meaningful Spanish port was distant Acapulco. San Diego, almost 400 miles away by open ocean, was not so much a trading partner of Monterey as a rival jostling with Monterey for a fair share of Acapulco's commercial and social attention. Acapulco was and of course remains thousands of miles from Monterey, maybe as removed as Cadiz is from Athens or Antioch or Alexandria or some other standard of enormous distance by Old World measure.
Any ship arriving from Acapulco, irrespective of the material cargo it transported to Monterey, dragged with it some discrete quantity of information, information bounded by the ship's admittedly rude tools consisting as they did in those times almost exclusively of the stuff a scribe might write or the chat coded into the inevitably disparate pronouncements of the sum total of passengers and crew on all the arguable points of that information, borne along to the dock in Monterey in that chat it was, variously advanced, denounced, declaimed, deplored, defended or, summarily, disregarded, by the humans, agents of that information's passage on that ship.
Sometimes the information carried by the given passenger arriving by boat from Acapulco might consist primarily of the announced, "I'm here!" with all the engaging mischief that brief and simple message must entail.
Shipbuilding and seamanship had advanced so profoundly since the time of the Greeks that the idea of regular communication between places as distant as Monterey and Acapulco was no longer inconcievable, but merely another long doable stretch in the global network of Spanish shipping that reached all the way from Manila and the East to the ports of the Spanish homeland by way of Central America.
Monterey was an adequate and sufficient harbor for the odd long distance boat that might reach port there, with an absurdly fertile hinterland nearby, and seas brimming with fish. The Spanish knew of the great protected bay just to the north; they settled it, but that place was never more than an outlier of Monterey, for all intents the capital city of the relatively attentuated Spanish presence in that part of California. Across its own bay, Monterey faced the small mission town of Santa Cruz.
People whose forebears had lived in those parts for six thousand years and in that time crafted for themselves what, given the millenia involved, represented an enduring relationship to that land, died in droves on the approach of the Spaniards, and it was all the Spaniards fault. The Spaniards brought disease and cruel uses, and the local people were laid low.
Just south of Monterey the Esalens ceased. The language they mouthed as they navigated those six thousand years along the central coast of what became California is unknown. Eventually, by enclosure and by infection, all the local people were eradicated.
Monterey lost its preeminent position in California to San Francisco following the Gold Rush, but continued to prosper.
What the internet now carries was transportable by ship or not transportable at all in those times. Most of what the internet now carries couldn't be and wasn't carried by the crude tools available for passing information along in those days, but such boats as there were, rude vessels they might seem to us, were apt enough vehicles not only for the crass cargo of physical objects ping ponging around the Pontus, but also the limited yet ever significant cargo of humans themselves bearing all their entailed mischief of accompanying written messages and pronounced speech, each boat in effect equal to a discreet packet of information readied to be spilled out on that shore, whatever other goods it might bear, the information of whatever value it might prove voyaging along to its alloted port in the reports and retorts of arriving humans and there stitched together as neatly as needs be to the continuously arriving other packets of information from other boats berthing there to form some provisionally useful semblance of the world on which the new place of Monterey must depend.
Monterey, as it turns out, was not founded on the bounded Pontus by colonizing Greeks. It was made by wide-wandering Spaniards on the far distant coastal shore of California, wide-wandering Spaniards who made Ulysses' travels look like a suburban commute. There was nothing regional for Monterey to connect with, no net of near relations in the Spanish world to fully engage. Such California settlements as San Diego had their small traffic with Monterey, but the closest meaningful Spanish port was distant Acapulco. San Diego, almost 400 miles away by open ocean, was not so much a trading partner of Monterey as a rival jostling with Monterey for a fair share of Acapulco's commercial and social attention. Acapulco was and of course remains thousands of miles from Monterey, maybe as removed as Cadiz is from Athens or Antioch or Alexandria or some other standard of enormous distance by Old World measure.
Any ship arriving from Acapulco, irrespective of the material cargo it transported to Monterey, dragged with it some discrete quantity of information, information bounded by the ship's admittedly rude tools consisting as they did in those times almost exclusively of the stuff a scribe might write or the chat coded into the inevitably disparate pronouncements of the sum total of passengers and crew on all the arguable points of that information, borne along to the dock in Monterey in that chat it was, variously advanced, denounced, declaimed, deplored, defended or, summarily, disregarded, by the humans, agents of that information's passage on that ship.
Sometimes the information carried by the given passenger arriving by boat from Acapulco might consist primarily of the announced, "I'm here!" with all the engaging mischief that brief and simple message must entail.
Shipbuilding and seamanship had advanced so profoundly since the time of the Greeks that the idea of regular communication between places as distant as Monterey and Acapulco was no longer inconcievable, but merely another long doable stretch in the global network of Spanish shipping that reached all the way from Manila and the East to the ports of the Spanish homeland by way of Central America.
Monterey was an adequate and sufficient harbor for the odd long distance boat that might reach port there, with an absurdly fertile hinterland nearby, and seas brimming with fish. The Spanish knew of the great protected bay just to the north; they settled it, but that place was never more than an outlier of Monterey, for all intents the capital city of the relatively attentuated Spanish presence in that part of California. Across its own bay, Monterey faced the small mission town of Santa Cruz.
People whose forebears had lived in those parts for six thousand years and in that time crafted for themselves what, given the millenia involved, represented an enduring relationship to that land, died in droves on the approach of the Spaniards, and it was all the Spaniards fault. The Spaniards brought disease and cruel uses, and the local people were laid low.
Just south of Monterey the Esalens ceased. The language they mouthed as they navigated those six thousand years along the central coast of what became California is unknown. Eventually, by enclosure and by infection, all the local people were eradicated.
Monterey lost its preeminent position in California to San Francisco following the Gold Rush, but continued to prosper.
September 21, 2007
The Successful Canning of the Invincible City
John Steinbeck is the reason most people have heard of Cannery Row, and Doc Rickett's ramshackle marine biology lab still stands there.
Some years ago the focus of the neighborhood was on fish restaurants and curio shops and dives left over from a previous generation's use of the space as the center of a thriving industrial fishing operation, centered on large structures extending out on wharves over the placid tidal waters of the bay on the north side of Cannery Row.
Over time Cannery Row had industriously used up all the nearby marine fishery, and eventually the previous purposes of the buildings there were abandoned to the next generation's uses.
The newer generation put up some newer buildings, but often enough just moved into something that was already standing there and made it over for its own reason. Before, the building might have been knee-deep in fish guts, and later the repository of insistent t-shirts and coffee mugs, but it wasn't replaced, just repurposed. The new uses for the place moved in to the neighborhood and took over what was there for the most part.
Now, though, with the coming of unending oodles of money poured into the Monterey Bay Aquarium by the generous whim of the Packard Family, the previous buildings themselves are being replaced to serve a newly conceived use for Cannery Row.
This is a sizable new mixed-use project literally spanning Cannery Row. It will house hundreds and hundreds of people when it's done, if the housing market doesn't totally implode in the meantime and drag its construction to a halt.
In recent years there's been so much money in home construction that the impulse to replace abandoned commercial buildings downtown with newly constructed blocks of mixed-use buildings has affected medium-sized cities all over the country. Downtown Tacoma has its own sizable inbuilding project in about the same stage of completion as this Cannery Row project.
When they grow up, people like living in humane urban environments, right there next to where all the real money is with all the civic conveniences right at hand. Often enough they're crowded out by all the other money-making uses an urban neighborhood can be put to, but still, people do like to live in the middle of a nice city, something that was never really arguable, but remained ignored for half a century all over America for the much better money to be had in building suburbs.
The life of a city is subject to its own tides, as examined by Carmilo Vergara at the Invincible Cities website, using photographs chronicling the fortunes of various building sites in Richmond, California, Camden, New Jersey, and New York (specifically Harlem), New York.
Cannery Row didn't languish derelict for a generation as some sites recorded in Invincible Cities have done, urban sites where human intervention seems for now to have exhausted itself among the abandoned detritus of previous use.
Instead, in time Cannery Row hit the jackpot when chosen as the site where the particulars of the shockingly generous bequest of the Packards were to be realized: the construction and maintenance of a magnificent sprawling aquarium dedicated to the deep, set at the end of Cannery Row over the waters of Monterey Bay.
Ed Ricketts was the acknowledged model for Doc in Steinbeck's famous novel. He operated Pacific Biological Laboratories at 800 Cannery Row from 1928 to 1948.
By sufferance of the enormous project next door the building at 800 Cannery Row where Ricketts did his marine biology still exists. Ricketts was a fellow using the rude tools available to marine biology in his time, with the same sort of affable impulses toward the sea as pronounced in its currently corporatized expression down at the end of the street in the enormous Monterey Bay Aquarium, where biological specimens of the deep are no longer simply held in jars or pails or cages or rows of tanks as in Rickett's time, but are now at the Aquarium made viewable to the public alive in spectacularly large tubs of replicated ocean placed all over the extensive wings of the place.
Some years ago the focus of the neighborhood was on fish restaurants and curio shops and dives left over from a previous generation's use of the space as the center of a thriving industrial fishing operation, centered on large structures extending out on wharves over the placid tidal waters of the bay on the north side of Cannery Row.
Over time Cannery Row had industriously used up all the nearby marine fishery, and eventually the previous purposes of the buildings there were abandoned to the next generation's uses.
The newer generation put up some newer buildings, but often enough just moved into something that was already standing there and made it over for its own reason. Before, the building might have been knee-deep in fish guts, and later the repository of insistent t-shirts and coffee mugs, but it wasn't replaced, just repurposed. The new uses for the place moved in to the neighborhood and took over what was there for the most part.
Now, though, with the coming of unending oodles of money poured into the Monterey Bay Aquarium by the generous whim of the Packard Family, the previous buildings themselves are being replaced to serve a newly conceived use for Cannery Row.
This is a sizable new mixed-use project literally spanning Cannery Row. It will house hundreds and hundreds of people when it's done, if the housing market doesn't totally implode in the meantime and drag its construction to a halt.
In recent years there's been so much money in home construction that the impulse to replace abandoned commercial buildings downtown with newly constructed blocks of mixed-use buildings has affected medium-sized cities all over the country. Downtown Tacoma has its own sizable inbuilding project in about the same stage of completion as this Cannery Row project.
When they grow up, people like living in humane urban environments, right there next to where all the real money is with all the civic conveniences right at hand. Often enough they're crowded out by all the other money-making uses an urban neighborhood can be put to, but still, people do like to live in the middle of a nice city, something that was never really arguable, but remained ignored for half a century all over America for the much better money to be had in building suburbs.
The life of a city is subject to its own tides, as examined by Carmilo Vergara at the Invincible Cities website, using photographs chronicling the fortunes of various building sites in Richmond, California, Camden, New Jersey, and New York (specifically Harlem), New York.
Cannery Row didn't languish derelict for a generation as some sites recorded in Invincible Cities have done, urban sites where human intervention seems for now to have exhausted itself among the abandoned detritus of previous use.
Instead, in time Cannery Row hit the jackpot when chosen as the site where the particulars of the shockingly generous bequest of the Packards were to be realized: the construction and maintenance of a magnificent sprawling aquarium dedicated to the deep, set at the end of Cannery Row over the waters of Monterey Bay.
Ed Ricketts was the acknowledged model for Doc in Steinbeck's famous novel. He operated Pacific Biological Laboratories at 800 Cannery Row from 1928 to 1948.
By sufferance of the enormous project next door the building at 800 Cannery Row where Ricketts did his marine biology still exists. Ricketts was a fellow using the rude tools available to marine biology in his time, with the same sort of affable impulses toward the sea as pronounced in its currently corporatized expression down at the end of the street in the enormous Monterey Bay Aquarium, where biological specimens of the deep are no longer simply held in jars or pails or cages or rows of tanks as in Rickett's time, but are now at the Aquarium made viewable to the public alive in spectacularly large tubs of replicated ocean placed all over the extensive wings of the place.
September 20, 2007
An Anniversary Present
The whole plan was to go see the otters at Monterey Bay Aquarium, a truly imposing structure on the Cannery Row waterfront. We turned off Highway 1 at Moss Landing, and just as we passed by the back of the harbor, Sharon said, "Hey! Otter!"
I pulled over. Sure enough, a sea otter lazing in the backwater of the harbor, sixty feet from the road.
Pretty soon another sea otter showed up and began sporting around with the first one.
Later, at the Aquarium, from the description Sharon gave of what we'd seen, a guide at the sea otter tank explained that the smaller sea otter was probably a juvenile who still wanted to frisk around with mom.
"Hey, ma, c'mon! Gimme a ride!"
Perfect. We were only halfway to Monterey Bay Aquarium, and we'd already reached our goal.
I pulled over. Sure enough, a sea otter lazing in the backwater of the harbor, sixty feet from the road.
Pretty soon another sea otter showed up and began sporting around with the first one.
Later, at the Aquarium, from the description Sharon gave of what we'd seen, a guide at the sea otter tank explained that the smaller sea otter was probably a juvenile who still wanted to frisk around with mom.
"Hey, ma, c'mon! Gimme a ride!"
Perfect. We were only halfway to Monterey Bay Aquarium, and we'd already reached our goal.
September 19, 2007
It Be Talk like a Pirate Day, Boy-o
From Language Log (and what more appropriate place to host a longterm discussion of talking like a pirate, for that matter), incited by today's annual occurrence of Talk Like a Pirate Day, this nice image, created by someone who left it out in the open on the internet anonymously some years ago:
On this day twenty-six years ago, with a full-throated "Arrrrrrrrrrrr!" I swung down on a rope from the highest yardarm in the British Navy, grabbed up the prized damsel in my free arm, and pirated her away with me. That would be the pirate way of putting it, I suppose, endorsed by the thinking like a pirate that all this talking like a pirate on this day encourages. For certain values of Arrrr, is what I'm saying, it was just like that, matey.
I got married on this day twenty-six years ago, though I can't square the pirate way of putting it with the wedding day itself, which in honest haze of memory I recall engaging with in a hyperreal daze, stunned by the magnitude of all the great yet still tentative possibilities opened up by taking my part in the act on that day.
Right there in the open field of Aptos Village Park, in front of all the people who cared to see it done, I acted the approved part of the dazed groom. There was little of the swagger, let alone the swinging down on a rope, required of buccaneers from me on that day, as I recall.
Today, twenty-six years on, we're heading over to Monterey to see our special friends the otters at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Happy Anniversay, dear.
On this day twenty-six years ago, with a full-throated "Arrrrrrrrrrrr!" I swung down on a rope from the highest yardarm in the British Navy, grabbed up the prized damsel in my free arm, and pirated her away with me. That would be the pirate way of putting it, I suppose, endorsed by the thinking like a pirate that all this talking like a pirate on this day encourages. For certain values of Arrrr, is what I'm saying, it was just like that, matey.
I got married on this day twenty-six years ago, though I can't square the pirate way of putting it with the wedding day itself, which in honest haze of memory I recall engaging with in a hyperreal daze, stunned by the magnitude of all the great yet still tentative possibilities opened up by taking my part in the act on that day.
Right there in the open field of Aptos Village Park, in front of all the people who cared to see it done, I acted the approved part of the dazed groom. There was little of the swagger, let alone the swinging down on a rope, required of buccaneers from me on that day, as I recall.
Today, twenty-six years on, we're heading over to Monterey to see our special friends the otters at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Happy Anniversay, dear.
September 18, 2007
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