quietly she waits, keeping the eggs warm
The hummingbird sits patiently still. No babies yet to be seen. Nearby we see some other birds, no doubt thinking about nesting, or are they?
flicker chipping holes
spotted towhee, and a golden crowned sparrow
I visited 2 days ago, and it was raining.
I thought the nest was empty:
not quite empty
On closer inspection I saw that the mother was there, when she decided to shift position.
Filed under Birds, Poetry, Uncategorized, Wildlife
The new bridge is finally open. It cost over $100,000,000 for a bridge over a narrow channel. Fixing the old bridge would have cost one quarter of the price. But heck, now we can sell a pile of scrap steel to China!
Never mind – it’s National Poetry Month, so here is a poem.
Spring and plants awake again
Pollen in the air brings pain
Coughing sneezing, choking, wheezing
Eyeballs itching, drips displeasing
Nature fights against oblivion
While men destroy her
With hearts harder than obsidian
In the bough tiny birds nest
Because survival allows no rest
Mother Anna incubates a pair
Underneath the Red Hawk’s glare
On the street motorbikes race
Courting death they speed apace
Spewing toxic fumes and dust
Eventually they all will rust
Nearby on the hill appears
A looming condo confirming fears
All bow and praise the economy
Forget about your lost autonomy
Forget about the forest lost
We must have progress
Damn the cost!
Filed under Poetry, Uncategorized
Back to the nest this afternoon, and the momma was sitting there when we arrived. No babies yet. Once again it was sunny and windy. I sat on the opposite side of the sun and tried to get some shots but the light was bad. Just then I looked up and there right above the nest, perhaps within 20 feet, sat a very windblown red tailed hawk. It too had the sun at its back so I had to move about to try and get a shot from a better angle. I was going from hawk to hummingbird, adjusting my camera and trying for a good shot all the while the wind was blowing the hawk’s feathers and the hummingbird nest all over the place.
female Anna’s Hummingbird
I bet the hummingbird knew the hawk was there – she hardly moved while we observed her, the hawk right above her nest.
Red Tailed Hawk
A few people passed by and didn’t notice anything, so we didn’t bother to tell them what we were looking at either. Further on we saw numerous birds and one oddity – a Rufous, or Eastern Towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus), an uncommon bird hereabouts.
Rufous or Eastern Towhee
The regular crowd was out too; one Great Blue Heron, Mallards, Song Sparrows, Coots and Stellar’s Jays
Filed under Birds, Uncategorized, Wildlife
very expensive Royal 10
the frontispiece de resistance
p.s. although I got some printed I haven’t yet published the book. I sent it to several agents who were too busy to even reject it! Woe to them when it sells a million copies!
Filed under Books, Typewriters, Uncategorized, writing
baby hummingbirds
I received a reminder today of what photos I had taken exactly one year ago. Google does this, for reasons that escape me. All I wanted was a place to backup my picture files, but this is what you get when you join the big machine. However, it was synchronous with a thought I’ve had mulling in my head for some time, which is the phenomenon of pairs – the duality of things. When you get right down to it, everything started with a singularity, which was simply everything in the universe compressed into a point with no dimension. It had no dimension because there was nothing to measure with. Try to imagine the concept – it floors me, so I avoid thinking about it. Maybe Steven Hawking could have explained it to me, alas, but we shall never meet.
So what happened? It expanded, fast. But, mathematically it had to go from being one thing to two, didn’t it? I mean if mathematics holds true in all universes, then the whole number that follows one is two. So I say that two is thus extremely important. With one, there was nothing, but with two there was instantly something, because the 2nd thing made the first thing a point of reference, before which there was none.
Before this gets too confusing I just want to share some pairs of things that I have recently encountered, just because they were a pair. Some were alive, others man made.
Here we have a pair of Smith Corona Sterling’s; a 1951 and a 1956 – one pica, one elite = a perfect set. Since I had collected a few of these, as wonderful as they are, I decided to sell them both. One sold in 2 days. The other just went on the market. What’s the point of having only one of them? So I have to sell the pair. I’m hanging on to my pair of Silent Supers however.
A pair of Olympia SG1’s, both 1963. Both had the same problems – including a disintegrated right margin stop. How odd – clearly a design defect. One elite, one pica – is this a pattern? One sold, the other still for sale. The advantage of this pair coming along in short order is that I have had a chance to examine the engineering closely, since they both required a fair bit of tweaking.
Buying and fixing these is not only fun, but also is a small contribution to keeping these great old machines from the dump. There are no repair shops left in this town, so when I get a typewriter back on the road I feel like I’m contributing something, and the money I make helps me buy and fix more machines, so I’m not out of pocket. Still, they are cheap when you think about what they are worth and what it would cost to buy one in today’s money.
Smith on the left, Corona on the right
Now we move on to wildlife. I always thrill to a pair of bald eagles. This pair was first encountered in one tree, then they flew away. Later on my rambles I saw them again in another tree. To see a pair of them take flight up close is a wonder to behold.
I saw a pair of ducks we could eat!
Moving on we find some ducks. They tend to hang out in pairs, male and female, but I wonder if they form couples? I think not, but they say geese do.
Filed under Birds, Philosophy, Photography, Typewriters, Uncategorized, Wildlife
Early Royal Caravan
Royalty don’t travel in caravans, unless fleeing the country. However, that never stopped the use of the word Royal from being applied to caravans, or any other thing. Here’s yet another example:
Royal Caravan: the typewriter
I picked this up last week. It’s a variant of a fairly common typewriter known as the Adler or Triumph, Tippa or Contessa, and of course Royal Caravan. It types well and is full featured with basket shift and tabs. Royal typewriter had a previous version that was not portable, although they always call these things portables:
Royal Caravan as used by Bob Dylan in the 60’s
The term “Royal Caravan” does not return the typewriter very high on the search results unless you specify the word “typewriter” however. The most interesting Royal Caravans in my mind seem to be travel trailers – here’s the most well known example:
Buckingham Palace Collection
This one was presented to Prince Charles and Princess Ann in 1955 when they were short enough to get through the door. It’s a miniature version.
no peeking at the royal children please!
There are other Royal Caravans, too:
hotel in Indonesia
Here’s a famous user of the latest clone, presuming from the source that it is Kubrick typing on one of the yellow iterations of the Adler/Triumph/Royal/Tippa/Contessa/Caravan.
Kubrick I presume?
You will see many of these on Etsy for way too much, but it seems that yellow and orange are now popular retro-nostalgia colours!
Filed under Thrift shop finds, Typewriters, Uncategorized
