Excitement! Thrills! Daring rescues!

Well, of a kind, anyway. We were scheduled to go whale watching, but the channel was too rough so we rescheduled for tomorrow and decided to drive up to Seaside instead. (We're staying in Lincoln City.) On the way up we decided to take the Three Capes scenic loop off 101. All was well and beautiful until just past Cape Lookout, where we hit the Coast's largest pothole. And I mean hit it.

A few miles down the road and it was obvious the tire was going flat. Fortunately, it had stopped raining, and we were in a little town called Oceanside, so we pulled into the parking lot of Brewin' in the Wind and called AAA. While we waited we had a spectacular view and coffee, so not much to complain about there. The AAA guy showed up pretty fast and told us where the Les Schwab in Tillamook was. (Jill the GPS thought the nearest Les Schwab was in Lincoln City...). We drove the seven miles to Tillamook and the nice man at Les Schwab took a hammer to the rim and straightened it out, tested the tire in the tank, and put it back on for us. For nothing. Les Schwab, my Washingtonian friend says, rocks.

Just thought I'd put that out on the Intertubes... For a flat tire, it worked out great.

Happy Birthday, Nikolai

Today (March 19, OldStyle) in 1809, in Sorochintsy, a town near Poltava, Ukraine, in what was then the Russian Empire Николай Васильевич Гоголь, Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol, or Микола Васильович Гоголь, Mykola Vasylyovich Hohol as he is in Ukrainian, was born. His deft touch with characters, linguistic playfulness, and keen sense of what a professor of mine insisted on calling "the Russian absurd, not the English one!" make him one of the most distinctive voices in all Russian literature.

Or, to put it another way, he's funny. Oh, my word, he's funny.


A number of his works are available on line, such as The Inspector General, The Overcoat, Dead Souls, and a collection featuring The Diary of a Madman, The Nose, and Taras Bulba among others.

Works in Russian are here.

Happy Birthday, Ewan

Today in 1971 Ewan McGregor was born in Perth, Scotland (he grew up in Crieff), and what a wonderful thing that is.

Happy Birthday, Countée

Countée Cullen was born today in 1903, probably in New York City. Abandoned by his parents, he was at first raised by his grandmother but then adopted by a Methodist minister. He was a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, but unlike others his upbringing had been primarily in a white community and his poetry lacks much of the personal experience or popular black themes other members of that movement show.

Though this is not to say there isn't any...


The Loss of Love

All through an empty place I go,
And find her not in any room;
The candles and the lamps I light
Go down before a wind of gloom.
Thick-spraddled lies the dust about,
A fit, sad place to write her name
Or draw her face the way she looked
That legendary night she came.

The old house crumbles bit by bit;
Each day I hear the ominous thud
That says another rent is there
For winds to pierce and storms to flood.

My orchards groan and sag with fruit;
Where, Indian-wise, the bees go round;
I let it rot upon the bough;
I eat what falls upon the ground.

The heavy cows go laboring
In agony with clotted teats;
My hands are slack; my blood is cold;
I marvel that my heart still beats.

I have no will to weep or sing,
No least desire to pray or curse;
The loss of love is a terrible thing;
They lie who say that death is worse.


Yet Do I Marvel

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!


(info here and poems here)

Too bad...

But on the other hand, I won't have to inflict any of the NCAAs on my friend, who hates basketball.

But I really thought at least one of the Tennessee teams would get further.

Happy Birthday, Gene

Today in Watkins, Minnesota, in 1921, Eugene McCarthy was born. I should have been for him in the '68 election, but I was young and I hated him for being alive when Bobby was dead... Older, I appreciated him more. We need men like him now.

He was also a poet.

BICYCLE RIDER (To Mary)

Teeth bare to the wind
Knuckle white grip on handle bars
You push the pedals of no return,
Let loose new motion and speed.
The earth turns with the multiplied
Force of your wheels.
Do not look back.
Feet light on the brake
Ride the bicycle of your will
Down the spine of the world,
Ahead of your time, into life.
I will not say--
Go slow.

QUIET WATERS

There are quiet waters
where a berry dropped
by a bird flying
starts ripples that
from the center of the pond
spread in concentrics, dying
in silence at the feet of the blue reeds.
I now know where these waters are.

WILLOW IN A TAMARACK SWAMP

There in the savage orange of autumn Tamarack
rusted spikes reeling the slanted, last
of the northern day, down
into the black
root waters,
among the least trees in that least land
in the darkened death camp
of the tribe of trees
I saw you.
green gold willow, arched and graced,
among spines and angled limbs.
captive? queen?
all lost light from the smothering swamp,
alone, you bear back.



KILROY

Kilroy is gone,
the word is out,
absent without leave
from Vietnam.

Kilroy
who wrote his name
in every can
from Poland to Japan
and places in between
like Sheboygan and Racine
is gone
absent without leave
from Vietnam.

Kilroy
who kept the dice
and stole the ice
out of the BOQ
Kilroy
whose name was good
on every IOU
in World War II
and even in Korea
is gone
absent without leave
from Vietnam.

Kilroy
the unknown soldier
who was the first to land
the last to leave,
with his own hand
has taken his good name
from all the walls
and toilet stalls.
Kilroy
whose name around the world
was like the flag unfurled
has run it down
and left Saigon
and the Mekong
without a hero or a song
and gone
absent without leave
from Vietnam.

Nets Party!

Fred Clarke notes:

Zernike also covered the "Tea Party Woodstock" yesterday in Searchlight, Nev., where former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was the headliner. That rally drew about 9,000 people. That's about 3/4 the size of the crowd at a New Jersey Nets home game this season. The Nets are 9-64. Just sayin'.

Happy Birthday, Mario

Today in 1936, in Arequipa, Peru, Mario Vargas Llosa was born. One of the great writers in the Latin American Boom, author of several brilliant novels (especially The Green House), Varga Llosa ran for the presidency of Peru, winning the first round but losing the run-off to Alberto Fujimori. He lives in London most of the time, returning to Peru for several months each year, and continues to write - his latest novel is 2006's The Bad Girl.

His semi-autobiographical account of his courtship and marriage, Aunt Julie and the Scriptwriter (it's only fair to say that Julie wrote her own book, What Little Vargas Didn't Say, in response) was made into one of my favorite movies, the quirky (and fairly unknown) Tune in Tomorrow.

Drina Daisy

We ate dinner in a Bosnian restaurant in Astoria, Oregon, tonight. It's called the Drina Daisy and it's fabulous. I had lamb, my friend a beef & spinach fila pastry thing, which she said was excellent. The wines were wonderful and the Sarajevo-style Turkish coffee wasn't bitter in the least.

If you're in the Pacific Northwest, you could do a lot worse than eat here. Yummmmm.

(this post by way of explaining, since I forgot to earlier, that I'm on vacation and things other than birthday posts may be a bit sparse...)

Sky Watch: Columbia River

The Columbia River between Washington and Oregon, looking south from the Wahkiakum Ferry out of Cathlamet (much nicer than a bridge!)






more Sky Watchers here

Happy Birthday, Robert

T0day in 1874 Robert Frost was born in San Francisco.

The Woodpile

Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day
I paused and said, “I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.”
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went down. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year’s cutting,
Or even last year’s or the year’s before.
The wood was grey and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labour of his axe,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

More Frost here

Happy Birthday, AE

Today in 1859 Alfred Edward Housman was born in Worcestershire, England.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

more Housman here

Happy Birthday, Christopher

Christopher Clavius was born today in 1538 or maybe 1537, depending on when you count the year beginning, which was not Jan 1 back then. That's not the only thing we don't know for sure about this astronomer and mathematician - his surname may have been Klau, Clau, or even Schlüssel.

But he gave the world the Gregorian calendar - named after the pope who used it, not the man who created it. So goes the world, doesn't it?

Happy Birthday, Patrick

Patrick Troughton was born on 25 March, 1920 in Mill Hill, Middlesex. He had a long and varied career, but to me (and millions) he will always be The Second Doctor...

Happy Birthday, Harry

Harry Houdini born today, 1874, in Budapest. Houdini (born Ehrich Weiss) began his career as a magician and became an escapologist - perhaps the escapologist. He certainly pioneered the PR-tie in and brought more than a little sex appeal to the trade as well. But in his later years he devoted his energy to investigating spiritualists - and debunking them. The Randi of his time, he used his knowledge of stage magic to unmask the tricks such frauds used to deceived their audiences. Since his death, yearly seances have been held (he'd told his wife, Bess, how to recognize a genuine message from beyond so that she would not be taken in, and she steadfastly refused to fall for those who claimed to have received one) - but to date, Houdini has not escaped from death. As he predicted...

Wonderful words

I don't know if you're reading Roger Ebert's blog or not, but if you just haven't gotten around to it, let me urge you to do so.

Indeed

From a review of "Courting Disaster"

Thiessen’s effort to rewrite the history of the C.I.A.’s interrogation program comes not long after a Presidential race in which both the Republican and the Democratic nominees agreed that state-sponsored cruelty had damaged and dishonored America. The publication of “Courting Disaster” suggests that Obama’s avowed determination “to look forward, not back” has laid the recent past open to partisan reinterpretation. By holding no one accountable for past abuse, and by convening no commission on what did and didn’t protect the country, President Obama has left the telling of this dark chapter in American history to those who most want to whitewash it.

Among the many reasons doing justice is more than "looking back"...

Happy Birthday, William

Today in Oxfordshire, England, William Smith - the "Father of English Geography" - was born. (I can heartily recommend The Map That Changed the World by the brilliant Simon Winchester.)

Wikipedia summarizes his life's work thus: As he observed the rock layers (or strata) at the pit, he realised that they were arranged in a predictable pattern and that the various strata could always be found in the same relative positions. Additionally, each particular stratum could be identified by the fossils it contained, and the same succession of fossil groups from older to younger rocks could be found in many parts of England. Furthermore, he noticed an easterly dip of the beds of rock- small near the surface (about three degrees) then bigger after the Triassic rocks. This gave Smith a testable hypothesis, which he termed The Principle of Faunal Succession, and he began his search to determine if the relationships between the strata and their characteristics were consistent throughout the country. During subsequent travels, first as a surveyor (appointed by noted engineer John Rennie) for the canal company until 1799 when he was dismissed, and later, he was continually taking samples and mapping the locations of the various strata, and displaying the vertical extent of the strata, and drawing cross-sections and tables of what he saw. This would earn him the name "Strata Smith". As a natural consequence, Smith amassed a large and valuable collection of fossils of the strata he had examined himself from exposures in canals, road and railway cuttings, quarries and escarpments across the country.

Happy Birthday, Edith

Today in 1936, Edith Grossman was born today in Philadelphia. She's one of the great translators from Spanish - her Don Quixote, which came out in 2003, is considered one of the, if not the, best translations (Carlos Fuentes called it "truly masterly") and was a best-seller, and Gabriel García Márquez calls her "my voice in English". She has also translated Mario Vargas Llosa, Mayra Montero, Augusto Monterroso, Jaime Manrique, Julián Ríos, and Álvaro Mutis. In 2003, at the PEN Tribute to Gabriel García Márquez, she said:

"Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable."

Or, as she put it in an interview with Guernica:

Yes, I think we have to be faithful to the context. But it’s very important to differentiate between fidelity and literalness. Because you can’t be faithful to words, words are different in different languages. You can’t be faithful to syntax, because that changes from one language to the other. But you can be faithful to intention and context. Borges allegedly said to one of his translators, “Don’t translate what I said. Translate what I meant to say.” That is, in fact, what a translator does. Because languages are very resonant and various levels of diction and styles of discourse echo in the mind of the native reader and native speaker. I always think that my job is to find the English that will resonate like the original Spanish for the English speaking reader.

And here's a bit about translating García Márquez for the first time, from a piece in Criticas:

“I knew this Colombian writer was eccentric when he wrote me saying that he doesn’t use adverbs ending with -mente in Spanish and would like to avoid adverbs ending in -ly in English.” She remembers thinking, what do you say in English except slowly? “Well, I came up with all types of things, like without haste.”

Okay, then

No bipartisanship by the GOP:

"There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year," McCain said during an interview Monday on an Arizona radio affiliate. "They have poisoned the well in what they've done and how they've done it."

I say, good. We've been jacked around enough by people desperately seeking bipartisanship from a party which want basically no such thing. A little less yielding ground to achieve that mythical consensus (the search for which may be the president's biggest weakness) and this bill might have been law six months ago.

I hope the Democrats take him at his word and just start going for passing legislation. And pointing out that the GOP, essentially, just wants Obama to fail at everything, regardless of who else gets hurt.

Phonics Rules?

"Breaking the phonics rules" was a category in Double Jeopardy today. The first one was "C is usually soft before E but not in this musical instrument" (cello), and the $400 was "English words that end in -int are usually short but not this measurement" (pint).

Okay, good clues. But then we have SH, TH, and PH: "SH not as usual in this insect that can jump six times its length", "like the Order of the Thistle, this British honor as TH but not as in thistle", and "there's a PH but no F-sound in this tiring battle". These words? grasshopper knighthood uphill

That was kind of cheating (though I got "grasshopper" since it was a jumping insect). These aren't single phonemes - they all cross not just syllable but morpheme boundaries.

I guess I was looking for something like, say, Keith or leper or calliope...

Monday Science Links

This week's sciency goodness:

• Brian at Laelaps looks at the darker side of male 'pregnancy': At almost every aquarium I have ever visited with a seahorse exhibit, the plaque in front of the tank says the same thing: in seahorses and their relatives, males, not females, carry the babies. It is always interesting to watch the reactions of visitors to this curious fact. Adult men, for instance, sometimes seem unsettled by the thought of male pregnancy, but the reproductive reversal among the fish is often seen as kinda cute ("How sweet. A fishy dad taking care of his kids!"). As shown by a study by Kimberly Paczolt and Adam Jones published this week in Nature, however, there can be a dark side to male pregnancy. Male seahorses, pipefish, and seadragons (collectively members of the Syngnathidae) expend a lot of energy caring for their offspring. For these fish, mating involves the female depositing her eggs inside an expandable brood pouch on the underside of the male which both houses and provides resources (such as food) for the developing young. As noted by Paczolt and Jones, this means that the males may be able to modulate the resources they put into raising young, perhaps withholding resources during some pregnancies to invest them in later broods, and to test this hypothesis the scientists looked at the reproductive behavior of Gulf pipefish (Syngnathus scovelli).


• Bec at Save your breath for running, ponies on the funnier side of gulf pipefish males: Well Gulf Pipefish Boys, you might think this is all pretty great, being able to pick and choose (and cannibalise) your own progeny with nary a qualm in the world. But the thing is, those ugly pipefish girls you mated with in the past, they’re not just going to disappear. The ocean might be big, but it’s not that big, and you know what they say – “Mate with one ugly pipefish that time you had nine vodkas, three gins and no dinner, and you’ll end up with six months of whiny text messages and a lifetime of really awkward encounters whenever you try and go back to that particular bar because they happen to serve $5 spirits till 1am.”


• PZ at Pharyngula on hox genes that make snakes: So if you want to know where snakes came from, the right place to start is to look at their nearest cousins, the lizards, and ask what snakes and lizards have in common, that is at the same time different from more distant relatives, like mice, turtles, and people…and then you'll have an idea of the shared genetic substrate that can make a snake out of a lizard-like early squamate. Furthermore, one obvious place to look is at the pattern of the Hox genes. Hox genes are primary regulators of the body plan along the length of the animal; they are expressed in overlapping zones that specify morphological regions of the body, such as cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacral/pelvic, and caudal mesodermal tissues, where, for instance, a thoracic vertebra would have one kind of shape with associated ribs, while lumbar vertebra would have a different shape and no ribs. These identities are set up by which Hox genes are active in the tissue forming the bone. And that's what makes the Hox genes interesting in this case: where the lizard body plan has a little ribless interruption to form pelvis and hindlimbs, the snake has vertebra and ribs that just keep going and going. There must have been some change in the Hox genes (or their downstream targets) to turn a lizard into a snake.


• At Eruptions, at look at the on-going (as of this writing) eruption at Eyjafjallajokull: The big news this morning is the eruption that started last night at Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland, producing a 1-km fissure vent. The pictures and videos I've seen so far have been quite impressive, with the classic look of a "curtain of fire", where basaltic lava erupts explosively from a linear array of vents - you can see the geometry in the image from the BBC/AP (above). Especially clear is the dual nature of the eruption, with both the explosive fire fountains and the effusive (passive) lava flows from the root of the curtain of fire. In many "curtain of fire" eruptions on Hawai`i, the curtain (see below) eventually coalesces into a single fire fountain, sometimes producing fountains that can reach a few kilometers in height. This will be something to watch for in the coming days if the eruption continues.


• And at Magma Cum Laude, Jessica looks at past eruptions at Volcán Santa Maria with plenty of pictures: On our way to visit the Santiaguito Volcano Observatory, Gustavo Chigna of INSIVUMEH (the Guatemalan equivalent of the USGS) was kind enough to take an afternoon off and show us some of the older deposits near Santiaguito. Our first stops were at an exposure of the air-fall deposit from the October 24, 1902 eruption of Volcán Santa Maria. This eruption was a devastating one, stripping the land for more than 50 km around the volcano, burying villages and fincas (plantations) in more than 3 meters of ash, mud and rock, and killing more than 7,000 people (the exact number will probably never be known). The area had already experienced months of earthquakes prior to the eruption, and activity at the crater formed in Santa Maria continued for weeks afterward.

Enjoy!

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: All of the extended edition of Lord of the Rings. Ahhhhh. A Ukrainian dub of a Swedish film called Karlson, yakyy meshkaye na dakhu (Carlson who lives on the roof). Some more of The Sarah Jane Adventures season 2: "The Temptation of Sarah Jane" was quite a touching episode, and it was great to see the Brigadier again in "Enemy of the Bane".

TV: House - why is Jennifer Morrison still in the credit? Good lines this week - Wilson, about the quick job furnishing the condo: "Piece of cake. You give them money, they give you furniture." Foreman to Taub, when their patient informs them there's a black hole in the MRI room, "She's hallucinating." Taub: "I certainly hope so." The Moonspinners, which I now realize is another in a long line of Disney movies that bear only a cosmetic relationship to their source material.

Read: Eyes Like Leaves, a 25-year-old high fantasy novel Charles deLint didn't publish because he decided he'd rather do urban fantasy. Reread a couple of old Mary Stewart books, The Moonspinners, and This Rough Magic - the latter one of my favorites and the former because I saw the movie on tv...

Happy Birthday, Johann

Today in 1685 in Eisenach, Germany, Johann Sebastian Bach was born. The world would be a poorer place without him.

One of my favorite CDs for the office is The Goldberg Variations, scored for a string quartet. But it's hard to go wrong picking something of his.

He spent a large part of his life as a playing musician - an organist, mostly - and much of his composed music was considered too old-fashioned or too ornamental. He changed jobs a lot, until 1723, when he became a choirmaster in Leipzig where he remained until his death in 1750. Most of his jobs were for one church or another, in fact, but he happily wrote secular music when he worked for Prince Leopold of Cothen - until his wife (the prince's) disapproved of such a frivolous expense as chamber music. But whatever kind of music Bach wrote, he did it gloriously.

Two at once

Herb here makes an innocent observation, in the course of which he manages two significant violations, so that it's no wonder Sarah misunderstands him.


First, he violates one of the Gricean Maxims, that of Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange), and Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. There's absolutely no reason for her to know what color the thread is; it's not like she walks around with red or purple threads in her hair.

Second, having decided to provide her with the extra information, he puts the modifier in the wrong place: "a gray piece of thread"? Not "a piece of gray thread"?

And now he'll pretend he didn't do it on purpose to pay her back for winning the argument yesterday...

Happy Birthday, Ivan

Іван Степанович Мазепа - Ivan Mazepa - was born today, in what is now called Mazepyntsy, near Bila Tserkva in Ukraine around 1640. The usual English spelling of his name is Mazeppa, which is from the Russian.

Mazepa was an ambitious Kozak (Cossack) officer who rose quickly through the ranks in the post-Pereyaslavl Left Bank Hetmanate (the 1653 Treaty of Pereyaslavl between Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytskyy and Tsar Alexey I of Muscovy was fraught with misunderstandings from the beginning). Mazepa began as a loyal ally of Russia (as Muscovy was now called under Peter I, the Great), and became hetman in 1687 after accusing his predecessor, Samoylovych, of planning to break the treaty and secede from Muscovy. In 1702 Mazepa crossed the Dnipro (Dneiper) and annexed large portions of Right-Bank Ukraine after Semen Paliy's failed uprising against the Poles, establishing him as a wealthy and powerful ruler.

But the Great Northern War wasn't good to Russia - the Swedes and Lithuanians were a serious force back then - and Peter I decided to take steps - steps Mazepa saw as threatening the Hetmanate's autonomy. Peter I began sending Kozaks to fight in foreign wars, instead of leaving them to defend Ukraine against Tatars and Poles (as the treaty stipulated). Kozak soldiers were neither equipped nor trained for modern warfare, and they were often commanded by Russians and Germans who often did not much value their lives. They suffered loss of morale, and heavy casualties, while at home a Russian force became an oppressive occupier.

In 1708, Polish King Stanislaus Leszczynski, an ally of Charles XII of Sweden, threatened to attack the Hetmanate. Peter I refused to defend Ukraine, expecting an attack on Russia proper by Charles XII. In Mazepa's opinion, this blatantly violated the Treaty of Pereyaslav, since Russia refused to protect Ukraine's territory and left it to fare on its own. As the Swedish and Polish armies advanced towards Ukraine, Mazepa allied himself with them on October 28, 1708.

The Russian army responded by razing the Kozak capital Baturyn, killing the defending garrison and all of its population. The Russian army was ordered to tie up the dead Kozaks to crosses, and float them down the Dnieper River all the way to the Black Sea with the goal of scaring all the people loyal to Mazepa who lived along the river.

The Battle of Poltava, June 29, 1709, was won by the Russians (a victory which shook Europe and established Russia as a true imperial force and power player in European politics), and this destroyed Mazepa's hope for an independent Ukraine. He fled along with Charles to refuge in Bendery, among the Turks, where he died soon afterwards. The tsars began to dismantle the Hetmanate, and by 1764 the largely puppet remains of it were abolished.

Mazepa's legacy during Russian rule of Ukraine, and Soviet rule thereafter, was one of treason and revilement. He was excommunicated by the Orthodox Church, Tchaikovsky's opera "Mazeppa" casts him as the villain, and any positive view of him was "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism", a serious crime in Soviet days. But since Ukrainian independence the hetman's memory has enjoyed a resurgence, and he is recognized as a national hero.


He's even on the money.

Hyphenation: NOT random

So, I bought the Subterranean Press edition of Charles de Lint's new/old novel, Eyes Like Leaves. New, because it hasn't been published before; old, because he actually wrote it in 1980. It wasn't published because when he was going to offer it to the publisher who'd taken Moonheart and The Riddle of the Wren, his agent, who knew of Yarrow and Mulengro (one finished, one in progress), warned him that if he got three "secondary-world" fantasies in print so quickly, that would be his brand, and his unpublished contemporary fantasies wouldn't sell. Since Yarrow had shown him he wanted to write contemporary fantasies, he never published Eyes Like Leaves.

I like it well enough. I found myself thinking that the story wasn't catching me, probably because I haven't read much high, or secondary-world, fantasy in a while (like 25 years, probably, always excepting Terry Pratchett - who is radically different from de Lint!), but on second thought, I probably reversed the causation arrow there: I don't read much of this sort of fantasy because the stories don't catch me any longer...

Anyway, my actual reason for this post is different. Here's a quote from the book (p 197):

He felt, as well, the fine webs of the weavers
drawing closer, binding, finishing off the tapes-
tried tale that had begun so many longyears before.

You have no idea how long I tried to make "tapes-tried" make sense. In a book with words like "stormkin, longyear, deepseeing, stonewood, tree-wizard, sea-sleep," you learn to accept odd compounds. But "tapes-tried"?

Oh. Finally, I realized what had happened. Some damned automated typesetting program had hyphenated "tapestried" in the wrong place. Russian newspapers have long done this, just slapping in a hyphen when they reached the end of the line, no matter where in the word it fell. But English-language presses have generally tried to hyphenate on syllable breaks, even if it meant futzing a little with the spacing...

You know, I don't mind paying Subterranean's prices for their attractive special editions of hard-to-find books, especially when they're signed copies. But this particular book has several typos in it... and this, which completely jolted me out the (tenuous) hold the story had on me.

I think I'll be waiting for de Lint's next contemporary book.

Happy Birthday, Earl

Born this day in 1891 in Los Angeles, Earl Warren, one of our greatest Chief Justices. In 1953, President Eisenhower appointed him, expecting a conservative; Eisenhower later called the appointment "the biggest damn-fool mistake I ever made." But the country is much the better for it.

Warren led the Supreme Court to many landmark decisions, including Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which banned segregation in public schools; Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), which ruled that poor people are entitled to a free lawyer in all criminal cases; Miranda v. Arizona (1966), which required that a person being arrested be read his or her rights; and Loving v. Virginia (1967), which made interracial marriage legal across the country.

Although he died in 1974, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1981 by President Carter.

Sky Watch: Here Comes the Sun

more Sky Watchers here

Happy Birthday, Nikolai

Nikolai Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov (Николай Андреевич Римский-Корсаков) was born today in Tikhvin, Russia, in 1844. As one of The Five - along with Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, and Alexander Borodin (Милий Алексеевич Балакирев, Цезарий-Вениамин Антонович Кюи, Модест Петрович Мусоргский,and Александр Порфирьевич Бородин) - he strove to write music that was Russian rather than European. In Russian they're called the Mighty Pack (or Group) - Могучая кучка. He's best known in the West for his symphonies and especially his Scheherazade suite, and for his operas, especially Sadko and The Snow Maiden, in Russia.

In 1905 Rimsky-Korsakov sided with the hundred students expelled from the St Petersburg Conservatory, where he taught, for taking part in the February Revolution. He was fired, and students put on his Kaschei the Immortal (or Kaschei the Deathless) and followed it with a demonstration. His works were subsequently banned. Riots and resignations followed in support until he was reinstated, but his next opera, The Golden Cockerel, was critical of monarchy, imperialism, and by implication the on-going Russo-Japanese War, and it only exacerbated his troubles with the tsarist police and wasn't produced until 1909, a year after his death - and then in an edited format.

This was his teaching philosophy:

Сейчас я буду очень много говорить, а вы будете очень внимательно слушать. Потом я буду говорить меньше, а вы будете слушать и думать, и, наконец, я совсем не буду говорить, и вы будете думать своей головой и работать самостоятельно, потому что моя задача как учителя - стать вам ненужным...

"Now I will speak a great deal, and you will listen very attentively. Then I will speak less, and you will listen and think, and finally I will not speak at all, and you will think to yourselves and work on your own, because my task as a teacher is to become unnecessary to you."

Happy Birthday, Christian

Today in 1690 Christain Goldbach was born, in Königsberg, part of Brandenburg-Prussia.

His famous conjecture:

Every even integer greater than 3 can be written as the sum of two primes

remains unproved (though intuitively obvious), but he's also remembered for the the Goldbach–Euler theorem (also known as Goldbach's theorem), which states that the sum of 1/(p − 1) over the set of perfect powers p, excluding 1 and omitting repetitions, converges to 1. (The perfect powers are 4, 8, 9, 16, 25, 27 - whole numbers which are other whole numbers raised to a power (squared, cubed, etc).) So the theorem is that 1/3 + 1/7 + 1/8 + 1/15 + 1/24 ... = 1.

Whoo! Math! It kills me, but I love it (abstractly).

Guest: Would Health Care Reform Help You?

I've never been asked this before, but Barbara O'Brien wanted to write a guest post. Who's she? Well, she blogs at The Mahablog, Crooks and Liars, AlterNet, and elsewhere on the progressive political and health blogophere, which has earned her the notoriety of being a panelist at the Yearly Kos Convention and a featured guest blogger at the Take Back America Conference in Washington, DC. Here's what she had to say:

Would Health Care Reform Help You?

Many obstacles and stumbling blocks remain in the way of health care reform. The House and Senate bills will have to be merged, and then the House and Senate both will vote on the final bill. We don’t yet know what will be in the final bill, or if the final bill will be passed into law. Passage will be especially difficult in the Senate, where it will need 60 votes to pass. It is still possible that after all this angst, just one grandstanding senator could kill the whole thing.

But just for fun, let’s look at what conventional wisdom says will be in the final bill and see if there is anything in it that will be an immediate benefit to people with mesothelioma cancer and other asbestos-related disease.

It is likely that the final bill will provide additional funding for state high-risk insurance pools. Currently more than 30 states run such pools, which are nonprofit, state-sponsored health insurance plans for people who can’t buy insurance because of pre-existing conditions. The biggest problem with such pools is that, often, the insurance they offer is too expensive for many who might need it. Both the Senate and House bills provide $5 billion in subsidies for state high-risk pools to make the insurance more affordable.

Under the Senate bill, beginning in 2014, private companies would no longer be able to deny coverage to adults with pre-existing conditions, nor could they charge higher premiums for people with pre-existing conditions. Until then, the state high-risk pools could provide some help.

Closing the Medicare Part D coverage gap — also called the “doughnut hole” — is another potential provision that could help some patients with asbestos-related disease. The “doughnut hole” is the gap between the coverage for yearly out-of-pocket expenses provided by Medicare Part D and Medicare’s “catastrophic coverage” threshold.

For example, in 2009 Medicare Part D paid at least 75 percent of what patients paid for prescription drugs up to $2,700. After that, patients must pay for all of their prescription medications until what they have paid exceeds $6,154. At that point, the catastrophic coverage takes over, and Medicare pays for all but 5 percent of the patient’s drug bills. The final health care reform bill probably will provide for paying at least 50 percent of out-of-pocket costs in the doughnut hole.

You may have heard the bills include budget cuts to the Medicare program, and this has been a big concern to many people. Proponents of the bill insist that savings can be found to pay for the cuts, and that people who depend on Medicare won’t face reduced services. But this is a complex issue that I want to address in a later post.

The long-term provisions probably will include many other provisions that would benefit patients with asbestos-related disease, including increased funding for medical research. Although there are many complaints about the bill coming from all parts of the political spectrum, on the whole it would be a huge benefit to many people.

— Barbara O’Brien
March 16, 2010

Happy Birthday, James

Today in 1751 James Madison was born. Father of the Constitution, I hate to think what he'd be saying now... but here's some of what he said back then:

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

The people of the U.S. owe their independence & liberty to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of 3 pence on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprised in the precedent. Let them exert the same wisdom in watching against every evil lurking under plausible disguises, and growing up from small beginnings.

There are more instances of abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation.

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

Nubbins felt confused

I wanted to put this cartoon in my post on "looking ridiculously" but didn't have it at home. Here it is: enjoy!

Happy Birthday, Maxim

Алексей Максимович Пешков - Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov, best known as Maxim Gorky (the Bitter), was born today in Nizhny Novgorod - once called Gorky after him - in 1868.

День - это маленькая жизнь, и надо прожить ее так, будто ты должен умереть сейчас, а тебе неожиданно подарили еще сутки. (A day is a small life, and it must be lived as though you were meant to die right now, but you've unexpectedly been given another 24 hours.)

Лишь бы люди начали думать, до правды они всегда додумаются. (If only people start thinking, they'll always get to the truth.)

Когда труд - удовольствие, жизнь - хороша! Когда труд - обязанность, жизнь - рабство! (When work is a pleasure, then life is wonderful! When work is an obligation, then life is slavery!)

In these pictures he's at Yasnaya Polyana with Tolstoy in 1900 (right), then in Yalta with Anton Chekhov in the same year, and then with Voroshilov and Stalin in 1931... Yeah. A complicated guy, Maxim Gorky.

Here is Gorky in Russian and here in English.

Happy Birthday, Ruth!

Today in 1933 Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn. She's now on the Supreme Court of the United States. "Associate Justice Ginsburg, who was once denied a Supreme Court clerkship because she was a woman, co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU and has been a stalwart defender of civil rights on the court."

Read a tribute here

Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• The always-funny bec at Save Your Breath for Running, Ponies spins a tale of an assassin bug who's not very good: Now this is all very elaborate and apparently successful, but we all know spiders are not that stupid. Lord knows if one asked me to do something, I sure as hell wouldn’t refuse, so they’ve definitely got something there. Plus we all know spiders talk,* which could make life pretty difficult for those assassin bugs I’d imagine. Because you can’t be an assassin if your victims can see you and your wide-open bag of tricks coming, right? So poor Assassin Bug would finally get an assignment, which is awesome because he’s just been sitting at home doing fuck-all for months because the pickings are slim when there are so many other assassin bugs around. It’s like, “Hey, so I heard an Achaearanea extridium moved in down town?” “Yeah, Lindsay already picked him off last week.”


• John McKay at archy tells the tale of the Wellington avalanche: One hundred years ago, it was snowing in the North Cascade Mountains. By itself, there was nothing unusual about that fact. It always snows in the Cascades around this time of year. We depend on it. The ski resorts need snow to stay open. The cities of Puget Sound rely on the snowpack laid down during the late winter for their water supply during the summer. Farms and orchards on the east side of the mountains depend on that same melting snowpack to water their crops. The salmon who have been spawning in Cascade streams since the end of the last ice age need that same meltwater to make their final journey. But the late February storms of 1910 were something different.
  


• Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy blogs on two galaxies seen by WISE: NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, only launched a couple of months ago, and has already done spectacular work. Gulping down huge tracts of sky every day, it has already discovered over 2000 asteroids — not seen, but actually discovered — including several that pass near the Earth (none on track to hit us, happily). It’s discovered four comets, too, and by the end of the mission in a few months will see far more. But since it’s a survey instrument, and it sees in the far infrared, the views it gets are nothing short of spectacular! Like this one... There is a lot to see here! First, the colors: all of this is far infrared, with blue being the IR wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns combined (5 and 6.5 times the wavelength the human eye sees), green is 12 microns, and red 22. Green is dominated by warm dust and big organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The glowing gassy stuff is part of the Heart Nebula, which I’ve posted about before (guess what date). But take a look a bit to the left of all that gas, and look much, much farther in distance...


• At Skulls in the Stars, a post on perpetual motion: With that in mind, it is worth pointing out that perpetual motion has been considered impossible — and treated with scorn — for a long, long time. When I dug up the first volume of The Harmsworth Magazine, dated 1899, to seek out a story by Winston Churchill, I also found a popular article on perpetual motion. It is not kind to the concept, or the people who pursue it.


• Ed Young at Not Exactly Rocket Science posts on the the weirdness that is chicken sex genetics: The animal on the right is no ordinary chicken. Its right half looks like a hen but its left half (with a larger wattle, bigger breast, whiter colour and leg spur) is that of a cockerel. The bird is a 'gynandromorph', a rare sexual chimera. Thanks to three of these oddities, Debiao Zhao and Derek McBride from the University of Edinburgh have discovered a truly amazing secret about these most familiar of birds - every single cell in a chicken's body is either male or female. Each one has its own sexual identity. It seems that becoming male or female is a very different process for birds than it is for mammals.

Enjoy!

Is she serious? (pragmatics post)

The Middletons' resident old lady (his mother, but I can't remember their names) is crazy. Who yells at a ref with that stress?



I confess to first thinking it should be "ump," anyway, but then I realized that it must be for March Madness, even with that distracting "spring training"... Either that, or this strip is totally messed up.

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Scarecrow and Mrs King - the first half of the first season. Watching the show was a bit odd - Reagan and Latin America... things look different now, looking back. And the whole time the Christmas episode was on, I kept waiting for someone to point out that it wasn't Christmas in Russia. Assuming the KGB guys actually cared, they wouldn't be caring until January 7! But it never came up... And Yakov Smirnov - what a hoot to see that guy again.

TV: So, last week I said we didn't know what they watch on The Middle. Now we know some of it, anyway: Grey's Anatomy and Sean Penn movies. And seriously: The Thundering Hens? I love that. And Modern Family: Mitchell's pet's names - too funny. Fliza Minnelli the bird, Zsa-Zsa Gaboa the snake. "How did I not know the kid was gay?" House was okay - the peripheral stuff was great, actually. I loved the speed dating, and Chase's re-evaluation of his life, and the porno Wilson was in was hilariously bad. The Mentalist was a really good episode. I'm sad that Psych is over for the season, but at least it got picked up for another one. Poor Shawn. And Lassie sacrificed his gun for Juliet! Wow! And Numb3rs: if this is the end, and it had that feel to it, at least they tied up all the strands. It's been a fine series, and this was a fine episode. I have to admit that I laughed hardest at Otto's reaction to Charlie's saying "Amita and I have been offered visiting professorships at Cambridge, so we decided to move the wedding to today": he boggled, he laughed, he hugged Charlie, and he said, wistfully, "I wish I had a visiting professorship." Larry's definition of love made me cry, seriously.

Read: The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostovo. Entirely different from The Historian except also very long and very good.

Some "rules" just won't die

Rex Parker (of Rex Parker Does the NY Times Crossword) says of today's puzzle:

I did not care for NORW. (42D: Neighbor of Swed.) — both clue and answer abbrevs. look ridiculously with that fourth letter on them — or ON TWO (145A: How a call may be picked up at the office), mainly because I don't really get it. "

Look ridiculously"?

No.

They look ridiculous.

Verbs of perception and sensing are like linking verbs; they take adjectives as their complements, because that adjective is modifying the subject.

DST

Котоматрица

Every year in the spring they put the clocks ahead by an hour. Every year this upsets everyone. And yet it would be so simple to make everyone happy! All you have to do is put the clocks ahead, not in the middle of Saturday night, but in the middle of the work day on Friday.


Смотреть ещё! (see more!)

Why did the ducks cross the road?

Happy Birthday, Albert

Yep. Today in 1879, in Ulm, Germany, Albert Einstein was born.


What else is there to say? Albert Einstein was born, and lived, and worked...



There's a nice poem here at Physics Buzz,

Young Albert E. and the Miracle Year
By James Riordon:

Well molecules and atoms at last were confirmed,
And solid state texts were rewritten or burned.
'Twas a wondrous discovery, though not without peer,
And it's hardly enough for a miracle year.

(It's hyperlinked and everything!)
(Hat tip Jen at Cocktail Party Physics)

Red Bird in the Dawn

Still slightly gray from winter, this cardinal catches the morning light and positively glows.

Happy Birthday, Percival

And speaking of Pluto ... today in 1855, Percival Lowell was born. He didn't discover Pluto, but his belief that Planet X lay beyond Neptune and Uranus and perturbed their orbits led to its discovery. Pluto of course isn't big enough to be "Planet X" - in fact, the whole "Planet X" thing was due to a mistake in measuring the mass of Neptune.

When you couple that with Pluto's subsequent reclassification; Lowell's mass building of observatories and funding programs; his enormous popularization efforts; and his obsessive drawings of canals and oases on Mars, the remnants of a desperate and dying ancient civilization ... well, you do have to admit that maybe Lowell had more money than sense.

Still, he contributed an enormous amount to astronomy and science fiction, and so we should be grateful. Let's raise a glass and pull out our Wells or our Bradbury and wish Percival Lowell a happy birthday!

Nuthatch

Spotted this little white-breasted nuthatch Wednesday morning

Happy Birthday, James

James Taylor was born today in 1948, in Boston, Massachusetts, although he grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Last year I gave you Circles Around the Sun, and before that Fire and Rain. This year, another of my favorites.


My Traveling Star

Watch my back and light my way
My traveling star, my traveling star
Watch over all of those born St. Christopher's Day
Old road dog, young runaway
They hunger for home but they cannot stay
They wait by the door
They stand and they stare
They're already out of there
They're already out of there

My daddy used to ride the rails
So they say, so they say
Soft as smoke and as tough as nails
Boxcar Jones, old walking man
Coming back home was like going to jail
The sheets and the blankets and babies and all
No he never did come back home
Never that I recall

Nevermind the wind
Nevermind the rain
Nevermind the road leading home again
Never asking why
Never knowing when
Every now and then
There he goes again

She had a cat and a dog named Blue
My traveling star, my traveling star
A big old stove and a fireplace, too
Old road dog, young runaway
She told me loved me like it was true
I knew I should stay
I knew I would go
Run run run away
Run run run away, boy

Run before the wind
Run before the rain
Over yonder hill
Just around the bend
Never asking why
Never knowing when
Every now and then
There you go again

Tie me up and hold me down
Oh, my traveling star
Bury my feet down in the ground
Oh, old road dog
Claim my name from the lost and found
And let me believe this is where I belong
Shame on me for sure
For one more highway song

My traveling star
My traveling star

Sky Watch: Red in the Morning II

This sky was over Laurel on Monday. The day was beautiful, though.




more Sky Watchers here (and I'm promising you that you really want to click through and see this week's feature: it'll stun you)

tangled skein

You know those neat Vs geese travel in? Most of them don't seem to last very long...

Hmmmm... I wonder.....

A friend sent around a list of 10 Reasons Gay Marriage is wrong. Here is #3:

Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

Another friend sent this back:

Re #3: Now that the Supreme Court says corporations are legally people...

Happy Birthday, Douglas

Today in 1952 in Cambridge, England, Douglas Adams was born.

Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox, Trillian, Marvin ... the mice and Slartibartfast and Deep Thought.

Dirk Gently.

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

Gone too soon, he is deeply missed.

Douglas Adams . com

Disconnect

So Pastor Scott Lively says (on the ABC Evening News tonight) that gays are attempting "to overthrow family-based society and replace it with sexual anarchy."

Then why the hell doesn't he support gay marriage?

Studios Have Tax Breaks?

From an email flyer:

Truth Wins Out condemned a shortsighted and terribly misguided Florida bill (CS/HB 697) that aims to reward movie studios with tax breaks that promote "family values' and punish those that do not fit the narrow definition of "traditional families".

I'm guessing they're not really rewarding movie studios that have tax breaks that promote and punish, or even rewarding movie studios that have tax breaks that promote and punishing those that don't fit... but rather that the bill aims to reward with tax breaks studios that promote, and punish those that don't.

Happy Birthday, PZ

Today is the birthday of the godless cracker-abusing cephalopodophiliac blogger lord we call PZed...


Head on over to Pharyngula and wish him many more.

Monday Science Links

This week's sciency goodness:

• Michael at Paleoblog posts on the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs: Responding to challenges to the hypothesis that an asteroid impact caused a mass extinction on Earth 65 million years, a panel of 41 scientists re-analyzed data and provided new evidence, concluding that an impact in Mexico was indeed the cause of the mass extinction. Thirty years ago, Luis Alvarez, Jan Smit and their coworkers suggested a large meteorite slammed into Earth 65 million years ago and caused one of the most severe mass extinctions in Earth's history, ending the age of the dinosaurs. In 1991, a more than 200-kilometer-wide impact crater was discovered in Yucatan, Mexico, that coincided with the extinctions. Since then, the impact hypothesis has gained overwhelming acceptance within the scientific community.
  


• At Skulls in the Stars, a post on an optical illusion: One of the wonderful things about having a career in science is that a deeper understanding of the science leads to a greater appreciation of its beauty. In physics, this usually requires a nontrivial amount of mathematics, but there are some phenomena that are self-evidently beautiful; unfortunately, many of these are also not very well known! In working on my textbook on optics, I delved rather deeply into one of these phenomena, known as the optical Talbot effect. First observed in 1836 by Henry Fox Talbot, the effect went unnoticed for nearly fifty years before being rediscovered by the great Lord Rayleigh in 1881. The true subtlety of the phenomenon was still not understood, however, for another hundred years!
  


• Jessica at Magma Cum Laude posts on her recent fieldwork (with photos!): I suppose I've left you all hanging long enough, so now it's time to show off the first batch of photos from Guatemala. The trip started out in Guatemala City, where we loaded up our rental car and drove to Quetzaltenango (known as Xela or Xelaju to most people). From Xela we drove to a finca, or farm/plantation, and then spent three hours hiking through jungle, over landslide scars and down rocky riverbeds. It was a tough, messy hike, although we were lucky enough to have porters go first and cut a path through the brush with machetes. (This did have its drawbacks, though, since the average Guatemalan is shorter than me, and we had some pretty tall people in the group. There was a lot of stooping and some crawling, which isn't all that fun when the foliage is covered in volcanic ash.)
  


• Erik at Eruptions posts on a possible Icelandic eruption: We talked a few weeks ago of signs that there were increasing signs that an eruption could occur on Iceland - increased seismicity on the Reykjanes Ridge suggested that magma might be on the move. Now, we have two pieces of evidence that we might see activity at Eyjafjallajökull, on the southern side of the island nation.
  


• Ed at Not Exactly Rocket Science posts on dinosaur-eating snakes: Snakes have been around for nearly 100 million years and scientists have found many fossils of extinct species. But this astonishing specimen is different. This serpent is Sanajeh indicus. It is sitting in a dinosaur nest and its coils surround three eggs and the body of a hatchling. There are many reasons to think that this prehistoric tableau represented a predator caught in the act of hunting, rather than a mash-up of unconnected players thrown together by chance. The snake is perfectly posed, with its head resting atop a coil and its body encircling a crushed egg. All the pieces are very well preserved and very little of the snake, the dinosaur or the crushed egg have been deformed. All of this suggests that the animals were caught unawares and quickly buried in sediment.
  

Enjoy!