more birds

last night I took Artie the Wonder Dog for a run. He pulled me for five miles. When we got home he did a few dozen laps of the yard, then went a couple of rounds with his old blanket. I was exhausted, he was energized. Today my quads feel as if I just ran ten miles down Mt Evans - had to brake on every step against his enthusiastic trot.

There were redwing blackbirds churring in the reeds. That is the earliest I've ever heard them in Highlands Ranch. On the other hand, every year for the last eight at least, the date has been moving up. I know this because it's noted in my training logs. Since we're right on the edge of its year-round residency, I guess that soon they'll be here continuously, and I'll lose my 'first-robin' marker on spring runs. Well, 'runs' for a generously-defined value of run: I'm working my way down to walking.

I suppose I could switch to the American robins themselves. They are thrushes like the rwb (the English robin is considered an old-world flycatcher) so not too much of a leap; but the rwb has this characteristic midday song so that he who runs may listen. It's easier to ID by ear. Then too, the robins are moving fast as well, according to the Audubon report.

The report also notes the meadowlark population is plummeting. Theirs is the true summer note. I always look forward to hearing their liquid trills on the bike in Chatfield.

weighing anchor

a marvellous poem by Seamus Heaney in the New Yorker ends up at:

As I age and blank on names,
As my uncertainty on stairs
Is more and more the light-headedness

Of a cabin boy’s first time on the rigging,
As the memorable bottoms out
Into the irretrievable,

It’s not that I can’t imagine still
That slight untoward rupture and world-tilt
As a wind freshened and the anchor weighed.
**

Exactly so. Old, trapped and grounded, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans everything; a last synapse flares, a spark in the punk; we can still set sail out of the dim caverns of the skull; somewhere there may yet be found
"still green water and clean bottom sand,
..
Above a seafloor where striped fish pass in shoals"

Dell and Nvidia

I'm not having much luck with Dell recently. As per the earlier post, the Inspiron 1510 contains a wireless card that doesn't play well with WPA-PSK secured networks. Now the latest Dell Vostro 2510, although a nice machine, turns out to ship with a defective Nvidia GPU that overheats. Hm.

The Dell 'fix' is to change the BIOS so the fan runs continuously, in an attempt to keep the GPU from frying. This makes the machine noisy and reduces the battery life. The only thing it 'fixes' is Dell's warranty liabilities, as it may extend the life of the GPU to slightly beyond the warranty period.

I posted a review of the machine on Dell's site, but it remains to be seen if they'll publish it. I thought I'd publish it here in the interests of transparency.

I was distressed to find that this model 2510 ships with the defective NVIDIA GPU card, but it is not included in the extended warranty.
Don't buy this machine until this is remedied.
See the Dell blog which indicates the 2510 contains the defective GPU.
But the guarantee is extended only to the products listed here.

I've used Dells at work for quite a few years without problems. However this may be the last Dell I buy..

pheasant with my phowling piece

We're going hunting, aren't we ? O boy o boy o boy, I can't wait, let's go, now or sooner if possible, this is gonna be great !

Artie does his job exactly as he's bred to do, runs deep into the weeds and flushes the birds out. I on the other hand frequently don't get my part of the job done, and miss the birds.. Once in a while I do hit, thereby avoiding Artie's ire - you should see The Look he gives me after missing - and he faithfully brings it in.

Pheasants are extravagantly beautiful. They are, as Gierach observed of trout, far prettier than they need to be. On the other hand, for the last couple of centuries it's been a very successful strategy from an evolutionary standpoint: be attractive/useful to man, and he'll spread you far and wee across the world. Both pheasants and trout seem like elementals of air and water, jewels that swim and fly. Then men like me come along to turn them into meat.

In the evening, the birds come in from the cornfields to their evening quarters in the bottomlands. We hide behind the haystack and wait to see who shows up. The trick to recognizing a rooster is the C's - either hear him cluck, or see the colour on his face. In the evening the colour trigger isn't usually visible; luckily they'll sometimes declare themselves by chattering to their harem. This evening, four hens swooped in silently. The solitary rooster dropped into the dense weeds. We went to root him out with the dogs but in the meantime he'd run down into the jungles of the wetlands. Outfoxed by a bird, yet again.

Back at the barn having tea, Artie fell asleep standing up, while I scratched his ears. A thoroughly-well-hunted dog.

Update: 'the last couple of centuries', forsooth. Pheasant arrived in England with Caesar's armies. They'd been moving out of Asia for a few thousand years before that. There are some 30 distinct sub-species of the common pheasant; the status in the wild of all of these is unknown. The common and ringneck pheasant are of course not endangered, being so widespread.

Harold Macmillan on pheasants in England, reported in a letter of Patrick Leigh Fermor's,

"We're very lucky to have them. It's entirely due to the Roman occupation of Britain. The junior officers were very fond of them, and collected them in large numbers. I believe there was a certain amount of rivalry about which centurion had the most or the handsomest birds. In the end, of course, in 410 AD, in the reign of the Emperor Honorious, the order came for all the legions to return to Rome, but they weren't allowed to take their birds with them, so very reluctantly, all the centurions let their birds go. There must have been thousands of them. Anyway, they survived the Picts and the Scots, and the Saxon invasion."

There are some other remarkable pheasants. Bird books usually give a picture plus a paragraph or more detailing the 'field signs', the notable features by which the bird may be recognized while twitching. For the Lady Amherst and the Golden pheasant, one word: 'unmistakeable'.

The Lady bird:

From excelglen's flickr set.

 The Golden:

From Dave Appleton's flickr set.

eragon and saphira

#1 son wanted me to publish his picture of Eragon and Saphira, so here it is..

what are we playing at ?

The last construction weekend of the year. We're putting up the deck for the yurt near Palisade, five 'professionals' with soft hands labouring manually. One ex-engineer who went careering off to law, and one actual engineer, so at least we have good directions to follow.

In the course of the weekend, the side of the shed in the background blew off. We upgraded the yurt with the wind package.

It's quite soothing to have nothing to do but heave lumber and bang nails, in the cold wind below the mesas.

The children of the yurt lent a hand and a hammer, putting in the spacers for the Trex boards. That palled after an hour or two, so they went off to Crash Valley, the gully where the previous farmer sent all his cars to die.

A few vagrant gleams of sunshine were all we got.

On the drive home even those would have been welcome - Vail pass was closed most of the afternoon and evening. We gave up and checked into a hotel. The boys and I went to sit in the hot tub, under snow, where we learnt that the hotel had just filled up and the Red Cross shelters opened. I hardly ever get that right, usually we're in the miserable cold waiting for the pass to reopen. After dinner we all huddled around the laptop, watching 'The Gods must be Crazy'. I thought the boys would enjoy the slapstick, their parents indulged in a bushveld nostalgia.

Two of the pictures courtesy of Mitch and Linda, thank you.

respectability

Brad DeLong says:
"We can finally have normal politics and policymaking again. That's not a tremendous accomplishment, is it?
It feels like one:
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth... the holy city, new Jerusalem..."

I'm not sure it's possible to return to a normal politics after the last eight years, that well is deeply poisoned: still I agree it's a relief (in the same way that a biopsy for cancer coming back negative, is a relief) to have a respectable President again.

Not much to ask, but it seemed unattainable for so many years. Ezra Klein sums up the Bush legacy:
"He has been worse than a bad president: he has harnessed the power of America to do genuine evil, under his watch."
From the report by the Senate Armed Services Committee (12 R, 12 D, ranking member Sen McCain):
"senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."
The general counsel for the Department of the Army has declared that what we did to prisoners in Guantanamo was torture. No weaseling, no mealy-mouthed obfuscation by tough-talking bed wetters, just the admission that it is in fact plain old ugly torture. The Red Cross thinks so too. Of course, most of the tortured were innocent as well.

This is the second time I've voted for a black president. I also got to vote for Nelson Mandela, in the first free South African elections. Praise be. Perhaps a Truth and Reconciliation Commission is a good next step, now that we will stop torturing people.

John McCain seemed relieved and happy in his concession speech. Odd. Perhaps he does have a conscience after all ?

Elsewhere I proposed 'Caravan of Love' as the song for the day. It's always worth hoping.

Update on torture: there was no campaign promise and no official statement on this. I had confidence however, and now:
"I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that. I have said repeatedly that America doesn't torture, and I'm going to make sure that we don't torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America's moral stature in the world."
Decency in government, what a refreshing change.