holy cannoli! a catbear!

okay, old news to 98% of the internet, but as this is an animal-focused blog i couldn’t overlook yesterday’s announcement of a new carnivorous species which was discovered in the andes!  they live in cloud forests, which sound like the most heavenly places on earth but may be more like this jungle, but i digress.   here’s a picture of the olinguito, for your perusal!

not a whole lot is known about these guys: they live high up in trees, eating fruit & insects, weigh only 1 kg, and have really cute ears.  they are part of the raccoon family, which includes them in the category “cute/scary”. it’s not an official linnean classifier, but so many things fit the category that it must be a real thing (eg: possums, aye ayes, star-nosed mole, tube nosed fruit bat, etc).

lichtenberg figures/lightning tattoos

as an impressionable, romantic teenager i came across a haunting, poetic novel, fugitive pieces, and a passage struck me:

Sometimes, when lightning passes through objects and then through human tissue, it imprints the objects onto a hand, an arm, a belly – leaving a permanent shadow, a skin photograph. Whole landscapes have appeared on the sides of animals. Across the courtyard, I imagined Petra had the divine tattoo: in the middle of her back, a Lichtenberg flower. I imagined she’d been imprinted as a child, that the rubber tiles of her bicycle had saved her.  In the small of her brown silky back, past an invisible down of hair, the faint breath of electricity remained.  A flower so faint you feel it could be washed away or, like a frost flower, vanish with your gasp. “From your lips to the ear of God.” But your adoration will not have the slightest effect.  The flower is ghostly and permanent’ maddening stigmata.

at the time i first encountered these words, i searched the internet for photo proof of such things, cows with landscapes tattooed by lightning, but i didn’t find anything and indeed forgot about it until seeing these photos last week.

to be clear, a lichtenberg figure is not just a fractal pattern left by high voltage on skin; the fractal can be seen in acrylic blocks, plates coated with reactive dust, on grass that’s had a lightning strike.

sweet baby tapir toes

it has recently been brought to my attention that tapirs are the cutest animal that is related to both horses and rhinoceri.  niche category, you say? no matter, say i!

SWEET BABY TAPIR TOES is also great as an exlamation.

tapirs kind of look like pigs but with prehensile noses. there are four species of tapir (malayan, brazilian, baird’s, and mountain) and all known populations are endangered or vulnerable.

tapir snouts are prehensile, like elephants, kind of. if english was a language made up of compound words like german, maybe we’d call tapirs ‘elephantpigs’ instead of tapirs.

elephant pigs can grow to be quite large (2m long/1m tall) and are herbivores, eating up to 40kg of fruits, berries & leafy shoots per day.

 

 

 

 

 

featured artist friday: the skullery

marisa rand of the skullery creates beautiful resin skull & bone casts. i’ve got a couple of her pieces, the crow skull necklace and magpie earrings, and i adore them. whenever i wear them i get a lot of compliments! her work is simple, affordable, and so stylish. it ships really quickly too, which is always a treat. her shop is one of my favourite finds on etsy!

(click through the photos to see shop listings for the items below)

mini crow skull necklace, $21

mink jaw bone necklace, $20

kit fox skull, $26

lacey magpie skull keychain, $21

much love monday: new tattoos

while i was in san diego, i had the pleasure to once again be tattooed by my old friend mike stobbe out of avalon II tattoo.

the swan and little finger pieces are the thirteenth – fifteenth pieces mike has tattooed on me (and i had to count that out a few times, because i kept forgetting different ones every time).

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the swan and little finger pieces are the thirteenth through fifteenth pieces mike has tattooed on me (and i had to count that out a few times, because i kept forgetting different ones every time).  it’s always so exciting getting new work done and the little pieces on my hands are especially precious.  i still haven’t gotten used to them and am finding them super charming.  no special symbolism behind any of them, just designs that i liked, although growing up i loved some fairy tales that had swans, particularly one where a girl must knit shirts out of nettle in order to save her brothers, who’ve been transformed into swans.

and another thing i realised: i got a heart tattooed on my left ring finger just a couple months after my abusive marriage ended (an unconscious promise to love myself?) and now the arrow just after i’ve fallen in love for the first time since.  didn’t intend for either to symbolise the state of my love life, but maybe that’s why the heart and arrow felt like perfect tattoos to get…

 

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another reason not to shoot prairie dogs

it wasn’t until i had lived in the city for a few years that i realized how redneck it is to go hang out with one’s family in the back of a pickup truck and shoot at prairie dogs (“gophers”, who am i kidding).  it was a treasured pastime in the westendorf family and i endured it until i became a teenager and figured out that i could shrug out of it to stay home and play civilization 2 instead.  there’s this prairie myth that gopher holes cause cows and horses to break their legs, and that’s the pretext for going out and shooting these dudes!  [ok, i admit that it’s entirely possible for livestock to break a leg in a hole, but i’ve never heard of it actually happening, which leads me to believe it’s vanishingly rare]

anyway, apart from the ethics of shooting an animal just because it exists, now we have a new reason not to shoot gophers!  it turns out that the have a startlingly complex language.

this article from cbc gives further details on the study of prairie dog language.  it seems that, like crows, they can even tell individual humans apart!

alex

this research, along with complementary research into language in birds, is so necessary in breaking the egotistical barriers humans have placed between us and other species.  the belief that we are the only ones with linguistic ability is so limiting.  perhaps not every animal is an alex or koko, able to communicate with us in our own language, but to think that animals are not capable of complex communication within a species is completely ridiculous.

tunesday – what i wouldn’t do

okay, sorry about the radio silence–first i was in california, and then a whirlwind after i got home, and then and then and then…

 

but here’s something small, a little musical offering. i’m so in love with this song right now! it’s dancey and wonderful and reminds me of my friend chris chan  (he got a crush on serena ryder like 10 years ago because he knows everything about the canadian indie music scene and it was cute then and it’s still cute now).   on top of that,  i’m in a lovespace and so lovey music makes me happy! your love is like an ocean indeed.

 

 

 

falling in love with ‘the silent world’

on a whim, i picked up the jacques cousteau classic the silent world.  although he was a native french speaker, he wrote the book in english, and i was shocked at how similar his prose is to the (translated) works i’ve read by antione de sainte-exupery, wind, sand and stars in particular.  the story of cousteau and his team, exploring the oceans as the first ‘menfish’ is so captivating; i had never before considered those early days of sea exploration and how little we truly knew about the world beneath the waves.

although cousteau later gained the reputation of a conservationist, in seems many of his undersea experiments involve harming animals out of curiosity.  will the shark die if you harpoon its head?  why not just harpoon this whale and see how long it takes to die?  oh, you’ve discovered a colony of monk seals, a species thought to be extinct for 300 years, so  why not kidnap (his own words) a juvenile and raise it for a couple months until you realise how vast its appetite, and then release it to a zoo?  although some of the things his team did, such as dissecting manta rays, led to greater scientific understanding of the species, many of the incidents served to highlight the difference in attitudes toward animals then and now.

anyway, that didn’t hamper my enjoyment of the book–i adored it and wished there was more to it, but that’s always the way with a good book.

One Sunday morning in 1936 at Le Mourillon, near Toulon, I waded into the Mediterranean and looked into it through Fernez goggles.  I was a regular Navy gunner, a good swimmer interested only in perfecting my crawl style.  The sea was merely a salty obstacle that burned my eyes. I was astounded by what I saw in the shallow single at Le Mourillon, rocks covered with green, brown and silver forests of algae and fishes unknown to me, swimming in crystalline water. Standing up to breathe I saw a trolley car, people, electric-light poles. I put my eyes under again and civilization vanished with one last bow. I was in a jungle never seen by those who floated on the opaque roof.

Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed, to discard the old, embrace the new, and run headlong down an immutable course. It happened to me at Le Mourillon on that summer’s day, when my eyes were opened on the sea.

struggles with dysmorphia

recently i’ve been having such a hard time with the way i look. i’m the most fit i’ve ever been in my life–i can run 6-8 miles easily, bike for hours at a fast pace, i’m flexible and strong from fourteen years of yoga–but i’m struggling to love my body. i hate the way my thighs rub when i walk in a skirt and the way t-shirts and jeans frame my stomach. i’m trying so hard but i just don’t know how to reprogram my brain. it isn’t easy that i have so much photographic evidence of me being ten or fifteen pounds lighter (early 20s! ugh) and that it’s been so difficult to lose that weight. something happened; it seemed like as soon as i moved to vancouver i gained weight, and not just muscle weight from biking everywhere.

one of the most ridiculous parts of this whole-brain struggle is that when i was at my “ideal” 10ish-pounds-lighter weight, i still wasn’t happy with the way i looked.  i’ve had issues with my appearance, mainly focused on my stomach, since i was probably nine or ten.  it’s so stupid to focus so much energy and dislike on a single body part.  my body is visually appealing in so many other ways and it’s so strong and capable!

the real issue at hand isn’t the weight, whatever it may be, but my struggle to accept my awesome, strong, athletic body because of this weight. i’ve had brief periods where i’m happier with my body despite the weight gain (one of them was having my bra size measured to be several cups larger than i expected, another was when i was boxing a lot) but i keep swinging back to this unhappiness. i don’t believe that other people look at me and think negative thoughts about my body, and i get lots of positive reinforcement from my friends and boyfriend, but this is such a negative thought pattern and i don’t know how to crawl out of it.

recently i read a wonderful post on a similar subject: when i became a plus size model. it really hits home with me because i did a tonne of modeling when i was younger, although it wasn’t the professional level that this woman did.  i keep reading things like that post,  and talking with my friends, and at times it’s so inspiring but in the end it’s still so hard to be okay with those extra pounds.  i haven’t found any magic way to just get over this–sometimes it’s easier to be happy with my appearance, and sometimes it’s so difficult.