Asakiyume mita

Look at this bird that came up on Aves do Brasil:



Doesn't he look like a volcano at night, with lava just waiting to overbrim?



I feel it's such a good representation of how we all are. All our hot feelings at the top of our heads.

In English he's called a ruby-crowned tanager. His Brazilian name, tiê preto, translates as "black tiê" (and the word "tiê" comes from a Tupi word, "ti'ye," but my very cursory investigations haven't turned up what that means). It's funny that the English name looks at that one bright patch and the Brazilian name looks at the rest of him.

In other news, sometimes negative reviews can make you want to read something. Someone I follow on Goodreads wasn't a fan of The Navigating Fox, but their description of it intrigued me--a world with talking animals who interact more or less as peers with humans (though, as in Narnia, there are also animals who don't talk). The main character is the titular Navigating Fox, Quintus Shu'al, who starts out the story in disgrace. Fingers crossed that the story ends up being good.

The cover is really pretty, too. Not that that's a reason to choose a book, I realize, but it makes it fun to look at.

This was more an invitation to tag along with Werner Herzog and volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer as they shoot the breeze and visit some volcanoes than it is a volcano film. There are volcanoes in the film, to be sure, but there's no underlying structure, questions to be investigated, or organizing principle, and it spends a lot of time on topics that have only very tangential--or no--relation to volcanoes at all. You can still enjoy the conversation, but.

( more on the film )

One minor, entertaining note: Oppenheimer twice measures the power of a volcano's eruption/explosion in terms of the amount of pumice it put out, and that in terms of how deeply it would bury people for how far a geographic area. ("Enough pumice to bury everyone in the United States to head height" in the case of the eruption that produced Lake Toba in Indonesia and "enough to bury the whole of New York City--only the highest buildings would poke out at the top" in the case of the "millennium eruption" of Mt. Paektu in 946).

Verdict: very beautiful to look at, and engaging in its way, but not what I was hoping for.

Yesterday at the blog The Blue and Green House, they talked about the year without a summer--1816, the year following the massive eruption of Mt. Tambora. In my neck of the woods, snow fell as late as June and as early as August--across Europe there were famine conditions from failed crops. Wikipedia says that there was so much aerosolized material in the atmosphere that sunspots were visible to the naked eye.

Later in the day, out of the blue, wakanomori started telling me about one of the most powerful eruptions in recorded history, which he'd seen tweeted about. "Oh, maybe it was the eruption of Mt. Tambora," I said--fresh from my reading. He looked at me strangely and said, "Yeah, I think that's the one."

We both mused on why, in two separate venues, two separate people should have happened to talk about Mt. Tambora.

... And discovered that yesterday was the bicentennial of the eruption. Well then!

Meanwhile, on Twitter, people were tweeting humorous thoughts for new Hugo Award categories, and Nisi Shawl suggested, among other things, an award for Most Dramatic Pie.

So I decided to make a volcano pie--surely dramatic--to commemorate the bicentennial of Mt. Tambora's eruption. Behold the Pie:

Lots of red-lava chunks

On September 21–22 in Pen Pal, Kaya first started using her crow Sumi to carry messages. Although crows are messenger birds in many mythologies, they're not actually used as couriers in real life, not regularly anyway--pigeons are. People all over the world enjoy keeping homing pigeons (including in my town: I got a tour of a dovecote some years back--picture here); pigeons were used to deliver mail in India into the 2000s; and China still keeps military homing pigeons as a safeguard in the event that twenty-first-century communications are disabled for some reason (see Malcolm Moore, "China Trains Army of Messenger Pigeons," Telegraph, March 2, 2011.)

(Image source: Morgan Banaszek, "12 Facts about China You Probably Didn't Know,", Project Pengyou.)


On September 28 in Pen Pal, a bubble of carbon dioxide rises from a lake in Kaya's country, with disastrous consequences. In real life, this happened most dramatically in Cameroon's Lake Nyos in 1986. Lake Nyos is a crater lake, into which carbon dioxide slowly seeps from a pocket of magma. On August 21, the weight of water on top of the accumulating carbon dioxide was no longer enough to keep it down: it bubbled up and out, and because carbon dioxide is heavier than air, it settled on the surrounding land, suffocating approximately 1,700 people and 3,500 livestock. A similar, less devastating event had occurred two years earlier at another lake in Cameroon, Lake Monoun. The only other lake known to be at risk of this is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but all that's required for it to be possible is a lake above a volcanic fissure.

The eruption of carbon dioxide at Lake Nyos was accompanied by a rise in dissolved iron to the lake's surface, turning it rusty red:

[image no longer available]

Accumulations of carbon dioxide in mines are one of four sorts of killing "damps" (from the German dampf, meaning "vapor"--they're "choke damp" (also called "stythe damp"). The other sorts are "white damp" (carbon monoxide), "fire damp" (methane or other flammable gasses), and "stink damp" (hydrogen sulfide).

I have two new food treasures: One, from mnfaure (thank you my dear!), is Thé des songes, tea of dreams, which is fragrant and ethereal like dreams, but the look of it--black, with bursts of red and gold--is like the surface of a lava lake, so I think of it as lava tea.



And the other, red as blood, red as hot lava, is this bottle of palm oil!



And with this bottle of palm oil, I'm going to make *even more* of Flo Madubike's recipes. I'm going to start with this one, for fried beans.

. . . has surely got to be working in the sulfur mines in the crater of Kawah Ijen, a volcano in East Java, Indonesia. Stop and think a moment. Sulfur mining. In a volcano.

It's a world of fire, acid, and poisonous gases.

(There is an acid lake in the crater.)

Molten sulfur is blood red, but it burns with a blue flame. The photographer Olivier Grunewald took these photos, which ran in the Boston Globe on 8 December 2010. (Source for the entire photo essay here.) (Hat tip to yamamanama for showing me these!)

sulfur flames

image © Olivier Grunewald


image © Olivier Grunewald

molten sulfur

image © Olivier Grunewald

( hard work )

In conclusion. If you want to do a Cracked list about working in actual hellish circumstances, don't leave out the sulfur mine of Kawah Ijen.

I love that the British government is sending out warships to bring its stranded citizens home. I also love that in British English touring buses are called coaches, because then, when the BBC says that they are also sending coaches to help bring people home, you can picture this huge gathering of teams of coaches-and-six, horses stamping, people climbing in.

Let's hear it for international emergencies that (a) don't involve one group of people hurting another and (b) involve (as far as I know?) no loss of life. Really just huge inconveniences. But what an adventure! I suppose I'd be pretty stressed out if I were stranded in a foreign country, but if I wasn't about to have a baby or in need of medical attention, I think it would be exciting, all things considered. Thrown together with other people, maybe being the recipient of the kindness of strangers... neat.

When 9-11 happened, we hosted some stranded tourists, friends of my husband's parents, who had been seeing the sights in New England and were stuck here. 9-11 was awful, but hosting people in an emergency was wonderful and warm.