ORANGE GROOVE

Crystal Blue Persuasion
and
Other Sounds of Today
USA 1969

NEW HEAVENLY BLUE

Now available.. burner fixed itself!


New Heavenly Blue
UK 1972

GOOD MISSIONARIES

Deranged in Hastings
(Unnormality Records 7")
UK 1979

Liberian BBC news story exposed!

Sometime the news reports are right, but this time the BBC is thick-as-a-brick wrong:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8377936.stm

This is a story in reporter Rob Young’s mind about Liberians getting flooded by rising ocean waters due to global climate change. A brief look at the locale on Google Earth imagery, plus a tad of knowledge about coastal erosion processes and common sense, however, puts the kibosh on the whole story. Young presents the video as being about coastal fishing families in imminent danger of losing their homes from rising seas due to climate change. But look closer…

Look at Young’s featured site at lat/long N006.329642° / -W010.804113°, and while you’re at it look around along the coast to the NW and SE and into the interior from the city of Monrovia, which is where the video was taken. You can see there is plenty of land available for housing to replace the videoed slum. If you understand coastal zones, you will quickly see that the slum was constructed right to the very edge of the water. How ignorant is that? Rudimentary knowledge of coastal zones screams out that this slum was built on a coastal spit of shifting sand. How ignorant is that? Of course, the sea is nibbling away at the edge of the island, or at least one side of it! That’s what coastal barrier islands do, in rising or falling seas. Don’t Young’s editors know that?

Wait a minute! Is this really a fishing village, or is it a big city slum? Look at the fishing village just up the coast at lat/long N006.400670° / -W010.811669°. Notice all those beached fishing boats, approx 48 in number. The houses in this village are too indistinct to precisely count, but their number appears to be about the same as or a few more than the number of boats. Young’s slum OTOH has about the same number of boats (47 by my count), but that number is dwarfed by the hundreds of houses in the slum. Therefore, I seriously doubt that more than a small fraction (<10%) of the slum’s residents are fishers. In any event, it is hard to believe that there are enough fishers in the slum to support the slum. Notice that the houses in the real fishing village are set well back from the shoreline, not at all like those of the slum. Fishers know better than to build seaward of the storm tide line, whereas economic refugees from the interior do not. Notice that residential density is much lower in the real fishing village than in Young’s slum, probably because the people living in the real fishing village own their land, whereas Young’s slum residents appear to be squatters elbowing their way into the only free land available in the city!

So Young’s story is really one about a slum, created in ignorance on a coastal spit of shifting sands by people like Anna and her eight children. The very nature of Young’s presentation is one of so-called investigative reporting, but since there appears to be a complete misrepresentation of the facts in this case, I say it is not.

Rip Again & Start It Up

The machine came back to life on its own and FIXED ITSELF!
Hooray.

10 Breathtaking Cloud Formations

Florence, Italy
As Frank Slack stood over the Arno river, the combination of the setting sun and clouds rolling in produced this magnificent yellow and gray sky.

Huntsville, Alabama
Wes Thomas was lucky enough to witness these low, fast-moving clouds one night over Jones Valley. To produce the blurred effect, he set the camera to a 30-second exposure.

New York, New York
While walking the Brooklyn Bridge, Ben Brown captured this red sky moment minutes after a summer shower soaked the city.

Rio Vista, California
Looking out toward Mount Diablo from the patio of her home, amateur photographer Rebecca snapped this mixture of red clouds and a blue sky.

Walla Walla, Washington
When the sun is unusually high and the temperature is hot, sometimes a circumhorizontal arc like this one forms”which was immortalized by Lynn Suckow one summer afternoon.

Valencia, Spain
According to Marialuisa Wittlin, these lens-shaped clouds loomed over the mountains all day and she was able to get a shot of them before the sun finished setting”when this lovely scene disappeared.

Buskerud, Norway
For almost an entire month in January 2008, these nacreous clouds”which are known for their mother-of-pearl colors and only form in frigid temperatures”graced the Scandinavia skies.

Central Illinois
When sunlight is diffused through thin clouds with uniform water droplets, it produces vivid colors like these in the photo above”a phenomenon called iridescence.

Santa Fe city, Argentina
Impressive Supercell!!! perfect lights under the dark clouds after 8 month of drought. Although it seemed that rain was pouring, only 25 mm (1 in.) fell. Note the size of the clouds compared with the small lights of cars going through the highway and the buildings of the city in the background.

Aurora Borealis
Shot very early hours of the morn (0630 am sgp time) . It was dark .

Wild peace

Last Sunday, after a full day in the Chassahowitzka wilderness area, the four of us took a leisurely 3:45 hr canoeing trip on the southern Withlacoochee River, putting in at the Riverside RV boat ramp in Nobleton about 0.4 mile upstream of the CR 476 bridge. The RV park staff is friendly and allowed us to leave our vehicles parked there without charge. A few park people feed white bread to the river turtles and bream from the park’s dock. Here you see a mature female peninsular cooter being chased by a smaller male. It was humorous watching her chase bread and him chase her. Some things never change.

We got a very late start due to a lapse of respect on the part of one fellow, and shortly after launching we were attacked by a pair of large, unneutered male dogs that leaped into the river and swam out toward us, barking and snarling, with the evident intent of doing us harm. Some woman on the property just stood there and watched, and did nothing to restrain the dogs or even call to them. I wanted to bean the closer one with my paddle, but could not get Bruce to steer us that way. The next day, Bruce said he called the Citrus County Sheriff’s office to complain. I intend to call on Monday to find out what the local law enforcement did about the matter. So be careful if you paddle parallel to Lamkin Street anywhere near lat/long N028.647401°, -W082.262214° in Nobleton, Florida.

Once past town, the river widens and is flanked on both sides by wide floodplain forests dominated almost exclusively by bald cypress. These now-undevelopable wetlands are about 350 – 750 ft wide, so there is no development anywhere near the edge of the river. Paddling through there it felt like wilderness, and the three small islands in its center were the perfect location to take a break. This scene along the way shows the floodplain forest, a floating mat of grass and a peninsular turtle basking. Note the three dark spots on the hinge between the turtle’s plastron and carapace; they confirm the species identification.

Floating into Istachatta and its riverside development, the river narrows and we scooted quickly along. From that small town all the way to the SR 48 bridge take-out are only two small developments, mostly set back from the river’s edge. The remainder of the paddle is wild peace, with nothing but clean water, tall trees and plenty of fish and wildlife. Only occasionally did we encounter another boater. Lake Annie, another widening of the river, is an oxbow feature on a north-south alignment. As we entered it from the south, we could see a small cloud of turkey vultures circling amid the vestiges of the day’s last thermal.

The north end of the lake had large several cypress trees and snags supporting a few hundred more vultures. They were coming in to roost for the night from miles around, first approaching and then circling, and finally landing beside others either on the east side of the river or the west. I wondered how they made their choice of sides? Why would one go over here and the other over there? Wouldn’t it be safer if they all settled in together? But as we came closer, we could see that the east side held only black vultures and the west side only turkey vultures. Yep, birds of a feather flock together. Here’s a snag full of black vultures:

But which side of the river is better from a vulture’s perspective? Is one side better or was the choice made at random by the first few vultures? I do know that turkey vultures get up earlier in the morning. On a number of cold days in south Florida last winter when I was on site before first light in order to see which trees the caracaras emerged from (nested in), I had ample opportunity to learn in what order avian scavengers would get up in the morning. First are the blackbirds and crows, second the caracaras and eagles, third the red-shouldered hawks, fourth the turkey vultures and last to wipe the sleep from their eyes were the black vultures. Is it possible that the west side of the lake gets earlier sunlight and thus warms up before the shadier east side, and thus assists the turkey vulture’s early rising on a winter’s day? Or is the east side better for unknown reasons and the vastly more numerous black vultures ran off the turkey vultures?

Eric and Rodolfo:

You know what happens when you don't kill large animals?

While working in the veg garden this morning, I tossed a few beetle larvae and earthworms out into the lawn behind me. The next thing I knew, this red-shouldered hawk was sitting in a sweetgum about 8 ft from me watching the garden ground intently:


As usual, I did not make a second eye contact and ignored it until my camera was loaded for bear, so it relaxed and let me take a few pics. Thank you, Bird.


I really need to get back to the garden, but my sandhill crane was impatient this morning too, so I am of a mind to stand aside while they gorge for winter. There must be something else I can do around the place for a while...

Chassahowitzka Canoe & Bike & Hike

Saturday we arose well before sunup and grabbed breakfast. Dealing with the new permit system and chatting with the 4th generation local who explained the new permits to us at great length cost us almost a half-hour. Oh well, it was a cultural experience. We then launched two canoes at the Chassahowitzka River boat ramp. We paddled about two miles east along this beautiful, spring-fed, fish-filled stream, gratified at being able to get so close to wood storks:


Once we reached the Gulf of Mexico salt marsh, the river turns south and flows through its estuary. The floristically neat thing to me about the trip thru the salt marsh was the giant leather fern, so incongruous among needlerush and saltgrass. I suspect it makes better cover for wildlife than Juncus and Spartina, as it is much denser in growth form:


We continued another 2.6 miles to the head of Ryle Creek where it reaches Zebrafinch Road. People tie their boats to the cabbage palms lining the creek banks and then step out of their boats onto a mess of decomposing wooden pallets reminiscent of a jumble of “pick-up sticks.” The pallets and separate planks are in good to rotten shape, and the word “precarious” came to mind when navigating the narrow pallet path. But don’t get me wrong! I bless the nice people who took the time and effort to bring the pallets out there. Otherwise, it would have been a very muddy slog through the salt marsh to the road.

Zebrafinch is an elevated dirt and limerock causeway that runs through the Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge, and is used by hikers, bicyclists and hunters. The road is a little bumpy, but it is hard packed and relatively easy to ride on, and quite beautiful:


There is a hunter sign-in station at the landing, and we signed in even tho we weren’t hunting. We knew we were going to be a long way from home and out late at night under a moonless sky. From there, we biked (yes, we carried bicycles in our canoes) 2.6 miles south on Zebrafinch and then east at a tee another 1.8 miles to a short, almost hidden trail road that goes less than a hundred feet to a scenic sinkhole pond:


Over the next (too) few hours we biked around there and points south, and several times stashed bikes and walked into the swamp seeking features that on aerial photos looked like sinkhole ponds connected by a karst stream named Blind Creek. It is a clear blue, spring-fed stream that emerges from the aquifer into the shade of the dense Chassahowitzka Swamp forest and then runs several miles through the forest before plunging back into the aquifer. The stream and sinkhole ponds – a string of pearls in a black velvet swamp – point toward Blind Spring at the edge of the salt marsh. Cave divers have explored some of these sinks but have endured incredible hardships slogging their bulky, heavy gear through the swamps. The few accounts I have read indicate little or no underwater cave has been found yet, but I dunno, cave divers are pretty thorough and very discrete.

Eric, Bruce and I had each assembled a veritable library of maps of the place before we left. We had color aerial photos, topographic maps at scales identical to the aerials, several versions of the topos, national wildlife refuge maps and state wildlife management area maps, not to mention the maps on two GPS units. I had also established waypoints at critical road and tramway junctions and major karst pond features, loaded them into my GPS unit and printed them on my aerials and topos. We were loaded for bear, mind you, not because there are bear out there, which incidentally there are, but because we wanted to avert a death march.

We knew ahead of time we would have to cover a lot of ground to see even a small fraction of the major karst features out there. In planning for the adventure, we were estimating maybe 10 miles of canoeing, another 10 miles of bicycling and 2 miles of hiking, all in a short winter day. We knew we would have to paddle back in the dark, so we brought headlights and spare lights. Indeed, the paddle home was so dark we might have made a wrong turn or two if it were not for the GPS. The final tally was 9.2 miles canoeing, 9.4 miles biking and 2.1 miles hiking, totaling 20.7 miles.

The Chassahowitzka Swamp appears to be a young forest, with dominant trees being less than 18 in dbh and only 60 ft or so tall. Tree species is relatively high in this pastiche of habitats. The “drier” portions are still low hammocks, supporting diamondleaf oak, water oak, live oak, swamp chestnut oak, southern red cedar, American holly, persimmon and more. The swamp proper may have several dozen species of trees; I spotted bald cypress, sweetbay, pumpkin ask, popash, swamp tupelo, water hickory, cedar elm, Florida elm, red maple, dahoon holly, corkwood, red buckeye and others. Epiphytic bromeliads, ferns and orchids are abundant. There was also a species of ladies’ tresses orchid blooming:


The best way to more thoroughly explore the Chassahowitzka karst would be to camp out there over a long weekend, but that is illegal.

Eric Zamora took the photo of the orchid; all others are mine.

Tuber Flower Harvest

Earlier this year I planted four tubers of Jerusalem artichokes in the veg garden, ranging in size from medium to small. One photo shows a single flower on a plant top that sported dozens of flowers. The other pic depicts today’s harvest, altogether weighing a tad over 12 lbs. Gotta go get some recipes!

Potts Preserve Recon

Friday the 13th four of us rendezvoused at Potts Preserve on the southern Withlacoochee and set up camp at a riverside pavilion. Surprisingly, we had the campground to ourselves the whole weekend despite temps in the 55F – 80F range under nearly cloudless skies. Hauling canoes and bikes around meant we arrived a little late in the afternoon, but still got in a good little 5-mile bike ride on a trail at Potts. The property was acquired as a groundwater protection measure, with habitat protection an added benefit. The Lake Tsala Apopka must have once been a fantastic complex of ponds, lakes and all kinds of wetlands, plus innumerable upland peninsulas and islands of sandhill and flatwoods habitats. It now is a mess of pea green water and cattails, old trailers and lawns.

But Potts Preserve is different. It’s nice. We had time late Friday to bike a 5-mile loop trail northward from our campsite, getting back to camp after dark. Not a moon in the sky, but stars aplenty to see by even along the forested riverside trails. The path closest to the river is in good to excellent shape. It is a mowed trail road for the most part with limestone rocks paving low spots. The rocks are, as I remember, in the 2” – 3” size range rather than the usual mealy limerock that one normally encounters. Only in a spot or two are they liable to roll your wheels, because they have been smushed down into the soft hydric soil by heavy equipment. Overall, it is a fine trail to take a leisurely bike ride. We heard tree crickets, leopard frogs, barn owls and possibly a great horned owl.

Discarding fanny packs and cameras back at our vehicles, we hopped back on our rusty steeds and pedaled south and back out the preserve’s entrance a half-mile to Turner’s Fish Camp. On the river, Turner’s has outdoor and indoor seating, a juke box and a bar and a grill, and karaoke on Friday night! Yeehah! A local fellow named Marvin (stitched on his work uniform) kicked it off and sang several more times during the evening. Our expedition photographer, Eric, sang A Boy named Sue, and Eric’s buddy Rodolfo sang something from Stevie Ray Vaughn that sounded gravelly, like BB King. Another fellow sounded I swear just like Johnny Cash, and a young woman did Coal Miner’s Daughter and some others. You can laugh at karaoke if you want, but it is real people singing from their hearts. Bruce kept buying, well, ordering pitchers, so after all that and a smoky fish camp jook dinner we were quite properly prepared to get up before the crack of dawn for Saturday’s real, planned adventure.

Estonian Fairy Tale

The 10 Coolest Places to Swim

1. Bioluminescent Bay

Located in Puerto Rico, on Vieques Island, there is a shallow body of water with a narrow inlet known as Mosquito Bay. In each gallon of the bay there are 720,000 phosphorescent single-celled organisms that glow when they are agitated. It is a defense mechanism — the glowing is designed to daze whatever predator is bothering the tiny dinoflagellates. All together the bay, on a moonless night, will produce more than enough light to read. Swimming in Mosquito Bay will cause your limbs to be bathed in blue-green light. If you stop moving the light will dim, and eventually disappear completely, but each time you twitch it begins anew. Every time your kayak moves it too will be illuminated. It’s also easy to spot larger creatures; when manta rays or large jellies enter the mangrove swamps gentle rings of light form around them. If you scoop up a handful of the water you can watch individual glowing plankton roll down your arms and hands. And the salinity of the water, like the Dead Sea below, is high enough you can float sitting upright. Photographing Biobay isn’t easy, so there aren’t many high quality pictures of it, but enjoy the ones we found below.
2. Jellyfish Lake

12,000 to 15,000 years ago one of the limestone rock islands in the nation of Palau sealed itself off from the ocean and became a marine lake. A few jellyfish were sealed inside, and with virtually no predators, they began multiplying and evolving. Today more than 10 million jellyfish inhabit Ongeim’l Tketau, known as Jellyfish Lake to tourists. Their sting became evolutionarily useless, and has been lost over time, to the point that the jellies are completely harmless to swim with. Swimming in Jellyfish lake, surrounded by a translucent sea of rhythmically pulsing creatures, is known to be unbelievably serene. The jellies, varying in size from basketballs to blackberries, slowly undulate as they follow the path of the sun across the surface of the lake.
3. Devil’s Swimming Pool

The Devil’s Swimming Pool, or Devil’s Armchair, is a naturally formed infinity pool at the very top of Victoria Falls in Zambia. 420 feet above the river below, it is perfectly safe (in the dry season) to relax at the edge of one of the world’s largest waterfalls. From above the water it appears as if there’s nothing to stop one from being carried over the lip of the falls, but beneath the surface there is a natural rocky ledge that generates a back-eddy and stops the current. Looks scary, especially to jumping into, but the thousands of still-alive visitors can attest to its perfect safety record.
4. Dean’s Blue Hole

In a bay west of Clarence Town on Long Island, Bahamas, is the deepest underwater sinkhole in the world. It plunges 663 feet to the ocean floor, making it vastly deeper than other blue holes (The Great Blue Hole in Ambergris Caye, Belize is 410 feet deep, and the Blue Hole in Sinai, Egypt is about 420 feet deep). Dean’s is known worldwide as the perfect spot for free-diving; it was the location over the last few years of numerous new world and national free-diving records. The blue hole is roughly circular at the surface, with a diameter ranging from 25 to 35 metres (82–110 ft). After descending 20 metres (66 ft), the hole widens considerably into a cavern with a diameter of 100 metres (330 ft). If you prefer marine life to extreme breath-holding, however, I might recommend The Great Blue Hole in Belize. I snorkeled and dove it in 2007, and was enthralled with the crystal clear water and huge number of large fish and sharks. It was the first place I encountered a wild Blacktip reef shark, a wonderfully beautiful place. Jacques-Yves Cousteau declared it one of the top 10 scuba diving sites in the world. See a gallery of pictures of the Great Blue Hole below.
5. Zacatón Cenote

Zacatón is one of a group of five interconnected sinkholes, or cenotes, located in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, Mexico. It is the deepest water-filled sinkhole in the world with a total depth of 335 meters. DEPTHX, a NASA funded project using an autonomous robot has measured the underwater portion to be 319 meters deep (an air-filled 16 meter drop from the surface to the water accounts for the total depth). In a 1993 dive Dr. Ann Kristovich set the women’s world depth record of 554 feet, and on April 6, 1994, explorer diver Jim Bowden and cave diving pioneer Sheck Exley plunged into El Zacatón with the intent of reaching bottom. Bowden dove to a men’s world record depth of 925 feet, but Exley (who invented/standardized use of the “Octo” or octopus safety regulator) died, probably from high pressure nervous syndrome (HPNS) at around 879~906 feet. The name Zacatón comes from the free-floating islands of zacate grass which move about on the surface with the wind. They are visible in the pictures as the surprisingly-large circularly symmetric islands. Because they aren’t connected to the lake bed they float with the wind. Besides swimming and diving in the cenote you can swim to the islands and suntan and picnic as they slowly drift on the surface of the sinkhole.
6. The Dead Sea

The shores of the Dead Sea are the lowest land point on the surface of the Earth. Resting 1385 feet below sea level, the Dead Sea is also a hypersaline lake, one of the world’s saltiest bodies of water. It resides in the Middle East, between Israel and Jordan, and even appears in the Bible. What interests STS, however, is the level of salinity. Besides tasting awful, it also provides exceptional levels of buoyancy. The tourist in the photo is sitting in a reclined position, and the water is dense enough to support his weight. If you tried that in your local swimming pool you’d immediately sink. Apparently it’s an unbelievable sensation.


8. Yangbajain hot springs

The Yangbajing hot springs, in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, (known to people who appreciate freedom as Tibet) provides much of the electricity for Lhasa, the capital. A thermoelectric power plant on the edge of the Yangbajain hot spring fields, which cover 20-30 square kilometers. These particular springs are so interesting because they are at an elevation of approximately 14,000 feet (about the same as the peak of Mt. Rainier in Washington State). The water emerges from the crust of the earth at 84 degrees F, which is higher than the boiling point at that altitude. The springs themselves aren’t as beautiful as some of the other locations on this list, but they have a misty charm of their own.

9. The Seagaia Ocean Dome

The Seagaia Ocean Dome was the world’s largest indoor waterpark, located in Miyazaki, Miyazaki, Japan. The Ocean Dome measures 300 metres in length and 100 metres in width, and is included in the Guinness World Records. It opened in 1993, and visitor numbers peaked in 1995 at 1.25 million a year. The Ocean Dome was officially closed on October 1, 2007. The Ocean Dome sported a fake flame-spitting volcano, artificial sand and the world’s largest retractable roof, which provided a permanently blue sky even on a rainy day. The air temperature was always held at around 30 degrees celsius and the water at around 28. The sand was made from crushed marble, which doesn’t stick to skin as much as regular does — meaning when you lay down you don’t get sandy. Check out the pictures below — what an engineering project!







10. Sistema Sac Actun

The Yucatan Peninsula is home to the longest underwater cave system in the world. Sistema Sac Actun was found to be connected to Sistema Nohoch Nah Chich, creating a system 154,783 meters long, the longest underwater cave in the world. By comparison the previous record holder Ox Bel Ha measured a puny 146,761 m. I mean that’s only 91 miles long, sheesh. The two have been exchanging the record for years as new, previously unexplored, sections are discovered. The whole system has been named Sistema Sac Actun, and is home to some of the most decorated and beautiful cave diving sites in the world. The most well known entrance is Grande Cenote, pictures of it are above and below. There is surprisingly little information about this incredible cave system, but we’ve shared what we could find. Once you get in to the system the water temperature is relatively constant, and some parts are very fragile and require perfect buoyancy. As you get deeper in the system there are incredible stalactites and stalagmites, and other geologic features.