Color their Jurassic world

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Artwork by Chuang Zhao and Lida Xing
Reconstruction of two Sinosauropteryx
sporting their orange and white striped tails, borrowed from here

Hi. It's time to color dinosaurs. Woohoo!




First off, there was an exciting discovery by a team of Chinese and British paleontologists and earth scientists reported in Nature. You can read about fossilized melanosomes, pennaceous feathers and integumentary filaments at that article, OR you can do like I did and read the Dinosaur Colors for Almost-Dummies at the NYTimes.

The upshot is that all the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and any other illustrations you've ever seen were painted out of someone's imagination. Fossils are white or gray or brown, not the color of the original obviously. So there would be no way to know what colors dinosaurs actually were.

Until now!

These scientists made connections over the last four decades that birds have microscopic sacs of pigment in their feathers called melanosomes, and that fossils of extinct birds have the same melanosomes. Paleontologists in the 1970s had started believing that birds evolved from two-legged theropods - dinosaurs. And this led to more studies and evidence of feathers on dinosaurs. And so on.

By analyzing the shape and arrangement of the fossil melanosomes, they were able to get clues to their original color. They determined, for example, that a 47-million-year-old feather had the dark iridescent sheen found on starlings today.

Isn't that crazy?

So I say, let's celebrate and color some dinosaurs! Not that I am going to be limiting myself to the iridescent sheen of starlings. I found this enchanted web site where you can pick from brachiosauruses and megaraptors and dozens of other dionsauruses and color them virtually - any colors in their palette.

See, this is mine. What can I say, I'm not too wild. But you can be as wild as you want, although it does not let you color outside the lines, drat.




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gold

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Even in poverty ~ with passion and perseverance ~
a lot can be accomplished.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948

January 26 is Republic Day in India
~ A day the whole world celebrates
the power of non-violent civil disobedience.

~ ~ ~

Permit me to synchronize that with
a poor artist's rich sunflowers
on a postcard my daughter sent from Amsterdam some time ago.
You don't need a lot of money to create something beautiful.
In fact you might be very poor financially.
You might not ever make a living at what you do best.

Vincent van Gogh

Sunflowers, repetition of the 4th version (yellow background)
Oil on canvas, 95 × 73 cm
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

~ ~ ~

And a winter field clipped of its corn
looking "like a man's badly shaved beard"*
might be where power waits under a white winter sky
that will come to life under the heat of the summer sun.
Just a plow, soil, seed, sun, rain ~
and a new field of corn will rise up ~
Just like that.

With the right combination of elements
an impossible alchemy is possible.

Golden.

Don't forget it.
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* simile borrowed from Guy de Maupassant's Miss Harriett
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"Don't think about getting off from work" (and I don't think he means my 9-5 job)

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my office window

The Sunrise Ruby


In the early morning hour,
just before dawn, lover and beloved wake
and take a drink of water.

She asks, Do you love me or yourself more?
Really, tell the absolute truth.

He says, There is nothing left of me.
I am like a ruby held up to the sunrise.
Is it still a stone, or a world
made of redness? It has no resistance
to sunlight. The ruby and the sunrise are one.
Be courageous and discipline yourself.

Work. Keep digging your well.
Don't think about getting off from work.
Submit to a daily practice.
Your loyalty to that is a ring on the door.

Keep knocking, and the joy inside
will eventually open a window
and look out to see who's there.


- Rumi

So. What is "the work"? Somehow (apologies to non-American friends who don't follow our political soap operas) I don't think it's trashing and bashing Martha Coakley for being an idiot or Scott Brown for being the male version of Sarah Palin or John Edwards for being a slimy bastard, or any other number of my responses to the frustrations of the last week. Maybe Haiti has brought out the work in a lot of us. But I think that work is far away - as good as it is and present in my heart - and still not what Rumi is talking about. How to bring it closer to home? When he talks about lovers, is he talking about sexual love? I don't think so, even though that's the language he uses. You have to get even closer than that intimacy. He's talking about quarrying out divine love inside, through the rock of the ego. When I manage to dig, listen, knock, and see the joy look out, that's when I stop seeing the difference between me and someone else, when I stop saying in my head, "Oh I would so not have done what you just did." I can think I am so much better than a lot of people. But when I stop saying and feeling that, tension and exhaustion just disappear - becoming one, like the physical act of lovers, but on the inside.

This digging isn't for sainthood. It's not applying for doormat status. It's not la·di·da·ing oblivious to evil and stupidity. I think it's realizing that I am capable of everything I see behaved by humans - from the top of the chain to the bottom - as the parade goes by. Not seeing someone else as the other. That's the work. If it weren't hard, we'd all be there. But when you see joy look out to see who's there, it's ecstasy, and worth digging for again.

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eggs & eggplant

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Some husbands give their wives flowers. Or Cadbury Kraft chocolates. Some get robin's egg blue Tiffany boxes enclosing something shiny. I watched old movies when I was little where tuxedoed men gave mink stoles to their wives, who then twirled round and round, diaphanous gowns flaring at their calves as they buried their lipsticked smiles in fur.

Happily for me, my husband gives me photo ops.

Like ornamental chickens with Samuel Beckett hairdos (see Honey on my sidebar). A weather vane named Carl the Cutter. A row of heavy bent sunflowers left for chickadee feeders and corn stalks that radiate the January sun. Gifts that are stealthy and still life-y, such as veggies in September just off the stem resting on the turquoise metal garden chair where I can see them when I pull in the drive. Or gourds and pumpkins lined up on fence posts.

Sunday it was the day's just washed eggs arranged by color on a dish towel showcase. Better than jewels. He said he was really just seeing how many he had of each color.




So what does the wife offer the leaver of egg art? His favorite vegetable that happens to have egg in its name, in a winter-warming soup: roasted eggplant with garlic. Even I who am not the #1 fan of eggplant's texture loved it, because it was pureed and super yums. Why do you suppose they're called eggplant? Sometimes Don's hens lay long eggs shaped this way, poor things. Well, apparently some cultivars of eggplant in the 18th century looked like hen's or goose eggs and were yellow or white. And, who knew? They originated in India, where they are known as brinjal, and that sounds something like the name I think is most beautiful for them: aubergine.

eggplant roasted with mashed roasted garlic mixed with Herbes de Provence

Eggplant-Garlic Soup


Ingredients:
1 cup roasted garlic
1/2 cup Herbes de Provence (available bottled, or dried herbs of your choice)
Drizzle of olive oil
Kosher salt and black pepper to taste
2 large eggplant
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 cup minced onions
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 1/2 quart of vegetable (or chicken) stock (I added more stock to leftover soup the next day and liked the thinner consistency better)
1 cup coconut milk (or heavy dairy cream)
Cayenne pepper to taste

Directions:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. In a mixing bowl, combine the garlic, herbs and drizzle of olive oil together. Season with salt and pepper. Mix thoroughly. Split the eggplant in half, lengthwise and smear the garlic mixture over the top of each eggplant half. Place the eggplant on a baking sheet and place in the oven. Roast the eggplant for 30 minutes or until the eggplant is tender.

Remove from the oven and cool. Using a spoon, remove the flesh of the eggplant and discard the skin. Heat the oil in a 2-quart saucepan. When the oil is hot, add the onions. Saute for 2 minutes. Add the roasted eggplant and garlic and continue to saute for 2 minutes. Stir in the stock and bring the liquid to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes. Using a hand-held blender (I don't have one, so I just put it in a regular blender), puree the soup until smooth. Stir in the coconut milk or cream and continue to simmer for 3 minutes. Season the soup with the salt and the cayenne.

Modified from a recipe found here.
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