Sunday, October 26, 2014
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Friday, October 24, 2014
Thursday, October 23, 2014
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
_on_the_James_River_in_2013.JPG)
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Monday, October 20, 2014
Charles Martel 'The Hammer'
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Aram Saroyan
On a cool autumn evening in 1965, a 22-year-old poet named Aram Saroyan typed seven letters that would amount to one of the most controversial poems in history.
Not that he knew it at the time.
It was growing late, and a waiting friend (Saroyan can’t remember his name) was getting antsy. He wanted to leave Saroyan’s little apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and head downtown to Le Metro Café where Lou Reed and The Fugs and Andy Warhol liked to hang out when they were still freaks, not superstars. But Saroyan held him off. Dead center on the sheet of paper curled in his Royal manual typewriter, he clacked out this single misspelled word:
lighght
Then they split. More than four decades after they shut the door, people are still talking about this word.
* * *
The mid-‘60s were a good time for new ideas. “In retrospect, it was sort of a Golden Age,” says Ron Padgett, a poet who spent much of that golden age in New York with Saroyan. “You could know Andy, and he’d put you in one of his movies or give you an art piece. Also, money in art wasn't the horrendous issue that it soon became.” He remembers hanging out with Saroyan at Le Metro, downing strong coffee and setting a course for how they were going to change poetry. Both were influenced by the Dadaists and the poet Robert Creeley. They’d been experimenting with “concrete” poetry, which is as much about the arrangement of words as about what they say. They were also creating minimalist poetry before such a classification existed. “There was a childlike delight in playing with words on the page,” says Padgett.
One day another of Saroyan’s friends, the poet Ted Berrigan, got a look at his latest one-word poem, eyeye, on a sheet of typewriter paper. “He said, ‘What the fuck is this?’” Saroyan recalls, “which I thought was a promising response.”
It’s also a valid question. “Lighght” is something you see rather than read. Look at “lighght” as a poem and you might not get it. Look at it as a kind of photograph, and you’ll be closer. “The difference between “lighght” and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn’t have a reading process,” says Saroyan, who lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at the University of Southern California. His Complete Minimal Poems was published in June by Ugly Duckling Presse. “Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn’t. You can see it all at once. It’s instant.”
Just how precarious the whole thing is, though, might not be so immediately apparent. Take away one “gh” and it would pass straight through you—add another, and its starkness is lost. Repeating the “t” in the middle would be like dropping a rock in the ancient-lake stillness laid out by those four silent consonants. What you’re left with is more sensation than thought. The poem doesn’t describe luminosity—the poem is luminosity. That way of looking at language became Saroyan’s playing field for years. “I got intrigued by the look of individual words,” he says. “The word ‘guarantee,’ for instance, looks to me a bit like a South American insect.”
What’s so controversial about that, you may ask? Nothing, in fact. It wasn’t until the U.S. government got involved that Saroyan found himself the unwitting center of a hurricane that still hasn’t spun itself out.
A year after “lighght” appeared in The Chicago Review, George Plimpton decided to include it in the second volume of The American Literary Anthology, which he was editing for the National Endowment for the Arts, then barely five years old. Under the NEA’s newly established Literature Program, every author featured in the anthology received a cash award. Plimpton picked Saroyan’s “lighght,” so the NEA cut him a check for $750—the same as all the other authors in the anthology. The Review kept $250, and Saroyan kept the rest. All of which seems reasonable enough—that is, unless you judge the poem’s worth on a strictly cost-per-word basis—which is exactly what Congress did.
When Representative William Scherle, a Republican from Iowa, caught wind of the one-word poem, he launched a national campaign against the indefensible wastefulness of the newly established NEA, and urged the removal of its chairperson, Nancy Hanks. Jesse Helms had his hackles raised, too. Pretty soon, Michael Straight, deputy chairperson of the Endowment at the time, “was personally called to the offices of 46 members of Congress to explain the matter,” according to NEA documents. Mailbags of letters from fuming taxpayers clogged the agency’s boxes, most of them variations on a theme: We can’t afford to lower taxes but we can pay some beatnik weirdo $500 to write one word…and not even spell it right?!
“If my kid came home from school spelling like that,” one congressman said, according to the now-defunct arts and literature quarterly Sabine. “I would have stood him in the corner with a dunce cap.” Plimpton, for his part, wasn’t about to step out of the fray. After Scherle denounced the poem in the House of Representatives, Plimpton traveled to Iowa to campaign against him. Scherle ultimately lost his re-election bid in 1974. And when Plimpton was asked by a congressman to explain Saroyan’s poem. According to Sabine, he responded, “You are from the Midwest. You are culturally deprived, so you would not understand it anyway.”
“Lighght,” it turns out, was more than just a groundbreaking poem. It was the perfect metaphor for the often hairy business of mixing government with art—an antagonism that would be revisited when the Endowment later financed the likes of Robert Clark Young, Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and the artists Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes, who became known as the NEA Four. While Saroyan was hardly the lightning rod these later artists became, “lighght” did become a pet anecdote for a cadre of conservatives who saw federal funding of the arts as just a few notches shy of setting tax-payers’ money on fire.
“‘Lighght’ provided a small amount of ammunition for attacking the NEA, but [the NEA’s opponents] used it all up,” says Padgett. “They never seem to pick on fiction. I guess they don't have time to read it.”
All of this was a little hard to take seriously, Saroyan says now, at a time when 500 Americans a week were dying in Vietnam, and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had recently been assassinated. However strongly the “lighght” controversy reverberated in the halls of Congress, it wasn’t exactly sending shivers down the poetry world’s collective spine. “The poets I knew didn't give a damn,” says Padgett. “We found the brouhaha amusing. And I think Aram did too. Imagine: we're wreaking havoc in Southeast Asia, our whole country's out of its head, and we're getting worked up about a misplaced consonant?”
In fact, angry politicos probably imbued Saroyan’s poem with more longevity than the art world ever could have. A quarter century after Saroyan first typed those seven letters—long after the sun had set on the Summer of Love and the poet had abandoned his minimalist experimentation to try his hand at prose—Ronald Reagan was still making pejorative allusions to “lighght.” That sparked Saroyan to write about the whole affair for Mother Jones in 1981, in a piece he called “The Most Expensive Word in History.”
But there is something uniquely enduring about “lighght”—a peculiar energy that goes beyond the realm of controversy or the resurrection of poetic taxonomies. That single word still manages to make people think—even Saroyan. Recently, he figured he’d make the poem into a Christmas card to send around to some friends—just the word, white on white, centered, and embossed into heavy card stock. “What I realized was that if you emboss it, you don’t need the extra ‘gh,’” he says. “So apparently the crux of the poem is to try and make the ineffable, which is light—which we only know about because it illuminates something else—into a thing. An extra ‘gh’ does it. Embossing it does it. Engraving it in stone, and letting the light play off the actual word, does it, too. It’s sculptural on that level.”
In Complete Minimal Poems, “lighght” is restored to its place at the center of a single white page. Minimalist poetry, Saroyan says, might be having another moment. But lighght isn’t the only word in there that should get people thinking again. “I realized recently that my poem “lobstee” was written in Stockholm, where the billboards in Swedish had more diphthongs, and I liked that look,” says Saroyan. “The double ‘aa’ in ‘aaple’ looked good to me. I love Gertrude Stein's line about ‘A rose is a rose is a rose.’ She said that was the first time the rose has been really red in English literature in the past two centuries.”
Not that he knew it at the time.
It was growing late, and a waiting friend (Saroyan can’t remember his name) was getting antsy. He wanted to leave Saroyan’s little apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and head downtown to Le Metro Café where Lou Reed and The Fugs and Andy Warhol liked to hang out when they were still freaks, not superstars. But Saroyan held him off. Dead center on the sheet of paper curled in his Royal manual typewriter, he clacked out this single misspelled word:
lighght
Then they split. More than four decades after they shut the door, people are still talking about this word.
* * *
The mid-‘60s were a good time for new ideas. “In retrospect, it was sort of a Golden Age,” says Ron Padgett, a poet who spent much of that golden age in New York with Saroyan. “You could know Andy, and he’d put you in one of his movies or give you an art piece. Also, money in art wasn't the horrendous issue that it soon became.” He remembers hanging out with Saroyan at Le Metro, downing strong coffee and setting a course for how they were going to change poetry. Both were influenced by the Dadaists and the poet Robert Creeley. They’d been experimenting with “concrete” poetry, which is as much about the arrangement of words as about what they say. They were also creating minimalist poetry before such a classification existed. “There was a childlike delight in playing with words on the page,” says Padgett.
One day another of Saroyan’s friends, the poet Ted Berrigan, got a look at his latest one-word poem, eyeye, on a sheet of typewriter paper. “He said, ‘What the fuck is this?’” Saroyan recalls, “which I thought was a promising response.”
It’s also a valid question. “Lighght” is something you see rather than read. Look at “lighght” as a poem and you might not get it. Look at it as a kind of photograph, and you’ll be closer. “The difference between “lighght” and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn’t have a reading process,” says Saroyan, who lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at the University of Southern California. His Complete Minimal Poems was published in June by Ugly Duckling Presse. “Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn’t. You can see it all at once. It’s instant.”
Just how precarious the whole thing is, though, might not be so immediately apparent. Take away one “gh” and it would pass straight through you—add another, and its starkness is lost. Repeating the “t” in the middle would be like dropping a rock in the ancient-lake stillness laid out by those four silent consonants. What you’re left with is more sensation than thought. The poem doesn’t describe luminosity—the poem is luminosity. That way of looking at language became Saroyan’s playing field for years. “I got intrigued by the look of individual words,” he says. “The word ‘guarantee,’ for instance, looks to me a bit like a South American insect.”
What’s so controversial about that, you may ask? Nothing, in fact. It wasn’t until the U.S. government got involved that Saroyan found himself the unwitting center of a hurricane that still hasn’t spun itself out.
A year after “lighght” appeared in The Chicago Review, George Plimpton decided to include it in the second volume of The American Literary Anthology, which he was editing for the National Endowment for the Arts, then barely five years old. Under the NEA’s newly established Literature Program, every author featured in the anthology received a cash award. Plimpton picked Saroyan’s “lighght,” so the NEA cut him a check for $750—the same as all the other authors in the anthology. The Review kept $250, and Saroyan kept the rest. All of which seems reasonable enough—that is, unless you judge the poem’s worth on a strictly cost-per-word basis—which is exactly what Congress did.
When Representative William Scherle, a Republican from Iowa, caught wind of the one-word poem, he launched a national campaign against the indefensible wastefulness of the newly established NEA, and urged the removal of its chairperson, Nancy Hanks. Jesse Helms had his hackles raised, too. Pretty soon, Michael Straight, deputy chairperson of the Endowment at the time, “was personally called to the offices of 46 members of Congress to explain the matter,” according to NEA documents. Mailbags of letters from fuming taxpayers clogged the agency’s boxes, most of them variations on a theme: We can’t afford to lower taxes but we can pay some beatnik weirdo $500 to write one word…and not even spell it right?!
“If my kid came home from school spelling like that,” one congressman said, according to the now-defunct arts and literature quarterly Sabine. “I would have stood him in the corner with a dunce cap.” Plimpton, for his part, wasn’t about to step out of the fray. After Scherle denounced the poem in the House of Representatives, Plimpton traveled to Iowa to campaign against him. Scherle ultimately lost his re-election bid in 1974. And when Plimpton was asked by a congressman to explain Saroyan’s poem. According to Sabine, he responded, “You are from the Midwest. You are culturally deprived, so you would not understand it anyway.”
“Lighght,” it turns out, was more than just a groundbreaking poem. It was the perfect metaphor for the often hairy business of mixing government with art—an antagonism that would be revisited when the Endowment later financed the likes of Robert Clark Young, Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and the artists Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes, who became known as the NEA Four. While Saroyan was hardly the lightning rod these later artists became, “lighght” did become a pet anecdote for a cadre of conservatives who saw federal funding of the arts as just a few notches shy of setting tax-payers’ money on fire.
“‘Lighght’ provided a small amount of ammunition for attacking the NEA, but [the NEA’s opponents] used it all up,” says Padgett. “They never seem to pick on fiction. I guess they don't have time to read it.”
All of this was a little hard to take seriously, Saroyan says now, at a time when 500 Americans a week were dying in Vietnam, and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had recently been assassinated. However strongly the “lighght” controversy reverberated in the halls of Congress, it wasn’t exactly sending shivers down the poetry world’s collective spine. “The poets I knew didn't give a damn,” says Padgett. “We found the brouhaha amusing. And I think Aram did too. Imagine: we're wreaking havoc in Southeast Asia, our whole country's out of its head, and we're getting worked up about a misplaced consonant?”
In fact, angry politicos probably imbued Saroyan’s poem with more longevity than the art world ever could have. A quarter century after Saroyan first typed those seven letters—long after the sun had set on the Summer of Love and the poet had abandoned his minimalist experimentation to try his hand at prose—Ronald Reagan was still making pejorative allusions to “lighght.” That sparked Saroyan to write about the whole affair for Mother Jones in 1981, in a piece he called “The Most Expensive Word in History.”
But there is something uniquely enduring about “lighght”—a peculiar energy that goes beyond the realm of controversy or the resurrection of poetic taxonomies. That single word still manages to make people think—even Saroyan. Recently, he figured he’d make the poem into a Christmas card to send around to some friends—just the word, white on white, centered, and embossed into heavy card stock. “What I realized was that if you emboss it, you don’t need the extra ‘gh,’” he says. “So apparently the crux of the poem is to try and make the ineffable, which is light—which we only know about because it illuminates something else—into a thing. An extra ‘gh’ does it. Embossing it does it. Engraving it in stone, and letting the light play off the actual word, does it, too. It’s sculptural on that level.”
In Complete Minimal Poems, “lighght” is restored to its place at the center of a single white page. Minimalist poetry, Saroyan says, might be having another moment. But lighght isn’t the only word in there that should get people thinking again. “I realized recently that my poem “lobstee” was written in Stockholm, where the billboards in Swedish had more diphthongs, and I liked that look,” says Saroyan. “The double ‘aa’ in ‘aaple’ looked good to me. I love Gertrude Stein's line about ‘A rose is a rose is a rose.’ She said that was the first time the rose has been really red in English literature in the past two centuries.”
Friday, October 17, 2014
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo!
James while John had had had had, had had had. Had had had had a better effect on the teacher
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Nimrod
The twin sons of King Nimród, Hunor and Magor, each with 100 warriors, followed the White Stag through the Meotis Marsh, where they lost sight of the magnificent animal. Hunor and Magor found the two daughters of King Dul of the Alans, together with their handmaidens, whom they kidnapped. Hungarian legends held Hunor and Magyar (aka Magor) to be ancestors of the Huns and the Magyars (Hungarians), respectively.
Monday, October 13, 2014
Sunday, October 12, 2014
Hugh Trevor-Roper
Trevor-Roper's most widely read and financially rewarding book was titled the The Last Days of Hitler (1947). It emerged from his assignment as a British intelligence officer in 1945 to discover what happened in the last days of Hitler's bunker. From his interviews with a range of witnesses and study of surviving documents he demonstrated that Hitler was dead and had not escaped from Berlin. He also showed that Hitler's dictatorship was not an efficient unified machine but a hodge-podge of overlapping rivalries. Trevor-Roper's reputation was damaged in 1983, however, when he authenticated the Hitler Diaries and they were shown shortly afterwards to be forgeries.
Saturday, October 11, 2014
SR-71
There were a lot of things we couldn't do in an SR-71, but we were the fastest guys on the block and loved reminding our fellow aviators of this fact. People often asked us if, because of this fact, it was fun to fly the jet. Fun would not be the first word I would use to describe flying this plane. Intense, maybe. Even cerebral. But there was one day in our Sled experience when we would have to say that it was pure fun to be the fastest guys out there, at least for a moment.
It occurred when Walt and I were flying our final training sortie. We needed 100 hours in the jet to complete our training and attain Mission Ready status. Somewhere over Colorado we had passed the century mark. We had made the turn in Arizona and the jet was performing flawlessly. My gauges were wired in the front seat and we were starting to feel pretty good about ourselves, not only because we would soon be flying real missions but because we had gained a great deal of confidence in the plane in the past ten months. Ripping across the barren deserts 80,000 feet below us, I could already see the coast of California from the Arizona border. I was, finally, after many humbling months of simulators and study, ahead of the jet.
I was beginning to feel a bit sorry for Walter in the back seat. There he was, with no really good view of the incredible sights before us, tasked with monitoring four different radios. This was good practice for him for when we began flying real missions, when a priority transmission from headquarters could be vital. It had been difficult, too, for me to relinquish control of the radios, as during my entire flying career I had controlled my own transmissions. But it was part of the division of duties in this plane and I had adjusted to it. I still insisted on talking on the radio while we were on the ground, however. Walt was so good at many things, but he couldn't match my expertise at sounding smooth on the radios, a skill that had been honed sharply with years in fighter squadrons where the slightest radio miscue was grounds for beheading. He understood that and allowed me that luxury.
Just to get a sense of what Walt had to contend with, I pulled the radio toggle switches and monitored the frequencies along with him. The predominant radio chatter was from Los Angeles Center, far below us, controlling daily traffic in their sector. While they had us on their scope (albeit briefly), we were in uncontrolled airspace and normally would not talk to them unless we needed to descend into their airspace.
We listened as the shaky voice of a lone Cessna pilot asked Center for a readout of his ground speed. Center replied: "November Charlie 175, I'm showing you at ninety knots on the ground."
Now the thing to understand about Center controllers, was that whether they were talking to a rookie pilot in a Cessna, or to Air Force One, they always spoke in the exact same, calm, deep, professional, tone that made one feel important. I referred to it as the " Houston Center voice." I have always felt that after years of seeing documentaries on this country's space program and listening to the calm and distinct voice of the Houston controllers, that all other controllers since then wanted to sound like that, and that they basically did. And it didn't matter what sector of the country we would be flying in, it always seemed like the same guy was talking. Over the years that tone of voice had become somewhat of a comforting sound to pilots everywhere. Conversely, over the years, pilots always wanted to ensure that, when transmitting, they sounded like Chuck Yeager, or at least like John Wayne. Better to die than sound bad on the radios.
Just moments after the Cessna's inquiry, a Twin Beech piped up on frequency, in a rather superior tone, asking for his ground speed. "I have you at one hundred and twenty-five knots of ground speed." Boy, I thought, the Beechcraft really must think he is dazzling his Cessna brethren. Then out of the blue, a navy F-18 pilot out of NAS Lemoore came up on frequency. You knew right away it was a Navy jock because he sounded very cool on the radios. "Center, Dusty 52 ground speed check". Before Center could reply, I'm thinking to myself, hey, Dusty 52 has a ground speed indicator in that million-dollar cockpit, so why is he asking Center for a readout? Then I got it, ol' Dusty here is making sure that every bug smasher from Mount Whitney to the Mojave knows what true speed is. He's the fastest dude in the valley today, and he just wants everyone to know how much fun he is having in his new Hornet. And the reply, always with that same, calm, voice, with more distinct alliteration than emotion: "Dusty 52, Center, we have you at 620 on the ground."
And I thought to myself, is this a ripe situation, or what? As my hand instinctively reached for the mic button, I had to remind myself that Walt was in control of the radios. Still, I thought, it must be done - in mere seconds we'll be out of the sector and the opportunity will be lost. That Hornet must die, and die now. I thought about all of our Sim training and how important it was that we developed well as a crew and knew that to jump in on the radios now would destroy the integrity of all that we had worked toward becoming. I was torn.
Somewhere, 13 miles above Arizona, there was a pilot screaming inside his space helmet. Then, I heard it. The click of the mic button from the back seat. That was the very moment that I knew Walter and I had become a crew. Very professionally, and with no emotion, Walter spoke: "Los Angeles Center, Aspen 20, can you give us a ground speed check?" There was no hesitation, and the replay came as if was an everyday request. "Aspen 20, I show you at one thousand eight hundred and forty-two knots, across the ground."
I think it was the forty-two knots that I liked the best, so accurate and proud was Center to deliver that information without hesitation, and you just knew he was smiling. But the precise point at which I knew that Walt and I were going to be really good friends for a long time was when he keyed the mic once again to say, in his most fighter-pilot-like voice: "Ah, Center, much thanks, we're showing closer to nineteen hundred on the money."
For a moment Walter was a god. And we finally heard a little crack in the armor of the Houston Center voice, when L.A.came back with, "Roger that Aspen, Your equipment is probably more accurate than ours. You boys have a good one."
It all had lasted for just moments, but in that short, memorable sprint across the southwest, the Navy had been flamed, all mortal airplanes on freq were forced to bow before the King of Speed, and more importantly, Walter and I had crossed the threshold of being a crew. A fine day's work. We never heard another transmission on that frequency all the way to the coast.
For just one day, it truly was fun being the fastest guys out there.
Friday, October 10, 2014
Thursday, October 9, 2014
The Simulation Dream
There’s an old dream in game design. It drives the design of games like SimCity, Dwarf Fortress, Tropico, The Sims, and Prison Architect. I like to call it the Simulation Dream.
In 1996, Starr Long, the associate producer of Ultima Online, talked about the game before release:
That’s the Simulation Dream – the idea of making a complex simulation of a story world, which creates fascinating emergent stories as powerful as those you might write yourself. The idea bursts with potential. And it appears everywhere. Early in the development of BioShock, that game had an ecology too. There were three parts to it. Splicers would hunt Gatherers, who were in turn guarded by Protectors. The player was supposed to interact with and manipulate this ecology to survive.
But these dreams shattered. After its release, Richard Garriott said of Ultima Online:
In 1996, Starr Long, the associate producer of Ultima Online, talked about the game before release:
“Nearly everything in the world, from grass to goblins, has a purpose, and not just as cannon fodder either. The ‘virtual ecology’ affects nearly every aspect of the game world, from the very small to the very large. If the rabbit population suddenly drops (because some gung-ho adventurer was trying out his new mace) then wolves may have to find different food sources (e.g., deer). When the deer population drops as a result, the local dragon, unable to find the food he’s accustomed to, may head into a local village and attack. Since all of this happens automatically, it generates numerous adventure possibilities.”
That’s the Simulation Dream – the idea of making a complex simulation of a story world, which creates fascinating emergent stories as powerful as those you might write yourself. The idea bursts with potential. And it appears everywhere. Early in the development of BioShock, that game had an ecology too. There were three parts to it. Splicers would hunt Gatherers, who were in turn guarded by Protectors. The player was supposed to interact with and manipulate this ecology to survive.
But these dreams shattered. After its release, Richard Garriott said of Ultima Online:
“We thought it was fantastic. We’d spent an enormous amount of time and effort on it. But what happened was all the players went in and just killed everything; so fast that the game couldn’t spawn them fast enough to make the simulation even begin. And so, this thing that we’d spent all this time on, literally no-one ever noticed – ever – and we eventually just ripped it out of the game.”
http://tynansylvester.com/2013/06/the-simulation-dream/#more-729
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Keeping a Water Feature, Without the Mosquitoes!
A water feature can be a positive addition to your garden landscape. It will create a relaxing feel and an interesting focal point and is also said to be good Feng Shui, especially if the water is flowing. The main downside to keeping a water feature is that it can easily become a breeding ground for mosquitoes, which are not only annoying but potentially dangerous. They can transmit diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and encephalitis, or even heartworm to your beloved pets. For this reason alone home gardeners often feel reluctant to add any water source to the landscape or home. Don’t let those pesky pests put you off! For every problem there is always a solution! With a few easy precautions you can have a water feature and still feel safe that you are not providing a breeding ground for mosquitoes.
There are a number of ways that you can prevent or reduce mosquito production. The simplest, laziest, and easiest way is to add BTI larvacide to the water. BTI is a naturally occurring type of bacillus bacteria that is eaten by the mosquito larvae, and rapidly kills them. It comes in tablet form and you simply drop into the water. It is not harmful to fish, pets, wildlife or humans, so you won’t have to worry if your dog or cat drinks the water. It is usually sold under names such as mosquito dunks or mosquito bits, and is readily available at good hardware stores and from the internet. It is also relatively cheap. If you don’t have aquatic plants or fish, and you need a one off solution to control a heavy infestation, a simple home remedy is to pour vegetable oil directly onto the water. The oil works by putting a film over the top layer of water, which prevents the larvae from breathing and penetrating the surface. If you have fish or aquatic plants within your water feature obviously this is not a suitable remedy.
The next easiest solution is to add a submersible pump, a waterfall or fountain. Flowing water is pleasant and will also enhance the water quality. If it is possible keep the water flowing at all times. Mosquito larvae can only survive in stagnant water. Newly hatched mosquitoes must rest on the surface for a few minutes to let their wings dry, because of this they will not lay eggs in water that is constantly moving.
If you can only run your pump for a few hours a week then the next best option is to incorporate mosquito eating fish into your water feature. Many varieties of fish prey on mosquitoes. They won’t stop mosquitoes laying eggs, but they will eat the larvae and prevent them from growing into adults. Goldfish, white cloud minnows, zebra danios and the betta fish (also known as the Siamese fighting fish) are all excellent choices for controlling mosquito outbreaks in your pond. Koi on the other hand are too large and will not target the larvae. The white clouds or the black and white stripy zebra danios are my personal favorites for a pond as they swim in a school, are attractive and easily munch up all the larvae. I once had an old aquarium out the back that had filled with rain water and hundreds of mosquito larvae.
I added as little as ten minnows and watched in amazement as they hunted down and devoured every last one. Within half an hour they had eaten every single mosquito larvae, not a single one left. And then after that, they kept on hunting for the next half an hour just to make sure that there were no more! I personally guarantee that these fish love to eat mosquito larvae. Minnows are very small, hardy and will companion well with goldfish, or Siamese fighting fish who are both also known for their ability to control mosquito numbers. It is important to note that the Siamese fighting fish is named so because of its behavior towards other males of the same species. You cannot keep two or more males in the same pond as they will fight each other until only one remains.
Proper maintenance will also contribute to reducing the mosquito danger. Water trapped in the top of pots, shallow margins, water trapped between rocks, thick aquatic plants all provide protection from natural predators (fish and insects). By managing these areas you will minimize opportunities for mosquitoes to hatch in your pond. If you have submerged pots in your feature, make sure that the edge of the pot is below the water’s surface. Fill in any small pools of water between larger rocks with gravel. Thin out any dense growths of aquatic plants, or overgrown plants around the water feature. Dense or overcrowded aquatic plants provide safety for mosquito larvae. Thinning them out allows the fish and water to circulate easier. Remove any excess organic material from your pond such as leaves or grass. This material provides food for mosquito larvae and can also shelter them from natural predators.
For mosquito prevention, your best option is to cover all bases and use a combination of all of these strategies. Run your pump for a few hours, add some fish, and regularly maintain overgrown or trapped water areas. Ideally a pump running for at least a few hours per day combined with suitable mosquito eating fish is the ideal set up for a home water feature. I would recommend adding ten minnows or zebra danios in conjunction with two or three goldfish, and maybe even a Siamese fighting fish. Make sure not to over feed the fish as they may not eat the mosquito larvae if they are not hungry. If you aren’t able to add fish then add some BTI or mosquito dunks. The way I see it, mosquitoes are essentially the weeds of the water garden, and just like real weeds with regular maintenance you can easily de-weed your water feature of those nasty mosquitoes.
There are a number of ways that you can prevent or reduce mosquito production. The simplest, laziest, and easiest way is to add BTI larvacide to the water. BTI is a naturally occurring type of bacillus bacteria that is eaten by the mosquito larvae, and rapidly kills them. It comes in tablet form and you simply drop into the water. It is not harmful to fish, pets, wildlife or humans, so you won’t have to worry if your dog or cat drinks the water. It is usually sold under names such as mosquito dunks or mosquito bits, and is readily available at good hardware stores and from the internet. It is also relatively cheap. If you don’t have aquatic plants or fish, and you need a one off solution to control a heavy infestation, a simple home remedy is to pour vegetable oil directly onto the water. The oil works by putting a film over the top layer of water, which prevents the larvae from breathing and penetrating the surface. If you have fish or aquatic plants within your water feature obviously this is not a suitable remedy.
The next easiest solution is to add a submersible pump, a waterfall or fountain. Flowing water is pleasant and will also enhance the water quality. If it is possible keep the water flowing at all times. Mosquito larvae can only survive in stagnant water. Newly hatched mosquitoes must rest on the surface for a few minutes to let their wings dry, because of this they will not lay eggs in water that is constantly moving.
If you can only run your pump for a few hours a week then the next best option is to incorporate mosquito eating fish into your water feature. Many varieties of fish prey on mosquitoes. They won’t stop mosquitoes laying eggs, but they will eat the larvae and prevent them from growing into adults. Goldfish, white cloud minnows, zebra danios and the betta fish (also known as the Siamese fighting fish) are all excellent choices for controlling mosquito outbreaks in your pond. Koi on the other hand are too large and will not target the larvae. The white clouds or the black and white stripy zebra danios are my personal favorites for a pond as they swim in a school, are attractive and easily munch up all the larvae. I once had an old aquarium out the back that had filled with rain water and hundreds of mosquito larvae.
I added as little as ten minnows and watched in amazement as they hunted down and devoured every last one. Within half an hour they had eaten every single mosquito larvae, not a single one left. And then after that, they kept on hunting for the next half an hour just to make sure that there were no more! I personally guarantee that these fish love to eat mosquito larvae. Minnows are very small, hardy and will companion well with goldfish, or Siamese fighting fish who are both also known for their ability to control mosquito numbers. It is important to note that the Siamese fighting fish is named so because of its behavior towards other males of the same species. You cannot keep two or more males in the same pond as they will fight each other until only one remains.
Proper maintenance will also contribute to reducing the mosquito danger. Water trapped in the top of pots, shallow margins, water trapped between rocks, thick aquatic plants all provide protection from natural predators (fish and insects). By managing these areas you will minimize opportunities for mosquitoes to hatch in your pond. If you have submerged pots in your feature, make sure that the edge of the pot is below the water’s surface. Fill in any small pools of water between larger rocks with gravel. Thin out any dense growths of aquatic plants, or overgrown plants around the water feature. Dense or overcrowded aquatic plants provide safety for mosquito larvae. Thinning them out allows the fish and water to circulate easier. Remove any excess organic material from your pond such as leaves or grass. This material provides food for mosquito larvae and can also shelter them from natural predators.
For mosquito prevention, your best option is to cover all bases and use a combination of all of these strategies. Run your pump for a few hours, add some fish, and regularly maintain overgrown or trapped water areas. Ideally a pump running for at least a few hours per day combined with suitable mosquito eating fish is the ideal set up for a home water feature. I would recommend adding ten minnows or zebra danios in conjunction with two or three goldfish, and maybe even a Siamese fighting fish. Make sure not to over feed the fish as they may not eat the mosquito larvae if they are not hungry. If you aren’t able to add fish then add some BTI or mosquito dunks. The way I see it, mosquitoes are essentially the weeds of the water garden, and just like real weeds with regular maintenance you can easily de-weed your water feature of those nasty mosquitoes.
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
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Sunday, October 5, 2014
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Thursday, October 2, 2014
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Asian Highlands Perspectives
Asian Highlands Perspectives (AHP) is a trans-disciplinary journal focusing on the Tibetan Plateau and surrounding regions, including the Southeast Asian Massif, Himalayan Massif, the Extended Eastern Himalayas, the Mongolian Plateau, and other contiguous areas. Cross-regional commonalities in history, culture, language, and socio-political context invite investigations of an interdisciplinary nature not served by current academic forums. AHP contributes to the regional research agendas of Sinologists, Tibetologists, Mongolists, and South and Southeast Asianists, while also forwarding theoretical discourse on grounded theory, interdisciplinary studies, and collaborative scholarship.
AHP publishes occasional monographs and essay collections both in hardcopy (ISSN 1835-7741) and online (ISSN 1925-6329). The online version is an open access source, freely available at: http://plateauculture.org/asian-highlands-perspectives. The at-cost print edition of the journal is available through print on demand publisher Lulu.com at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/AsianHighlandsPerspectives. The journal currently has a core editorial team of five members and a consultative editorial board of twenty-five experts from various disciplines. All submissions to the journal are peer-reviewed by the editorial board and independent, anonymous assessors.
AHP welcomes submissions from a wide range of scholars with an interest in the area. Given the dearth of current knowledge on this culturally complex area, we encourage submissions of descriptive accounts of local realities – especially by authors from communities in the Asian Highlands – as well as theory-oriented articles. We publish items of irregular format – long articles, short monographs, photo essays, fiction, auto-ethnography, etc. Authors receive a PDF version of their published work. Potential contributors are encouraged to consult previous issues.
Editorial Board: Andrew Smith, Arizona State University; Barbara Brower, Portland State University; Bianca Horlemann, Humboldt University; Bill Bleisch, China Exploration & Research Society; Charlene Makley Reed College; Daniel Berounský, Charles University; Daniel Miller, US AID; Emily Yeh, University of Colorado; Fernanda Pirie, University of Oxford; Geoffrey Samuel, Cardiff University; Gray Tuttle, Columbia University; Hildegard Diemberger, University of Cambridge; Huadan Zhaxi (Dpal ldan bkra shis དཔལ་ལྡན་བཀྲ་ཤིས), Humboldt University; Jermay Jamsu ('Gyur med rgya mtsho འགྱུར་མེད་རྒྱ་མཚོ), Independent Scholar; Juha Janhunen, University of Helsinki; Katherine Morton, Australian National University; Keith Dede, Lewis and Clark College; Keith Slater, SIL International, East Asia Group and University of North Dakota; Mark Bender, The Ohio State University; Mark Turin, Yale University; Paul K Nietupski, John Carroll University; Sarah E Fraser, Northwestern University; Sienna Craig, Dartmouth College; Toni Huber, Humbolt University; and Veronika Zikmundova, Charles University.
Peer Review: All articles for the annual volume of collected papers receive double-blind peer review. Other volumes are subject to in-house review by journal editors, in consultation with members of the editorial board.
Open Access and Publishing Fees: AHP is a green open access journal; we do not charge publishing fees. Contributing authors are free to self-archive and disseminate their work. All works published in AHP are subject to a Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/deed.en_US for more information.
AHP publishes occasional monographs and essay collections both in hardcopy (ISSN 1835-7741) and online (ISSN 1925-6329). The online version is an open access source, freely available at: http://plateauculture.org/asian-highlands-perspectives. The at-cost print edition of the journal is available through print on demand publisher Lulu.com at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/AsianHighlandsPerspectives. The journal currently has a core editorial team of five members and a consultative editorial board of twenty-five experts from various disciplines. All submissions to the journal are peer-reviewed by the editorial board and independent, anonymous assessors.
AHP welcomes submissions from a wide range of scholars with an interest in the area. Given the dearth of current knowledge on this culturally complex area, we encourage submissions of descriptive accounts of local realities – especially by authors from communities in the Asian Highlands – as well as theory-oriented articles. We publish items of irregular format – long articles, short monographs, photo essays, fiction, auto-ethnography, etc. Authors receive a PDF version of their published work. Potential contributors are encouraged to consult previous issues.
Editorial Board: Andrew Smith, Arizona State University; Barbara Brower, Portland State University; Bianca Horlemann, Humboldt University; Bill Bleisch, China Exploration & Research Society; Charlene Makley Reed College; Daniel Berounský, Charles University; Daniel Miller, US AID; Emily Yeh, University of Colorado; Fernanda Pirie, University of Oxford; Geoffrey Samuel, Cardiff University; Gray Tuttle, Columbia University; Hildegard Diemberger, University of Cambridge; Huadan Zhaxi (Dpal ldan bkra shis དཔལ་ལྡན་བཀྲ་ཤིས), Humboldt University; Jermay Jamsu ('Gyur med rgya mtsho འགྱུར་མེད་རྒྱ་མཚོ), Independent Scholar; Juha Janhunen, University of Helsinki; Katherine Morton, Australian National University; Keith Dede, Lewis and Clark College; Keith Slater, SIL International, East Asia Group and University of North Dakota; Mark Bender, The Ohio State University; Mark Turin, Yale University; Paul K Nietupski, John Carroll University; Sarah E Fraser, Northwestern University; Sienna Craig, Dartmouth College; Toni Huber, Humbolt University; and Veronika Zikmundova, Charles University.
Peer Review: All articles for the annual volume of collected papers receive double-blind peer review. Other volumes are subject to in-house review by journal editors, in consultation with members of the editorial board.
Open Access and Publishing Fees: AHP is a green open access journal; we do not charge publishing fees. Contributing authors are free to self-archive and disseminate their work. All works published in AHP are subject to a Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/deed.en_US for more information.