Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 12

How much solar eclipse are you getting today, North America?

This cool tool from NASA tells you how close to total your view of today's solar eclipse will be. I'm quite pleased with my 93.8 percent, in some seven hours and change!

https://eclipse-explorer.smce.nasa.gov

I just looked RIGHT AT THE SUN (for practice) using my official NSF glasses (given away at my public library--apparently many libraries were doing this), and I am happy to report they WORK and I'm not blind, and the sun through them, right now, is a lovely orange ball.

(comments turned off--ju...

Encontro das Águas

The meeting of the waters is where the Rio Negro joins the Amazon--or, as Brazilians name the upper portion of it, the Rio Solimões--at Manaus, Brazil. This happens over a thousand miles east of where I was in Leticia, Colombia. In other words, the broad, broad waters I experienced were the Rio Solimões/upper Amazon before the Rio Negro adds its waters in.

This vasty vastness is what you get where they join. For perspective, look at the size of that boat in the first few seconds (the whole video...

when you are a midnight volcano

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 ...

feedback

I got a story rejection, and the editor said if I wanted feedback, he could give it--because he was always bummed to send stories in someplace and then just get a no--but he didn't want to force it on me if I didn't want it.

My first instinct was to say thanks-very-much-but-no-thanks, but then I thought, What the heck? This is a story that has had only three readers--or rather, only three readers who talked to me about it (it's been out on submission to other places and gotten form rejections). H...

in the key of C Major

For the daily prompt thing I'm doing, I ended up going down a rabbit hole about windmill sails and came across this story of a miller who restored the last of what used to be many windmills--"the highest concentration of windmills in the Iberian peninsula"--on a mountain in Portugal. Here he is with his windmill in 2019:

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Photo by Maria Rebelo Photography; resized from the image at the blog post

He's using the mill to grind ancient wheat grains; he says ants prefer wheat grains that don't have pest...

"A Turtle in Love, Singing," by Tara Campbell

I read this sweet, weird, hilarious story yesterday, and now I want to become a traveling doctor, using this story as my patent medicine. "Lifts moods and births laughter, guaranteed to leave you feeling better than you started." It's "A Turtle in Love, Singing," by Tara Campbell, in Bourbon Penn, a new-to-me zine.

The story is in the form of police reports from the hapless Green Lake Police, who deal with a string of odd encounters, beginning with a disgruntled pelican or perhaps pelicans, sight...

touch moss, release spores

Where I am, at this time of year it's the moss that comes back to life first, intense green. It sends up the thinnest straight green things--they look like thin, tiny blades of grass but really they're called setae: they're the stalks for the moss's spore cases, which form on the ends. These then ripen and, when they're ready, they release their spores.

Yesterday I was in the woods, and I came to a big puddle, and by the puddle was a rock, and on the rock was a quantity of moss. This moss:



See how...

Wednesday reading--wildly disparate!

I'm nearly done with Betsy-Tacy and Tib, which continues to be delightful. It's not just that the things the girls get up to are both very believable and amusing, but also the way it's told, the way Maud Hart Lovelace lets in the parents' perspective or the baby siblings', and how events flow one into the next kind of like a picaresque novel, but they're not traveling; they're just living their lives.

They want to cut off locks of hair to give to each other as keepsakes in case one of them dies-...

temporary versus permanent

Elsewhere on the interwebs, I follow Glenn Shepherd, an ethnobotanist who works in ... guess where? (If you guessed the Amazon, you (a) are correct and (b) have been reading this blog for more than two entries.) He wrote about an ergot-related fungus on a certain sedge which is used medicinally by the Matsigenka people.

One time when Shepherd had a headache, he was treated with some of this sedge. The headache disappeared almost instantly ... and he gained a temporary ability to juggle. He write...

"Alphabet Soup: How Picture Books Are Made, from A to Z"

"Alphabet Soup: How Picture Books Are Made, from A to Z" is an exhibition running currently at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, one of my favorite museums that I happen to live right near. MAN that place has great exhibitions.

This particular exhibition draws on the museum's permanent collection to illustrate all the stages of picture-book creation, with each letter of the alphabet standing for something--B is for book dummy, E is for endpapers, I is for india ink, etc., followed by ill...