Bill Murray's Blog, page 106

Friday Photo #45

Bug on a log! With mighty horns and armor!

Same guy. I think the lipstick works, don’t you? Understated. Earth colors.

This particular bug lives in South Africa. Check out 661 more living things from all over in the Animals and Wildlife section at EarthPhotos.com. And see all the Friday Photos.

And a good weekend to you.

Great Interactive World Map

With past, present and predicted wind, temperature, clouds, wind, waves, snow and air pressure.

Click and take it out for a spin.

Friday Photo #44 from Papua New Guinea

Here is a Mud Man, costumed for the annual Goroka Show, held in September in Goroka, Papua New Guinea. If you go, you’ll see a couple of days of dance presentations from maybe a hundred tribes from all over Papua New Guinea and as you can see from our Mud Man friend’s headgear, the whole thing is elaborate, exotic and while our man is all white other than his betel juice stains, the rest of the festival is wildly colorful. Wild might be the best word for Papua New Guinea overall.

As festivals go, this one has to be near the top of the list anywhere in the world for reasonably hardy travelers. It’s not the easiest to get to, but with a little determination it’s not that difficult. In our case it required a flight up from Brisbane to Port Moresby, then two more short flights to Mt. Hagen and then Goroka.

We did it independently but group tours are possible, although probably the biggest tour operator is already sold out for September 2016 here in November 2015.

See more photos from the Goroka Show in the Papua New Guinea Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

On the same visit to Papua New Guinea we arranged a (sort of) cruise on the also wild Sepik River on which we were the only passengers who turned up. I wrote about it in the book Common Sense and Whiskey. You can read that chapter and see photos of life along the river here, and you can get the book locally from Amazon in your country.

More: See the rest of the Friday Photos, and check out photos of 844 more pretty exotic people from all over the world.

A good weekend to you!

NASA Time Lapse of the Sun

Friday Photo #44 – Pachyderm Pals

Science asserts that humans have the capability for complex symbolic thought because showing concern for the dead reveals the cognitive ability to represent group members after they have died. Elephants are also known to bury their dead. They have this same cognitive ability.

The Maasai believe that only elephants and humans have souls. And souls or no souls, just look at these two. Smiling, caressing, these two are clearly pals.

See more in the Kenya Gallery at EarthPhotos.com, and see all the Friday Photos.

Zambian Tales

Here is a bit of my eventual book on travel in Africa. Aubrey is the English name of a guide who helped show us Zambia.

Photo: On safari in South Luangwa National Park, Zambia

•••••

Aubrey grows melancholy by the campfire. The lantern casts an unsure light and a rich Milky Way splays out overhead. Aubrey once had three sisters and three brothers. Now he’s the head of the family.

He has one sister, and more matter-of-factly than I think I would, he says the others died of “natural causes.” He sits motionless, staring into the fire and his past, and then he turns to us.

His mother’s brother was ill south of Lusaka. She went to care for him. While she was gone, one of her sons, younger than Aubrey, took ill. They sent word and she boarded a bus home. A few kilometers south of Chipata, the nearest proper town, the bus blew a tire and his mother was killed. Aubrey’s father was already ill, so Aubrey went to get the body and they buried her the next day. His father lost the will to live, Aubrey says, and died four months later.

“This is African life.”

HIV? He just shakes his head. He has grown concave with gloom.

The price of maize skyrocketed between the end of last year’s store and this year’s harvest. Aubrey tells two horrifying stories he has heard, about maize and making ends meet:

A farmer protecting crops surprises a thief carrying a stolen bag of maize. The thief decapitates the farmer and leaves the bag of maize, with head inside, on the farmer’s porch for his wife to find. She opens the bag unsuspecting, thinking it’s part of the harvest.

A father is taking his son to the doctor but his son dies en route. The man rolls his son up son in cloth and begins the sad return to his village, but has car trouble. A farmer finds the bundle where the car is broken down, suspects theft of his maize, flies into a rage and kills the bereaved father.

Aubrey looks tired. This is all heartbreak and woe. 

He tells another story, though, and gradually brightens as he does. It’s hard to understand it all, but the outline is that, according to a Zambian folk practice, a log is set alight to burn for one month, and during that month a couple must conceive.

The prospective groom’s uncle on his mother’s side goes to his desired bride’s family to negotiate a bride price – cows, for example, or maybe even simply that they can visit their daughter as often as they want. Once the bride price is settled, an elaborate ritual takes place to get her to the wedding bed. 

The groom-to-be arrives alone at the young girl’s village and the mother of the bride leads him to their house. It starts with the young man inside alone. The young girl’s mother brings her to the house. She won’t come in. There is cajoling. Now the door is open. He throws coins; She steps closer.

In the end they spend the night and don’t come out until the next day, and the next day they are married. It’s a festive day, with food offerings from both sides of family, and the dowry is delivered. The catch is, if the bride isn’t pregnant by the time that log goes out, in a month, the bride’s family can give the boy back.

“I am fighting that log,” he smiles. Aubrey is a newlywed.

•••••

Friday Photo #43

Stalking leopard, Maasai Mara National Reserve, from the Kenya Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. And see all the other Friday Photos.

Rock Star Pope

One afternoon in the autumn of 1978 I came screaming across Atlanta in my Chevette, rushing from a job fifty miles up the road, hurrying to meet my friends at the IHOP. My adulthood so far was a scramble of post-college roommates, general naïveté and a bad job, with all the self confidence that just having been turned down for a VISA card would allow.

I paid no attention that day, October 16th just like today, when a puff of white smoke over the Sistine Chapel announced the first non-Italian Pope in 456 years. Karol Wojtyla, the vicar of Krakow (his church, above), chose the regnal name John Paul II.

If we’d said things like that back then, looking back I’d have said, Whoa, dude. It was a pretty darned fateful day. 

•••••

Josef Stalin scorned the church. “The Pope! How many divisions has he got?” he would sneer. The year he said that, 1935, was a long time ago. But on December 1st of 1989, eleven years one month and fifteen days after that puff of smoke in Vatican City, Stalin’s successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, came hat in hand to Vatican City, pleading that the Pope return the favor with a visit to the Soviet Union.

Stalin’s heir needed the Pope more than the other way around, and John Paul II was noncommittal, replying that he hoped “developments would make it possible for him to accept.”

•••••

I do not believe in Catholic doctrine. That autumn day in 1978 I didn’t believe in much beyond my disc-jockey job, rock bands of the moment and girlfriends. But with hindsight, with time enough to have visited Krakow and Gdansk, and Warsaw as both Soviet satellite…

and today…

I respect that Polish Pope for his hand in shaping the events that puff of smoke helped set in motion back in October 1978.

•••••

Pope John Paul II came to visit Dubrovnik, where we happened to be visiting, on my birthday in 2003. We stood close enough to the Popemobile to be able to read his watch.

Friday Photo #42

Blowing glass in Halifax, Nova Scotia. An HDR. More photos in the Canada Gallery and the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. And see all the Friday Photos.

Wildebeest Crossing HDR

Sizing up the herd we reckon that if they all go it could take half and hour. Waves of animals gather at the edge of the cliff and then move toward and away from the water. At times even hundreds of wildebeests will fall in line moving away from the crossing and each time they do I despair, even though with all those crocs, we are in effect egging on a tiny percentage of wildebeests to their deaths. 

 

This is a single photo HDR, re-exposed +2, +1, 0, -1, -2 in Bridge, recombined in Photomatix, finished in Photoshop. Click the photo for a bigger version.