Location Taken: Yellowstone National Park
Time Taken: October 2012
Zzzzzzz…. Zzzzzz….
Huh? Wha? You want a photo? Here, have a photo.
Zzzzzzzzzz….
What, you want to know what the heck that is too? Can’t you just let me sleep?
No?
Fine! It’s a tunnel to the heart of an apocalyptic entity, spewing forth poisonous gasses and strange colored fluids into an unsuspecting river in an idyllic land full of frolicking animals! And non-frolicking ones too!
Happy?
Zzzzzzzzz. Zzzzzzzzz!!!
Location Taken: North Sydney, Nova Scotia
Time Taken: July 2012
Boat boat, I’m a boat. Boat boat, happy boat.
…I claim to be all sorts of things, don’t I? Ah well, we all have our quirks.
I don’t really know boats that well. I’ve only been in a handful over the years, mostly ferries and kayaks. It’s not because I get seasick or anything like that, I just don’t find being out on the water in a boat that exciting. With a kayak, I at least have to concentrate on controlling the craft as well, which is kinda fun. Of course, it also puts me out in that there evil sunshine stuff, so well, it’s only about two or three times a decade I’ve been out in one.
I have very little idea about mid-sized boats in general, much less proper care or maintenance. Most of them I see just floating at the dock, though, which is why this one boat pulled up out of the water just tickled my fancy. I took like ten photos of just this boat while waiting for the ferry I was on to get moving.
Didn’t take too many photos on that ferry. It was a seven hour boat ride to Newfoundland, and most of it was just water to every horizon. Makes for pretty boring photos, really. That’s probably another part of why I’m not big on boats.
Location Taken: Seagirt, New Jersey
Time Taken: February 2011
I noticed an odd quirk in my personal dialect this week.
There’s a place in Guild Wars 2 called Cursed Shore. It lives up to its name, being full of all sorts of undead and corruption and areas that are just a pain to get around. But it’s also one of the few places you can get the best crafting materials, so I still go there, and have been there a lot this week.
But that’s all secondary information. The important part is the name.
You see, I pronounce Cursed Shore with Cursed being two syllables, “cur-sed”, but when the word is on its own, I pronounce it with one syllable, “cursd”.
Now, if you check the dictionary, you’ll find both pronunciations there, so I’m not incorrect whichever way I choose. I tend to default to the one-syllable version, though.
But Cursed Shore gets the special two syllable treatment for some reason. My best guess is that it’s because they sound really awkward together if you try using the one-syllable version. You’re going from a soft syllable with a rising sound to another soft rising sound, so you try to go up even more on “shore”, and that just doesn’t quite work. They blend together as well, dropping the understandability by a lot. I keep switching from a soft “d” sound to a hard “t” sound mid-pronunciation to try to correct that, which causes my tongue to stumble some. If your personal accent uses “curst” rather than “cursd”, it’d work, but my accent doesn’t.
The two syllable version adds a falling sound with a hard ending, so it solves all the stumbling spots of the other variant. Which, I guess, is why this Shore is Cur-sed, not Cursd.
Oh, and if you’re wondering about the photo, it’s not just a picture of a random shore. This was taken along the coast of New Jersey, about a year and a half before Hurricane Sandy came to visit. And yes, this spot got hit by the storm surge, and all the beach buildings and fences and what not, well, let’s just say they needed to be replaced. So in some ways, the beach this day was living under a curse of future troubles…
Location Taken: Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho
Time Taken: June 2010
Sometimes I run across one of my photos that says a whole lot only if you have a clue what it’s saying in the first place.
For instance, what does this look like to you? A somewhat odd pile of rocks? Yeah, probably.
Me, I look at this and see lava spurting out of the top, liquid rock spattering out in globs to build up a ten-foot tall cone of chaotic rocks, the lava not even having a chance to really cool before it hits the ground.
These spatter cones are actually fairly rare, even discounting how rare lava features are in the first place. It requires a very specific composition of lava, very fluid so it can move easily and full of gas bubbles to provide the popping effect that sends the liquid lava flying. And only certain rocks can melt into that pattern as well, winnowing the number of possible locations some more.
There’s some on the Big Island in Hawaii, in the area near the Kilauea volcano inside Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, and there’s some at this one spot in the Craters of the Moon, and there’s some in Lava Beds National Monument. And probably a multitude of other places around the world, all in areas full of low-laying lava fields and cinder cones not even a hundred feet high, not at all your typical volcanic mountain.
You see, the type of rock that makes spatter cones? It’s terrible for building up a large volcano. It oozes out of the ground too easily, and spreads out rather than builds up. Not that you can’t find large volcanoes near spatter cones, mind you. In fact, all three of those places I mentioned have nearby large volcanoes, for varying definitions of nearby. Lava Beds is only forty miles from Mt. Shasta, one of the southern volcanoes in the Cascade chain. The Big Island is actually a giant volcanic cone, built up from the lava pouring out of Kilauea and the other volcanic peaks that form it. And Craters of the Moon, well, it’s only about 150 or so miles from the mother of all volcanoes, Yellowstone!
And if 150 miles seems far to you, just remember that the lava coming out at Craters of the Moon is an offshoot of the Yellowstone magma, following old cracks from when this spot WAS the Yellowstone Volcano, before the volcanic hotspot moved further to the east. Or, to be technically correct, the continent moved 150 miles to the west over the top of the hotspot.
…I love the oddities of geologic time scales…
Location Taken: Ontario, Canada
Time Taken: June 2010
There’s always something special about seeing a flower you’re used to seeing in gardens growing in its natural habitat.
In this case, this seems to be a lovely wild phlox. It’s one of the flowers my mom grows in her garden, and one of the very few I can both identify AND name! It’s the fun spelling, actually. I like words that have either “ph” or “x” in them, and this has both!
This particular plant was just hanging out near a waterfall in an unpopulated region in western Ontario, a land full of pine trees and fantastic rocks. There’s a slight possibility this phlox species was introduced when the small visitor’s parking lot was put in place, but it’s also native to the area and this particular plant was placed by the hand of nature, not man.
Non-native plants seem to always clash just a little with the local greenery, in some subtle way, while native plants blend in just fine, no matter how gaudy they actually are. Maybe it’s just my imagination, or perhaps plants do best if they’re the same tone of green as their neighbors. I don’t know enough botany to be definitive on the subject.
But that subtle fitting in is what makes native flowers just that bit more special. They’re both beautiful and harmonious with their surroundings, creating a gorgeous scene to enjoy.
