Archive for May, 2016
Vantransient
Retreeting the wacky and wonderful on transit in BC’s Lower Mainland: a fun little project @bfwriter and I started six years ago. That’s a photo of my gymnastic bus-driver at the Scottsdale Station in Surrey, taken a couple years back.
Good answer
“Why are you asking that?” This, I’ve found, is always a good answer to an unfriendly question. – Rebecca Solnit, in The Mother of All Questions
h/t KC
Lydia Loveless
Earlier this week I stumbled upon Lydia Loveless‘s 2011 album Indestructible Machine. I don’t remember how, because her songs and her singing engulfed me so completely, provided so much delight and elation, that I forgot where my first entrance-way to this world was. (Her 2014 effort, Somewhere Else, is also astonishing.)
Filmmaker Gorman Bechard recently completed a documentary called Who Is Lydia Loveless? and has started screening it in the United States. The trailers are truly wonderful.
This woman has been really, really good to her muse.
Saving the nautilus
My sister Jenny Basil, a renowned professor of biology at City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, is over the moon because of this news: The United States Fish and Wildlife Service is recommending that the chambered nautilus, pictured below, be placed on the international endangered species list.
The chambered nautilus, with its beautifully intricate shell and exquisite coloring is traded in large quantities, mostly as jewelry and shell products. The United States has long been concerned about the impact that this trade may have on the seven species in the nautilus family , as have some ambitious young conservationists (learn more here and here). Nautiluses are slow to reproduce, leaving them particularly vulnerable to overfishing. The United States, Fiji, India and Palau have put forward a proposal to include the nautilus family in Appendix II to ensure its survival in the wild.
Truly happy news.
Photo from the Flickr stream of Klaus Steifel shared under Creative Commons licensing.
basil.CA 