Taken March 16, 2013 at Arabia Mountain, GA
DAILY PHOTO: Mossy Green Spring
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Category Archives: nature
DAILY PHOTO: Mountains Near Tucson, Arizona
DAILY PHOTO: Fungi at Yellow River State Park
Orange Mock Oyster Mushroom
I have it on good authority that these are a non-edible mushroom (i.e. keyword “mock.”) Taken yesterday (March 10, 2013) at Yellow River State Park near Stone Mountain, Georgia.
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Two Tigers Circle In The Night
Taken at the Budapest Zoo
Two tigers circle in the night.
Neither eager to be first in fight.
Bellies low, they scrape the ground.
Each step pads without a sound.
One false step brings the pounce
of each fearsome muscled ounce.
They twist and writhe and snap,
each jaw a toothy, steely trap.
In the end one slinks away.
Both live on to later days.
A test upon the jungle floor
and each cat knows the final score.
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DAILY PHOTO: Sunflower Field in Rural Hungary
Taken on the road between Szentendre and Visegrad
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DAILY PHOTO: Llamas over Machu Picchu
One llama, two llama, dun llama, zoo llama
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DAILY PHOTO: Toccoa Falls, Georgia
About an 18 story drop
In 1977, there was a flood here when a dam gave way, killing almost forty people.
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DAILY PHOTO: Shark Ray Alley in Belize
A Disciplined School
This was taken with a cheap underwater camera while snorkeling off Ambergris Caye in Belize. The fish align themselves in the shadows of boats. The water is shallow there, and so the sun blazes off the white sand on the bottom. The fish apparently have a hard time getting fishtan lotion, and need to take advantage of any shadow they can get.
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TODAY’S PHOTO: Providence Canyon in Southern Georgia
It started as a plow furrow, seriously.
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BOOK REVIEW: Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Nature is a harsh teacher. That was the last lesson Chris McCandless ever learned. A recent college graduate, McCandless struck out for the Alaskan wilderness with minimal resources, his body was found by a party of moose-hunters several months after he’d begun his Alaskan adventure.
Into the Wild gives us a well-researched explanation for how McCandless died, but it also tells us a great deal about how he lived– and that story is fascinating in its own right. Many thought McCandless must have been crazy, but refusing to acquiesce to the work-a-day world is often incorrectly diagnosed as insanity.
McCandless had an obsessive desire to find out whether he could make it on his own, not just separate from his parent’s wealth but from all the trappings of modern society. McCandless’s most iconic indicator of insanity-by-way-of-thwarting-convention was when he gave away the entirety of his $25,000 savings account and burnt all the money in his wallet. He wanted to know whether he could survive if he was returned to the state of nature from whence mankind came. Sadly, the answer was no.
It would be easy to dismiss McCandless as a dumb kid who got in over his head. Though he certainly was that. On his deathbed, in a bus carcass in the remote Alaskan wilderness, McCandless likely had a revelation that most teenagers pass into adulthood without ever realizing, that he was mortal.
However, McCandless was more than a kid with an underdeveloped sense of his own mortality. He was a kid with the courage to confront a question that most of us just let nag in the back of our minds. That question being,do we have what it takes to live not as a cog in a machine but as a human in the natural world.
I know many are intrigued by this question in part because there are entire TV channels that are practically devoted to survival shows. Yet most people don’t take it beyond sitting on a couch contemplating whether they could survive. Will thinking man (Homo sapiens) be replaced by doing man (Homo effectus)?
There was a movie based on this book. I didn’t see it, but here is its trailer.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 