Running Commentary 1/20/2024

Hello,

I saw the owls! A week ago, the evening after the last RC went out, I was able to see them, as I describe in this week's Bird of the Week below.

Anyway...

Watching...

Skeleton Crew

• The show ends in a pretty interesting place. The story of this first season has been nicely wrapped up; we don't end on a cliffhanger or on some sort of tease for season 2. And yet, it doesn't feel like the book is totally closed on Skeleton Crew either. Particularly, there's more we could see about Jod Na Nawood, both his future and his past, beyond what we got in this season. I suspect we will see more soon.
• A lot of people seemed convinced that the Supervisor would be the old pirate captain; that didn't make a lot of sense to me. I figured he would be either a droid or alien long dead and operating on pre-recorded messages. He turned out to be a droid, of sorts.
• The pirate attack on the city of At Attin wasn't hugely clever but it did feel like an obligatory big action scene for the finale. The pirates don't really have a reason to shoot the place up. I didn't hate it, and it was probably needed for excitement, but it fell a bit flat for me, at least once the very neat alien invasion vibes from the beginning were off.
• Jod Na Nawood turned out to be a very interesting, sympathetic villain. I say sympathetic not because he's someone you're meant to agree with at any point, but because he's someone you sort of pity. We don't get his background with the Jedi; he wasn't even a Jedi himself, but he was, briefly, cared for by a Jedi who's survived the purge. We don't get a name, just a description that she was "ragged." This made me think of Vima-Da-Boda, from Dark Empire; she's already been referenced in Canon, in one of the Return of the Jedi FACPOV stories, and her name even follows the same general pattern as Jod's. Jod grew up poor and starving in a world (perhaps Nar Shaada?) where virtue was ruthlessly punished. He's a selfish, dishonest murderer, sure, and you don't excuse it, but you also understand why he is that person, and you can believe that's not the person he wishes he was.
• Overall I really did like this show. It did not end on its best episode, which is a bit of a shame, but even this finale was a solid bit of Star Wars. I think this has been the most consistent Star Wars show in terms of quality episode-to-episode, and that level of quality has, happily, been quite high. Expect a full review as quick as I can write it.

Playing...

Warframe

I promised I'd let you know what happens on New Year's Eve if you don't pair off with one of the Hex: you hang out with Kalymos. This is a – well, as of today, I suppose this is a downright vice-presidential creative choice, albeit probably unintentionally so. Anyway, that's it for Warframe this week.

Bird of the Week

There’s a difference, in birds, between “migrations” and “movements”. Migration is a particular kind of movement, triggered seasonally by factors of climate and sunlight. As day length changes, it triggers hormonal shifts in birds to prepare them for a sudden, long journey. Once the weather turns, they get moving from one range to another, entire populations relocating at once.¹ Birds like warblers and cranes exhibit this sort of regular migration. But there are other kinds of movements that birds will make, less dramatic ones driven by specific circumstances. I've written in the past about irruption, when a population boom pushes birds beyond their regular range for a short time, and about altitudinal migration, when birds come down out of the mountains for a season but do not otherwise travel far. Today I'd like to feature a "nomadic" bird, the Short-eared Owl.

The short-eared owl is cousin to the long-eared owl, but where the long-eared owl is quite a typical owl (besides its propensity to roost in large groups), the short eared is a really weird owl. They are not nocturnal, at least not fully. They have been observed hunting in daylight regularly, mostly around dawn and dusk. Studies have indicated that these owls are at least supplementally reliant on their eyesight, rather than being wholly reliant on their hearing as owls tend to be.² The short-eared is the highest flying of owls, often flying as high as hundreds of feet up in the air to gain a hawkish vantage point.³ Short-eared owls are among the only owls to build a nest; while most owls appropriate nests or burrows constructed and then abandoned by other birds, the short-eared will dig a scrape in the ground in which to lay its eggs.⁴

Short-eared owls are birds of open country, living in fields, tundra, and marshes rather than in woodlands. This is not unique among owls, but it is somewhat unusual. These owls are among the most widespread in the world, with populations in every continent besides Antarctica and Australia, as well as in many island chains, which are generally home to endemic subspecies. The birds are considered resident in the western Eurasian steppe, the northwestern North American prairies, and in the grasslands of sub-Amazonian South America, but are considered migratory elsewhere. A great many short-eared owls breed in the open subarctic regions of Canada, Russia, and Northern Europe. While the movements of this particular species has not been particularly well-studied but it seems to be mainly driven by the availability of rodent prey: if it's too cold and snowy for mice, the owls move to warmer fields where they can still hunt. When the northern fields thaw out again, the owls return. Even during a given season, short-eared owls wander widely in search for food, not nearly as locked to particular places, schedules, or routes as birds are typically thought of as being.⁵

I drew this bird song as a memento of using them for the first time recently. I arrived at a field at a research farm within the hour of journey I’m willing to make to search for a particular bird (always remember Edwards’s 2nd Law of Birding). As it turns out I had to make the trip twice: when I first went to see them it was early morning and misty, and they didn’t show; I wasn't too late, as another birder had been there since pre-dawn and hadn’t seen any. The second day I came in the evening and after watching an apparently empty field for about half an hour I spotted a bird flying about near a cattle barn, its presence helpfully signaled by several other birders pulling over and getting out of their cars. As I came over toward the barn, I actually saw two owls, one on either side of the access road, darting low across the corn stubble. I heard a third calling out in the field; the call of this species is quite distinctive, sounding like a dog’s bark as made by a cat.

I saw a fourth as I was leaving. The sun had set by that point, and being mid-January, it was getting very cold. I had only seen half the owls reported by others, but I had seen them, and it was time to go. The following week was to be much colder still; I figure I saw these birds just before they moved onward further south.

The short-eared owl's Latin name is perplexing to me: Asio flammeus. This should already be familiar, as that's also the genus of the previously-featured long-eared owl; it means refers to an eared owl in Latin. "Flammeus" means "flame-colored," which this bird is not. Straw-colored, perhaps. The name seems more like a name to be given to an oriole or the western tanager. It was given by Erik Pontoppidan, a Norwegian clergyman and naturalist known for his belief in fantastical creatures, which a flaming owl certainly would be.⁶ Jules Verne mentioned the bishop's claims to have witnessed sea serpents in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea:

One after another, reports arrived that would profoundly affect public opinion: new observations taken by the transatlantic liner Pereire, the Inman line’s Etna running afoul of the monster, an official report drawn up by officers on the French frigate Normandy, dead-earnest reckonings obtained by the general staff of Commodore Fitz-James aboard the Lord Clyde. In lighthearted countries, people joked about this phenomenon, but such serious, practical countries as England, America, and Germany were deeply concerned.
In every big city the monster was the latest rage; they sang about it in the coffee houses, they ridiculed it in the newspapers, they dramatized it in the theaters. The tabloids found it a fine opportunity for hatching all sorts of hoaxes. In those newspapers short of copy, you saw the reappearance of every gigantic imaginary creature, from “Moby Dick,” that dreadful white whale from the High Arctic regions, to the stupendous kraken whose tentacles could entwine a 500-ton craft and drag it into the ocean depths. They even reprinted reports from ancient times: the views of Aristotle and Pliny accepting the existence of such monsters, then the Norwegian stories of Bishop Pontoppidan, the narratives of Paul Egede, and finally the reports of Captain Harrington—whose good faith is above suspicion—in which he claims he saw, while aboard the Castilian in 1857, one of those enormous serpents that, until then, had frequented only the seas of France’s old extremist newspaper, The Constitutionalist.
An interminable debate then broke out between believers and skeptics in the scholarly societies and scientific journals. The “monster question” inflamed all minds. During this memorable campaign, journalists making a profession of science battled with those making a profession of wit, spilling waves of ink and some of them even two or three drops of blood, since they went from sea serpents to the most offensive personal remarks.
For six months the war seesawed. With inexhaustible zest, the popular press took potshots at feature articles from the Geographic Institute of Brazil, the Royal Academy of Science in Berlin, the British Association, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., at discussions in The Indian Archipelago, in Cosmos published by Father Moigno, in Petermann’s Mittheilungen,* and at scientific chronicles in the great French and foreign newspapers. When the monster’s detractors cited a saying by the botanist Linnaeus that “nature doesn’t make leaps,” witty writers in the popular periodicals parodied it, maintaining in essence that “nature doesn’t make lunatics,” and ordering their contemporaries never to give the lie to nature by believing in krakens, sea serpents, “Moby Dicks,” and other all-out efforts from drunken seamen. Finally, in a much-feared satirical journal, an article by its most popular columnist finished off the monster for good, spurning it in the style of Hippolytus repulsing the amorous advances of his stepmother Phaedra, and giving the creature its quietus amid a universal burst of laughter. Wit had defeated science.⁷

But even so, surely Pontoppidan noticed this owl wasn't flaming. Or is it? There is another creature called the flammulated owl, which is also a mostly brown owl, and it was so named because those brown streaks are flame-shaped⁸; I imagine the same logic applies to the short-eared owl.

Curation Links

Holes in Buildings | Graham McKay, Misfit's Architecture

A look at holes left by omitting part of a story or of a few stories in a building, as an architectural trend in urban luxury structures of the past half-century. “The downside of these holes – or any holes in buildings for that matter – is that they’re structurally enclosed space that can’t be sold full-price and, in this case, doesn’t add much in the way of amenity value. The upside is that being seen to not monetise every possible cubic metre is an indicator of prestige”

The Michelangelo of Microsoft Excel | Great Big Story

[VIDEO] I do most of my drawing using a program called Krita; Tatsuo Horiuchi does his in a different software: Excel, the spreadsheet tool with, apparently, untapped graphical capabilities. (2:29)

Ernest Shackleton’s War Is Over | Ernest Shackleton, Lapham's Quarterly

“From South: The “Endurance” Expedition. On his first journey to the South Pole in 1902, Shackleton came within four hundred miles of his goal; on his second in 1907, within ninety-seven miles. On his third expedition in 1914, his ship was crushed in ice, forcing him and part of his crew on an 800-mile journey in a whale boat to South Georgia Island and then a thirty-six-hour trek to Stromness.“

The Sandman | E. T. A. Hoffman, trans. John Oxenford and C. A. Feiling

[FICTION] A classic work of German speculative fiction, which Sigmund Freud used as an example to define the uncanny. To say more would be to spoil things.

See the full archive of curations on Notion