feral

Monday, October 17, 2005

Awoke at 3:30 a.m. to Greta and Apple pursuing the deer mouse through the rooms upstairs. Whenever the mouse found a good place to hide, it would gnaw. Usually this haven was a narrow gap behind a small junque-antique hutch; maybe its green finish is milk paint—I'm sure the creature is hungry, now that its breadcrumb stash has been cleaned up. The hutch broadcast the repetitive chewing noises very effectively. Sleep was impossible. But sleepiness wasn't. I couldn't wake up enough to get up and do anything; instead I lay there for hours in a twilight state. Around six I finally found my way back into dreams that were numerous and strange and strangely wonderful. One followed from my remarks about the frogs the other day. In the dream I gathered up cloth to launder and found tadpoles in various stages of development, from fishy to limbed, in the folds of the cloth. Frantic to save them, I filled a bowl with water and plopped them in, hoping I acted in time. And then I found the mom frog. She was dead, torn open, her insides spilling out. I felt awful: had one of the dogs snapped at her? They'd shown no interest in the frogs before. Remaining dreams pick up where several recent others had left off and were too vague and strange (but curiously nice) to nail down. The frog part reminds me of the whale dream of August, where a mother whale was cut open to remove the infant whale. Watery stuff.
5:52:15 PM

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A picture named Popping_Rocks_Map_web.jpg

SCRIPPS INSTITUTION OF OCEANOGRAPHY NEWS RELEASE:

'Popping rocks' found in deep sea give researchers
clues about rare gases from 'young' seafloor volcano
Scientists aboard the Scripps research vessel Roger Revelle this week solved a 45-year-old geological mystery.
In 1960, Scripps oceanographer Dale Krause reported the discovery of extraordinary deep-sea volcanic rocks in waters off Mexico, near Guadalupe Island, approximately 200 miles south of San Diego. When brought to the surface, the rocks spontaneously exploded "with a sharp snapping sound," according to Krause.
Since then, only a few other sites, mostly along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, have been reported with similar "popping rocks." An attempt by the late Scripps Professor Harmon Craig to locate the site in 1984 proved unsuccessful, largely because the location of the original discovery lacked the precision of today's navigational technologies.
A team of U.S. and Mexican geologists and student researchers aboard the Oct. 5-10 Revelle expedition explored the region, including the area now known as Popcorn Ridge, in an attempt to precisely locate the source of Krause's popping rocks and the unique information these rocks could provide about important Earth processes.
Three dredge hauls of Popcorn Ridge on Oct. 7 recovered some volcanic rocks, though none "popped" on deck. A sonar survey of the seafloor revealed a small mound, which was later identified as a volcano, at the base of Popcorn Ridge, 3,200 meters (10,500 feet) below sea level. On Sunday, Oct. 9, the researchers hit the jackpot with 'D-11,' or the 11th area dredged during the expedition. D-11 is located along the flank of what the scientists are now calling "Krause Volcano."
"As soon as we took the rocks out of the water we could hear them popping, much like a firecracker," said Barry Eakins, a post-doctoral researcher at Scripps and one of the chief scientists on the cruise. "We were very excited because we knew this was a big find."
Eakins and co-chief scientist Dana Vukajlovich, a Scripps graduate student, say the loud popping sounds are due to high concentrations of volcanic gases trapped in bubbles within the lava rocks that explode when they escape the confining water pressure of the deep ocean floor. ...
Vukajlovich says that the rocks are important because the volcanic gases (such as carbon dioxide, water vapor, helium and argon) that are trapped in the bubbles did not escape during eruption and therefore should represent the concentrations of these gases in Earth's mantle. Eakins believes the rocks will not only give researchers more information about the inventory of these gases within Earth, but also help them better understand the origin and history of Earth's atmosphere.
"We expect that these rocks will be the source of research for decades," Eakins said.
The rediscovery also will provide new information about seafloor volcanoes. The researchers characterized Krause Volcano that provided the popping rocks as very young-from decades to a few centuries old-which is a rare find.
"There are lots of volcanoes on the seafloor but most are quite old," said Vukajlovich. "It's exciting to find one that may be very, very young and possibly still active."

Click here to read the full press release and view photos.
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Well, I wrote the preceding very personal entry assuming that more persons than not would click on one of the two links embedded in the first paragraph and actually read the poem I referred to! Unless you read it you won't get why I'm revealing such stuff; it must seem like questionable taste, at least.

But guess what. Not one reader among the 70 or so who have stopped by in the past 18 hours has clicked over to read the poem. If they had they would have laughed, because it's a very erotic-sounding poem, and in fact posting it got me into more than a little hot water hereabouts and precipitated the end of a relationship. So when you know what truly inspired the lines then it seems funny, almost.

I dunno. Should I wipe out the entry? ... I think I won't. Someone might look and get a smile from it.

In other household news: a powerful if very tiny magic occurred last night. As I was drifting off around 11 I remembered I hadn't refrigerated something leftover from supper. I wanted just to move into sleep, but frugality won out (can't risk spoilage around here), and I struggled back into consciousness, sort of, and switched on the lamp, got out of bed, and in the doorway I turned to sidle past an object waiting to be carried downstairs the next morning and taken to the shop. As I did, I reached out my right hand to grasp the doorframe, and my ring finger came down on the tail end of a gigantic sleeping wasp. I got the sting of my life, wow, and made lots of noise about it as I first ran cold water and then fetched the ice thingy from the freezer. It took a while for the freezing to stop the pain, which it did just as I fell asleep again up under the blankets.

But it makes a superstitious mind wonder—you get up in the middle of the night, you could have chosen not to, and you plant your right-hand ring finger on probably the only wasp in the whole house at that moment, and it seems to be waiting for you, and the pain is terrible and your fingers are all swelled up now, but isn't that strange?

And the small wee rational guy rolls his eyes from his impoverished corner of my mind.

OK, shut up.

But I want that it should be telling me something about energy. This house is full of bugs, and I ignore them. I don't even talk about them. They're just there. And in a year and a half they have left me alone. Then last night I was talking to a friend online and I remarked about all the bugs in my house, and I named all the different kinds, and wasp was at the top of the list. Then this, less than an hour later. I always have said that what you give energy to is what comes to you.

The wee small rational guy shrinks further still. Sorry. I'll go read about physics now. That'll really shake you up.
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