I just watched a video of jellyfish which is so beautiful (found it at this fun blog, Nummy Nims). The video was made by the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, whose website states that they are working to inspire action for conservation of the oceans. I wanted to go there when I visited family in California in summer 2008, but it was closed. anyway, I figured it would be a great receiver of my donation this year – last year I supported Wikipedia. Do you too find the conservation of millions of wonderful marine creatures important? Please donate an amount of your choice using the link of the picture below.

Donation page for The Monterey Bay Aquarium

If the darn jellyfish would stop moving, the photo would have been in perfect focus. They still look interesting. The blue background makes a nice combination with the shape of the fish and their colors.

It was harder than I had thought to take a simple snapshot. The window is too small and the creatures won’t stop swiming. Two or three people in the way and nobody can get close to see or take photos. I actually had to wait in line for my turn.

Too many hands with camers following the fish around. I am amazed how little people know about photography but are also so eager to snap photos away. I think it is more of a psychological thing to point and shoot than actually expect good photographs. I have seen enough point-and-shoot shots to doubt the value of these shots.

* This post belongs to the Weekend Edition of World of Cush Schlog and may also appear in Reviews by Cush and or other blogs. Snapshots are cellphone photos unless noted otherwise.

If the darn jellyfish would stop moving, the photo would have been in perfect focus. They still look interesting. The blue background makes a nice combination with the shape of the fish and their colors.

It was harder than I had thought to take a simple snapshot. The window is too small and the creatures won’t stop swiming. Two or three people in the way and nobody can get close to see or take photos. I actually had to wait in line for my turn.

Too many hands with camers following the fish around. I am amazed how little people know about photography but are also so eager to snap photos away. I think it is more of a psychological thing to point and shoot than actually expect good photographs. I have seen enough point-and-shoot shots to doubt the value of these shots.

* This post belongs to the Weekend Edition of World of Cush Schlog and may also appear in Reviews by Cush and or other blogs. Snapshots are cellphone photos unless noted otherwise.

Photographed by jimg944

A window into the endless, mysterious world of open waters; the Jelly Fish exhibits at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The stunning one-million-gallon Outer Bay exhibit is home to the largest community of open-ocean animals to be found in any aquarium. Giant bluefin tuna power their way through the water. Hammerhead sharks circle inches away. Sea turtles cruise lazily by.

The Outer Bay also features the largest permanent collection of jellyfish species in the United States. Egg-yolk jellies and sea nettles drift gently in ten-foot-long exhibits beautifully lit to accentuate the jellies’ delicate beauty. Comb jellies pulse with rainbow bands of light as they swim.

– License

East Coast Japan…200 Kilo Jellyfish…deeee!

See more HERE

Week 2. Cairns, Australia.

We arrived at the Cairns Colonial Club Hotel at 9:00. Everyone tired from traveling all day immediately went to bed.

The Great Barrier Reef.

The next morning at 7:00 am we made our way to the Cairns Harbor, to experience what is the Great Barrier Reef. We were warned early that if anyone had problems with sea sickness that it would be best to take the medicine offered on the boat. I guess just being ignorant Americans, nobody believed the Captain and about 20 minutes in we all wished we had. The surf became very, very big as I sat in the lower deck for my mandatory scuba diving lesson with about 10 others from the class. Soon after, I and many other also found themselves on the back of the boat feeling far less than 100%. Chaotic and horrific best describe what happened next.

Note: sorry to those with a weak stomach:

As I made my way through the door and out onto the back deck of the boat green and dizzy feeling I was almost hit in the head with three bags of vomit, which were being held in one hand by the deckhand, a poor little Asian girl who sadly didn’t know what she was in for when a bunch of foreigners got on the boat. After this near-death experience (I would have died if someone else’s bag of vomit exploded all over me) I was thrown into a vomiting girl by a wave we had hit, which then caused her to fall down and vomit all over the deck. Another guy, seeing the girl’s vomit/seeing her vomiting then started to vomit. I helped her up, trying to direct her to the nearest bench, however the surf got even bigger and after hitting a huge wave we were both thrown to the ground. If things hadn’t gotten pretty bad already, a mask and a pair of flippers fell from the drying racks about 7 feet above my head onto my back as I was trying to stand. As my stomach condition became worse and worse the sound of the lion-like roars and heaving, vomit hitting the bags, the look of sheer terror on everyone’s faces, the large surf, the little Asian girl with the big eyes throwing vomit at people and the fifty bags of vomit that had accumulated in a trash bag near me all became too much to handle. Seeing my face and stomach twisting, a girl gave me her extra bag and it wasn’t long until I had added my bag to the Asian girl’s collection.

We finally reached our first dive site. I got suited up, went over the instructions our dive teacher had given once more and then took the plunge into the warm water. On the first dive we had to practice breathing, dropping the regulator, picking it back up and then breathing again, filling our masks with water and then clearing the water out of our masks etc. After the preliminaries we were led by our guide on a tour of the reef. It was so beautiful and full of life -  I saw Nemo and his parents, giant clams, parrot fish, all kinds of fish really, even a shark sleeping, or so we thought, on the bottom. Unfortunately I couldn’t get any pictures, my camera not being water proof and all. We went to a total of three dive sites. Those who didn’t dive snorkeled instead, which was, for me even more fun than diving at times. I dove on the first and third sites, the most beautiful in my opinion and snorkeled on the second. The boat provided us with a great lunch and even some suits that protected us from jelly fish. One girl got stung on the face, the only place that the suit didn’t cover and sat on the boat the rest of the day. Poor thing.

After our day full of snorkeling and diving we made our way back into the harbor. The ride back thankfully wasn’t as bumpy and everyone held on to their lunch just fine. Once back at the hotel many got ready to go out on the town, while I stayed in and did some work for the class.

Cairns Natural Wildlife Habitat.

Day two of our Cairns adventure was spent at the wildlife habitat. The habitat was full of all sorts of birds native to Australia, kangaroos, wallabies, and of course the crocs. Our first stop through the park was the bird house. Our guide told interesting facts and stories about all the birds we came across and even had names for all of them. How she remembers who is who I have no idea – there had to have been about 2,000 birds. There was even a little birdie named Jack who liked to perch himself on everyone’s head. Coach Wilk got to experience this as Jack sat on his head for the whole tour through the bird house, which was around 45 minutes. We also came across a pelican named Doodie. Doodie was sleeping and didn’t enjoy it when our guide tapped her head to wake her and actually bit the guides arm. She was left with a giant slash mark on her right arm and when we asked if she was okay she merely said to Doodie, “now, now Doodie what have I said about biting?” The bite looked so painful I think I would have cried.

We got to see the kangaroos and crocodiles next. The kangaroos, which you are allowed to pet and feed, never came close enough to touch. There was one little wallaby that was interested in everyone and he came up and played with all of us. The crocs were all lying in the sun or under the water and apart from looking like dinosaurs, were pretty boring.

I also had a chance to hold a koala named Glenn. Glenn was very nice and just slept in my hands. Koalas sleep about 20 hours a day and eat the other four. What a life that would be!

Tjapukai Aboriginal Museum.

Day 3 in Cairns began with a morning of learning. We woke at 7 to drive to the Tjapukai Aboriginal Museum. The Tjapukai culture is considered a lost one in Australia, however the museum is doing everything it can to preserve the culture, language, history etc. We were given a short introduction to the people and how their culture has been destroyed by industrialization in Australia, as well as a presentation of the birth of the culture. Wilk then gave us the assignment to relate the religion of the Tjapukai people with our own, finding similarities and differences. We learned how to throw a boomerang – I had trouble with the wrist snap, how to throw a spear at a kangaroo (not a real one) – my spear went into a tall tree about 30 yards in front of me, how to play the didgeridoo (the long wooden instrument that makes that weird noise, that’s the only description I can give) and the medicinal values of the berries and leaves native to Australia. There was also a native dance performance, where members from our group went up and participated in.

After the museum we rode the longest gondola in the world from the city of Cairns to the nearby city of Kuranda, where we ate a fantastic café lunch and did some shopping at the nearby market. The 7 mile-one-way gondola had stops along the way where we took photos of the beautiful scenery and listened to the life in the rain forest below us.

Melbourne and the Australian Open to come!

There’s something very calming about going to the aquarium.

Monterey Bay Aquarium, CA

Here, there are few straight lines, few direct flights or shortest distances, and yet things have never looked lovelier.

What a bummer!!!!!! Guess I should have done my home work before I sent out all of those request to my friends to come over and sign up under the google friend connect.  Oh well, maybe they will get wordpress.com to where it is up to date…I must say I am disappointed but will keep trucking a long with what gadgets I do have here. It took me a while just to figure out how to even start blogging. It is an adventure that I am glad  I decided to tackle.

SO how about a picture for the day OR maybe one or 2…

Eye Level

He is still out there..wonder if he misses this tooth..lolol… A story about the tooth is that I had found one on my previous visit to Jacksonville Beach. The lady that we are parked next to at the RV camp told me that she had been looking for one for her grandson….I told her jokingly that if I found one I would give it to her…GUESS what (almost) the first thing I found on the beach…yeap you guessed it..the sharks tooth above….I laughed and said well Lord thank you…the lady was so happy and said her grandson would be exstatic…..

All washed up until tomorrow!

Reflection of 2009

u can almost see the arctic air coming for 2010….burrr.

Setting on 2009

Rising on 2010!!!!!!!

The other day my son asked me why the keys on a keyboard are in a random order. I happened to know the answer to that question, furthering the illusion that adults know more things than children. My uncle, who spent many years in the old typesetting business, told me the story. He explained that keyboards used to be laid out in a logical, alphabetical order. Typists became so fast, though, that the mechanical keys of typewriters would get jammed up. I am actually old enough to have used a typewriter in middle school, and this was a frequent occurrence even with my inept typing skills. And so, the story goes, IBM invented the QWERTY layout of keys to slow down typists. So, we have a legacy system designed to make it hard to type. Now, I haven’t checked to see if the QWERTY story is an urban myth, since that would mean the possibility that adults don’t always know what they are talking about, but somebody has to have the courage to change this. I’m talking to you, Apple Computers! You are the big innovators; you are the ones 9 1/2 years ahead of other manufacturers. You should be the one brave enough to change the keyboard. You got rid of floppy disk drives before anyone was ready and we all adapted. You could transition the population with a switchable QWERTY/Alphabetical board.

While you are making that change, Apple, add this long neglected feature: A cents sign. It’s a bit absurd that there’s a dollar sign above the 4, but no cents sign. In all the years I’ve been using keyboards, I can never remember what the combination of keystrokes is that creates the cents sign. If they have to get rid of something, get rid of that ` thing to the left of the 1. It’s not really an accent mark, since you’d have to press all sorts of buttons to get it to appear above an e. The accent marks should be imprinted on the letter keys and appear when you press the letter with a helper button.

Speaking of cents, my son had this idea: The U.S. mint should make 99 cent coins. Everything seems to on sale for $something.99, and who needs all those single pennies weighing down their pockets? Have you ever stood there after buying something for $10.99 while you had to wait awkwardly for your one cent in change? Do you say, “keep the change?” or would that mess up their accounting system? You don’t know, so you just stand there & when you get your nearly worthless penny, you look for a little change cup on the counter to put it in. I know these observations are pretty cultural-centric, but if you’re reading this and you live in India, just bear with me… it’s one way of learning all the inane little details of life in the United States, in case you ever decide to live here.

And, if you do live in the United States, you have to get from one place to another. Even if you are a blogger, and you spend all day at your computer, you may occasionally look out the window and see that many people are walking on two legs, which is a roundabout way of bringing me to my next point:

Bipedalism seems an unlikely mode of transportation. Isn’t it precarious to balance a high center of gravity on two leg sticks? It just strikes me as a strange outcome of evolution.

As far as evolution goes, I’m constantly amazed that it has worked out as well as it has. Have you ever thought about what things would be like if evolution hadn’t done such a good job? There must be a planet somewhere with really messed up creatures. What if we had evolved to have a third leg that was always getting in the way? I know what you evolutionary biologists are thinking: “That would be inefficient & thus would tend to be replaced by a better system…. And I wear a turnip for a hat.” But, evolution is the result of random mutations, and it seems to me that there’s at least a slim possibility that the mutations necessary to get rid of a third leg might not ever happen to pop up.

And while we are on the subject of evolutionary mutations, I was surfing the internets today looking for an update on our species’ progress toward immortality, when I discovered that there is at least one multicellular animal that is known to be immortal. It is a small sea creature called turritopsis nutricula, a sort of jellyfish. It grows from a polyp to an adult & then the cells in its body actually reverse and grow back into a polyp, just like Benjamin Button, only back & forth forever. There’s another possibly immortal animal called a hydra. You see them all over in ponds and streams. They are tiny predators with up to 12 poisonous (to water fleas) tentacles. When it’s time for the hydra to reproduce, it has two options. If food is scarce, it opts for sexual reproduction. To do that, it grows an ovary, testes, or both, and releases gametes in the water to find their way to hydras with ovaries and fertilize eggs. But the hydra aren’t stuck with sexual reproduction. When food’s a-plenty, a hydra will sprout a bud on the side of its body which grows into a complete miniature adult hydra & breaks off. But wait! There’s more! Sadistic scientists of the 19th century discovered that you can squeeze a hydra through cheese cloth, dissecting it into a mush of individual cells & the cells will regroup & grow back into a hydra.

I tell you all of this because the bud-sprouting hydra reminds me of a science fiction movie idea I had years ago. I envisioned a race of people who reproduced by sprouting walnut-like spores on their backs, which would then fall off to the ground & if watered, would grow into babies. I figured that cultures would develop communal baby gardens to make sure the new ones were watered and cared for.

Now that might seem like a strange thing to write in a blog, but what attracts me to the walnut baby humans is that they are raised communally, and I think that would forge a strong sense of interdependence and group responsibility. So, Apple Computers, I’m just suggesting that the iWalnut Baby may be something to look into.

The day’s concerns trail behind noiselessly the cerulean silk of sleep.

A circus of blue moon pies.

They floated and fraternized in mysterious ways until finally, one bright idea emerged.

                                                         Happy New Year!

(photo: D. Cheng)

Buoyantly toward this night, lit by paper lanterns of our own hope.

(photo: D. Cheng)

Yes, the tickets for the Vancouver Aquarium are expensive. $22 for adults. That’s not cheap. But it really is a great place to go on a rainy day. The Beluga whales are amazing. Before we knew it, we had spent 4 hours there.

The aquarium has an Arctic area, with sea otters and the Beluga whales. The Coastal Waters section was really interesting, too. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see the giant octopus because it was hiding in the rocks. The aquarium also has an Amazon exhibit, a Jelly Fish area, and a Frogs exhibit.

]]> http://chrissym79.wordpress.com/?p=683 Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:10:36 +0000 chrissy http://chrissym79.wordpress.com/?p=683

A much needed weekend to deal with all the shit I’ve been through.

So me, Jen and L went to the Cape for a night. Really awesome to not be in my house. I didn’t care what happened when we were down there, as long as I wasn’t in my house.

We drove up Friday night. Nice calm, relaxing ride. Until we hit the bridge and I was having a serious panic attack. I swear in a former life or something, I was driven off a bridge and drowned. (Maybe it was Kennedy’s fault.) (Ok to make this even worse, I wrote this Tuesday August 25, and Teddy died. Found out this morning. RIP. Seriously I cried. I’m still gonna leave it in here though. No hate mail please, just saying.) Man I was freaking out.

We grabbed munchies before we got to the house. I got all the junk food (like always.) Jen got ham, cheese, salami and bread (like always.) It made for very tasty sandwiches.

We thought it was going to be raining. It was such a beautiful day. I couldn’t even stand how awesome it was. The water was wicked warm. I mean I could have stayed in it all day except for the seaweed. Listen, seaweed is wicked gross, I was even more freaked when people were talking about jelly fish. I didn’t want someone to have to pee on my leg.

Update: Another little lost blog found. 8/25/09

So on Tuesday it was about -12C in Toronto and what better way to spend it than in the great outdoors!  Yes, I spent about  4 hours wandering around the Toronto Zoo in the freezing cold, but I was well wrapped up and didn’t really feel the cold too much.  I took the pictures below at the Zoo using my Panasonic DMZ Fz-7 (I really needed the zoom to get up close with the animals)

Everything you didn’t know about your favorite animals!

Fox, C

Goes by Courtney, Sweet Lips, Sugar Tits, or Chumbawumba.

Beat Texas in a staring contest.

Physically, doing ok. Emotionally, doing SEXY.

Didn’t get the joke you just made, so she turned it into a joke about bad gas in her head.

Penguin

Definite flirt. Acts as though they are unaware, but they totally are.

On the plus side they make the best snickerdoodle you’ll ever eat.

Love math jokes.

They tell great stories – but they’re always stories about ‘a guy I know.’

They like to shout “don’t pre-judge” then moon each other.

Lion

Hate, hate, hate the border patrol.

The most racially hyper-sensitive animal you’ll ever meet.

Hopes to be in corporate by next quarter.

Aren’t sure if you’re kidding when you’re being sarcastic.

Taller than you’d think.

Jelly Fish

Not nearly as funny as he thinks.

Says ’shoot you an email’ sincerely.

No sense of tradition.

Into kinky stuff.

Smokes that tra-la-la.

The Background music is from a KEXP Podcast, Featuring Bishop Allen

I was recently in a show called The BIG 100. Here are the 20 pieces I submitted for the show. On most of these 8″X8″ panels I used spray paint. Some were mixed with a local Portland newspaper called Street Roots. It was a fun one night only show to be apart of with 99 other artists, and I’m excited to participate next year!

An invasion of jellyfish the size of sumo wrestlers is throwing the Japanese fishing industry into jeopardy.

The vast stinging creatures have appeared on Japan’s Pacific coast after floating from Chinese and Korean waters where they breed every year.

The Echizen jellyfish grow up to 2.2m in diameter and can weigh over 300kg.

Their size means they are capable of ruining fisherman’s nets and poisoning and crushing catches.

One fishing boat was even capsized after a mammoth creature got caught in its net.

A local fisherman said: ” I have never seen anything this big before.”

Much about the jellyfish swarms remains a mystery but some scientists believe global warming and rising sea temperatures may be a factor.

Japan’s Meteorological Agency says the waters of the Sea of Japan are warming at a speed three times faster than the global average.

Be the first to discuss this news article

The Muddled Mass of Jelly on the Shore (Part II)
21 September 2009
Ponquogue, Hampton Bays, NY