Front Street from California to Sacramento gets closed down for the evening on St Patrick’s Day. Royal Exchange, Harrington’s, and Schroeder’s all open into the street, and the barricades go up in the mid afternoon. These pictures are from 9 AM, noon, 5 PM, and 7 PM. The Paddy Wagon (yes, I went there) wasn’t doing any business—it was just sitting there, flashing its lights from time to time.
I’m doing a terrible job, sometimes going days without taking a picture, but I’m still doing a lot more photography than I was doing last year. The best part is when I finally see something I’d walked past mindlessly countless times before, like this gate and door.
Late as usual, but I haven’t failed yet! I have officially embarked on my artificial lighting journey.
OK, fine. I got detail on the fur of a black cat inside late at night. I guess I understand the appeal of artificial lighting now.
and other images were captured in the 70s, commissioned by the Nixon administration in conjunction with the creation of the EPA, for a project called Documerica. The National Archives have recently been making photos from the collection available.
A couple of days ago, Wired Science published a selection of these photos, and you can search the archives at the National Archives (you might want to use the search instructions at the Documerica site at the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism).
Do you feel lucky? A set that’s set to grow.
All-black penguins are so rare there is practically no research on the subject–biologists guess that perhaps one in every quarter million of penguins shows evidence of at least partial melanism, whereas the penguin we saw appears to be almost entirely (if not entirely) melanistic….
Observing this black penguin waddle across South Georgia’s black sand beach revealed no different behavior than that of his fellow penguins. In fact, he seemed to mix well. Regarding feeding and mating behavior there is no real way to tell, but I do know that we were all fascinated by his presence and wished him the best for the coming winter season.
Lots of discussion about this photo and this kind of coloring, plus other links, at the National Geographic blog entry about it.
March: 1 shot a week with lighting (not just available light)
April: CAT A DAY! (Does your cat need a portrait? I might need to visit other cats to keep it interesting.)
Stay tuned to see what I end up making. Or, you know, just to snigger at my failure!
“Drunk” bats have no trouble flying under the influence, a new study says.
Tropical bats of Central and South America regularly eat fermenting fruits and nectar. But they can fly and use their built-in “sonar” just as well while inebriated as while sober—even with blood-alcohol contents that would exceed legal limits for people.
“We went into the study fully expecting that some of the species wouldn’t be able to hold their drink,” said study co-author Brock Fenton, a biologist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.
But “the bats, unfortunately, hadn’t read the proposal,” he said.
Read the National Geographic writeup or the full article at PLoS ONE – rest assured that the female bats were not visibly pregnant or lactating, and all bats got a chance to sober up before they headed home. The National Geographic story also has more pictures of Central American bats, as well as other fun bat links sprinkled throughout its writeup. (Bonus: boozy shrew.)
Eames House by Peter Stackpole, August 1950, part of the Google LIFE collection.
I don’t know how your day starts, but my commute’s become awfully pretty, lately.