Stick Insect

I took this photo of an as yet unidentified stick insect one evening. It was resting on some Oamaru limestone just by our front door.

It transpires that there are nine genera and twenty-two species - wouldn't you know it! According to the New Zealand Stick Insect website, there are two subfamilies. Being able to tell one species from another depends on the arrangement of body spines, size of body, and most importantly the structure of the male and female genitalia and morphology of the eggs. Given that eggs were nowhere to be seen, and I couldn't get close enough to investigate the poor beast's genitalia (even had I known what I was looking for) identification of this beastie is not going to be possible. However, based solely on distribution criteria and the fact that it was found effectively in our garden I am plumping for a member of one of the eight species of Acanthoxyla. They are usually green or brown (yes), have black tips to their spines (yes) and thrive on garden plants (yes), and to boot this specimen is about the right size!

Pudding and Praise

I judge the value of human pursuits by their bearing upon human interests; in other words, by their utility; but I should like that we should quite clearly understand what is meant by this word “utility.” In an Englishman’s mouth it generally means that by which we get pudding or praise, or both.

I have no doubt that is one meaning of the word utility, but it by no means includes all I mean by utility. I think knowledge of every kind is useful in proportion as it tends to give people right ideas, which are essential to the foundation of right practice, and to remove wrong ideas, which are no less essential foundations and fertile mothers of every description of error in practice. And inasmuch as, whatever practical people may say, this world is, after all, absolutely governed by ideas, and very often by the wildest and most hypothetical ideas, it is a matter of the very greatest importance that our theories of things, and even of things that seem a long way apart from our daily lives, should be as far as possible true, and as far as possible removed from error.

Quotation from: A Lecture on the Study of Biology, in Connection with the Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus. (South Kensington Museum, December 16, 1876). by Thomas Henry Huxley.

Dog on the Beach

The rain kept on pouring Friday and Saturday. The gulls looked miserable.

So on Sunday after it stopped they went for the washed up kelp like mad things, only ...

to be disturbed by dogs running madly round. The beach was well patronised, walkers, runners, the old, the young, the very young in prams, and plenty of dogs - all relishing release from a week spent watching rain; stir crazy times.

Rainy Day

Well,actually a rainy night and rainy day. The combined effects of which have just about filled the Leith.

So for a comparison here's the more or less the same view taken six months ago in September.

It's rare that there's enough water to form a standing wave, but there were actually plenty of them today - this one kept breaking, just like they do at the seaside.

We had had a 'severe weather' forecast this morning. And, it's rained over the whole country. Apparently Oamaru, just over an hour's drive north, is cut off by floods. Check this out ...

Yikes!

Real Writer

To me these were the oddest of love letters, if they were indeed love letters and not merely the expression of a deeply sentimental friendship. They aroused my curiosity. I had been reading one half of a shared life and I wanted to read the other half. What sort of a reply did the Captain receive at the other end of the world? Perhaps it was the old ambition to be a ‘real writer’ which was latent in me and the curiosity of a would-be writer which drove me next to go and speak to that family Devil, my father. I want to continue this account and find a better conclusion than ‘I wonder perhaps.’

The Captain and the Enemy by Graham Greene

Mill Pond

We've been having a great calm sunny and warm autumn

Too quiet for much surf action...

Though that does mean there's plenty of time for good yarn or two. No doubt reliving waves past.

Giggling and Gagging

During that summer he ate for the first time a salad with a lemon and oil dressing and, at breakfast, yoghurt – a glamorous substance he knew only from a James Bond novel. His hard-pressed father’s cooking and the pie-and-chips regime of his student days could not have prepared him for the strange vegetables – the aubergines, green and red pepper, courgettes and mangetouts – that came regularly before him. He was surprised, even a little put out, on his first visit when Violet served as a first course a bowl of under-cooked peas. He had to overcome an aversion, not to the taste so much as to the reputation of garlic. Ruth giggled for minutes on end, until she had to leave the room, when he called a baguette a croissant.

Early on, he made an impression on the Pontings by claiming never to have been abroad, except to Scotland to climb the three Monroes on the Knoydart peninsula. He encountered for the first time in his life muesli, olives, fresh black pepper, bread without butter, anchovies, undercooked lamb, cheese that was not cheddar, ratatouille, saucisson, bouillabaisse, entire meals without potatoes, and, most challenging of all, a fishy pink paste, tarama salata. Many of these items tasted only faintly repellent, and similar to each other in some indefinable way, but he was determined not to appear unsophisticated. Sometimes, if he ate too fast, he came close to gagging.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan