I love Black Hockey Jesus!

Juvenile green sea turtle in a facility in Florida that I visited while a participant in the Scripps Howard Institute on the Environment for journalists.
Copyright (c) 2006 Wendee Holtcamp

I think I am in love. With Black Hockey Jesus.

OK no it's not romantic love. Certainly not erotic love - much as he he might like to think or wish or hope from his latest blog post - that his blog title Wind in Your Vagina might inspire erotic thoughts... but it's love nonetheless. And in writing this, I can not even hope to be half or even a quarter or a duotrigintillionth as witty and random and strange and poetically charming and moving as his blog is, but I can be inspired. (I also have to admit my boyfriend, on me reading the post to him, said, "Is he married? He seems like a perfect match for you.") Ha! I thought that was quite humorous. Was he jealous? Trying to pawn me off to someone more writerly than he? I had to wonder.

I must admit vainglory to having him write a whole blog post about me - Science. OK that is an exaggeration. It's not ALL about me. It's really about him writing about me writing about him. But he mentioned being wedged in between cyanobacteria and parthenogenesis and how cool that was (amidst a bunch of other
mildly insane random thoughts - I say this in the kindest of ways). When I read it I laughed out loud and had a grin you couldn't wipe off my face. Call it my own vanity, I admit it! Because he's just brilliant.

Anyway, if you get a chance, and I hope you do, read this completely gorgeous essay he wrote about his daughter on her 5th birthday. It will bring you to tears. Just reminds me of that amazing beauty of being a parent that you experience when kids are so young and innocent and wise and alive all at the same time. As he writes in the sidebar describing the title of his blog:

I took Jackson (9) to soccer practice, put Lucy (4) on a swing, and sat on a bench to read. Lucy screamed, “The wind, Daddy! The wind! It feels so nice. It’s nice in my vagina!” I looked at my daughter. She appeared to me in this context as the radical opposite of all dead things.

Profound! So here's his essay, 5, about his daughter. It is worth your time! Here's a snippet:

When I was 18-years-old I was not so happy. One time I stood on a dock that stretched way out onto a frozen lake. I cried icicles, clenched my fists, and screamed until my throat hurt. I screamed at the dark and dared it to come get me. I said Well come get me then! I am not so afraid of you! I wanted to run as fast as I could to the end of the dock and leap right into the dark. I was not so happy.

But many years later, when you were born, when you were no more than a couple handfuls of raging pink littleness, the very first thing you did was change everything. When I saw you I shuddered with my whole body. The room rippled. I gasped. The future filtered through your open eyes. Your wail rewrote the past. That shuddering ripple changed everyone I ever was. You ran all the way back to that dock and whispered in my ear Don’t you jump into the dark just yet, mister. You will one day be my Daddy.

WOW!!!!! It was reprinted in a magazine, even. And his commenters are so funny too! I guess witty writers attract witty readers. And some of them have even migrated and checked out my blog - hello Black Hockey Jesus fans! Oops, I just wrote Black Hokey Jesus. Hey BHJ, maybe you should add that to your Google alerts? (By the way my new love, BHJ, you gave me a great idea, to add my name to Google Alerts. I do admit to vainly Googling my name now and then...why not have them come to me?)

But speaking of science (and math) and Google, did you know that 'Googol' is the term for 1^100? It is also the word that the company Google meant to call their company but apparently someone there (or many people) couldn't spell. It was also a winning answer on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in the UK. And other names for it are ten duotrigintillion, ten thousand sexdecillion, or ten sexdecilliard. Who even knew such words existed?! I learned these factoids when science writer Carl Zimmer's daughter recently wrote it out and it took 5 minutes to write all those zeros, and he posted this to his Facebook status updates. And I didn't know what the heck a Googol was, so I .... Googled it. Then I read the entry in Wikipedia. So there ya go. God Bless the internet! Back to shark parthenogenesis I go...

sharks and weiners

Left to right clockwise - Richard Fitzpatrick, Dean Miller, Mike DeGruy and M. Sanjayan on board the Undersea Explorer holding down a whitetip reef shark as they prepare to take data and film the documentary Mysteries of the Shark Coast at Osprey Reef in the Coral Sea off the coast of Australia
Copyright (c) 2008 Wendee Holtcamp

I am not quite sure why I'm not blogging so much lately. The more time that goes by the more it seems overwhelming to begin to blog, so I better just do it. I've been insanely busy - but then again when am I not? I am struggling with the thought of my book needing to be completed by June 1. I got a whole lot done in the early months of this year and then sort of stalled due to other deadlines. I had that article on cyanobacteria due, and then Tuesday I gave a talk at my son's school called the Tree Huggers Revenge: Why People Need Trees. I am trying to put a copy of my Powerpoint from my tree/forest talk online but the PDF I made using Adobe Converter turned everything sideways. Harumph. Any ideas on how to turn a PPT file into a PDF without it turning weird like that?

Oh. My. God. I just laughed so hard at this essay about a dad and his young daughter's obsession with weiners on the blog Wind In Your Vagina by Black Hockey Jesus (don't ask, just read...). It will make you laugh!! Weiners.. The comments are especially hilarious too!! Such as, "She does have a point. It is considered polite to keep your weiner in your pants. Especially at a restaurant."

Speaking of weiners, I'm working on an article on shark virgin birth - aka parthenogenesis - and why sex evolved in the first place. There are costs and benefits, evolutionarily speaking, to sex as opposed to asexual reproduction. My article will discuss several recent cases of virgin birth in various species. The two that have been genetically confirmed are a hammerhead (bonnethead specifically) and blacktip shark but they've now found suspected and probable cases with white bamboo sharks and a whitetip reef shark - the same species I saw in Australia when I wrote the Discovery Channel Expedition Shark blog. That means that sharks that give live birth and that lay eggs can reproduce asexually. So why do they have sex? Why did sex evolve? That's the question of the hour...

One kind of cool thing that happened was one of the scientists that I interviewed for my article said that Mysteries of the Shark Coast was one of the best documentaries he'd ever seen (that's the documentary I was blogging about the filming of in the Expedition Shark blog), and thought it was cool I was there during part of the filming. This scientist is actually doing a similar project to what Fitzpatrick and colleagues are doing on Osprey Reef but on the Eastern Shore Board of the U.S. and he - and another shark scientist - invited me along with their research. Hell ya!!! Now I just have to find a magazine to give me the budget...

you'll always have the sky

A Nazca booby sits like a sentinel on Española Island, Galapagos archipelago. See my Galapagos photo gallery for more pics.
Copyright (c) 2007 Wendee Holtcamp

Where has the week gone? I'm starting a new article on virgin birth in sharks, which is just incredibly cool and interesting. Have just started on my taxes... They're always a bear since I do them myself, and being self employed there are like 10,000 forms... (that might be a slight exaggeration). :)

I watched the movie Vicky Cristina Barcelona tonight while sorting out my receipts for taxes and the beauty of Barcelona and Spain ignited my wanderlust. Watching it made me want to travel and experience a different culture again, and to see the beauty that is there in Barcelona, or anywhere but the concrete jungle of Houston. One of my students in my writing class said that a Hopi woman once said to her, when she lamented living in a city, at least you have the sky.

The other night Doug and I went for a lovely walk around his neighborhood at dusk and the sky was just beautiful. The sky was a lovely pastel periwinkle blue with clouds illuminated by buttery sunshine. Then the full moon emerged, so large it looked four times it's normal size, peeking out behind a dark grey cloud. The contrast between the grey and the blue and yellow - it was just very luminescent. I only wish we had more stars here in the sky. All the lights of the city drown them out. I still imagine so clearly the absolute brilliance of the night sky in Costa Rica in December of 1999 when Discovery Channel sent me there to write about leatherback sea turtles (Love & Death on Turtle Beach). It was a new moon, and as I patrolled the beach looking for nesting sea turtles at night I was astounded, I mean truly astounded that I could see so many stars. Never in my life had I been in so much awe of the night sky. I've seen stars since but never like that. It was a magical time, a magical moment.

I also loved this quote from the movie. Juan Antonio is the main male character in the movie, and at one point Vicky and he visit his dad, who is a poet who writes beautiful poetry in Spanish but refuses to publish because he hates the world and the people of the world. Vicky asks Juan Antonio why, and he replies, "Because after thousands of years of civilization, they still haven't learned how to love." I thought that was very profound. I'm so tired of hate and prejudice and intolerance and judgment.

Tomorrow I hope to get started again on my book. I had to write that article on cyanobacteria which took time away from it, and am now getting back to my chapter on young earth creationism and my visit to the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose. I watched the movie Alice in Wonderland as "research" today for that chapter.

On a practical note I just announced the opening of a new session of my online writing class! It will begin April 11. If you're interested check out the writing page website, or email me. http://www.wendeeholtcamp.com/nature.htm