Stamps of the Day: American Records

A few years ago the US Postal Service issued a series of 40 stamps highlighting the places, animals, and plants in the US that were the largest, loudest, tallest, deepest, fastest, oldest, etc., called Wonders of America.   They also made a puzzle featuring the stamps (in larger than natural size, of course), and it is one of our favorite puzzles here at home.  Tonight when I sat and looked through some of my stamp images to decide which one to pick to write about, I realized that it is actually amazing how many of these record places and organisms I have seen or been to after living in the US for nearly 20 years (yes, it has been that long, incredible).  

So, here it goes, the list of American records:

You can see these in Central Park these days, the peregrine falcons are back!  But one of the best observations I had was in Yellowstone National Park.
(FASTEST BIRD - Peregrine Falcon)

There is nothing like bumping along an old railroad track in the American west over vast sage brush areas (Colorado to be precise) after a vintage steam train and look out the window and see a couple of pronghorn staring at you.
(FASTEST LAND ANIMAL - Pronghorn)

Ancient ruins at the mesas in New Mexico, such as Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde, makes me wonder what kind of threats made people live like this - with the whole village only accessible by ladders.
(LARGEST CLIFF DWELLING - Cliff Palace)

Oh, Mississippi - I love the name of that river.  4 s's, and 4 i's and 2 p's.  And a single M, alone in the beginning.  The delta at its mouth might be as large as half of Sweden, or something like that. 
And New Orleans is of course set in the middle of it.
(LARGEST DELTA - Mississippi River delta)

Just a bit south of where we live, a few hours, is a giant bay along the Atlantic coast... the funny sounding Chesapeake Bay, once full of oysters, blue crabs and fish, but now overpolluted and overnutrified. It is still gorgeous, but it needs to get healthier again. 
(LARGEST ESTUARY - Chesapeake Bay)

Oh, the bullfrog's noises in the night wakes you up in the early mornings around here on the mountain... It is like a giant toad, fat and fleshy, and rather pompous in its behavior.

(LARGEST FROG - American Bullfrog)

Buffalo, bison, same thing.  I have only seen wild bison in Yellowstone, and there we saw them really close, actually too close for comfort when they suddenly changed direction and went straight in among the parked cars where we stood photographing them crossing the road.  I had to jump into the back of a minivan.  Nobody was hurt, but it gives you a lot of respect for these animals. 

(LARGEST LAND MAMMAL - American Bison)

Alligator meat is not bad.  It is lighter-colored than beef, a little fishy in texture, but not taste, more like chicken.  They can move fast too - I have seen 8-feet alligator lay still for 20 minutes and then be gone in 3 seconds with a giant splash down the bank to the water. Never trust a reptile :)

(LARGEST REPTILE - American Alligator)

I have only visited Rocky Mountains in bits and pieces, here and there.  New Mexico (oh Taos!), Colorado (wow, it was incredible), and up in Yellowstone, of course.  But this summer I think we will see the real thing when we visit Idaho and Boise.  This is something else than the Swedish mountains called 'fjällen'. A bit taller, steeper, fiercer, and younger. 

(LONGEST MOUNTAIN CHAIN - Rocky Mountains)

Speaking about mountains, the ones on the East Coast are the sister mountains to the Swedish mountains, same age, formed at the same geological time, and even if maybe taller in the US with the same feel of a bit worn-down, eroded landscapes, and with sequences of ridges and peaks blueing in the distance.  

(OLDEST MOUNTAINS - Appalachians)

In Hawaii, the mountains are so young they don't exist yet.  They are being formed, right now, tonight and tomorrow.  I have stood and looked at the spouting lava at the Kilauea crater in Hawaii, using binoculars since you weren't allowed very close.  Magic magma, lovely lava, and deadly.  

(MOST ACTIVE VOLCANO - Kilauea)

Here is a manmade record piece, which is something you see if you arrive in New York by boat from Europe - the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge connects Staten Island with Brooklyn over the narrow sound (The Narrows) that leads into New York City.  They are starting to grow oysters again under the bridge.  In the past there were lots of oysters here, more than people could eat, but then they disappeared because of pollution.  Soon we might have New York oysters again! 

(LONGEST SPAN - Verrazano-Narrows Bridge)

No records without the most amazing geysers of Yellowstone.  When I was a kid I used to look in books at my grandfather's house, and he had a book on Yellowstone.  I couldn't imagine the hot water spouts, sulfuric ponds, or bubbling mud pits, but they fascinated me, and I hoped that one day I would be able to see this crazy place.  Geology in action, of the most severe kind.  Well, volcanos might be a bit more severe, but Yellowstone is actually a giant volcano, and it is about to erupt at some point... About ten years ago I got the opportunity to visit Yellowstone during a workshop, and it was as crazy a place as I had imagined, or worse.  It is like a place out of a movie.  Moose grazing grass next to hot water springs that are deadly.  Geysers spouting giant fountains of water and steam on schedule.  Day and night. Incredibly.  I need to go back! (My grandfather's Yellowstone book is now in my house too.)

(TALLEST GEYSER - Steamboat)

When we drove up on Mount Washington in New Hampshire in June or July, they still had snow on the top.  It is the windiest place in America, this curved tip of an Appalachian mountain, and it felt like it.  It reminded me of the Swedish mountains, except our mountains in Scandinavia doesn't have giant weather stations on them.

(WINDIEST PLACE - Mount Washington)

And finally, another manmade thing, and this one is of utter impracticality and uselessness.  It just exist because someone had an idea, made it happen, and now everybody comes to see it. (Brilliant tourist marketing!)  I have never been up in the Gateway Arch in St. Louis by the Mississippi, but I have seen it from a distance.  You can take a little elevator inside to go up to the top, but if you are claustrophobic and or afraid of heights it is better to stay on the ground and look up.  

(TALLEST MAN-MADE MONUMENT - Gateway Arch)

Field report from Philadelphia International Flower Show 2012

Each year there is a massive flower and gardening show in Philadelphia, a giant pompous event on par with the Chelsea Show in England.  This year I went with neighbor and friend JL, and we had a blast.  The theme was Hawaii, which means that they invite garden designers to design and mount exhibits with flowers, structures, and other gardening features on this theme.  You would think Hawaii wouldn't be that hard - just think lava, lava, silverswords, rainforest, pineapple plantations, ocean, and some more lava.



Unfortunately, it seems like most designers never had been to Hawaii, nor looked up some basic facts. I don't have any good photos from the "Hawaiian" exhibits because I had set the ISO on my camera wrong, but if I had to categorize these ca 10 different garden designs I would say:  stuff a square on the floor with palms, anthuriums, orchids, all in a variety of chaotic colors, and maybe have a little lagoon, sand, and a surfboard - always a surfboard.  The native Hawaiian species were absent.  Lava, who cares about that!?  Not hint of volcanism.  And the exhibits all looked the same.  Stuffed full with the same artifical-looking tropical plants from any tropical island, nothing Hawaiian specific at all.

It really was rather painful, I think. I like the tropics, but I like people to design from real things and real plants, not pick things out from a hotel planting in any tropical country.  But then, the designers care very little about botany, history, geology, soils, and what can actually grow together for real.  They just stuff things together in some artificial design, in a unnatural and I would say, messy and illogical chaos.



This was pretty cool though - put an upside down Tillandsia on a stick, glue a sand dollar (sea urchin shell) on top, and wow, you have a jellyfish in your coral reef plant design.



This was the only exhibit we saw that actually built on the lava theme.  A patio dinner table set for dinner, and then the lava comes and disturbs the scene.  I wonder how the lava was made, it was very real-looking, it was even glowing with red lights.



At the show are also many other exhibits and exhibitors, some of which where really great. People compete over the best dinner centerpiece arrangement, best bonsai, largest flowering cactus, nicest tiniest flower design, and so on.

 
I bet 90% of the contestants are women.  The Asian women rule the pressed plant art exhibits, and their artwork is amazing.


In some cases the organizers tell the contestants to make a flower design containing specific things. These two were under the category "bamboo, cheap ugly glitterish stuff from Michaels, and then throw some orchids on it". It was horrendous. Generally it was far too much orchids and anthuriums. Come on, was there a sale on these? There are tens of thousands of tropical flowers, why just pick what is popular? One exhibit got an award for having 'the best design with rare and unusual plants', but I didn't see any rare and unusual plants in it! Strange... maybe anything but palms, orchids, and anthuriums is considered rare by non-botanical horticulturalists? (OK, I know I am critical here, but come on! There are a quarter million plant species out there. And design is supposed to have a thought, a theme, a line, a pattern, not just be mish-mash of the plants you expect to see in front of a Caribbean hotel).


This was fantastic on the other hand. A simplified model of central Philadelphia, from the art museum to Center City, with xerophytic succulents as the model plants. Wonderful, and done by the Philadelphia Parks department. Innovative, beautiful and educational, all at the same time. 5 stars!



The tropical wedding dinner table was a bit too much, and a bit too yellow in its filtered yellow spotlight, but still interesting. There wasn't much space to actually sit, eat, and talk, but who cares. And they covered the cycad stems with tubes of red flowers - cool, but why?


One of the things that bothers me most is how artificial all the designed gardens look like. For example, here the plants are spaced far too evenly, like if they were measured out with gauge blocks ('måttsats' in Swedish, which is a Swedish invention from my hometown!), and not just grown there for a while. It is nearly like having a Lego garden - the plants can only sit on the Lego knobs, not in between. It gives you this feeling of it not being real, not being alive, not being natural. One exception was a garden with spring bulbs, which was gorgeous, and there they had also used dried old oak leaves as mulch, not the regular ugly cedar mulch that was in most exhibits.



Lots of funny and nice things were for sale. Morel pottery. Seeds in packets designed by local artists. Weeds dried and sold as fancy flowers. Pottery vases from Maine.



Lots of very ugly, tacky, and cheap-looking (but not cheap) things were for sale. Metal palm lamps that looked like they belonged in some NJ mafioso home on the sea shore. Oils lamps with silk and plastic flowers made from oil-based plastic. Here you dig up oil from the Earth to make flowers with the Earth while it is full of living flowers? And glass fountains that would break if a bluejay was just looking at it, I bet.





In case you didn't know it, the sponge holder is the latest thing to have! You might think I spent the day being upset and disgusted, but not at all. It was a great show, a great trip, I just feel I don't really relate to some of the things the garden designers and horticulturalists do. I know, I am 'miljöskadad' as we say in Sweden, i.e., damaged by my career choice and education... :)

(And here is a link to all photos at the Flower Show 2012 - there was much more to look at)

Lava and smoke

exhibit about Hawaiian volcano eruption, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

A little corner exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago tried to showcase the lava eruptions in Hawaii using darkness, glow lights and LED lights. Did they succeed? What do you think?

When I was walking these exhibits I was thinking that most of these dioramas are missing the impressions of so many of our senses - there need to be scents, sounds, winds, and the feeling of touch to really get the real experience.

Just looking doesn't really do it. But being in Hawaii and smelling the sulfur, stepping on crunchy lava cinder sand and feeling the warm wind is a different thing. Couldn't exhibits try to invoke some of this too? I am not sure how to do the noise and smell or the warm wind, but I bet in the future there will be movie theaters with smell makers, fans, and boxes you can put your hands into to feel any texture or surface (ick, imagine that, anything slimy or gory...).  Virtual but real.  Still, that wouldn't be the real thing.  But I have always thought that to teach history, an experience such as walking down the street in 1850s New York would tell you a lot more about history than any book. 

I love the animal dioramas with stuffed beasts and painted backgrounds with a few silk flowers at museums, but it only gives you maybe 10% of the experience of being outside in nature. It is great that parents take their kids to museums, but they should even more just take them outside to many different kinds of places (and not be afraid of rain, ticks, dirt, germs, and toxic plants). How can you describe something to a kid that has never had that experience? You can't describe sulfur smell, it is unknown to you until you have actually smelled the rotten egg smell from a stinking boiling pot in Yellowstone. So, let's get out more. And put a sulfur smelling station next to the lava exhibit.

Kilauea Hawaii 2011 March

Picture from USGS, from the new eruption site on Hawaii in the Napau crater.

Once a long while ago...

breakfast, originally uploaded by istolethetv.

...I was in Hilo in Hawaii, and I had to try the local breakfast favorite, loco moco. It is served at every diner and fast food place as THE Hawaiian thing, and it is THE Hawaiian thing, based on American food culture mixed with Japanese. There has been a large historical immigration from Japan to Hawaii.

So, the loco moco - you take some cooked rice and dump it on a plate or in a bowl. Add some kind of rather unhealthy grilled meat on top (SPAM is what I had, you can have sausage or hamburger meat too). Dump some brown gravy on that (for Swedes, that is 'brun sås'). And then one or two fried eggs on top of that. Healthy? Not. Good? Depends. I am not such a spam freak but it was OK.

(This is not my photo, istoletheTV took it, thanks for letting us borrow it from your Flickr account.)

Stamps of the Day: The Sandwich Islands

Welcome to the Sandwich Islands (named after Lord Sandwich, who also gave name to the food item), a previous name for the Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific. This stamp sheet has 10 stamps hidden in the tropical rainforest of Hawaii.

Stamp of the Day: December 7 and Hawaii

Today is the 341st day of 2009. Are you ready for 2010? I am not, it feels like 2009 just started and I haven't even picked up speed yet. I need two-three months more to finish what I had planned for this year, both at work and home.

Today' date is the day Pearl Harbor was attached in 1941, Cicero was assassinated in 43 BC, Delaware was the first state in 1787 to ratify the US Constitution, US declared war on Austria in 1917, the stea locomotive Norfolk & Western 611 ran for the last time in 1994, Galileo (the spacecraft) arrived at Jupiter (yes, the planet), and the birthday of Louis Prima. And finally, it is the Cotton Candy day in the US.

All you need is spam....

There recently was a comment about spam here on the blog, so I thought you might want to see the latest addition to the SPAM brand from the local store in New Jersey. So here - have some Crazy Tasty for the 70th year anniversary of SPAM. And then of course there is the origin of e-mail spam!

I only like SPAM one way - Loco Moco, the Hawaiian breakfast where you get a bowl with white rice, then fried spam and a fried egg on top, and then brown gravy and hot sauce all over it. And only when I am in Hawaii, and only because it is traditional... Hawaii has the highest SPAM consumption in the whole world, and even McDonalds has it on their menu there. And you can get it sushi-like in small lunch boxes in all local stores, it is called musubi.