Tsunami Notice

Strange thing, you know; since the Big Tsunami in the Indian Ocean on December 27 2006 (my birthday, as it happened) everyone has got all concerned.

It's fairly obvious that, on an island like Siargao, where most of the flat ground is only 1 or 2 metres above high-tide mark, that, if a tsunami happened, we'd all be done for.

A tsunami's not something you can plan ahead for.

We're only a few miles from the Philippine Deep (some 10km down), and if, say, a huge submarine landslide or something similar happened there, we wouldn't have much time to run.

So there's not much point in putting up notices like this, especially when it's distinctly ambiguous about whether you have to run 14 kilometres or just a mile.

So, it may happen at any time, and since I can't run much any more, I'll just plod along, and pray (even though I'm an atheist).

Fidelity - Female Fruit Flies Only Fuck on the First Date

I'm not a lot interested in fruit flies, as such, but they (Drosophila) have been a great deal helpful to science in general and especially in the genetics corner.

It seems that female fruit flies are fussy. After the first time they have intercourse, they don't want to do it again.

Someone has discovered (or thinks he has) how.

Now this is how you find out the the details of the complicated and devious mind of the female fruit fly.

You feed them. With yeast that contains lots of heavy nitrogen. That isotope labels all of the female proteins.

Then you look at them after they've fucked. Anything that didn't have the heavy nitrogen was given by males. The researchers discovered some sixty-three proteins from fruit fly semen, which may suggest that the male fruit fly lacks confidence in his wife's fidelity, and is over-doing it a bit.

(Sorry to anyone who's offended by the fffour-letter word - the alliteration was just too good to resist).

Jungle Terror Orchid

This is part of an orchid that grows on the second coconut tree down in my garden. It's the sexy bit, the bit that makes insects (mostly bees) come in to pick up pollen.

I've not seen such a greedy image in nature before. It has little beady eyes, and a gaping mouth, and even little hands at each side. And it's got a big wide-open bag to hold all the victims it finds, for future consumption.

It even appears to have arms and hands, to drag its victims into its ever-open pouch.

But don't those insects ever watch movies?

The creature at the heart of this flower is a copy (or perhaps the inspiration?) for the creature that burst into the world in Alien.

H.R.Giger's wonderful inspirations for the original film were great, but the first Alien was aggressive.:

The second film, though, showed a more seductive Alien, and Sigourney Weaver fell for it.

Barringtonia - Bito'On - Sea Poison Tree

I'm getting into this digital painting lark now, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

This is a crudely altered photo of a Barringtonia or bito'on tree flower.

The tree grows near the shore almost everywhere in the coastal areas of Island SE Asia and Oceania.

It's a wonderful shade tree, and when it's in the mood, produces these fabulous flowers, about three inches across, with a fan of stamens (pistils?) at dusk.

The next morning, they are moribund and abandoned on the ground, as this one was.

A lovely specimen of the tree used to grow in the churchyard in General Luna, but the holy Catholic vandals of that institution cleared it of this and several other beautiful trees.

But Barringtonia doesn't only produce flowers. The fruit look a bit like squared-off apples, and they're valuable. They float very well, so they're widely used as net-floats (and also as the way for Barringtonia to colonise new shorelines).

The area of their distribution is very, very near that of Austronesian languages, and of the natural distribution of coconuts.

And the flesh of the fruit is poisonous to fish. Don't fiddle about with big, bright yellow lures, just zap 'em.

See more about Barringtonia here : (Apologies if you don't go straight to the bookmark; I haven't updated this page for ages).

Them green lizards

We have a couple of 'daily lizards' around the place.

There are the always-present geckos. As I sit at my worktable in the evening, I can count around a dozen on the walls and ceiling around me.

They chatter, attack and rape each other, and are altogether a very useful digression from the problems of thinking and writing.

But we also have another lizard. The Emerald Green Skink - Lamproletis smaragdinus.

I featured them here. They are very beautiful; one of those things that you see occasionally, that give you immediate pleasure, just from their appearance - a bit like a bunch of silent hot air balloons crossing the escarpment in front of you, as they used to do, over the Chiltern Hills, when I lived in Tring, Hertfordshire. It's only when they pass directly overhead, and fart, as they boost the hot air, that you realise they are not disembodied spirits, but have bodily functions as well.

So when I saw one of my Emerald Lizards chomping a gecko, I was a little disappointed that he had very definite bodily functions, as well.

Pornography - Some Observations

I don't like pornography - at least, I don't like the stuff that's peddled for inadequates on the internet and in those top-shelf magazines in plastic bags.

If I want to see a c**t in all its great wonder, I really don't have to go to a Broadway movie house, as I once did, to be confronted by a magnified vagina in full, glorious, slippery Technicolor, forty feet high.

I can buy a girl in Cebu for less than the price of a 'Playboy' magazine, and see for myself.

But I do like subtle, arousing (in all the best senses, physical as well as sensual, spiritual, etc, etc) stories and pictures that lead me on to think and feel more ... and more.

One of the very first genuinely porno film scenes I ever saw (in the sense that it aroused real physical feelings in me, not just prurient ones) was the scene in Tom Jones (1963) where Albert Finney and Joyce Redman dine together. Their lip-smacking, smirking attention to each other, while they were only eating something, gave more than a few hints, and stimuli for the imagination, than could any pictures of 40ft high c**ts.

That wonderful scene can be seen here

Siargao Pythons

I am running out of things to say about my life; it's a wee bit humdrum, so:

About two years ago, I started a temporary zoo of local animals and featured some of the photos I took in my website section on Early Human Diet.

That shows the obvious fact that along shorelines from East Africa to right out to here, the mammals and reptiles are very much the same.

See mammals here and this particular species of reptile here.

My first python died, before I could even get him home.

He'd been attacked by a bunch of local timber-stealers, and was moribund when we found him. He died, and decayed, on the 4 hour trip home, and we couldn't even recover his beautiful skin, that had been hacked around by the timber-stealers' machetes.

But we did render down his skull:

As you can see, he had vicious, back hooked, and very sharp teeth.

It was a bit too much trouble to reconstruct the bones. If we had, we would have demonstrated the very flexibleskull structure of the snake, with the bones joined by cartilage and sinew, and not rigidly fused together.

This allows the snake to stretch its jaws to the maximum when trying to swallow anything large. The back-hooked teeth ensure that anything it is trying to swallow has great difficulty in getting out again.

Pythons are not poisonous, but are not very friendly either. If you get a body part into a python's jaws, it's very difficult to get it out again.

Besides which, their 'wrapping muscles' are really, very very strong.

My second python was brought to me from Consuelo, just up the way, where it was caught trying to cross the (only) road.

He's the fellow shown top right. Only about 3 feet long, but he definitely didn't have a 'good' character.

I f***ed up the photo just following that, because he suddenly attacked, and I panicked. (I'd already been through the problem of taking him out of his chicken-coop, and having him wrap around my lower arm while he proceeded to bite my thumb).

After that insult to my hospitality (I had local kids bringing rats and mice for his dinner) I took him back to another jungle village and let him go.