We're linking tongues and moving on

[sovay]

Most of today does not bear repeating, but in the afternoon my mother and I went to the Museum of Science and looked at the frogs: they were still beautiful. The dart-poison frogs, which look like metallic glazes. The waxy monkey frog, sitting up on its branch with delicate, unsticky fingers and opposable thumbs. Bullfrog tadpoles, fire-bellied toads; even a clawed Xenopus, whose name I learned almost twenty-five years ago from a children's abecedary, As I Was Crossing Boston Common. The Brazilian milk frog is the one that I love. Its skin is like celadon, softly watered with black; it crouches with only its throat flickering and its eyes are wide rims of gold. There are three or four of them near the beginning of the exhibit, the first frogs the visitor sees after the initial materials. I can imagine them in clay and faience. They look like things recovered from the ancient world.

On a channel that unfortunately cut for commercials, I caught the last third of The Magnificent Seven (1960) earlier tonight. I need to rewatch it and Seven Samurai (1954); I saw them both at the same time, probably not later than my first year of high school.

The Pliny moment yesterday was the Great Meadows of Arlington and Lexington, burning. Being wetlands, they should regrow soon. I still think conservation land should not be catching on fire. I imagine someone was smoking, and I wonder if I can invoke contrapasso against them.

There are not enough good stories with shape-changing and frogs.

Comments

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Well, given that the site's behind a school, it's probably a fire started by kids either deliberately or fooling around. I've heard that there's a big problem with that on the North Shore, actually: those damn invasive phragmites burn real well at the dry-stalks stage, fire spreads rapidly through them because of their thick, impenetrably growth habit. Very gratifying for the JD firebug. Cattail marshes aren't so dense and have water channel space, so don't burn so well.

On the other hand, burning off phragmites is about the only way to get the seed heads, and the beds don't support much other life (it's a monoculture and too dense to offer cover for water birds), so I can't be too torqued about that.

Early spring fire in a spot like Great Meadows should do no long-term damage. It'll green up in a couple weeks if you get some rain.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

There was a great thing on NPR about goats being used to remove phragmites from an area. They'd eat all the vegetation--native and invasive both--but the native vegetation came back, whereas the phragmites couldn't deal with being eaten :D

[sovay]

Early spring fire in a spot like Great Meadows should do no long-term damage. It'll green up in a couple weeks if you get some rain.

I walked down in the afternoon to look: the grass and the brush had burned out or blackened to the ground, but the trees were still standing. I took this as a good sign. Thanks.