So, say you're a paleontologist in Madagascar, and one day you dig up the 80 million-year old bones of a carnivorous frog the size of a beach ball. What do you call it?
Why, Beelzebufo, of course!
Monday, February 18, 2008
Saturday, February 16, 2008
New Furniture
We ordered a nice Lazy Boy reclining chair before we left for Hawaii, and this week's big excitement was it's arrival. It's super nice. Now we have a comfy place to sit! As long as you're willing to displace the cat... This picture was taken about 2 minutes after we got the chair set up. Say what you will about Kaiyo, he has excellent taste in furniture.
For my part, I've been listening to lots of Moxy Fruvous, and declaring life to be rich and sweet. How's things with you?
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Aloha!
Well, we have safely returned from our adventure in Maui, and it was great! Anita wants me to ask around and see if there are any good microbiologists to do postdocs with at the University of Hawaii. I'm not sure it'll come to that, but it sure is nice there.
For example, here's the view from our hotel room:
Winter is humpback whale season in Maui (more on that later), and we could see them swimming and breaching out in the ocean from our little balcony. It was a pretty amazing way to start the day.
Here's Anita, consulting our guidebook, which turned out to be very reliable, thank goodness.
We never would have found half of the cool things without it, especially restaurants. This is the Aloha Plate Lunch, in Lahaina. Plate lunch is the only way to go for dining on a budget in Maui. You get a huge pile of tasty food, generally with a scoop of macaroni salad on the side, for some reason. The plate lunches were usually enough for us to share, which helped save for the fancy meals (which cost and arm and a leg).
The fanciest thing we did was the Old Lahiana Luau, which was a lot of fun.
They start you off with a flower lei and free mai tais, followed by a tremendous traditional feast of slow-roasted pork, yummy fish, more things made out of taro than you've ever seen in your life, and general excess on every front. I've now established that I don't like poi. Good to know, I suppose.
The big event at the luau, though, was the dancing. After dinner, there was a hour or so of traditional music and dance to watch. It was very cool:
Those hula girls certainly know how to shake their hips. My goodness.
While we were in Lahaina, we took a 2 hour whale-watching cruise with the Pacific Whale Foundation, a non-profit group that works for whale conservation. As I said, we didn't have to cruise very far out to sea to get to the whales, so we puttered out into the bay and started looking for whales.
The boats aren't allowed to go closer than 100 yards to the whales, but the whales sometimes come closer than that on their own. Like this guy:
We got incredibly lucky. Two adolescent whlaes swam right up to (and under) our boat and checked us out, swimming around us, popping their heads up, spraying everyone with whale snot, and generally having a good time. The crew of the boat just about peed their pants.
They're beautiful animals. It was amazing.
The island is stunning. We spent a lot of time just hanging out on beaches. The ocean is hypnotic.
One thing which was nice was that the ocean in Hawaii doesn't smell like fish.The reason is that it's too warm for most plankton, which means that there really isn't much living in the water. (Nothing for the whales to eat, for example; they're just here for the mating season.) There are lots of fish on the reefs (we had a blast snorkeling), but it's basically an aquatic desert. That's also why the water is so clear.
So long, Maui! We'll be back...
For example, here's the view from our hotel room:
Winter is humpback whale season in Maui (more on that later), and we could see them swimming and breaching out in the ocean from our little balcony. It was a pretty amazing way to start the day.
Here's Anita, consulting our guidebook, which turned out to be very reliable, thank goodness.
We never would have found half of the cool things without it, especially restaurants. This is the Aloha Plate Lunch, in Lahaina. Plate lunch is the only way to go for dining on a budget in Maui. You get a huge pile of tasty food, generally with a scoop of macaroni salad on the side, for some reason. The plate lunches were usually enough for us to share, which helped save for the fancy meals (which cost and arm and a leg).
The fanciest thing we did was the Old Lahiana Luau, which was a lot of fun.
They start you off with a flower lei and free mai tais, followed by a tremendous traditional feast of slow-roasted pork, yummy fish, more things made out of taro than you've ever seen in your life, and general excess on every front. I've now established that I don't like poi. Good to know, I suppose.
The big event at the luau, though, was the dancing. After dinner, there was a hour or so of traditional music and dance to watch. It was very cool:
Those hula girls certainly know how to shake their hips. My goodness.
While we were in Lahaina, we took a 2 hour whale-watching cruise with the Pacific Whale Foundation, a non-profit group that works for whale conservation. As I said, we didn't have to cruise very far out to sea to get to the whales, so we puttered out into the bay and started looking for whales.
The boats aren't allowed to go closer than 100 yards to the whales, but the whales sometimes come closer than that on their own. Like this guy:
We got incredibly lucky. Two adolescent whlaes swam right up to (and under) our boat and checked us out, swimming around us, popping their heads up, spraying everyone with whale snot, and generally having a good time. The crew of the boat just about peed their pants.
They're beautiful animals. It was amazing.
The island is stunning. We spent a lot of time just hanging out on beaches. The ocean is hypnotic.
One thing which was nice was that the ocean in Hawaii doesn't smell like fish.The reason is that it's too warm for most plankton, which means that there really isn't much living in the water. (Nothing for the whales to eat, for example; they're just here for the mating season.) There are lots of fish on the reefs (we had a blast snorkeling), but it's basically an aquatic desert. That's also why the water is so clear.
So long, Maui! We'll be back...
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