Month: July 2014

Eastern Spadefoot frogs dig getting down in the rain:

To avoid predators such as fish, they evolved to consummate their vows in temporary ponds created by heavy rainstorms. “It’s one night of a massive frog orgy,” says [herpetology professor Steve] Johnson. When the downpour starts, male toads emerge from the ground making “vomiting-like” mating calls. The females respond, and the orgy runs through the night, after which the females lay thousands of fertilized eggs in the ponds. Most other toads spend a long time looking for mates, Johnson says, so this behavior is quite unique.

Within a few days, tadpoles hatch in such high numbers that the ponds resemble “boiling water” or a “super-organism that’s moving,” Johnson says. The ponds grow algae the tadpoles feed on. Two weeks after the rainy night, tadpoles become toads, hop away from their birthplaces, and burrow into the ground where they await their turn to party. Johnson says the toads are patient and can wait for the perfect mating conditions for months or years.

Dwight Furror assesses the war between “terroirists” and “anti-terroirists”:

Few terms in the wine world are more controversial than “terroir”, the French word meaning “of the soil”.  “Terroir” refers to the influence of soil and climate on the wine in your glass. But the meaning of “terroir” is not restricted to a technical discussion of soil structure or the influence of climate. Part of the romance of wine is that it (allegedly) expresses the particular character of a region and perhaps its people as well.

According to some “terroirists”, when we drink wine that expresses terroir, we feel connected to a particular plot of land and its unique characteristics, and by extension, its inhabitants, their struggles, achievements, and sensibility. Can’t you just feel their spirit coursing through your veins on a wild alcohol ride? The most extreme terroirists claim that the influence of soil and climate can be quite literally tasted in the wine. If this strikes you as a bit of, well, the digested plant food of bovines to put it politely, you are not alone. Many in the wine business are skeptical about the existence of terroir claiming that winemakers should make the best wine they can without trying to preserve some mystical connection with the soil. But the issue is an important one because the reputation of entire wine regions rests on the alleged unique characteristics of their terroir, not to mention the fact that the skill and discernment of wine tasters often involves recognizing these characteristics.

In a profile of William T. Vollmann, Tom Bissell paints a vivid picture of an author whose interests range from war reporting to sex work to government surveillance (he was once suspected of being the Unabomber). He quotes Vollmann pondering mortality:

Vollmann stressed that in writing Last Stories, he really wanted to face up to death’s psychological challenges. Death, he said, “is nothing, and therefore the only way we can engage with nothing is to personify it … to invent.” For Vollmann, facing up to the inevitability of death involves remembering the orange he ate in his Bosnian rental while his friends sat dead in the front seats. “It was a hot day,” he said. “I was really thirsty. I ducked down and I was peeling one of these oranges and thought, ‘This is probably the last thing I’m ever going to eat.’ ” Twenty years later, when he gets upset about something, he wills himself to remember that orange and the strange reassurance it offered. Any type of permanent consciousness in the afterlife would, he believes, inevitably devolve into torture, and there would be no parting orange to leaven it. Consciousness is to our mortality what beer is to Homer Simpson: the cause of, and solution to, all our problems.

“Where does consciousness come from?” Vollmann asked, and it took me a moment to recognize he really was asking. I told him I didn’t have the faintest idea. Neither did Vollmann. “It makes no sense to me. None of it makes sense. It’s all preposterous, no matter how I look at it.” I reminded him that his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels, seems to suggest that the collectivist social intelligence of insects might be preferable to the disquieting solitude of human intelligence—and it was possible that Vollmann spent more time alone in his head than any other living American writer. “Maybe,” he said, “it’s not so bad to be a social insect.”