Last weekend, near Dundas St. W and Chestnut St., Toronto.
Showing posts with label photos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photos. Show all posts
July 17, 2010
April 11, 2010
Another Pleasant Valley Sunday.
I went for a stroll today to take some photographs and came home four hours, eight miles and 130 shots later. These are a few frames from my walk along the Wheeling Creek portion of the Greater Wheeling Trail, runs southeast along Wheeling Creek, where both the creek and the trail parallel to I-70 through town, and along National Road. Click on any picture to launch a larger version of the image in a new browser window or tab.
The trees and grasses on the flood plain between the creek and trail are in full bloom at this time of year. The green shoot rose vertically from a trunk growing in several different directions, and the yellow flower blossomed along the hill below I-470.
Wheeling Creek cuts through the limestone that underlies much of West Virginia. The rocks in and along the creek are made up of layers of sediment.
Graffiti appears on signs and billboard towers along the trail.
Further along the creek, a man catches a fish near a bridge under Route 88.
On National Road through the Elm Grove neighbourhood, someone bought billboard space to beg for President Obama's help against the "corrupt" movers and shakers in Wheeling. (This person has a much larger and more detailed version of his complaint on a billboard downtown.)
On an abandoned garage, a "Wacko" tag.
The Grove Terrace Motel has a simple sign visible from the Interstate. I've also heard that inside the motel, it's sad and rundown.
The eastern junction of Interstates 70 and 470 is overhead.
Farther along National Road, a retirement home's new cottages for some of its residents look like they were designed by the same architect who worked on the tv show The Prisoner.
The house at 1343 National Road was built in 1902 by William L. Glessner, President of the Laughlin Nail Company.
At the corner of Washington Avenue and National Road, a spider hung in the air on nearly-invisible threads.
The trees and grasses on the flood plain between the creek and trail are in full bloom at this time of year. The green shoot rose vertically from a trunk growing in several different directions, and the yellow flower blossomed along the hill below I-470.
Wheeling Creek cuts through the limestone that underlies much of West Virginia. The rocks in and along the creek are made up of layers of sediment.
Graffiti appears on signs and billboard towers along the trail.
Further along the creek, a man catches a fish near a bridge under Route 88.
On National Road through the Elm Grove neighbourhood, someone bought billboard space to beg for President Obama's help against the "corrupt" movers and shakers in Wheeling. (This person has a much larger and more detailed version of his complaint on a billboard downtown.)
On an abandoned garage, a "Wacko" tag.
The Grove Terrace Motel has a simple sign visible from the Interstate. I've also heard that inside the motel, it's sad and rundown.
The eastern junction of Interstates 70 and 470 is overhead.
Farther along National Road, a retirement home's new cottages for some of its residents look like they were designed by the same architect who worked on the tv show The Prisoner.
The house at 1343 National Road was built in 1902 by William L. Glessner, President of the Laughlin Nail Company.
At the corner of Washington Avenue and National Road, a spider hung in the air on nearly-invisible threads.
April 3, 2010
Yonge Street Shopping List: Sushi, Tylenol, Lipgloss, Tampons and Condoms.
Click on photo to launch large version (1024x506) in another window.
December 28, 2009
Ring-billed Gull.
Click here for a larger version (1024x680) in a new window.
A Ring-billed Gull (Larus delawarensis), photographed in Cleveland, Ohio. Nikon D40 with 100-300mm D lens at 300mm, ISO1600, 1/1000 sec exposure at f6.7.
September 17, 2009
The Band With Nearly As Many Names As Members
We saw an excellent show in Pittsburgh's Club Cafe last night, billed as "An Evening With The Minus 5, The Baseball Project and The Steve Wynn IV," which was really just a bit of crafty misdirection inasmuch as the same four people comprised all three bands, making it just about impossible to tell which group was playing which song.
(Readers who require a more rigid structure may wish to imagine that The Minus 5 opened, playing an energetic and muscular set during which Scott McCaughey and Steve Wynn's guitars provided churning, roaring, jangling melodies on top of bassist Peter Buck's steady hand on a vintage-style Eastwood Airline Map bass, throbbing along with Linda Pitmon's thundering and rock-steady drumbeat. The Minus 5 were followed by The Baseball Project, featuring Scott McCaughey and Steve Wynn singing about baseball legends like Fernando Valenzuela, Satchel Paige and Harvey Haddix while their guitars provided churning, roaring, jangling melodies on top of bassist Peter Buck's steady hand on a vintage-style Eastwood Airline Map bass, throbbing along with Linda Pitmon's thundering and rock-steady drumbeat. The Steve Wynn IV showed its versatility in the second set, with the bandleader supplementing fiery licks and crunching chords on his Fender Jazzmaster with howling harmonica work, while Buck took turns playing rhythm guitar on a blue and white Rickenbacker twelve-string as McCaughey took over the role of the Airline pilot's with the steady hand on a vintage-style Eastwood Airline Map bass, throbbing along with Linda Pitmon's thundering and rock-steady drumbeat.)
Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey.
But no matter which band was playing, they were killing, their chops were great, and that they were having fun was obvious, as was the crowd in the Club Cafe. They played nearly forty songs during their three-plus hours on the stage, including a version of Neil Young's "Revolution Blues," a track on the band's sold-only-at-gigs Butcher Covered disc.
Steve Wynn.
Between the first and second sets, the band members signed autographs, chatted with fans, posed for pictures and sold a little merchandise. (Peter Buck was an especially convincing salesperson - if the whole rock'n'roll thing doen't work out for him, he might have a future on QVC.)
And have I mentioned that Scott McCaughey and Steve Wynn's guitars provided churning, roaring, jangling melodies on top of bassist Peter Buck's steady hand on a vintage-style Eastwood Airline Map bass, throbbing along with Linda Pitmon's thundering and rock-steady drumbeat?
Linda Pitmon.
Now, if only they could pick one band name and stick with it.
(Readers who require a more rigid structure may wish to imagine that The Minus 5 opened, playing an energetic and muscular set during which Scott McCaughey and Steve Wynn's guitars provided churning, roaring, jangling melodies on top of bassist Peter Buck's steady hand on a vintage-style Eastwood Airline Map bass, throbbing along with Linda Pitmon's thundering and rock-steady drumbeat. The Minus 5 were followed by The Baseball Project, featuring Scott McCaughey and Steve Wynn singing about baseball legends like Fernando Valenzuela, Satchel Paige and Harvey Haddix while their guitars provided churning, roaring, jangling melodies on top of bassist Peter Buck's steady hand on a vintage-style Eastwood Airline Map bass, throbbing along with Linda Pitmon's thundering and rock-steady drumbeat. The Steve Wynn IV showed its versatility in the second set, with the bandleader supplementing fiery licks and crunching chords on his Fender Jazzmaster with howling harmonica work, while Buck took turns playing rhythm guitar on a blue and white Rickenbacker twelve-string as McCaughey took over the role of the Airline pilot's with the steady hand on a vintage-style Eastwood Airline Map bass, throbbing along with Linda Pitmon's thundering and rock-steady drumbeat.)
Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey.
But no matter which band was playing, they were killing, their chops were great, and that they were having fun was obvious, as was the crowd in the Club Cafe. They played nearly forty songs during their three-plus hours on the stage, including a version of Neil Young's "Revolution Blues," a track on the band's sold-only-at-gigs Butcher Covered disc.
Steve Wynn.
Between the first and second sets, the band members signed autographs, chatted with fans, posed for pictures and sold a little merchandise. (Peter Buck was an especially convincing salesperson - if the whole rock'n'roll thing doen't work out for him, he might have a future on QVC.)
And have I mentioned that Scott McCaughey and Steve Wynn's guitars provided churning, roaring, jangling melodies on top of bassist Peter Buck's steady hand on a vintage-style Eastwood Airline Map bass, throbbing along with Linda Pitmon's thundering and rock-steady drumbeat?
Linda Pitmon.
Now, if only they could pick one band name and stick with it.
September 10, 2009
The Short, Happy Life of Greener The Tobacco Hornworm
I was standing on the sidewalk in front of my townhouse one Friday afternoon when The Neighbour Kid suddenly asked, "What's that?"
She was pointing at a caterpillar that was as big as the finger she was pointing with. It was bright green, striped, and had a quarter-inch-long curved red hook at one end. It stood motionless on a stalk of one of my cherry tomato plants.
I told her that I didn't know what it was and went inside to get my camera. I grabbed a little plastic storage tub at the same time. I wasn't going to let the caterpillar eat my tomatoes, but it was a beast too fascinating to squash, so I decided to make it my guest for a while. The Neighbour Kid said she might like to take it to school on Monday, if I could figure out what it was.
It was a tobacco hornworm - Manduca sexta, more formally, and Greener, somewhat less so.
Greener and his cousins, the tomato hornworms, eat things like tobacco and tomato plants. They've evolved ways of neutralizing the toxins in tobacco plants - like nicotine - while still being able to enjoy that cool menthol taste.
They're voracious eaters - on Sunday afternoon I watched Greener chew up a section of leaf the size of a quarter in about two minutes - that devour your plants and grow quickly before turning into Carolina Sphinx moths. I was looking forward to seeing it.
A few hours later, I knew that wasn't going to happen. At about 7:30 I noticed a single white nodule, no larger than a grain of rice, on Greener's back. It was a braconid wasp larva.
Braconidae are a natural control for hornworms: adult wasps lay their eggs in the hornworm between molts, and the wasp larvae grow inside the hornworm for a couple of weeks; all the while the hornworm goes about his usual business - which is to say, eating my tomatoes. Then, at the end of the two weeks, the larvae emerge through the hornworm's skin.
In the time it took me to look up that information online - about twenty minutes - Greener went from having one larva on his back to having eighteen.
Within half an hour, he had more than fifty larvae on him, each one slowly rotating at its unattached end as it spun a coccoon.
By Monday morning, Greener's rear end was covered in coccoons. By Monday evening, The Neighbour Kid was not so interested in taking Greener to school.
Once the larvae emerged and spun their coccoons, not much happened that anyone could see. The coccoons got darker as the pupae developed. Greener eventually stopped eating and a week after the first larva popped through the skin, Greener was dead and the little plastic tub was filled with several dozen braconid wasps. They're tiny - only about an eighth of an inch long - and look like blackflies to the naked eye. Under magnification, though, they look every bit like a wasp.
The wasps themselves live for about two weeks. Each female will lay eggs in as many as 200 hornworms during that time. Greener's friends are in deep doo-doo.
She was pointing at a caterpillar that was as big as the finger she was pointing with. It was bright green, striped, and had a quarter-inch-long curved red hook at one end. It stood motionless on a stalk of one of my cherry tomato plants.
I told her that I didn't know what it was and went inside to get my camera. I grabbed a little plastic storage tub at the same time. I wasn't going to let the caterpillar eat my tomatoes, but it was a beast too fascinating to squash, so I decided to make it my guest for a while. The Neighbour Kid said she might like to take it to school on Monday, if I could figure out what it was.
It was a tobacco hornworm - Manduca sexta, more formally, and Greener, somewhat less so.
Greener and his cousins, the tomato hornworms, eat things like tobacco and tomato plants. They've evolved ways of neutralizing the toxins in tobacco plants - like nicotine - while still being able to enjoy that cool menthol taste.
They're voracious eaters - on Sunday afternoon I watched Greener chew up a section of leaf the size of a quarter in about two minutes - that devour your plants and grow quickly before turning into Carolina Sphinx moths. I was looking forward to seeing it.
A few hours later, I knew that wasn't going to happen. At about 7:30 I noticed a single white nodule, no larger than a grain of rice, on Greener's back. It was a braconid wasp larva.
Braconidae are a natural control for hornworms: adult wasps lay their eggs in the hornworm between molts, and the wasp larvae grow inside the hornworm for a couple of weeks; all the while the hornworm goes about his usual business - which is to say, eating my tomatoes. Then, at the end of the two weeks, the larvae emerge through the hornworm's skin.
In the time it took me to look up that information online - about twenty minutes - Greener went from having one larva on his back to having eighteen.
Within half an hour, he had more than fifty larvae on him, each one slowly rotating at its unattached end as it spun a coccoon.
By Monday morning, Greener's rear end was covered in coccoons. By Monday evening, The Neighbour Kid was not so interested in taking Greener to school.
Once the larvae emerged and spun their coccoons, not much happened that anyone could see. The coccoons got darker as the pupae developed. Greener eventually stopped eating and a week after the first larva popped through the skin, Greener was dead and the little plastic tub was filled with several dozen braconid wasps. They're tiny - only about an eighth of an inch long - and look like blackflies to the naked eye. Under magnification, though, they look every bit like a wasp.
The wasps themselves live for about two weeks. Each female will lay eggs in as many as 200 hornworms during that time. Greener's friends are in deep doo-doo.
August 26, 2009
August 15, 2009
August 14, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
