Zombie Lapdance

Last year I discovered that a giant colony of purple martins roosted at Highland Mall every night at sunset.

They’ve returned once again. They’re roosting in a slightly different location, on the property of the Wells Fargo, just across the street from the North Side of the mall. It seems like there’s not as many as last year, but last year I saw them a month later into the summer, so they’re probably still finishing up fledging the chicks and the rest will join up later.

You can get a better idea of the size of the swarm from the video I took, which is much better than the video I made last year. The previous video got a link from an Audubon blog! But it nevertheless only racked up about a hundred views. *sigh*

From some of the reading I’ve done about this particular roost, the purple martins have been shifting the roost by a few hundred feet every summer, slowly working their way northward. The birding community initially located this swirling flock of swallows because it showed up on Doppler weather radar!

This is indeed one of the great unsung attractions of the Austin area. It even has an entry on Roadside America, although the entry is marred by a horrid slur from a Mister Robert Baumgardner who says that purple martins do not roost in trees, do not flock, and have already left for South America by June. Therefore, Robert Baumgardner claims, they are not purple martins, they are grackles.

Bob, that has got to be one of the most amazing series of wrong assertions I have ever heard. Just go and look at the stupid birds, Bob.

Now that I have the creek aquarium, I have a halfway legitimate excuse to muck around in every creek I pass. Creeks that actually have water are pretty thin on the ground this time of year, but I found a creek with an active trickle near Spiderhouse and Trudy’s.

It was teeming with tiny little tadpoles. They were fat and slow, with big old tadpole bellies, so it was pretty easy to catch them. Basically I put this used hotdog holder into the water and they swam right in.

How many tadpoles is too many?

It doesn’t take long for the vultures to descend. Here’s some cookies they’ve been making at Quack’s Bakery:

And before you ask, no, I was not the first one to ask why it was on a ginger cookie instead of a butter cookie, nor was I the first one to suggest that the cookie have its hair on fire. I was however the first one to point out that the cookie’s arms are too short for it to grab its crotch.

For my obligatory day-job, I work at Quack’s Bakery, which is near 43rd and Duval in Austin. I usually keep a little stand of Space Squid among the other free periodicals in the little hallway near the bathrooms.

So it always warms the cockles of my heart when I see evidence that people have been enjoying the current issue.

Honestly, I can think of no better spot for this skeezy little zine.

Of the birds that I see on a regular basis here in Austin, the one that has grown to be my favorite, even more than the feral parakeets, is the nighthawk.

I took this picture from my bike as I rode home. It was well after full dark and the nighthawk was feeding on the insects caught in the glare of the floodlights that stabbed into the sky from a perfectly blank billboard.

You see these birds in virtual flocks anywhere there is a lot of light pollution. In the wild they feed when there’s enough light to catch night insects, mainly in the dusk and dawn. Artificial lighting has extended their feeding period through all hours of the night.

You can see them around the banks of billboards along Airport Boulevard, or the lights in the Highland Mall parking lot, or the floodlights lighting the steeple of Hyde Park Baptist, or flocking above the dome of the State Capitol.

Considering that they have been found nesting on the flat roofs of malls
they are the perfect illustration for my standard rant about the false dichotomy of the natural and unnatural (but I’ll spare you for now).

But they are my favorite local bird because they are part of a larger experience.

Imagine that you are biking home through Hyde Park late at night. The city is dark and quiet, it’s just you and the taco carts. You hear the nighthawk first. It’s an unmistakable sound, audible for several blocks before you see the bird. It’s like the cross between a sparrow’s chirp and the shriek of an eagle. It’s not unlike the thrumming of a taught flagpole rope.

And then you see it. The nighthawk is invisible against the sky until it flaps into the glare of the billboard flood light. It moves like a bat, but the profile looks like a pigeon or a falcon. At the elbow of each wing are short white stripes that look like eyes, or maybe military insignia.

But the best part of all, is that no one else sees them. They are everywhere. They are loud. But only you know what they are. They are your own special event, as you pedal quietly, all alone through the night.

I just want to point out that I’m not posting this picture of my cat because I’m one of those people who think that their cat is somehow important.

I just think the lighting is neat.

I heard this story, that may be apocryphal, about a librarian who was so opinionated about movies that she refused to watch any movie that contained a sword.

Recently I watched two different movies that prominently featured swords. And I thought they weren’t so bad at all.

The first sword movie I watched was Asoka, a sprawling three-hour Bollywood period epic. It’s about the historical figure of Ashoka the Great, an iron-age warlord who’s famous for obliterating the world’s first parliamentary monarchy, and then feeling so bad about it that he devoted his life to the proliferation of Buddhism.

Asoka stars Shahrukh Khan as the titular hero, and like you might expect, instead of focusing on personal enlightenment and wise edicts about peace and understanding, they focused on the warlording that lead up to it.

There’s a couple of scenes where he uses a double-bladed spring-steel razor-whip. Buddhism could never compete with that.

The second sword movie was the much anticipated, Outlander, the vikings versus space dragon actioner that never made it to theaters in Austin.

It was okay. The period costumes were a little silly, but there was plenty of blood and guts. It was a little disappointing that when you get right down to it, this was just another film rehashing of Beowulf. I mean, c’mon, Hollywood. Vikings did things other than fight marauding monsters. They raped the Irish. And the French. And some Saxons.

Couldn’t they make a movie about that? Hollywood will never learn.

I’ve been doing more work with the creek aquarium. For instance, it now has LED lighting.

Yeah, I know, I couldn’t make a ham sandwich without giving it LED lighting. It’s just my thing I guess.

The super-clever pump and filter apparatus that I invented continues to give me nothing but trouble. And there’s some weird worms, probably planaria, that plaster the glass.

But this afternoon, with co-editor Steve and his family in tow, we went down to Waller Creek near the UT to expand my aquarium’s population of native minnow species.

Several of the minnows that we caught, are apparently the common mosquitofish, which has been introduced to innumerable countries around the world (ostensibly to control the mosquito populations).

In other words, although it is a native, it’s simply the dullest fish imaginable.

The other fish, the one that I’m most impressed with, is also the fish that gave me the idea to go down this whole path in the first place. I was standing on a pedestrian bridge over Waller Creek, across a parking lot from MLK, when I caught sight of pink fins rippling among a school of minnows. I thought, why get all these fish from other countries, when there are perfectly beautiful fish right here in the creeks?

Today, working in tandem with young master Wilson, we managed to catch one of these elusive and colorful minnows.

With a specimen in my possession, I scoured the web for its classification.

At the bottom of this page belonging to the Waller Creek society, you can see its picture.

As it turns out, it’s not actually a native minnow. It’s a variable platy, an invasive aquarium fish native to Mexico.

(At first I thought that the moquitofish were females herded by the platys, but although they are both of the family Poeciliidae, they’re not really related.)

So, no. My initial thesis of "native fish are just as good" doesn’t hold up to field testing. Although I’m impressed that a fragile tropical fish, similar to the dozens and dozens of doomed aquarium fish I bought as a kid, would have an invasive range stretching through the entire creek.

While digging through google image searches, I found this abandoned blog by a local who built a similar Austin creek ecosystem in a loft apartment. You will notice that his profile picture has about a dozen variable platys.

According to this guy, Shoal Creek, a short jaunt from Waller Creek, contains a bunch of Texas Cichlids, which are both a native species and a respected aquarium fish.

So an exploration of Shoal Creek is next on the agenda.

Earlier this week, I found an old big-screen projection TV out on the curb. It had been outside so long that all the particle-board of the case was rotting. So it was a simple matter to peel off a bunch of parts that I thought would be neat.

For instance, here’s some of the lenses and optics that were in the projection part:

I’m not quite certain what I’m going to do with them. I haven’t been too impressed with their performance as telescope parts, but I’ll probably keep working at it.

The most amazing part of the TV is the Fresnel lens that makes up the screen (not Fresno lens as I keep trying to call it).

I had seen a Make TV episode were people used one of these lenses to melt plastic soldiers and whatnot. I thought instead that I would try it on an egg.

It only took a minute or so to cook. And there was only minimal burning!

The focused bit of light was so intense that even with sunglasses and my eyes squinted to the tiniest slit, I couldn’t more than glance at it for a brief moment.

But a couple of days have gone by and I haven’t gone blind, so I consider that a success.

A little earlier, I blogged about the Austin artist, Palfloat. This last weekend I went to his art show slash garage sale, and bought a few interesting items.

A nerf margarita and a Telly Savalis-crossed-with-roast-beef doll.

And I got this honest-to-god paper zine.

And inside it had honest-to-god irrational typesetting.