PunditGuy has posted his submission guidelines for the 127th Carnival of The Vanities. That’s next week’s Carnival, not this week’s, which should appear tomorrow at SoccerDad.
Archive for February 15th, 2005
RightSideRedux reworks a blast from the past into a little tribute to the new DNC chair.
I cannot tell you how many hours I spent playing that damn game. Never finished it, either.
A bit of whisky talk, for those of us so inclined. (via Kehaar, who apparently has the time to email me the link, but not to post it to the blog)
And then there’s Islay. The sea-soaked and peaty spot of land yields an intensely unique flavor. Laphroaig presents an oily texture, a hint of seaweed and a blast of peat. Sampling a wee bit poured by Dave immediately reminded me of sitting before a very smoky peat fire (and there’s no other kind) in my cousin’s home in Ireland. Powerful stuff!
The 12 year old Bowmore I bought for the ski trip is an excellent example as well. Haven’t had much since I’ve come down with a cold, but the cross between sweetness and peat in the taste was just great.
God help us, we’re turning into a natural history blog. And it’s worse than it appears, as I’ve got at least three, perhaps 4 more species posts patiently waiting their turn, a turn they will in all likelihood get, as I learned a long time not to try and put off one type of entry in favor of another. That pisses off the muse something fierce. Better to let them come as they may, and not worry about a supposed balance of articles that was never there to begin with.
The White Tailed Plover is another bird endemic to the Middle East, which means that squat is known about the species. Depending on whom you refer to, the Latin name of the species is either Vanellus leucurus or Chettusia Leucura, which seems to be an older usage. It’s also commonly called the White-Tailed Lapwing. Fortunately, no matter what one calls it, the bird is strikingly easy to identify, thanks to the bright yellow legs and distinctive wing pattern.
Most everything else we know about the species comes from the Helms Guide to Shorebirds, the entry from which a fair number of sites have reproduced on the web, so I don’t feel bad at all about doing the same thing here.
It breeds semi-colonially on inland marshes in Iraq, Iran and southern Russia. Four eggs are laid in a ground nest. The Iraqi and Iranian breeders are mainly resident, but Russian birds migrate south in winter to south Asia, the Middle East and north east Africa. It is a very rare vagrant in western Europe.
This elegant medium-sized lapwing is long-legged and fairly long-billed. It is the only lapwing likely to be seen in other than very shallow water, where it picks insects and other small prey mainly from the surface.
Adults are slim erect birds with a brown back and foreneck, paler face and grey breast. Its long yellow legs, pure white tail and distinctive brown, white and black wings make this species unmistakable. Young birds have a scaly back, and may show some brown in the tail.
The breeding season call is a peewit, similar to that of the Northern Lapwing.
One of the biggest questions about the White-Tailed Plover is the exact range of the species. As this fellow points out, where they have been seen so far says more about the distribution of birders in the Middle East than it does about the birds. Actually seeing a photo of one from Iraq is heartening, as the species was thought to be threatened by the widespread draining of the southern Iraqi marshes during Saddam Hussein’s campaign against the Marsh Arabs.
“Saddam Hussein was a master ‘brown field generator,’” said Richardson, referring to a term for environmental decimation. “He churned that country upside down. It looks like you let a child loose in a sand box with hand grenades.”
Of the three remnant marsh areas, he found the Central Marsh to be in the worst shape. “It’s just a complete dust bowl,” he said. Locals had broken a Hussein-built drainage dike in one area in an effort to return some water, but “nothing was growing there yet,” except for a few remaining desert plants, he added. In another recently re-flooded area, too much salt had been drawn out of the long-dry soils to support freshwater vegetation, and this area was now turning into a salt-flat
Fortunately, efforts to restore the marshes have begun since his fall from power, efforts that are already paying off.
As Abu-Zarag contains many important ornithological factors, it harbors a some which exceeds the expectation, since it is recently flooded! In addition this fieldwork occurred within breeding season, to see considerable list of Iraqi breeding Waterfowl and Passerines
…
Some of these species are in abundant numbers, like White-tailed Plover that was distinct breeder, while one nest with two eggs was observed. The other abundant species was the Little Bittern, surely it was breeder, but I couldn?t find a nest! Many other species were observed frequently, but less than the upper case, which ranged between 5-10 c…”
It’s not often that you can detect sheer joy in the pixels of a pdf. Obviously humans were not the only species to benefit from the 2003 invasion.
If you’d like to help with the marsh restoration efforts in Iraq, EdenAgain accepts donations via the Iraq Foundation. There’s also an art sale, intended to help fund a studio at the Iraqi Marshes Conference and Research Center. It features paintings by one of the better known Marsh Arab artists.
Doesn’t look too much like a “brown field,” does it? The artist’s name is Kamal Mousawi.
His agent is an American, of course.
Previously:
The White-Cheeked Bulbul
The Mesopotamian Crow
Next: The Barn Swallow
Ran into a problem with the new cgi version of php yesterday. For some reason, a script that was running happily under php 4.3.2 breaks when it attempts to run under 4.3.10, first throwing off the following errors
Cannot find module (IP-MIB): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (IF-MIB): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (TCP-MIB): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (UDP-MIB): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (SNMPv2-MIB): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (SNMPv2-SMI): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (UCD-SNMP-MIB): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (UCD-DEMO-MIB): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (HOST-RESOURCES-MIB): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (HOST-RESOURCES-TYPES): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (UCD-DISKIO-MIB): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (SNMP-VIEW-BASED-ACM-MIB): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (SNMP-COMMUNITY-MIB): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (UCD-DLMOD-MIB): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (SNMP-FRAMEWORK-MIB): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (SNMP-MPD-MIB): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (SNMP-USER-BASED-SM-MIB): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (SNMP-NOTIFICATION-MIB): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (SNMP-TARGET-MIB): At line 0 in (none)
Cannot find module (SNMPv2-TM): At line 0 in (none)
then causing Apache to cough up a 500 error.
Oddly, aside from the initial line referencing the php binary, there’s literally no php in the file that’s failing. It’s all straight html.
What’s annoying is that at least some other scripts on the server also throw this error, but run successfully anyway, so it’s impossible to tell how widepsread the problem is.
From what I can tell by googling around, as long as php was compiled with both “–with-snmp=DIR” and “–enable-ucd-snmp-hack,” this should not happen, and both the 4.3.2 version and 4.3.10 binaries were.
At least I have a work-around should anyone else complain, but 4.3.2 has a vulnerability problem, so I’m not very excited about sending people back to it.
Anyone else run into this–and find a solution? There’s tons of people complaining about the same thing on a number of message boards, but no real clear answers.
Anyone else run into the “Cannot find module” errors?
Fisherman’s Prayer
God grant that I may live to fish,
until my dying day,
And when it comes to my last cast,
I then most humbly pray,
When in the Lord’s safe landing net,
I’m peacefully asleep,
That in his mercy I be judged,
As big enough to keep.
Author Unknown