I did a bit of rummaging on the web about the mushrooms popping up amongst the composting worms and:
the mushrooms and fungus in your bin are simply an indicator that the conditions that are conducive to worms thriving, are also conducive to most fungal organisms, which particularly like the steady high moisture and relative darkness as well as the coll temperature
I’m good with that.
You can tell I spent some time with the NYTimes today! Don’t miss this great slideshow about Edward Weston’s photography.
My work has vitality because I have helped, done in my part, in revealing to others the living world about them, showing to them what their own unseeing eyes had missed. — Edward Weston
Rest of the article is here.
Found this piece linked in the NYTimes and thought it was just a heart-warming and wonderful way to lay out some basic truths.
On a much grimmer and graphic note:
Earlier in the week I was listening to a piece on NPR about a well-known Vietnam-era photographer, Eddie Adams. I was struck by this bit:
there are films of that same execution. But Buell and Arnett both argue that the still photo had more of an impact.
“You can see the gun, you can see the expression on the man’s face as the bullet enters his head, and you see the soldier on the left who is wincing at the thing that has happened,” says Buell. “With the still picture, you have time to consider all these factors.”
There was a large BANG as this went off in my head* – OH OH OH – a still image allows you to look at the whole scene. One bit of it after another, to see how all the parts connect. Oh. You look at A then B, then consider how A is related to B, then move on to C and repeat. The extension of this: if there is only A…. you look and acknowledge and move on.
Capture a moment in time and let the eye and brain figure it out.
The other interesting part of this story was that Mr. Adams was puzzled about what people did with that photo.
In An Unlikely Weapon, Adams said he found the attention given to this photo disturbing: “I still don’t understand to this day why it was so important, because I have heard so many different versions of what this picture did, like it helped end the war in Vietnam.”
But that’s the age-old truth about art – the artist makes it and the viewer interprets it, regardless of what the artist intended or tells about it. We have to deal with that everytime we hold or hang something up and say “look at this, will ya?”
* ok, yes I am afraid I really did describe my reaction as a big BANG going off in my head so close on the heels of that photo description. Unintentional I assure you — maybe we should go with huge AHA moment and leave it at that…
Well a little cleaning, a little un-quilting, a little tripping around in Azeroth, and today — well today, dear readers, I went and played with my friendly composting worms. It’s hard not to ignore them but they don’t seem to mind. A little food, a cool dark place and they’re good to go. Sometimes I worry what I’ll find when I peek in but there they are wiggling around, surprised to see me (or the light probably), doing their munching thing.
Today when I looked in there were not only quite a number of worms but some rather good sized mushrooms. I left them there, LOL.
So I took the top container of pretty much deserted compost and put that in a bucket. I filled that same container with lovely moistened and shredded newspaper and the peelings from today’s dinner – carrots, potato bits and outer cabbage leaves. Put that one on the bottom and put the stirred up container of compost and worms on top.
Over the next week or so all those little wigglers will find their way down though holes to the bottom feast and leave me with another bucket of compost to put on the garden. Sounds like goodness all around.
Oh my! Am I a barrel of excitement or what? Well, the mage has to do something to amuse while waiting for 555 MB of coming patch to download, eh?
Edit: As of 3 p.m. today, a whopping 396 MB of 555 downloaded… Come on Ulduar!
Thanks to a post from Mark Bitten at the NYTimes, some interesting new ways to look at statistical information (and god knows there’s enough of it out there!) from the BBC. The click through slideshow is a great example of how math really works but the chart at the bottom is a brilliant way to look at numbers.
