(You are looking at the centre section. If you click on it you can get the whole thing up in a new window.)
This bird is a noddy.
Noddy is a tropical seabird. I didn’t know that. Here are more noddies, standing in a queue. (Click to see the whole picture in another window.)
That’s better. I needed a holiday.
A Bad Guide 
Look at that surf behind the noddies …oooh! I bet you can go snorkeling there.
I guess that’s like saying I’ll bet you can go skiing in Norway.
I don’t have a mouse, so I can’t get the full pictures, but the top one is a wonderful abstract painting.
I do have a full mouse, even if it’s half red, but I don’t understand how to see the full picture. There’s no little (Maradonna’s) hand that you usually have when you scroll over a clickable image. That’s very frustrating because I’d really like to see who else is in the queue. (Marie-Lucie, do you have a laptop only? On laptops you usually have the large button/pad that allows you to move the pointer across the screen, but you also have two smaller buttons underneath. Normally the right one is the right click.)
AJP, yes, you can go snorkelling, but this place has an amazing number of sharks. But turtles too, as well as stingrays, and loads of
toadsfish, some of them cray.but the top one is a wonderful abstract painting
Rothko I’d say.
I’m sure that in no time AJP will find a painting by Rothko which will look exactly like the one above. Maybe not in blue though.
To see the full picture, Sig, you right click on the picture, then click “view image”.
To use the numeric keypad as a mouse, m-l, they say you can use the Windows accessibility feature called MouseKeys.
Or AJP could use the WordPress editor to resize the photos to 500 pixels wide, which should make it show up okay with all browsers. If the link is set to the original uploaded image, someone with a mouse can still click to view it larger.
Yes, I caught my breath when I saw the first one. Usually a seascape has something in it, like a boat or wave or something, not just an expanse of sea. But then I like Rothko, too.
I have found your Rothko; in my URL.
Wow. I love the first image. It reminds me of Egypt and the Red Sea. The only colors are shades of blue and shades of beige, and at first it seems boring. But then your eye adjusts and you see there is a whole world in those two colors.
I need a vacation, too. It’s been snowing in Moscow:(
Well, it goes to show I mustn’t post something and go to bed and expect it to run itself. Alarm bells and a fireman’s pole are now being installed at this end. Thanks to Nij’s advice I think — I hope — from now on you’ll be able to just click on a picture in order to get the whole thing up in a separate window.
Sig, about these sharks. Do I have to swim with 2 bodyguards, or just risk it, or what?
Everyone who sees that first photograph says the same things. I don’t remember ever having seen a view to the horizon with no object to focus on. It’s so obvious. We must all have thought of it as ‘understood’, not needing a picture, but it seems we did need it after all.
Well done, Sig.
Instead of bodyguards you could employ some sort of Stranglers: “Watch what I do when I swim with the sharks”… But I presume they are already too well fed there to notice a man with a goatee, no matter how appetizing he might look.
Well done, Sig.
It’s just another siganid who took that picture, not me. But Martian waters are appealing to a lot of fishy creatures. Since Nijma must be sleeping now — les absents ont toujours tort — I might as well send you the paintings I mentioned on her blog.
les absents ont toujours tort
la responsabilité délictuelle?
Yes, send anything. I’ll be back later, I’m going shopping.
I’m having second thoughts about this. It might be better to put them onto the camel’s back and don’t tempt these goats that can eat anything on Earth, or so it seems. I’d rather send you more birds. There’s one that is called “zozo Lavierz” (the Virgin’s bird). It is a beautiful absolutely white bird that lays its eggs directly on the branches, without any sort of nest. (They must have a particularly high rate of
infantegg mortality.) Would this be alright with you?By the way, the link you have provided for the noddy lead me to an image that I found amazing. It wasn’t because it was showing a noddy in the middle of the Pacific while we have the same ones on the other side of the world — after all birds fly —, but it was to see that it was sitting on a veloutier! The veloutier is a small tree that I always liked. It brings back very good memories of time spent at the seaside, in days long past. (Children love to climb on its nicely curved branches and its velvety leaves, which gave the bush-like tree its name, make like a hut or cabin (cabane).) The bird and part of the tree (Tournefortia argentea) can be seen here:
In fact ours is not so much the black than the brown (or common) noddy, know as maquois. Usually they don’t wear a red bonnet with a bell and they don’t drive their little car. Non-non.
… known as “maquois”…
And everyone knows Oui-Oui, no?
I used to hate Noddy; however, I saw it again recently and it seemed a lot better than I remembered.
les absents ont toujours tort
You think I can’t google that? Ha!
I have Sig’s paintings now:
http://camelsnose.wordpress.com/2009/04/19/a-martian-painter/
For me, they don’t inspire the reverence that Rothko does, of course (that one’s still in my URL), but even though they are only photographs, I find myself drawn to them and fascinated to look at them in detail.