More than the other goats, Misty likes to explore
every opportunity
to get hold of branches
It’s not always easy.
But, on the other hand,
she’s not really
that busy.
I suspect these are young midges, small mosquito-like insects that swarm in the evening. If you click on the picture, you’ll see they came out as dots and straight lines, and if you were a midge you would probably think that cameras are rubbish. Imagine if people came out as either dots or straight lines.
A Bad Guide 
Misty seems like quite the intrepid explorer! Maybe the hard to get at leaves taste better?
I hadn’t thought of that. You could be right.
But could she get those branches? Looks like didn’t, poor Misty…
I love her last portrait!
I don’t think she did, no. But they aren’t the only leaves in the forest.
Misty is a blinder. Many thanks. The skyward inspection of the air and winds of Spring… ah, the pastoral!
May I offer a sheep or three by way of return?
It looks lovely where you are. But then relative to the way things are, currently,
here, that would not take much.
<a href="http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/knut-hamsun-finger-of-god.html"This
would be as near as I’ve been able to come to you lately. Not all that near when one thinks of it, and hardly pastoral, in any case.
(Many thanks for the link by the way, I have just now returned that favour as well — would have done so earlier, but for a complicated few days…)
Oh well, clever clever…
Here’s that not very near approach. For what it’s worth.
Thank you for your links. As well as the lovely sheep that’s a beautiful drystone wall. I read The Autobiography Of A Super-Tramp at school.
I once had the opportunity to gaze down at that boiling lava inside the earth, it was in the volcano in the big island of Hawaii. The red-hot lava flowed over a cliff and into the ocean in a cloud of steam. I’ll never forget that.
Do you live in the West? Arizona?
http://www.physorg.com/news194539934.html
(H/T naked Capitalism)
What’s “H/T”? Funny they didn’t use mohair goats. They don’t give milk, but mohair & silk would be a nice combination fur.
It’s Berkeley. I am US native, by way of Cambridge & various parts. The wife’s family came from Vienna; she ends up here by way of their flight (induced by historical emergency: read, Hitler) to first Norway, then the wilds of Wyoming (where scientists extract spider silk from goats’ milk; what’s the world coming to?), and then New Zealand (where there are of course many many sheep), a place she would surely have done better never to have left.
We envy you your “situation”, how very lovely it appears to our trapped-in-America eyes.
I like Misty’s looks as-is, though a combination fur of mohair and silk is an interesting idea, almost.
Heaven knows what they’ll hatch next in Wyoming.
Just guessing but could H/T stand for the dread beast High Technology? (I think that’s what they’ve used to first cause, then not be able to cope with, the present catalcysmic oilspill.)
H/T means “hat tip”, apparently. But then I used to suppose that LOL meant Lots of Love, so who am I to opine?
I read The Autobiography Of A Super-Tramp at school.
Shaw called St. Francis a super-tramp. I wonder if the band got their title from The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism:
Also, note “oneanother” and “each of them may cherish about herself”. Shaw was doing the he/she indefinite pronoun thing well in advance of 70’s feminists.
The title was revived again when the young man, McCandless I believe was his name, stalked off “Into the Wild” and never came back; he rather romantically called himself Alexander Supertramp, I think it was, though he had none of the breadth of experience of William H. Davies, who had dreamed up the title and then defended it heroically against querulous publishers who didn’t like it. The young man’s story gave rise to the Jon Kracauer best seller and rather silly film of the same name (“Into the Wild”). But I think McCandless in calling himself Supertramp was probably referencing the band, not Davies. The band may well have heard about the Davies book via Shaw. Though perhaps like AJP Crown they actually read the book at school, and were in thus wise inspired. And the Davies book really would not have come into existence had it not been for Shaw’s wife, whose endless promptings caused Shaw to help find Davies a suitable publisher (one who would agree to pay him royalties) and to contribute the Preface.
W.H.Davies’s book is the source of the band’s name, according to Wikipedia. Their greatest hits record is called The Autobiography of Supertramp.
There was a useful period in the late ‘sixties when every other week something we were studying at school would become the name of a new band: as well as Supertramp (English), Jethro Tull (history) and Van Der Graaf Generator (physics) are the two I can remember, but I think there were more.
“each of them may cherish about herself.”
Grumbly, thanks, that’s interesting.
There’s a good biography of Shaw by Michael Holroyd.
Tom, I lived in northern California in the ‘seventies (S.F. & Point Reyes). I sometimes find the landscape here similar, but I may be the only one who thinks so. I have two (unconnected) Norwegian neighbours who were students at U.C. Berkeley.
I once saw a rattlesnake in the Berkeley botanical gardens.
By golly, I had never even heard of Davies – although somehow I knew the lines
My speculative link between Shaw and the band was just a bit of silliness. The point was the appearance of the word “super-tramp” in a book written in 1927.
Published in 1928, who knows when it was written.
Well, AJP, it seems we have convergng ancient histories at at least one point. When you were living in Point Reyes, we were just a bit down the road in Bolinas (’68-’78). Point Reyes was actually the nearest town of any dimension (well, lilliputian, but still), so we were often there. Indeed perhaps we have met in that previous life.
As to Seventies bands with scientistical monikers… well, Ten cc did occur to one. (“I’m Not In Love,” & c.)
Talk about your time capsules.
I suppose this may be at least tangentially “on topic,” inasmuch as here, from the deep past, they appear in partial guise of sheep.
They were perhaps wolves in sheep’s clothing.
They were mancunian art schoolish lads. The fellow on the left, Graham Gouldmann, was the clever one; he wrote half the hit catalog of the Hollies, Yardbirds & Herman’s Hermits. A chequered early history through congestions of strawberry bubblegum & c. until they were “discovered” by and attained prominence through the auspices of the producer Jonathan King, who gave them their name. Speaking of wolves amid the pastoral.
King I had briefly encountered in Cambridge when he was a Trinity undergrad and I a grad student at Caius. In 1965 he penned and recorded a colossal hit, Everyone’s Gone to the Moon. It reached the top of the pirate charts. (Those offshore drill rig platforms of Deepshore Horizon still put me in mind of Radio London and Radio Caroline in that antediluvian epoch.) This was somewhat equivalent to Christopher Marlowe’s great splash with Tamerlane, also achieved while still a Cambridge undergraduate. In both cases the academic careers ended with the hits. And segued into darker areas.
King named the band 10 cc. The following curious wikisentence refers at its climacteric to the aptly named band member Lol Creme.
“A widely repeated claim, disputed by King and Godley, but confirmed in a 1988 interview, ironically by Creme, is that the band name represented a volume of semen that was more than the average amount ejaculated by men, thus emphasising their potency or prowess.”
So there would be your pop musical link to science from the middle of the night here, AJP.
Point Reyes: When I was in Berkeley last summer, my daughter and son-in-law took me to Point Reyes – the village and the park, all the way down to a little beach. We didn’t see any sheep, but there is a subspecies of elk that lives on top of the cliffs and we saw quite a few of them from a distance. A wonderful place, but it would be lonely in the winter, I think.
Where I lived was Marshall, Ca. on Tomales Bay. All the surrounding land belonged to a cult. It was quite lonely there both in summer and winter. I liked the barbequed oysters at the Marshall Tavern quite a lot.
I remember 10cc, I didn’t know they were part of Jonathan King’s setup; and I’d never heard of Graham Gouldman, so I had no idea he’d written all those songs. It’s odd that he isn’t very famous, perhaps they never made it in the US.
Marie-Lucie,
A Tule elk preserve was established in 1978. One can walk the Tomales Point Trail and see the Tule elk at Point Reyes. I don’t get around much anymore, to do such hikes, but others who do tell me the elk are still alive and well. And it seems you are one of those who do, and have seen them, happily for you.
AJP,
Yes, Gouldmann composed some of the hooky-est songs of that earlier era; Bus Stop and Look Through Any Window (writ for the Hollies) still inveigle themselves into the ancient cerebrum every now and again.
Ten cc were pretty big in the US, for about one minute. Pretty much a one-hit wonder deal, you know how that sort of thing goes. Disposable culture now, specialty cult later (maybe).