Micromegas

nice one. you know you've achieved something when you climb cactus with a ladder.

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Haha. I had to google that ^^ it doesn't appear to be true. from wiki: Hippo eats dwarf From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Hippo Eats Dwarf is the title of a hoax news article which claims that a dwarf was accidentally eaten by a hippopotamus. The urban legend has been circulating via the internet since the mid-1990s.[1] Contents 1 Story 2 History of the hoax 3 Legacy 4 References Story The article states that, in a "freak accident" at a circus in northern Thailand, a dwarf bounced off a trampoline and into a yawning hippopotamus' mouth, where he was abruptly swallowed whole. History of the hoax The hoax news story has been circulating the internet since 1994, when it was posted to Usenet.[2] Karl Pilkington, of The Ricky Gervais Show, once told the story in a segment called "Educating Ricky" in which Karl believed the story to be true. This led to both Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant laughing hysterically.[3] Legacy A book entitled Hippo Eats Dwarf: A Field Guide to Hoaxes and Other B.S., written by Alex Boese, takes its name from the popular hoax. It was published in 2006.[4]

Looks like a great trip to an unusual location. E. gerardiana has an interesting folk history I'd not heard of before.

not like my DNA Icaro, more similar to 'Len'.

Nice one! I passed the decade mark a few months ago myself. I didn't realise the forum kept a history of every post ever made. It's really remarkable to look back over the years. Also definitely a repository of some fairly esoteric knowledge. In fact apparently I sent you some cactus seeds in Feb 2009: " All I ask is that in a few years you send a couple of the seedlings back to me" How'd they turn out! Haha. All the best for the next 10!

I found this fella in a garden greenhouse about 6 yrs ago. size of a basketball. I assume there's a stock underneath.

That's awesome, great photos too. Did you plan your trip in order to find particular species of plants, or just by accident?

Nice plants. Tantalizingly difficult photos to ID. Is it just one massive clump of three varieties and then the fat one on its own? In the zoomed out shots, which is the short-spined tersheckii? I've never seen that one before, it's cool, but nothing looks fat enough in the long shots for tersheckii or validus. I'm curious about that. The big fella is a form I have seen before in the riverland. I met a grower who planted one around 30 yrs ago. That was in 2010 when i lived up there so let's say 40yrs in the ground. Came as a mail-order from Victoria, pretty sure via Germany. My cutting of it went through an id thread several years ago, consensus was chilensis hybrid (EG). I'd bet money this one you found is the same clone, looks like the same spination and moreso the habit of it. The peruvianus looks familiar as well, also in a garden up that way. Grows on weird angles and can droop like in those pics. Looks good young but pretty ragged as it gets older, i only planted the one for that reason and never propagated it. Some varieties just don't grow up pretty - often we don't think about that. This one is an example. Do you have zoomed in shots of the individual plants? The one on the right in the last pic intrigues me most from an id-perspective. I don't think it's a trich, I reckon a mytillocactus or something like, but not actually, a cleistocactus. I have one I collected up there, it gets fat and tall, grows slow, has semi-opening lilac flowers. I like it I just can't find my photos of it right now and I never id'd it myself. But if it is a trich, would be interesting that one especially. This also confirms my ongoing suspicion that cactus are excellent host plants for quandong, left first pic. The riverland has some great gardens planted out during the last 40 years. Some trich varieties are shared between them, and some are unique to each garden, it might reveal a lot about what was imported into Oz in the 60-80s to know what standard forms are (like sausage plant) and which are more unique. Big variation in the gardeners in that area too. It's really important to know where the limit is in asking people for cactus from their home gardens, let alone having a mad doof there!! Here's my riverland monster below.

echinopsis oxygona or similar

Nice article, cool plant!

^^ that's awesome. surely will test out bank integrity! and your whitewater rafting skills!!

"The sign and divinity have the same place and time of birth" Jacques Derrida

Shark Bay hey. When I was up in the Pilbara I saw lots of acacia citrinoviridis around. I have 10,000 + photos from that region be buggered if I can find the few I took of that acacia right now! But a.citrinoviridis is a dead ringer for a.acuminata, it's called pilbara jam, smells like raspberry jam when you break it, has ehtnobotanical uses but my ethno guide to the region is somewhere else than here. Below is the distribution range, just outside of shark bay.

Nice tree you found etho. Definitely not burkittii, these are shrubs with needle-like leaves, the ones i've grown and seen wild in SA anyway, also don't form small trees. Below is a 'narrow leaf' acuminata in my garden; also have wide-leaved in the background of the second pic. maybe what you have there is like a wide-leaved version that has narrower leaves because it is in the north (drier) extent of the range. climatic variation. in my garden wide and narrow are very distinct. wide leaved is a larger more robust tree overall, narrow leaf grows slower and more shrubby, never has a trunk like you have in those photos but wide-leaf forms a trunk, conditions are the same. the one you picture is intermediate, so i am leaning to climatic variation of the wide leaf variety. never been to sw wa though, no personal field experience, never looked in a book about this species at all.

I was wracking my brain to remember where I read about this when I was looking into Huichol art. Here is an absolute cracker of an article by Peter Furst. http://entheology.com/peoples/kieri-and-the-solanaceae-nature-and-culture-in-huichol-mythology/ There's a good one at the adelaide bot gardens.

worth buying the house for.

Hey Sharxx I did two years in south korea, ten years ago now lol. I don't know what it's like now it terms of setting up jobs. At that time, what you needed was a three (or more) year undergraduate degree to get the working visa. No TESOL. No Korean language. Pick a school on the internet, do a paper then phone interview, make sure you send a good clean photo, make sure you are very clear on the conditions, some people get stung. Round trip flight provided if you stay for 12 months. Nice flat. Good pay. I chose Korea because the pay is good, so is Japan. Other places (China, SE Asia) don't pay much, it's hard to save in those countries, so it depends on what your priorities are. Korea is not a romantic tourist place but it's lovely, great culture, friendly people, mountainous with temples and such. I liked it a lot, may have changed now I don't know. I worked in a private academy, private tutor on the side, also in public schools, pay no tax (1.5%), it's a reasonable saver out of university. Great climate on the south coast, good snow up around Seoul if you like that. I looked in south america (and poland once) a few years later when I was stuck for what to do, and wanted to spend time in the Americas - but good knowledge of spanish was a condition at many schools there.

Sweet! I thought the creek would be pumping with all the rain?

Chalice Vine Solandra grandiflora. Sacred among the Huichols this one. Here's an old thread that popped when I was trying to remember the latin name.

^^ that's awesome google street-view-spying. the rest of this thread looks corroboree old skool interesting but i don't have time to read it right now!

The OP actually raised in my opinion some important epistemological questions. Because I happen to be reading along these lines (but not specifically about marriage) right now I will finish off my discussion of the subject with this very interesting quote I came across today: Although it is somewhat of an exaggeration, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1966:233-34 [the savage mind - this is a very interesting book FYI]) has divided up societies into two types: those that believe that every generation recreates the past and that time is a series of cycles, which he calls "cold" societies, and those that are conscious of change and of the irreversible direction of history, which he labels "hot" societies. In a lecture given at Berkeley in 1984, he tried to trace the emergence of one kind from the other by reference to ninth-to-eleventh century Japanese Heian court society. During that period the usual marriage rule requiring the marriage of men to their cross-cousins (mother's brother's daughters or father's sister's daughters) broke down when people began to break the rules and marry strategically for status and personal gain. He was able to show how the former kind of society, found traditionally in much of the world, is one that reproduces the social structures every generation (so that men fell into the same positions as their fathers and grandfathers, and women, their mothers and grandmothers). Whereas in the latter kind, every generation is different and, according to the literature of that age, more exciting, so that new family relationships and kinship structures were formed every time. This kind of excitement and period of intrigue he called "The Birth of Historical Societies." From: What is Tradition? Nelson H. H. Graburn This feeds into my point that marriage arrangements reflect social structure/ideology and at the bottom of this, personal identity. I'll tie it up here!

I happened to be doing some research into Arnhem Land yesterday and came across this paper re: marriage in the area: Oenpelli Kunwinjku Kinship Terminologies and Marriage Practices. This can be read in conjunction with Radcliffe-Brown's Three Tribes of Western Australia (1913). Following on from this came the Social Organisation of Australian Tribes (1930?). All are available on the web as pdfs I think but ask if you can't locate them. These two works by ARB really set the direction for kinship studies in Australia and its structural elements are confirmed in the more recent Oenpelli study. These two geographical areas (the Pilbara and the Top End) are regions I am somewhat familiar with. The bottom line is, the kinship system and sub/section system(s) and moieties remain of fundamental importance in contemporary aboriginal society but my personal experience does not extend to knowledge about how these systems continue to determine marriages and social life in 'reality' because I am not part of these communities and therefore cannot speak for them in any way whatsoever. This leads to a final point about structuralism and structural anthropology for the etic observer, such as myself. The aboriginal kinship and totemic system is a work of genius when viewed structurally from the outside - it is a system which encompasses all entities within a network of relationships that can be extended ad infinitum. Its structural logic is profound and philosophically it's hard to beat in its ability to locate points within a network and imbue them with meaning by virtue of a spatial (landscape) and spiritual (kinship/ritual) position relative to other positions (Black Cockatoo is my Dreaming , my country is my father's [or my mother's] country, second cross cousin [or first cross cousin] is my wife, my position in ritual is according to the generational moiety of the initiate and so on.). Totemism and kinship as systems of inventory can accommodate every object and, importantly, also every subject as a meaningful position in the structure of what reality logically consists, and embeds reciprocity into these relationships (inversely, it removes the individual). Structural anthropology revels in this logic; Levi-Strauss for example is a major proponent in building 'superstructures' which exist within the 'savage' mind; thought which is 'analogical' as opposed to 'analytical'. The 'Dreamtime' has a fatalistic, but timeless, and determined character. An ancestral mandate is laid down in creation times, enters the earth as part of the 'great founding drama' and sets the structure for all time; it is apprehended within the relationships that exist between landscape/environment, social institutions, and cognition (taken together this is Law) and these relationships are structural: totemism, kinship and ritual express them, collapse and renew them on a continual basis. Not only in marriage but in all aspects motivation for choice is removed - you don't innovate the Law. Correct and incorrect actions and their consequences are related in narrative in order to remove their potential expression in the field of actual experience. Linear change (analytical history - processes of linear causation) is suppressed; everything conforms to the ancestral mandate (analogical history - the Dreamtime past is the Dreamtime present). Philosophically, structural anthropology is really appealing, if not a little cold. But there's the problem of 'men at the business of life'. I can't provide an emic perspective of aboriginal culture - I'm not an aboriginal. But I know from experience that the capricious nature of man (and woman) makes actual living a mess! Life can't always conform to structure; sometimes it loses its shape. At an individual (microcosmic) level this is sexual desire, love, elopement, jealousy, choice and free will that structure aims to impede. At a community (macrocosmic) level this is territorial usurpation, warfare, intertribal jealousy (again) and so on, again human elements which structure seeks to mollify. At a landscape (micro-macro) level climate change and landscape modification (erosion, sea level rise, frequency of burning) upset structural social dynamics by forcing change at the level of subsistence and territorial organisation. All of the problems above show up in narrative (i.e. ancestors break kinship rules and have some transformative experience that institutes land forms or Law), in archaeology (i.e. seed grinding develops at onset of ENSO), language (i.e. Pama-Nyungan mid-Holocene spread) and rock art (i.e. stylistic changes during marine transgression) and so on. The structure is constantly bombarded by personal and impersonal forces that seek to overwhelm its ability to prosper and, fundamentally, exist. Paradoxically innovation must occur, at the individual and the collective level, for communities to survive. Thus there are as many authors on the side of multiplicity and diversity in aboriginal studies as there are on the side of structuralism, some even see the Dreamtime as a very recent (late Holocene) religious movement that arose out of mid-Holocene demographic packing of the continent. They are studies that need to be taken seriously but they downplay Dreamtime ontology, that things are set at the beginning. The bent of my personal nature is toward structuralism. So for me what is remarkable about aboriginal culture in Australia is that it appears (in my assessment) to maintain some continuity in structure. Not all cultures managed to do this - on many continents cultures collapse and are replaced (it would be a big effort for me to produce the evidence for this right now but for example consider the Moche-Sican-Lambayeque-Chimu-Inca transition in the north coast of Peru where temples were razed and Gods abandoned sequentially and replaced with new Gods with new attributes; I believe this may have also happened in parts of Australia). There are two points I a making here: at the level of 'men at the business of life' there will always be elements of choice and behaviour that contravene the structure of ideal cultural norms. Because we fall in love and get jealous (and seek power), and because environmental parameters never remain fixed, there is always a point of instability from the micro to the macro. Things do change. But on the other hand if change can be assimilated against an ancestral (structural) template, perturbations that destroy other cultural forms allows aboriginal culture to survive. In this sense the ancestral beings truly have become the superstructures that allow cultural continuity: Law. And they have become such superstructures exactly as described in myth!!! Thus while the structural rigidity, anti-individualistic, anti-choice and analogical thinking of aboriginal culture is hard for a westerner (individual, linear, dualistic and choice-oriented) to accept one does need to credit to the aboriginal world view the survival of a culture over an inordinate time-span and a ontology of true ingenuity and, I suspect, absolute perceptual truth while the continent remained closed. In addition, maintenance of biological diversity. I baulked at study of aboriginal culture because I couldn't find in it the values I wanted for myself. More and more these days, however, I see it for the value that it has independently of my cultural bias (which I may never get completely away from) and what I initially wanted to find in it. In regard to the OP, to understand aboriginal marriage customs you have to make an effort to understand aboriginal culture in its entirety and the (probably under-investigated and taken-for-granted) values of your own cultural paradigm that block lateral thinking! That last bit is not aimed at you beau, or anyone actually, but more accurately reflects my own obstacles in learning.

Hi beau, from my investigations I have concluded there is very little marriage 'choice' in aboriginal culture, either for women or men. It is dictated by the kinship system. Eligible partners usually fall into classificatory (not consanguinal) position of Mother's Brother's Daughter or Mother's Mother's Brother's Daughter's Daughter viewed from the position of male ego (but there are alternative positions). These classificatory positions will also place the spouse into the opposite moiety, section or subsection. These classifications are extremely important in determining land ownership and obligatory and reciprocal relationships in day to day life (provision of resources), foraging, ritual and ceremony (often arranged across generational moieties as well). This has weakened with colonialism but is still followed in many places. Native Title is based on these lines of descent and it is of fundamental social and legal (both western and aboriginal) importance. Diversity nothwithstanding most aboriginal tribes can be arranged into four kinship types (Aranda, Kariera, and two others I forget, usually with around 24 kinship terms and 3 or 4 generation levels) and three types of classificatory systems: moeities, sections and subsections (with 2, 4, and 8 categories). There is a remarkable homogeneity across Australia and broad cultural zone of tribes (say for example the west Pilbara or Lake Eyre Basin) would have say 25 tribes that all had very similar kinship and classificatory systems and linked religious beliefs (similarly 80% of Australian languages are quite similar). The main division in aboriginal australia is between the tropical north (Top End and Kimberley) and the rest of the continent. Generally, groups on adjacent lands had profoundly similar and interlocking kinship systems, languages, subsistence strategies, religions and population numbers. Interestingly while kinship and moiety systems are common in hunter-gatherer societies worldwide section and subsection systems appear to be an Australian innovation. Consent is not gained between partners in most cases and marriage is set up when children are still very young (this pretty common in many cultures so nothing to be shocked about). Consent is (often but not always) negotiated by classificatory 'uncles' (mother's brother) with the father of male ego (in aboriginal kinship father's brother is also one's father; a process known as bifurcate merging in the kinship system is really important in marriage arrangements whereby mother's sister is also mother but mother's brother is 'uncle', which allows prospective spouses to fall into the opposite section or moiety from oneself - again, it gets complex but again, this what aboriginal land rights is based on - lines of descent). The 'uncle' selected is usually a 'far off' uncle from another clan or even language group (tribe) and promises his daughter to male ego's father in return for something (goods, rights to land, ritual knowledge, or often in return for a woman promised to his own son etc.). This sets up a situation of tribe or clan exogamy which is really important in knitting together affiliated tribes within cultural zones which themselves are often topographically delineated in some way (i.e. mountain ranges, water courses). Male ego can end up with many promised wives but because a man can only marry after a lengthy period of initiation many of these wives will die, be married to someone else (i.e older men in the correct classificatory relationship) and so on, but the obligatory responsibilities of the promise remain. Marriage is a social transaction. Horseplay did exist of course, it's human nature. However if people 'choose' based on 'love' and elope the punishment can be very harsh indeed. Spearing, death, death to one's family. Elopements between people in the correct classificatory relationship can be negotiated but elopements outside of that relationship are strictly prohibited by Law, it is a serious offense and transgression against this are frequently the subject of narrative, and especially against the incest taboo (classificatory sister). That being said extramarital affairs appear to have been common and in certain (correct) kinship relationships tacitly accepted. 'Love' was not part of the equation at least not in my substantial reading, it rarely comes up although 'love magic' by women is mentioned for chasing after unmarried boys and was a significant aspect of Western Desert woman's business. Nevertheless actual 'marriage' was more of a transaction based on reciprocal obligations between kinship groups. 'Divorce' was possible. I do believe women could hold considerable power within their relationships, just like they do today. To put it crassly the power of nagging and making one's husband miserable, of withholding sex or food (women provided 70% + of hunter gatherer diets). That husband could grant that woman as a wife to his classificatory brothers. So there is a rigid system but it is made fluid by powers of negotiation between interested parties. Finally were aboriginal women 'forced' to have sex? I don't know. Are we 'forced' to believe in our own cultural norms of monogamy and sexual puritanicalism. The question is out of cultural context and you won't make progress with that line of reasoning. I have read many (many) times about ceremonial events where kinship and marriage rules are relaxed for a night or two and ceremonial 'orgies' take place (the word orgy is not really correct). Enough to believe there is some truth in it. Other prohibited actions are also allowed at these times (i.e. son- and mothers-in-law who are usually forbidden to speak or make eye contact berate one another). The 'purpose' of these events is to diffuse social (and sexual) tension. Likewise ceremonial (or non-ceremonial) deflowering of promised girls (by intercourse, I have never read about a kangaroo skin-covered finger) prior to their marriage appears to have occurred in some areas. Similarly senior men with many wives was common especially in the north (gerontocracy, but less common in the south). This was a reward dangled in front of young men to undergo the arduous task of full initiation, which can take about 40 years. A final point on 'sex' in aboriginal culture (and it is a pervasive and explicit element in comparison to our western society) is that the link between sex and conception was not widely made. The decoupling of procreation and sex puts sex into a whole different context. There were also entire ritual cults dedicated to sexual activity (see Kurangara (sp?)) There were a lot of things I 'wanted to believe' when I started researching aboriginal culture and I still want to believe them because of my own bias and upbringing. But they may simply not be the case. We are talking here about a system of belief so different from our own (western view) it is nearly incomprehensible. Suspending judgement and bias is key. Berndt, Elkin, Tonkinson, Radcliffe-Brown, Maddock, Stanner, Meggit, Myers, Munn, Hiatt and many others are good authors to start with. Best to drill down into peer reviewed academic literature in noted journals to get more detailed regional or gender perspectives and understand the diversity involved, although it is not as great as the posted map suggests. It's more like biological diversity in nature on a single continent - different yes, but recognizably related (magical practices and language is a clear example of this). Keep away for new age reworking of the literature with very little depth. Note, however - this article you post from ANU is quite good and Diane Bell is an outstanding contemporary scholar on Aboriginal Australia, one of the best. I totally agree that the research has been biased toward male anthropologists with a penchant for structuralism, which Aboriginal culture can be made to fit so nicely (see Radcliffe-Brown especially). More recent 'feminist' work on Aboirginals is REALLY important and so is understanding that the structural rules (kinship, totemism especially) could be made to bend for certain reasons and in certain circumstances (for example subsection terms could sometimes be manipulated to put people into positions of correct marriage when they originally were not), and that the colonial process did interrupt what people could accurately record. There is a flexibility in aboriginal society that matches their ability to handle sexual desire, a natural energy whose repression has crushed the west into near cultural oblivion (see Foucault on this point) and created obscene religions that subvert the feminine to the extreme - that are, in fact, a response to male fear of the power of the feminine. This is the culture we in Australia have inherited so don't lose sight of that - our own culture is downright abusive to women and is patriarchal to the max, despite what you consider to be your own personal position (this patriarchy is perhaps slowly weakening?). I have not read into much about women's roles in Aboriginal pre-colonial society but I am certain it was important and downplayed by anthropology until recently. This is the caveat I add and I commend you for searching for that paper and others. That being said, the structuralism and patriarchy is still there. Choice, love, even the individual, I believe is more subsumed into a network of relationships (including the natural world) within the Aboriginal worldview than the western mind can easily accommodate. The internal dynamics of aboriginal culture makes me feel uncomfortable, it's not all fluffy love the earth stuff as new age literature would have you believe. But it makes me feel uncomfortable because it is a direct challenge to my own culture, which is itself, I have slowly realised, internally inconsistent and corrupt from the start and has more or less killed the entire planet. A final point is that I am not a scholar and if you want to know more about aboriginal marriage you should undertake a thorough reading of the literature to form your own opinion, my own opinion is in process! Great question though!