I need to get a better spam filter on WordPress, but in the meantime, I can’t help marveling at the ability of spambots to sound remarkably like Steve Martin and Dan Akroyd’s “wild and crazy” Festrunk brothers trying to butter up some “American foxes!”

A few choice verbatim excerpts before I delete them permanently:

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Or, how about:

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And my favorite:

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Not only was there a full moon on March 27, but an extremely high tide of 8.9 feet (the record tide height for this spot is 9.8 feet) peaked at 4:44 a.m. — about 30 minutes before a 700-foot section of cliff tumbled into Puget Sound. (Also of note, the tidal coefficient was a “very high” 103, and it was an excellent day for fishing.)

The Whidbey landslide occurred a few miles down the beach from one of my favorite hiking spots, Fort Ebey State Park. The bluffs there are spectacular, almost spiritual; I often visualize them when I’m swimming laps or doing yoga. It’s humbling to remember that these remnants of ancient glaciers are works of erosive art in progress, continually buffeted by the elements, undermined by underground springs percolating through pockets of gravel, and at the mercy of “earth tides” caused by the moon’s gravitational pull. The human impulse is to climb them, build our houses topside, pretend these great earthen plinths will last forever.

Growing up on Whidbey, I often witnessed micro landslides on the beautiful bluffs as I played on the beach: sudden dribbles of loose earth trickling down, small bursts of rocks bouncing down the slope. Apropos of nothing, it seemed. My parents now live on a nearby island, in a house a few hundred feet from the edge of a cliff. As they gaze out at their awe-inspiring view, they seem unperturbed by what might lurk beneath them. This, despite a slow landslide in 1990 that did a number on a neighboring beach community up the road. (A local blog, Fidalgo Island Crossings, recaps that geologic event nicely.) Their attitude seems to be, hey, why worry? It’s not like we built our house over some sinkhole in Florida.

Keeping trash at bay.

Walking around Baltimore’s newly developed East Harbor yesterday, I was appalled by the slurry of bottles, plastic, and detritus floating in the water alongside the boardwalk. I wondered how this lone duck could stand it. Then I realized, with some relief, that the bird was swimming free and clear of the trash — which was contained by booms on the storm drains that flush into the harbor. Well, I thought, that’s one sign of  progress. But, clearly, there’s much to be done upstream to protect the watershed. According to this interesting story in the Baltimore Sun a couple of years ago, more than 300,000 pounds of trash and debris a year flow down from the Jones Falls. While a little more than half is organic material (leaves, etc.), the rest is manmade: an estimated 189,000 plastic bottles, 160,000 foam cups, 58,000 grocery bags, and more than 1 million cigarette butts.

Poster: “Dig” by Sadie Wendell Mitchell.
Prints and Photographs Online Catalog,
Library of Congress.

The nation’s librarians have kindly made a list of delicious and demanding reads from the science division. Which of these books have you read and loved? I found Moonwalking with Einstein fascinating and fun, and I reread The Double Helix every couple of years. #books

A bench? A pedestal? This clunky piece of furniture is a kind of medical lazy Susan — a rotating examination table from the leprosy colony on the island of Culion in the Philippines. Children born and raised within the colony, which opened in 1906, were regularly placed on this table and examined from almost every angle for suspicious lesions and numb patches of skin that might indicate an active leprosy infection. This exam was known as a “reconoser,” according to Dr. Arturo C. Cunanan, who waxes rather nostalgically about the routine in a recent Sasakawa Memorial Health Foundation/World Health Organization newsletter.