Daphne revisits Lorikeets in rainbow color!
(plus Dom, telegraphy, Marconi and God)
Just got this wonderful web page and pictures from Daphne long with a brief note:
An update on the lorikeets. They are now daily guests in our garden, and will continue to visit as long as the honey-laden flowers last. All the flowers in the pictures are native to Australia. They're as exotic as their feathered friends.
Daphne enclosed an entire web page she had built with the brief note. You'll find it here. (This opens in a new window - just close the window to return to Natural High.
Meanwhile, Dom's reaction to the same item (Of lorikeets, dx20s, imacs and banksia, Daphne and Dom) was to go off in another direction. He wrote:
Your ham radio blog sent me spinning back in time, half a century and more. The Morse code was the trigger. My father was a professional telegraphist. He earned his living by tapping out deets and dahs.
Occasionally he'd take little me out of the pram and into the office. The sound was like a test room in a castanet factory! But my dad could zoom in on a single telegraph key and read it clearly out of the cacophony.
And those were the days when people were precise, not prolific, because telegrams cost by the word. Fluff was shaved off messages, and only vital words survived.
Strangely, the American empire was there also. Wasn't Samuel Morse responsible for my dad's profession?
And coincidentally, wasn't Morse born in your part of the world, at Charlestown, near Boston?
Yes, Morse did come from Charlestown and Marconi worked around here, as well - you can still see where he established trans-Atlantic signal towers in 1902 - it's part of the Cape Cod National Seashore park now. As I recall, the ocean is creeping in on the site, already having eroded away the portion of the dunes where two of the four towers were anchored. (This picture, taken in 1917, hints at that erosion, but I believe it is much more extensive today. Cape Cod is a relatively recent feature, being essentially debris from a glacier that melted around 18,000 years ago. The sea is slowly, but surely, reclaiming it.)
Some folks don't see the works of man as natural - but I think they are as natural as a bird's nest and the erosion of the foundations of these towers illustrates the point. It is not unlike an abandoned birds nest being blown out of a tree - just takes a little longer. We're all part of this continuous shuffling and rearranging of the essential ingredients - and those essentials remain the same.
You have to respect Morse, though,(yes, I just left Marconi dangling on the edge of the dune) if for nothing else, for the content of that first telegraph message from Washington to Baltimore. It read, simply, "What hath God wrought?" That should be the question we all ask with ever more urgency today. Talk about pithy!
Posted by Greg Stone at June 15, 2003 07:01 AM