by wjw on February 1, 2025
Here’s a spotted eagle ray cruising over the reef in the Turks and/or Caicos, 2016.
Eagle rays are impressive, with their ten-foot wing span, but they don’t hang around for long. They’re both fast and shy, and if they see divers in their vicinity, they’re out of sight very quickly. They’re pelagic fishes, living in the deep ocean, and only hang around islands and reefs if they happen to run into them on their travels in the Big Blue.
This one zoomed past, giving us only a few seconds to admire it, but then our guide Bob pointed a course orthogonal to the path of the ray, and we followed him along it. It seems that eagle rays will often circle back once they’re out of sight of intruders, and so we got another look at it as it crossed our track. Awesome.
Picture by photo pro Troy.
by wjw on January 22, 2025
So what to do with a beef round roast? It’s tough, it’s very lean, and it can be kind of flavorless.
Yet roasts can be comfort food, and comfort is what I’d kind of like given recent events, which include freezing weather for the last week, and a tomorrow promised to remain below freezing all day.
So beef round? The traditional method is to braise the hell out of it, for a couple hours or so.
I decided to go another route. I marinated it overnight in a marinade of Worcestershire, soy, balsamic vinegar, garlic, mustard, and olive oil. Then I chucked it in the sous vide pot for eight hours at 133 degrees, after which I seared it on an ultra-hot pan.
So here you see the London Broil I produced. A lovely medium rare all the way through, and every bite tender. It still was lacking in flavor somewhat, but I could mitigate that by reducing the marinade and serving it as a sauce.
Served with sweet corn and Kathy’s sublime ginger and broccoli in soy sauce. And a double Malbec blend, one variety from 1100 meters, and the other from 700.
With this, who needs dessert?
by wjw on January 22, 2025
A gorgeous nudibranch crawling along the reef at Siladen, Sulawesi (formerly known as Celebes).
Sulawesi is a paradise for nudibranchs, and apparently every other form of aquatic life. Nudibranchs are a type of gastropod, basically a snail that has got rid of its shell and survives by tasting really awful to predators. The colorful exterior is a warning of bad taste to follow.
There are hundreds of types of nudibranchs, all of them colorful and beautiful, many of them yet to be discovered and catalogued. And all of them taste awful, not that I’ve tried myself.
Photo by Atti.
by wjw on January 18, 2025
French pro-Axis poster from the Second World War. Churchill smiles at a starving French family while surrounded by the slogan, “Monster, you make us suffer!”
Churchill looks more like a film comedian than a statesman, let alone a monstre.
The poster is intended to encourage the French public to forget that it was the Germans, not the British, who were confiscating food, fuel, and human beings.
From the Churchill War Rooms in Westminster. I doubt this poster hung here in Churchill’s time.
UPDATE! Please erase “French” in the message above and replace with “Belgian.” The drawing was by Oskar Garvens, a German caricaturist, but the poster was displayed in Belgium..
by wjw on January 15, 2025
Mid-1960s, I think. I analyze the performance envelope of the P-38 fighter for the benefit of my mom’s friend Giulia Simola.
