Cocina oriental -Compramos algo en Tako Pachi??-
Published Saturday, September 30, 2006 by Spyder.
3 bolas por 2$ en Tako Pachi, una de las cadenas que vende en Singapur el Takoyaki japonés (bolas de pulpo rebozado con mayonesa encima).
No se ustedes, pero yo miro estas imágenes y se me hace la boca agua...
Labels: Gastronomía
Cocina oriental -El Takoyaki japonés-
Published Friday, September 29, 2006 by Spyder.
Takoyaki es una comida japonesa hecha básicamente de harina de trigo y unos trozos de pulpo. Se hace en forma de una bola (tamaño de la de Ping Pong). Sus ingredientes son: masa de harina de trigo con huevo y agua, trozos de pulpo, jengibre curtido troceado, alga (ao-nori), etc. Se asan en un tipo de plancha de cobre con huecos en forma semicircular, y se sirven con salsa tipo worcester. también se puede usar cuscurrús.
Via Wikipedia
Las fotógrafias están tomadas del blog de Seru-Kun
El post que coloca es muy interesante. Copio un fragmento.
Takoyaki wa sugoi desuuu!!
...pese a que a Patty no le guste lo más mínimo. La frase se traduce como "¡¡El takoyaki es fantásticooo!!".
¿Que qué es el Takoyaki?Un takoyaki es una bola de harina muy esponjosa en cuyo interior se encuentra un trocito de pulpo (en japonés, tako) y que se sirve con una salsa característica de esta comida, muy popular en Japón. He aquí un plato ya acabado. Lo que lleva por encima espolvoreado es un rallado de pescado seco (el mismo con el que se prepara la base de caldo dashi, muy usada en la cocina japonesa, así como yo lo suelo incluir bastante en mi arroz marino).Se prepara sobre unas grandes planchas con agujeros que le dan la forma redonda. (...)
Para seguir leyendo aquí
Labels: Gastronomía
Cocina -Pulpo a la mugardesa-
Published Monday, September 25, 2006 by Spyder.
Ingredientes
(Para 4 personas)
Un pulpo fresco de 2 Kg, o en su defecto congelado
2 Kg de patatas
1 cebolla grande
2 pimientos morrones
aceite de oliva
pimenton dulce y picante
Preparación
Si el pulpo es fresco lavarlo bien y después hay que “mazarlo” como dicen en Galicia , es decir hay que darle golpes (como si le dieras una paliza con un palo) para que ablande. Si es pulpo congelado, no es necesario mazarlo ya que el congelado (4 o 5 días) lo ablanda también.
(Para 4 personas)
Un pulpo fresco de 2 Kg, o en su defecto congelado
2 Kg de patatas
1 cebolla grande
2 pimientos morrones
aceite de oliva
pimenton dulce y picante
Preparación
Si el pulpo es fresco lavarlo bien y después hay que “mazarlo” como dicen en Galicia , es decir hay que darle golpes (como si le dieras una paliza con un palo) para que ablande. Si es pulpo congelado, no es necesario mazarlo ya que el congelado (4 o 5 días) lo ablanda también.
Una vez el pulpo esté ablandado, se pone agua a hervir, cogiéndole de la cabeza, se sumergue 3 veces consecutivas (asustar el pulpo), dejandolo dentro a la tercera vez. Esta operación es para que las patas se ricen.
El pulpo se cuece e sin sal para que no se endurezca, y suele tardar aproximadamente una media hora.
Pasado este tiempo se le saca del agua y se coloca encima de un vaso puesto al reves para que repose.
En el agua de coder el pulpo, se cuecen las patatas peladas y en rodajas del tamaño de 1 cm.
Una vez cocidad las patatas, se pasan a una olla de barro y se colocan en el fondo, encima se pone el pulpo cortado en pedacitos.
Con la cebolla, los pimientos y el aceite de oliva, se hace un refrito sin dejar que se cora demasiado, se apaga el fuego y cuando el aceite esta templado, se le añade una cucharadita de pimenton dulce y otra picante, se le da unas vueltas y se echa por encima de pulpo y las patatas, se les da un hervor a todo junto y se irve en la misma cazuela.
PD. Y el brandy que comentábamos ayer???? Esto lo arreglamos enseguida.
¿Recuerdan el pavo al Whisky? Pues hacer lo mismo con el pulpo al brandy....
PAVO AL WHISKY
Ingredientes:- Un pavo de unos tres kilos- Una botella de whisky- 250 gramos de zanahorias- Medio kilo de patatas- Unas tiras de panceta- Aceite de oliva- Sal y pimienta
Paso 1.- Limpiar el pavo, rellenarlo con la panceta, atarlo, salpimentar y ponerle un buen chorrito de aceite de oliva.
Paso 2.- Pelar y trocear las patatas y las zanahorias, y alfombrar con ellas la bandeja del horno.
Paso 3.- Precalentar el horno a 180 grados durante quince minutos.
Paso 4.- Servirse un vaso de whisky para hacer tiempo.
Paso 5.- Meter el pavo al horno.
Paso 6.- Servirse otro vaso de whisky, beberselo y mirar el horno con ojos ligeramente extraviados.
Paso 7.- Boner el terbostato a 150 gramos... grabdos y esberar trenta binutos.
Paso 8.- Servirse odro paso, odros pasos.
Vaso 9.- Al cabo dum drato, hornir el abro bara condrolar y echar un chodreton de pavo al guisqui y odro de guisqui a uno bisbo.
Baso 10.- Darle la vuelta al babo y quebrarse la bano al cerrar elorno, bierda...!
Passso 11.- Intentarr sentarrse en una silla y sebirrse unossss quessitosss bientras pasan los binutosss.
Parso 12.- Retirar el babo del horrrno y luego regogerrrrlo del suelo con un brapo embujandolo a un blato, bandeja o ssssimiliarrrr.
Faso 13.- Rombersssse la sabbbiola al refalar en la graasssa.
Paaaso 14.- Indendar lebandarse sin soltarr la vodella y dras bariosss indendoss decidir que en el suelo sesta fenommmeno.
Aso 15.- Appburar la potella agompanada de aspapas y zahorias dal rededor, adrastrarse asta la gama, y dormir sseeee.
Paso 16.- A la manana siguiente, tomar abundante cafe para el inexplicable dolor de cabeza, comerse el pavo frio con un poco de mayonesa y el resto del dia dedicarlo a limpiar el estropicio hecho en la cocina.
Buen provecho!!!
PD. Y el brandy que comentábamos ayer???? Esto lo arreglamos enseguida.
¿Recuerdan el pavo al Whisky? Pues hacer lo mismo con el pulpo al brandy....
PAVO AL WHISKY
Ingredientes:- Un pavo de unos tres kilos- Una botella de whisky- 250 gramos de zanahorias- Medio kilo de patatas- Unas tiras de panceta- Aceite de oliva- Sal y pimienta
Paso 1.- Limpiar el pavo, rellenarlo con la panceta, atarlo, salpimentar y ponerle un buen chorrito de aceite de oliva.
Paso 2.- Pelar y trocear las patatas y las zanahorias, y alfombrar con ellas la bandeja del horno.
Paso 3.- Precalentar el horno a 180 grados durante quince minutos.
Paso 4.- Servirse un vaso de whisky para hacer tiempo.
Paso 5.- Meter el pavo al horno.
Paso 6.- Servirse otro vaso de whisky, beberselo y mirar el horno con ojos ligeramente extraviados.
Paso 7.- Boner el terbostato a 150 gramos... grabdos y esberar trenta binutos.
Paso 8.- Servirse odro paso, odros pasos.
Vaso 9.- Al cabo dum drato, hornir el abro bara condrolar y echar un chodreton de pavo al guisqui y odro de guisqui a uno bisbo.
Baso 10.- Darle la vuelta al babo y quebrarse la bano al cerrar elorno, bierda...!
Passso 11.- Intentarr sentarrse en una silla y sebirrse unossss quessitosss bientras pasan los binutosss.
Parso 12.- Retirar el babo del horrrno y luego regogerrrrlo del suelo con un brapo embujandolo a un blato, bandeja o ssssimiliarrrr.
Faso 13.- Rombersssse la sabbbiola al refalar en la graasssa.
Paaaso 14.- Indendar lebandarse sin soltarr la vodella y dras bariosss indendoss decidir que en el suelo sesta fenommmeno.
Aso 15.- Appburar la potella agompanada de aspapas y zahorias dal rededor, adrastrarse asta la gama, y dormir sseeee.
Paso 16.- A la manana siguiente, tomar abundante cafe para el inexplicable dolor de cabeza, comerse el pavo frio con un poco de mayonesa y el resto del dia dedicarlo a limpiar el estropicio hecho en la cocina.
Buen provecho!!!
Labels: Gastronomía, Recetas
Cocina -Espagueti con salsa negra-
Published by Spyder.
Ingredientes:
350 gramos de espagueti.
1/4 de taza de oliva.
1/2 cebolla picada.
2 dientes de ajo picados.
2 jitomates finamente picados.
1 taza de puré de jitomate.
1 sobre de tinta de pulpo.
1/2 kilo de pulpo.
1 hoja de laurel.
Sal al gusto.
1 ramita de epazote.
Procedimiento:
Freír en el aceite de oliva la cebolla, el ajo, el jitomate y el puré. Incorporar la tinta. Añadir el pulpo y el laurel, sazonar. Cocinar 10 minutos. Colocar el espagueti en el platón encima el pulpo, y la ramita de epazote.
Espagueti: Cocer el espagueti en aagua con sal. Escurrir.
350 gramos de espagueti.
1/4 de taza de oliva.
1/2 cebolla picada.
2 dientes de ajo picados.
2 jitomates finamente picados.
1 taza de puré de jitomate.
1 sobre de tinta de pulpo.
1/2 kilo de pulpo.
1 hoja de laurel.
Sal al gusto.
1 ramita de epazote.
Procedimiento:
Freír en el aceite de oliva la cebolla, el ajo, el jitomate y el puré. Incorporar la tinta. Añadir el pulpo y el laurel, sazonar. Cocinar 10 minutos. Colocar el espagueti en el platón encima el pulpo, y la ramita de epazote.
Espagueti: Cocer el espagueti en aagua con sal. Escurrir.
Labels: Gastronomía, Recetas
Pulpos y Festejos -Festa do pulpo en Mugardos-
Published Sunday, September 24, 2006 by Spyder.
Mugardos es una población de La Coruña, por la que pasa la Ría de Ferrol. Situada junto al Ferrol, limita al sur y oeste con Ares y al este con Fene.
Es curioso que la Wikipedia francesa da más información sobre Mugardos que la Wikipedia en castellano. Es tradicicional que cada año se celebre la tradicional "Festa de pulpo".
Y ahora solo queda pasear un poco por el puerto, entrar en alguna de las tascas y tomar un pulpo a la mugardesa (cocinado con una salsa de pimiento, cebolla, brandy y pimentón)
Y lo que quería poner, que es el cartel de la “Festa do Pulpo” ganador de este año, que se celebra en la Real Villa de Mugardos .
Cartel ganador en su XIII edición hecho por Mª. Jose Mosquera Beceiro (alias "sex")
Para consultar la biografía de la autora.
Labels: Festejos, Gastronomía
Guillermo Piro -Los pulpos de Italo Calvino-
Published Saturday, September 23, 2006 by Spyder.
Hace unos meses salia el nombre en este blog del argentino Guillermo Piro, aquí dejo otra muestra de su calidad estilística. El texto es una continua mención a otro de Italo Calvino. Desconozco el texto original, ni siquiera estoy seguro que lo haya (Guillermo Piro tiene mucho sentido del humor). De todas maneras, si alguien tiene el texto de Italo Calvino al que supuestamente se hace referencia, agradecería que me lo enviasen.
Guillermo Piro
Italo Calvino lo sabía: literatos y caballeros, entre otras cosas, tienen en común el obligar al cuerpo a adoptar posiciones innaturales: el literato estando sentado, el caballero andando a caballo, lo que por cierto no es muy higiénico que digamos. De todos modos siempre es mejor estar sentados que de pie: se evitan las várices. En realidad, todos los males del hombre, siempre según Calvino, vienen del hecho de haber decidido éste ser un bípedo, cuando su naturaleza le imponía distribuir el peso del cuerpo en las cuatro extremidades. Así es como nuestros progenitores desarrollaron la habilidad de trabajar con las manos, que liberadas de la función locomotora hicieron posible la historia humana. Pero para Calvino el perfecto equilibrio fue alcanzado durante la larga era de permanencia en los árboles. Las glaciaciones nos bajaron de los árboles, condenándonos a una vida que no nos pertenece y que resultó ser un acontecimiento irresistible. No se puede volver atrás. Hemos construido un mundo para bíperos sentados, dice Calvino, que no tiene nada que ver con nuestro cuerpo, un mundo que heredarán organismos más aptos para sobrevivir. Dado que gran parte de su vida la pasó sentado delante de un escritorio, Calvino opinaba que la forma que le hubiera resultado más cómoda es la de la serpiente. Pero se daba cuenta de que disponiendo sólo de la cola para realizar todas las operaciones manuales, algunas de sus capacidades físico-mentales ligadas a la digitación habrían disminuido notablemente: la dactilografía, la consulta de enciclopedias, contar con los dedos y comerse las uñas.
La forma perfecta, concluye Calvino, sería la del pulpo. Los pulpos pueden hacer de todo, salvo manejar un auto. Está claro que serán los pulpos los que ocupen nuestro lugar. El mundo que hemos construido está hecho a su imagen y semejanza. Hemos trabajado para ellos.
Labels: Literatura
Arte y pulpos -John Bauguess-
Published Friday, September 22, 2006 by Spyder.
John Bauguess
Via Robert Canaga Gallery
For more than three decades John Bauguess has been photographing people in city and rural landscapes, mostly in Oregon.In his photographs in both color and black and white, Bauguess expresses his love of traditions he has known since his childhood in Oregon, as evidenced in images of Grange hall dances and fiddle jams.
"Maybe what I photograph will help remind us that good traditions are worth hanging onto, that these contribute to a kinder society in which simple pleasures such as homespun music and lively conversation help people survive and stay together as families and communities."
It's not always good times in the small towns in his photographs, however. Bauguess also captures the decay and pathos of communities as a result of decline of sawmills and farming that once provided livelihoods and community stability. His photographs of the grittier side of rural life also contain in their starkness and loneliness a commonality with his documentation life in cities and suburbs.
"I think of myself as a recorder of contemporary Oregon history," he says. "At times I am preserving cultural elements that have given the state its identity. In other photographs I have attempted to reveal to people what they don't know about Oregon, perhaps even try to ignore. Two of my most important bodies of work have focused on homeless and disenfranchised people. The pictures of migrant workers living in abandoned cars were made to create questions. Regardless whether these photographs contributed to social change, they may have substantiated evidence for the need of it.
"Some photographs require my getting to know the people, as in the homeless, migrant worker and fiddler series. In the urban landscape, however--where I don't care to live, but like to often visit because it's interesting--I find a theatrical backdrop for a range of moods—sometimes humorous, sometimes disturbing. In these situations I usually keep a distance from the subjects as I quickly record gestures and expressions as they move through the scene. In these pictures the camera in a fraction of a second may capture something of my state of mind about the people and the environment. In situations where I get to know the people, I attempt to become like wallpaper. When the people are comfortable with me, then I can become comfortable, too, and photograph freely. In the cities, when I blend in with the crowd, I also find freedom to photograph."
Born in Eugene, Oregon in 1943, Bauguess has concentrated his personal photographic efforts during the last year learning to convert his photographic printing from the darkroom to the computer and digital printer. A greater need to care for his mother in recent years has forced him to be more at home than photographing in the field. As a result, he is using spare moments to archive 35 years of photography, scanning negatives and slides onto disk. In this process he has started to make black and white archival inkjet prints of photographs, a large number of which he has never or seldom published or displayed. At Robert Canaga Gallery he is displaying both vintage and more recent photographs. In the near future he plans to print a number of limited edition books that contain more than 300 of his best images.
Exhibitions:
Lane Community College, Eugene, OR, 1996, 1988, 1969Grand Central Terminal, New York City, NY, 1995Maude Kerns Art Center and Photo Zone Galleries, Eugene, OR, 1991Oregon Repertory Theatre, Eugene, OR, 1981Umpqua Valley Arts Center, Roseburg, OR, 1978Visual Arts Resources, University of Oregon Museum of Art, Eugene, OR, 1977Crossroads Art Center, Baker, OR, 1976Pearl Street Photo Gallery, Eugene, OR, 1976Brass Rail Tavern, Eugene, OR, 1972Contemporary Crafts Center, Portland, OR, 1970Klamath Art Association, Klamath Falls, OR, 1969Blue Mountain Community College, Pendleton, OR, 1968
Group Exhibitions:
Corvallis Art Center, Corvallis, OR, 1994, 1989, 1988New Zone Gallery, 1989Newport Art Center, Newport, OR, 1988Oregon-Washington Biennial at Maryhill Museum, Goldendale, WA, 1987Public Image Gallery, New York City, NY, 1984Project Space, Eugene, OR, 1983Woodstock, NY Center for Photography, Woodstock, NY, 1979University of Oregon Museum of Art, Eugene, OR, 1962
Publication Credits:
London Independent Sunday Review Magazine, Harrowsmith Country Life, Los Angeles Weekly, Utne Reader, Discovery, Northwest Magazine of The Oregonian; The Oregonian, The Oregon Journal, North American Review, Nature Magazine, Sunset, Harper's, Travel and Leisure, Viking Books, Riverhead Books, LaEspresso Magazine of Italy, Northwest Review, Oregon Quarterly, Oregon Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, The Oregon Stater, North American Review, Gold's Gym Book of Weight Training and Gold's Gym Book of Strength Training by Ken Sprague.
Videos -Camuflaje- Invisible octopus-
Published Tuesday, September 19, 2006 by Spyder.
He observado minuciosamente una y otra vez el momento en que el pulpo cambia de color, y al principio el cambio me parecía tan sorprendente que me decantaba a que debía ser algún tipo de montaje. Aunque aquí se ha hablado muchas veces de la capacidad del pulpo para camuflarse la verdad es que el video no deja de sorprender.
En el propio video hay toda una polémica entre los más de 3000 mensajes que este video ha recibido discutiendo si es un fake o no.
Yo me inclino a que no, el cambio de color es debido a la cualidad de la piel de los pulpos que puede adoptar diferentes colores y texturas de acuerdo con el entorno. Varias personas dicen que han visto el video en Discovery Chanel, lo cual le da una cierta credibilidad. De todas maneras juzguen ustedes mismo.
La verdad es que por más que lo veo, me parece sorprendente.
En el propio video hay toda una polémica entre los más de 3000 mensajes que este video ha recibido discutiendo si es un fake o no.
Yo me inclino a que no, el cambio de color es debido a la cualidad de la piel de los pulpos que puede adoptar diferentes colores y texturas de acuerdo con el entorno. Varias personas dicen que han visto el video en Discovery Chanel, lo cual le da una cierta credibilidad. De todas maneras juzguen ustedes mismo.
La verdad es que por más que lo veo, me parece sorprendente.
Labels: Videos
Pulpos y música -Red Norvo- Dance of the Octopus-
Published Monday, September 18, 2006 by Spyder.
Quizás la incursión más importante respecto a los pulpos en el Jazz sea la composición que hizo xilofonista Red Norvo en 1933, y que tituló Dance of the Octopus. El disco es una oportunidad de escuchar a Benny Goodman tocando el clarinete bajo las memorables versiones de “In a Mist” y la de “Dance of the Octopus”.
Labels: Música
Roger Caillois y el acoplamiento de los pulpos
Published Saturday, September 16, 2006 by Spyder.
“Opiano, en la Antigüedad, insiste sobre la lubricidad del pulpo; Hokusai, en el Japón, lo representa actuando sobre una mujer dormida. En el siglo XVI, Aldrovandi recuerda que, según los antiguos, su carne es afrodisíaca y que el animal pasa por el más lascivo de los habitantes del mar. En el siglo XIX, Víctor Hugo no deja de señalar que "ese espanto tiene sus amores". Se vuelve, entonces, fosforescente: "Espera al himeneo. Se pone bello, se enciende, se ilumina...". Coquetería y lascivia no resultan en absoluto de observaciones: están deducidas casi exclusivamente del número de tentáculos y del teclado de ventosas que caracterizan al molusco. En realidad, los amores del pulpo son extremadamente castos. El hombre no puede más que considerarlos como lúgubres.
Aristóteles ofrece del acoplamiento de los pulpos una descripción sucinta: estarían estrechamente enlazados, boca contra boca y brazos contra brazos. Así nadarían conjuntamente, el uno adelante, el otro atrás. Esta disposición es puramente imaginaria. Por mi parte, no he encontrado una descripción objetiva de los amores de los pulpos anterior a la de Henry Lee. El término de descripción, además, conviene mal a las circunlocuciones oscuras y trabadas que el autor, frenado por el pudor Victoriano, utiliza para dar la idea de relaciones sexuales sin embargo excepcionalmente ascéticas. Según él, parece que en el momento de celo se infla el tercer brazo derecho del pulpo macho, de donde sale una especie de gusano alargado terminado por un filamento: es el hectocotilo. El macho lo ofrece a la hembra, quen lo acepta y se lo lleva consigo”
Roger Caillois –Mitología del pulpo-
Aristóteles ofrece del acoplamiento de los pulpos una descripción sucinta: estarían estrechamente enlazados, boca contra boca y brazos contra brazos. Así nadarían conjuntamente, el uno adelante, el otro atrás. Esta disposición es puramente imaginaria. Por mi parte, no he encontrado una descripción objetiva de los amores de los pulpos anterior a la de Henry Lee. El término de descripción, además, conviene mal a las circunlocuciones oscuras y trabadas que el autor, frenado por el pudor Victoriano, utiliza para dar la idea de relaciones sexuales sin embargo excepcionalmente ascéticas. Según él, parece que en el momento de celo se infla el tercer brazo derecho del pulpo macho, de donde sale una especie de gusano alargado terminado por un filamento: es el hectocotilo. El macho lo ofrece a la hembra, quen lo acepta y se lo lleva consigo”
Roger Caillois –Mitología del pulpo-
Labels: Literatura
Pulpos y montajes
Published Friday, September 15, 2006 by Spyder.
De la web de Worth1000
Si saben dar buen uso al programa Photoshop, y tienen además imaginación, tiempo y sentido del humor, esta web debería formar parte de sus referencias de la red. La única pega es que todo está allí un poco desordenado y navegar por ahí, es casi peor que hacerlo por Internet (uno más que encontrar lo que busca, se tropieza con lo que encuentra). Pero por suerte todas las galerías son muy divertidas.
Miren por ejemplo la secuencia del barco de la que he extraído el segundo montaje.
Si saben dar buen uso al programa Photoshop, y tienen además imaginación, tiempo y sentido del humor, esta web debería formar parte de sus referencias de la red. La única pega es que todo está allí un poco desordenado y navegar por ahí, es casi peor que hacerlo por Internet (uno más que encontrar lo que busca, se tropieza con lo que encuentra). Pero por suerte todas las galerías son muy divertidas.
Miren por ejemplo la secuencia del barco de la que he extraído el segundo montaje.
Labels: Montajes
Cocina -Pulpo en su tinta-
Published Thursday, September 14, 2006 by Spyder.
(6 porciones)
Ingredientes:
2 kg de pulpos
1 pizca de orégano
1 taza de aceite
1/2 lt. de vino tinto o tres tazas de jugo de naranja
2 kg de jitomate
Sal y chiles en vinagre al gusto
2 cebollas grandes Limones
3 dientes de ajo Aceitunas al gusto
1 manojo de perejil
2 hojas de laurel
Preparación:
Limpie los pulpos (guarde la bolsita de la tinta) y lávelos con jugo de limón. En un recipiente ponga a calentar el aceite y fría el pulpo picado; agregue el jitomate picado, la cebolla, ajo y perejil, también picados. Fría todo y deje hervir a fuego bajo, cuando haya soltado el primer hervor agregue las aceitunas picadas, laurel orégano, jugo de naranja o vino tinto, la tinta de las bolsitas y sal. Deje cocer a fuego bajo hasta que los pulpos estén blanditos; antes de retirarlos del fuego agregue los chiles en vinagre. Sirva acompañado con arroz blanco o hervido.
Ingredientes:
2 kg de pulpos
1 pizca de orégano
1 taza de aceite
1/2 lt. de vino tinto o tres tazas de jugo de naranja
2 kg de jitomate
Sal y chiles en vinagre al gusto
2 cebollas grandes Limones
3 dientes de ajo Aceitunas al gusto
1 manojo de perejil
2 hojas de laurel
Preparación:
Limpie los pulpos (guarde la bolsita de la tinta) y lávelos con jugo de limón. En un recipiente ponga a calentar el aceite y fría el pulpo picado; agregue el jitomate picado, la cebolla, ajo y perejil, también picados. Fría todo y deje hervir a fuego bajo, cuando haya soltado el primer hervor agregue las aceitunas picadas, laurel orégano, jugo de naranja o vino tinto, la tinta de las bolsitas y sal. Deje cocer a fuego bajo hasta que los pulpos estén blanditos; antes de retirarlos del fuego agregue los chiles en vinagre. Sirva acompañado con arroz blanco o hervido.
Vía Conapesca
Labels: Gastronomía, Recetas
El brazo del argonauta
Published Wednesday, September 13, 2006 by Spyder.
El argonauta es una especie de pulpo cuya hembra segrega una elegante concha delgada como el papel. Habitan las zonas de la superficie pelágica de los mares cálidos, donde se desplazan propulsando agua por su sifón.
El macho, que carece de concha, es además unas veinte veces menor que le hembra.
El tamaño no importa
El macho, que carece de concha, es además unas veinte veces menor que le hembra.
El tamaño no importa
Los machos de Argonauta, que no construyen conchas, tienen un tamaño 20 veces inferior al de la hembra. Son tan diminutos que durante mucho tiempo se ignoró su existencia. La historia de cómo fueron descubiertos constituye uno de los capítulos más famosos y divertidos de la historia natural.
En 1827, el zoólogo italiano Stefano delle Chiaje descubrió un pequeño cuerpo pegado a una hembra de argonauta. Después de estudiarlo detenidamente, concluyó que se trataba de un parásito. Dos años más tarde, el barón Georges Cuvier recibió otros cinco ejemplares de este extraño cuerpo y también dedujo que se trataba de parásitos, llegando incluso a establecer un nuevo género para la ciencia. Dado que se parecía mucho al brazo de un pulpo y de que incluso tenía varias filas de ventosas, bautizó al nuevo género como Hectocotylus, que viene a significar algo así como “brazo con cien ventosas”. El prestigio científico y la influencia de Cuvier eran tan grandes, que durante mucho tiempo su diagnóstico se dio por bueno sin apenas discusión.
Pero conforme aumentaba la información acerca de la biología de los argonautas, algunos científicos comenzaron a sospechar que algo no encajaba bien. Entre estos científicos escépticos se encontraba el suizo Albert Kölliker, que entre 1845 y 1846 publicó varios artículos en los que describía como había descubierto que la piel del supuesto parásito contenía cromatóforos, las células pigmentadas tan características de los cefalópodos. También descubrió que tenía decenas de pequeñas cavidades llenas de espermatozoides. Kölliker estuvo a punto de desentrañar el doble misterio de la reproducción de los argonautas y la existencia del diminuto macho, pero entonces cometió un error fatal. Quizá demasiado ansioso por conseguir la gloria que suponía el descubrimiento, se precipitó al concluir que el parásito de Cuvier era en realidad el macho del Argonauta.
Finalmente se descubrió que tanto Cuvier como Kölliker estaban equivocados. El extraño cuerpo que ambos describieron erróneamente como un organismo autónomo era en realidad el brazo que el macho de Argonauta utiliza para introducir el esperma en el cuerpo de la hembra. Lo que sucede es que, después de la cópula, el brazo se desprende y permanece fijo a ella. En 1853 el zoólogo alemán Heinrich Müller encontró en el estrecho de Messina varios argonautas diminutos carentes de concha que tenían entre los brazos sacos llenos de esperma. Müller había descubierto por fin al macho de los argonautas y así resolvió la segunda parte del apasionante misterio.
Via Casa de Ciencias
Labels: Características
Pulpos y joyas -De oro y brillantes...-
Published Monday, September 11, 2006 by Spyder.
Sobre la conducta sexual del pulpo -Mark Norman- Bizarre Octopus Sex-
Published Sunday, September 10, 2006 by Spyder.
Es la transcripción de una entrevista que mantienen Mark Norman y el presentador Robyn Williams en el el programa The Science Show en la cadena ABC, respecto a ese pequeño gran pulpo.
Bizarre Octopus Sex
This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.
Mark Norman: These are the very brittle shells that wash up on southern Australian shores mainly and it's produced by a fairly normal looking octopus that lives in this funny looking shell. The female gets to about the size of a football and she swims around in open ocean grabbing small shrimps and fish. The male is about the size of a jelly bean, has no shell, mainly travels by hollowing out tubular jelly fish and driving this little jelly fish like a jet scooter out of The Jetsons, using jet propulsion to drive this little tube along, and he seems to spend his life hunting around hoping to bump into a female. And these animals very rarely come near shore; sometimes they strand and die and people find hundreds and hundreds of shells washed up but we managed to get in the water with some live ones in Port Phillip Bay late last year and they are the fastest, most spectacular animals. It's like driving around with little alien robots on jet propulsion, they can swim faster than we can so we were sort of swimming like crazy to keep up with them. They have a row of sharp spines on the edge of the shells and when you get close they turn around and ram you full speed with the spines on the front of shell, which scratched hell out of all our video camera lenses.
Robyn Williams: I can imagine yes.
Mark Norman: But this is sort of, rare footage; nobody's really filmed these things live before so it was a fantastic opportunity. We also found that they're using the shell as buoyancy control: they're bobbing to the surface, taking a gulp of air in the shell and then moderating the amount of air in it to control their level in the water and then jetting away, so it was just a very rare opportunity for us to come across such a strange animal.
Robyn Williams: Isn't that interesting, Mark because I always thought the Nautilus lived very, very deep down?
Mark Norman: Well, there's the true Nautilus, the chambered Nautilus, it's the really primitive one, and those animals used to dominate our oceans. They got to three and a half metres in diameter, these monsters sort of mini vans with squid heads stuck in the front; they're the really primitive ones, and then at the opposite stream of, or radiation of these animals you come across a fairly normal looking octopus swimming around in a convergent -shaped shell, as these pelagic ocean travellers, and these are sort of blue water drifters, they hang out in the middle of the blue water oceans, in surface waters, feeding on shrimp and fish.
Robyn Williams: And what you're saying before is that the male is so very much smaller than the female.
Mark Norman: He's tiny: so she's the size of a football, he's the size of a jellybean. When he finally bumps into a female he has this sort of, kamikaze sex system where he breaks off a special arm full of sperm, he dies and the arm independently crawls into the female's gill cavity where it hangs and is probably stored alive for anything up to months.
Robyn Williams: Do you mean she's swimming around with this arm.?
Mark Norman: With live arms, like things from the crypt, in her gill cavities and they've found females in trawl nets with six male arms wrapped around their gills, and she must wait until her eggs are mature and then feel round in her pockets for these sort of, live tetra packs of sperm, tear the caps off them and sort of sprinkle them on her eggs as she's doing her egg laying into the inside of the shell; so they hang the eggs from the inside of a shell.
Robyn Williams: Clearly she knows the arms are there?
Mark Norman: Well, who knows? I don't know actually what's going on but they'd actually be like little tiny tickling devices in the background, so - very, very strange animals. Some friends had one animal in an aquarium for three weeks, a female; she finally died. The male arm crawled out of the female - there's no male in sight - this live arm is crawling around the aquarium three weeks at least since it was separated from the male. So how the hell does this arm stay alive, how's it fed oxygen, fed nutrition? It's a real puzzle and we're trying to get a handle on that.
Robyn Williams: I can imagine. But I would have thought a rather neater way of doing it is for the male to give up its 'arm', if you like, and the sexual content thereof and then grow another one.
Mark Norman: I know, but there's been males caught quite frequently in trawl nets, there's never been a male found with a regenerating arm. The arm is half the male's body weight and their reproductive system only produces one sperm package and that sperm package gets inserted into the arm and then it's all over. So it's a sort of different form of that massive size dimorphism you get in things like deep sea angler fish, where they get six little parasitic males all sucking off blood vessels and just producing sperm. This is sort of a short-lived kamikaze version instead.
Robyn Williams: How amazing. Yes, well that discrepancy - the football to the jellybean - how extreme does that size difference get?
Mark Norman: Well, we were pretty blown away by that and then also recently we had a very rare encounter. We came across the first live male blanket octopus, which is a related family to the the paper nautiluses, and again we found a little jelly bean shaped guy swimming around and we took some photographs of him. We weighed him and he was .23 of a gram.
Robyn Williams: That's tiny. The one I'm looking at now is just gorgeous.
Mark Norman: He's a beautiful little orange guy with these deep webs on the arms with iridescent little orange spots all over the webbing and this pouch that has the modified arm developing in it ready to break off and give to the female. He was fully mature at .23 of a gram. We have measurements on females that they get up to 2 metres long and 10 kilograms, so she's 40,000 times heavier than the male is. So you're dealing with this sort of jumbo jet with this annoying sparrow kind of pecking at its tail and just after we'd found this male we got an email from the Azores in the Atlantic Ocean, where they'd come across several live females for the first time and photographed them underwater and that's one of the photographs we've got there as well. They found one of them had a live male arm crawling his way up the length of the arms towards the female's gill cavities. So it had been a very recent mating. The arm was trying to get somewhere safe where it doesn't get blown off in the current.
Robyn Williams: How does she notice she's been mated then?
Mark Norman: Well, maybe she doesn't, who knows? I mean, she may just come to the stage of laying eggs again and go, Do I have any of those sperms packets on me. And again, the multiple arms full of sperm in females that have been caught in trawls as well, so very, very strange life cycles. But it wasn't till we actually got the photographs back and started developing that we realised that one of the photographs is the first live photograph anywhere in the world of the really weird defence behaviour of these little jelly bean males. These animals must be so vulnerable out in open ocean where they could be eaten by any passing tuna or fish or trevally, or barracuda or anything.
Robyn Williams: Yes, he looks most apprehensive: that great big eye. Describe what we're looking at here.
Mark Norman: Well, we've got a little round bulbous body which is probably close to a jelly bean, a pair of large eyes staring out from that and then arms about the same length as the jelly bean, which in this photograph he's pulled back over his head - and this was as we approached the animal, it kept pulling his arms over his head. When we got the closeup photographs back and developed them we thought that we'd actually got some muck tangled on the suckers and when we looked up close they're actually little short segments of jelly fish tentacles. And it turns out that this little guy is carrying around live tentacles from jelly fish that he's removed from jelly fish and is holding like little clear pieces of rice vermicelli in his suckers as a defence. And so an animal the size of a jelly bean is packing a jelly fish punch which is probably enough to knock out a 30cm tuna that comes along and bites it, because the stinging power of some of some of these jelly fish is incredibly strong, as we've seen by recent stings and deaths associated with the Irukandji jellyfish.
Robyn Williams: Well this is quite interesting, because I've heard of that kind of use of other creatures' weaponry before, and the trick is to absorb them into your own body without setting off the mechanism.
Mark Norman: Yes, there's some little open ocean sea slugs that do it and some of the sea slugs that eat poisonous sponges and things like that, but this goes a step further. Animals like boxer crabs put live anemones on their claws and then, kind of aim the claws at whoever is having a go at them. This doesn't take the whole jelly fish; he's regularly farming fresh clean pieces of armoury from passing jelly fish and it's quite possible that these guys hitchhike on the back of jelly fish like their paper nautilus relatives do. We've got this photo from the Andeman Sea, of one of the small paper nautiluses hitchhiking on the back of a jelly fish. Like the photographer who took the photos said it took him an hour to get the photo because every time he tried to take a snap the little paper nautilus squirted jets of water to turn the jellyfish's tentacles towards the diver, and in the end he had to use two divers to even get the photograph. So it looks like this group of animals, the paper nautiluses and the blanket octopuses, have probably long associations with jelly fish and have developed immunity to their stinging cells much like the anemone fish, the clown fish, that live in the big anemones.
Robyn Williams: Well back to this little fellow's sex life. I've heard about intimidation when you've got a big beautiful woman who is just completely outclassing the little boy, but how did this come to be? Could you imagine that?
Mark Norman: Well it's something that we've been speculating on and we're writing this work up at the moment. One possibility is that both of the sexes found refuge by being small enough to use these jellyfish defences, and the females have been found from trawl captured animals to have jelly fish tentacles up to the size of 7 cms. When the females are bigger than 7 cms they never find jellyfish tentacles. So it's possible that that small size works for using jelly fishes defence; anything bigger you start to lose it. Now a male can produce tones of sperm and be that size but the female, to produce hundreds of thousands of eggs to pour out into the water to give their young a chance of survival, they need to be big body size. So we have no idea what defences the females take over once they stop doing the jellyfish things but there may have been a refuge for the male to stay hiding in that jellyfish defence world while the female got bigger and bigger and found other means of defence or other decoys.
Robyn Williams: Well obviously they can still reproduce, however tiny he is compared to her.
Mark Norman: Yes and there's a lot of parallels to things like barnacles, where the parasitic male of the female barnacle can be absolutely microscopic just living on the lip of the barnacle and all he has to do is produce sperm and that takes a fairly low energy input compared with females producing hundreds of thousands of eggs.
Robyn Williams: I suppose if it was in human society it would have a tiny testicle on tiny legs.
Mark Norman: Chasing you around a crowd or along the freeways or something and hoping to stick something on your boot that will eventually crawl to the necessary route.
Robyn Williams: Or maybe just kept in the cupboard until it's needed.
Mark Norman: A handy little purse of them on a hook, or something like that.
Robyn Williams: It would have some advantages.
Mark Norman: Yes, but I'm not advocating that for us.
Robyn Williams: Thank you.
Mark Norman: No worries.
Guests Mark Norman
Research Fellow Department of Zoology Melbourne
Universitymailto:mnorman@unimelb.edu.au
Labels: Comportamiento
Sobre la conducta sexual del pulpo -Love that costs a leg or two-
Published by Spyder.
Tener sexo con tu pareja que pesa entre 10.000 y 40.000 veces más que tú, puede considerarse más que una machada, como un auténtico milagro de la naturaleza. Eso es lo que ha descubierto el equipo que de dirige el biólogo marino Mark Norman desde Melbourne.
Love that costs a leg or two
January 23 2003
January 23 2003
By Stephen Cauchi
Picture: David Paul
A male member of the world's most sexually unequal animal species has finally been found alive.
A senior curator at the Melbourne Museum, Mark Norman, has captured and photographed a male blanket octopus.
A senior curator at the Melbourne Museum, Mark Norman, has captured and photographed a male blanket octopus.
Not only is the hapless male about 100 times smaller than the female of the species, but it dies after having sex with her.
Dr Norman, who found a living one on the Great Barrier Reef, said that until now the two-centimetre male had only been discovered dead in trawls and plankton nets.
His achievement in capturing and photographing a live one has been documented in a recent paper for the New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research.
According to the article, the male blanket octopus is, technically speaking, "the most extreme example of sexual size-dimorphism in a non-microscopic animal . . . such dimorphism is not seen in any other animal remotely as large".
In other words, as Dr Norman told The Age: "There's no other critters on that scale that have such a significant difference between the male and the female."
The two-metre female weighs at least 10,000 times as much as the male, sometimes up to 40,000 times as much.
This could make the question of position rather delicate, but as it turns out it doesn't matter.
The male, it seems, relies on its arm as much as its penis to have sex.
This reproductive arm, known as a hectocotylus, is tucked away in a white spherical pouch between its other arms. When males mate, the pouch ruptures, the penis injects sperm into the tip of the arm, the arm is severed, and passed to the female.
It stays there until used to fertilise the female's eggs, which can be weeks later.
And while the human post-orgasm is sometimes referred to as "the little death", for the male blanket octopus the term takes on literal meaning. The male dies, but the female carries on, free to have sex with more males. In lieu of notches on the bed-post, she carries a collection of male arms carrying sperm.
"It's kamikaze sex, effectively," said Dr Norman. "They've found females with up to six male arms in the gill cavity."
But how did it get that way? Males compete with each other to fertilise the female, said Dr Norman.
Being small allows the male to mature earlier, and allows for better self-protection using its tentacle segments.
Both the male and female species are lodged with the collections at Museum Victoria.
Labels: Comportamiento
Pulpos y el hockey
Published Saturday, September 09, 2006 by Spyder.
Existe una tradición muy curiosa entre los fans del equipo de hockey americano de los Detroit Red Wings, los cuales en la temporada de playoffs lanzan siempre algún pulpo a la pista de hielo; el pulpo ya está muerto, por si algunos dudaban...Octopus On Ice
For nearly 50 years, hockey fans in Detroit have been throwing octopi on to the ice after a big win by the Red Wings. This started on April 15, 1952 during the Red Wings' Stanley Cup run. Two brothers, Pete and Jerry Cusimano, who owned a fish shop in Detroit threw an octopus on the ice during a game in Detroit. Each tentacle of the octopus was symbolic of a win in the playoffs. Back then, the NHL had just six teams and eight wins (two best-of-seven series) were needed to win the Stanley Cup. The largest octopus to be thrown on the ice was a 50 pounder in 1996. The creature was proundly displayed on the hood of the Zamboni while the ice at the Joe Louis Arena was being cleaned between periods.
Labels: Curiosidades
Pupos y el hockey -Legend of the octopus-
Published by Spyder.
Más información de lo anterior desde la página de los Detroit Red Wings
There are few traditions in sports that compare to those in the game of hockey. One such tradition is the throwing of octopi onto the ice at Red Wings games. Ever wonder how it started?
The octopus first made its appearance on April 15, 1952, during the Red Wings' Stanley Cup playoff run.
Two Detroit brothers, Pete and Jerry Cusimano - storeowner's in Detroit's Eastern Market - threw the eight-legged cephalopod on the ice at Olympia Stadium. Each tentacle of the octopus was symbolic of a win in the playoffs. Back then, the NHL boasted only six teams, and eight wins (two best-of-seven series) were needed to win the Stanley Cup. The Red Wings swept the series that year, and the Octopus has come to be the good luck charm ever since.
The tradition carried over to Joe Louis Arena on opening night in 1979 when several found their way onto the ice. During the 1995 playoffs, Bob Dubisky and Larry Shotwell, co-workers at a meat and seafood retail company near Detroit, tossed a 38-pound octopus onto the ice during the National Anthem prior to Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals. The year after, the duo struck again with a 50-pounder in the Conference Finals. Although the feat received no airtime on the nationally broadcast game, the octopus was proudly displayed on the hood of the Zamboni between periods.
Labels: Curiosidades
Ignacio Aldecoa -Entre el cielo y el mar-
Published Friday, September 08, 2006 by Spyder.
"La red iba saliendo lentamente a la áspera playa. Su dulce color de otoño, roto por la lucecilla plateada de un pescado muy chico o por el verde triste un alga prendida en sus mallas, dividía la oscura desolación de grava menuda; cerca cabeceaba la barca vacía. Los niños pisaban la red. Pedro había asumido la labor de espantarlos. Decía una palabrota y hacía que corrieran apenas unos metros para pararse en seguida y volver confianzudamente a poco. Pedro tenía entre los labios el chicote de un cigarrillo y les miraba superior y hostil, porque era casi un hombre y trabajaba. En el copo había un parpadeo agónico y blanco de pascado y se movía la parda masa de un pulpo con algo indefinible de víscera o de sexo. Un último esfuerzo. Los pescadores se inclinaron más; luego se irguieron en silencio y contemplaron el mar. La tercera vez en la mañana. El señor Venancio, el de la nostalgia de los tiempos buenos de la costera, dio una patada al pulpo, que retorció los tentáculos, y, al fin, medio dado la vuelta, los extendió tensamente, abriéndose como una rara flor"
Ignacio Aldecoa -Entre el cielo y el mar-
Ignacio Aldecoa (Vitoria 1925-Madrid 1969) fue un narrador excepcional y uno de los escritores más importantes de la narrativa española de la segunda mitad del siglo XX y con el paso del tiempo no ha dejado de obtener un refrendo cada vez más amplio de la crítica y el público. Aldecoa, pese a su breve vida, fue uno de los mejores autores de cuentos de la literatura española contemporánea, recuperado por la crítica y el público treinta años después de su prematuro fallecimiento, como demuestran títulos como Vísperas del silencio (1955), El corazón y otros frutos amargos (1959) y Caballo de pica (1961). También nos dejó magníficas novelas, como El fulgor y la sangre (1954), Con el viento solano (1956) y las inolvidables: Gran Sol y Parte de una historia (1967)
Labels: Literatura
Sobre la conducta sexual del pulpo -Reproductive behaviour of the blue-ringed octopus-
Published Thursday, September 07, 2006 by Spyder.
Sex identification and mating in the blue-ringed octopus, Hapalochlaena lunulata
CHENG M. W. ; CALDWELL R.
CHENG M. W. ; CALDWELL R.
"We studied the reproductive behaviour of the blue-ringed octopus, Hapalochlaena lunulata, in the laboratory by examining 15 male-male and nine male-female interactions. The initiation of physical contact was independent of sex, size or residency status, and there were no noticeable changes in behaviour such as sexual displays associated with courtship or aggression prior to contact. Males did not distinguish between females or other males and copulated (defined as the insertion of the hectocotylus into the mantle cavity of another octopus) readily with both. Spermatophores were released in all copulations with females but not with males. The duration of copulation was significantly longer in male-female interactions (median 160.5 min) than in male-male interactions (median 30 s). Although male-male copulations ended passively with the withdrawal of the hectocotylus by the initiating animal, male-female copulations were always terminated by the females following an intense struggle. These studies suggest the inability of male H. lunulata to determine the sexual identity of potential mates prior to the insertion of the hectocotylus and demonstrate the active role of the female during copulation".
Labels: Comportamiento
Pulpos -Dibujos- El pulpo Manotas es gay-
Published Wednesday, September 06, 2006 by Spyder.
Si hablamos de Squiddly Diddly seguramente no sabrán de que les hablo. Pero tal vez sí -al menos los que pasan la treintena- si que recordarán al Pulpo Manotas. Un pulpo que hacía vivía en un parque acuático y continuamente se intentaba escapar de allí, burlando la vigilancia del dueño, el Sr. Alférez Pérez (en la versión inglesa Chief Winchley).¿Recuerdan al Pulpo Manotas gritando aquello de “ay Mamá Pulpa”?
Lo curioso es que la versión original inglesa el pulpo es en realidad un calamar (squiddly) aunque realmente tiene aparencia de pulpo, por lo que no se descarta que sus creadores de la Hanna-Barbera quisieran dotarle de una mentalidad trastornada desde su más tierna infancia: un profundo problema de identidad, sumado a un exceso de influencia materna, un cierto amaneramiento en sus gestos, su color rosado y su voz aflautada... (lo vimos en algún capítulo vestido de marinerito dispuesto para arrancarse con el In the Navy, y si no atiendan a la imagen). Todo ello, me hace preguantarme. ¿cuales pudieron ser los motivos de los dibujantes de Hanna-Barbera para ser tan crueles con su propia creación?
Y en un paralelismo de ideas, me viene a la cabeza el divertido blog de Laura Bravo Astroboy es gay
Labels: Dibujos
Juegos de Pulpos -Nintendo Octopus-
Published Tuesday, September 05, 2006 by Spyder.
Desde luego quedan lejos estas maquinitas, pero todos los treintañeros tuvimos alguna. En esta se trataba de bajar desde una barca hasta llegar al cofre del tesoro que estaba bajo el mar, pero con la dificultad de que había que esquivar a un pulpo que custodiaba el tesoro. Una vez llegabas al tesoro le dabas rápidamente al botón derecho para aumentar el número de puntos.
Todo un juego de pulgares, uno para dirigir al buzo hacia la izquierda y el otro para que fuera hacia la derecha, todo un ejemplo de sencillez opuesto a los juego actuales donde existen quince botones que realizan acciones distintas.
Y por si hay incrédulos, el juego enganchaba, porque hay una cosas que siempre es adictiva, y es el superar el record que ha puesto otra persona.
Todo un juego de pulgares, uno para dirigir al buzo hacia la izquierda y el otro para que fuera hacia la derecha, todo un ejemplo de sencillez opuesto a los juego actuales donde existen quince botones que realizan acciones distintas.
Y por si hay incrédulos, el juego enganchaba, porque hay una cosas que siempre es adictiva, y es el superar el record que ha puesto otra persona.
En Handled Games Museum se pueden encontrar la mayoría de estas maquinitas prehistóricas que tanta compañía nos hicieron. Otro dia hablo de mi Spectrum 48 K.
This is a review of a hand-held game "Game & Watch" made by Nintendo (makers of the Donkey Kong video arcade game). The model I have is called "Octopus". The store where I bought mine had five different models, each costs $35.
First a general description of the physical configuration. The case is quite thin; about 3/8 inch thick, 4 1/2 inches long, and 2 2/1 inches tall. About the size of a wallet calculator. It has a large LCD screen in the middle. The dimensions of the screen are 2 1/8 inches by 1 3/8 inches. The game is held with the long dimension horizontal. To control the action there are two large red buttons, one on each side of the screen, each conveniently near the lower left/right corner where your thumbs would naturally rest. The left red button causes movement to the left and the right red button causes movement to the right. In the upper right hand corner are three buttons; two select the level of difficulty, game A and game B, the third button turns on the clock display as the game can be a clock while it isn't being used. It has a little swing out stand in the back so that it can be stood up on your desk.
The game: to get as much of the treasure out of the sunken ship as possible. The scenario: in the upper left corner is your boat floating on the surface of the sea with a rope dangling to the ocean floor, in the lower right corner is the sunken ship with the treasure chest. Filling up most of the area in the water is a large octopus with four tentacles that grow and shrink at random rates and intervals. The rightmost three tentacles don't move around, they just grow and shrink. The leftmost tentacle can grow either in a downward direction or in an upward direction. In the upward direction it can snag you while you're climbing down the rope. If one of the tentacles touch you you're dead. As the game starts you have three divers in the boat and you use the right button to move the first one down the rope and over to the treasure then you use both buttons to make it dance back and forth to avoid the tentacles or when you're all the way over to the treasure you press the right button to make it grab some of the treasure. For each piece of treasure you snatch you get one point. After you've picked up any amount of treasure you can climb back into the boat and get a three point bonus. While the game is being played it makes a ticking sound; reminds one of a time bomb and adds to the sense of tension and panic. When the octopus gets you the game makes a buzzing rasberry sound and the remaining diver(s) do a left shift in the boat in preparation for the leftmost one going down next. Game A and B are the same except the tentacles move faster in game B.
It's quite fun. It's difficult enough to keep you coming back but not to difficult to frustrate you. The design of the characters is very humurous. The octopus has a sappy, lugubrious expression. When the diver is grabbing some of the treasure it's arm moves back and forth from the treasure chest to the bag it's stuffing it into. When it gets back into the boat it's arm swings up and down with the bag to show it unloading the treasure. They have comical positions when walking over to the treasure. When the octopus gets one of the divers he pulls it up towards him and the diver flails its arms and legs frantically.
Features: As mentioned before it has a clock. When the game isn't being played it can stand up on your desk as a clock with the time displayed in the upper right hand corner of the screen. While in clock mode the display is active with the divers marched down to the treasure and pranced around until the octopus gets them but it is all done silently with no ticking or beeping. It also has an alarm. The clock and alarm are 24 hour.
Misfeatures: to set the clock or alarm requires a thin object to poke the recessed buttons. A paper clip straightened out will do. It remembers the highest score but setting the clock causes it forget it. There is no on/off switch (being LCD I suppose that's not a misfeature).
Labels: Juegos
Un pulpo macho a la hembra...
Published Monday, September 04, 2006 by Spyder.
¿Qué le dice un pulpo macho a un pulpo hembra?
Te doy:
Mi mano
Mi mano
Mi mano
Mi mano
Mi mano
Mi mano
Mi mano
Mi mano
Te doy:
Mi mano
Mi mano
Mi mano
Mi mano
Mi mano
Mi mano
Mi mano
Mi mano
Labels: Humor
Literatura y pulpos -Sakutaro Jaguiwara-
Published Sunday, September 03, 2006 by Spyder.
El pulpo que no murió
Sakutaro Jaguiwara
Todo el mundo se olvidó de este lóbrego acuario. Era de suponerse que el pulpo debía estar muerto y sólo podía verse el agua podrida iluminada apenas por la luz del crepúsculo.
Pero el pulpo no había muerto. Permanecía escondido detrás de la roca. Y cuando despertó de su sueño tuvo que sufrir hambre terrible, día tras día en esa prisión solitaria, pues no había carnada alguna ni comida para él.
Empezó a comerse entonces sus propios tentáculos. Primero uno, después otro.
Cuando ya no tenía tentáculos empezó a devorar poco a poco sus entrañas, una parte tras otra.
En esta forma el pulpo terminó comiéndose todo su cuerpo, su piel, su cerebro, su estómago, absolutamente todo.
Una mañana llegó el celador, miró dentro del acuario y sólo vio el agua sombría y las algas ondulantes. El pulpo había virtualmente desaparecido.
Pero el pulpo no había muerto. Aún estaba vivo en ese acuario mustio y abandonado.
Por espacio de siglos, tal vez eternamente, continuaba viva allí una criatura invisible, presa de horrenda escasez e insatisfacción.
Vía Texto Sentido
Sakutaro Jaguiwara
Un pulpo que agonizaba de hambre fue encerado en un acuario por muchísimo tiempo. Una pálida luz se filtraba a través del vidrio y se difundía tristemente en la densa sombra de una roca.
Todo el mundo se olvidó de este lóbrego acuario. Era de suponerse que el pulpo debía estar muerto y sólo podía verse el agua podrida iluminada apenas por la luz del crepúsculo.
Pero el pulpo no había muerto. Permanecía escondido detrás de la roca. Y cuando despertó de su sueño tuvo que sufrir hambre terrible, día tras día en esa prisión solitaria, pues no había carnada alguna ni comida para él.
Empezó a comerse entonces sus propios tentáculos. Primero uno, después otro.
Cuando ya no tenía tentáculos empezó a devorar poco a poco sus entrañas, una parte tras otra.
En esta forma el pulpo terminó comiéndose todo su cuerpo, su piel, su cerebro, su estómago, absolutamente todo.
Una mañana llegó el celador, miró dentro del acuario y sólo vio el agua sombría y las algas ondulantes. El pulpo había virtualmente desaparecido.
Pero el pulpo no había muerto. Aún estaba vivo en ese acuario mustio y abandonado.
Por espacio de siglos, tal vez eternamente, continuaba viva allí una criatura invisible, presa de horrenda escasez e insatisfacción.
Sakutaro Jaguiwara(1886-1942)
Poeta japonés. Sus poemas originales poseen una extraordinaria calidad musical. Su obra más importante fue editada en 1917 bajo el título de Ladrando a la Luna.
Vía Texto Sentido
Labels: Literatura
Chiste -El pescador y el pulpo-
Published by Spyder.
Un pescador en plena veda de pulpos, pesca uno de un tamaño inmenso.
En ese momento ve venir a la guardia costera y nervioso coge al pulpo y se lo echa por el hombro.
- ¿No sabe usted que está prohibido pescar pulpos?
El pescador mira al pulpo incrédulo y responde al policia:
-Ya le decía yo a este puñetero bicho que nadie se iba a creer el cariño que me ha tomado.
En ese momento ve venir a la guardia costera y nervioso coge al pulpo y se lo echa por el hombro.
- ¿No sabe usted que está prohibido pescar pulpos?
El pescador mira al pulpo incrédulo y responde al policia:
-Ya le decía yo a este puñetero bicho que nadie se iba a creer el cariño que me ha tomado.
Labels: Humor
Mitología del pulpo -Charles Montgomery-
Published Saturday, September 02, 2006 by Spyder.
El periodista Charles Montomery escribe sobre los hechos que le sucedieron al antropólogo Pierre Malanda en las islas Solomon, reflexiones encuadradas en la mitología del pulpo.
The Octopus
Can the myths of the Lau Lagoon clan survive their preservation?
by Charles Montgomery
Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic.
Can the myths of the Lau Lagoon clan survive their preservation?
by Charles Montgomery
Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic.
—Edward Said
Culture and Imperialism (1993)
They are saying terrible things about the anthropologist Pierre Maranda in the Solomon Islands.
They are saying terrible things about the anthropologist Pierre Maranda in the Solomon Islands.
The accusations began in the heart of the South Pacific archipelago of Melanesia, just off the coast of Malaita, on an artificial island in the middle of the vast Lau Lagoon. They were passed from shore to shore by canoe, skiff, and freight barge, and by 2002 they had made it across the water to Guadalcanal and Honiara, capital of the Solomon Islands.
I first heard them from a man with images of the sun—marks of the Lau Lagoon clans—carved into the soft flesh of his cheeks. The man was drunk and possessed by a desperate anger. He insisted that the foreigner had stolen his clan’s octopus and was holding it captive in a swimming pool on his own faraway island, which was called Canada. “And now,” he said, “this Maranda is using the magic power of our octopus to make himself rich and famous.”
To understand this accusation it is helpful to look back to a point near the beginning of time. Some Lau historians remember the beginning this way:
The ancestors, who were descended from worms, lived on a mountain above the jungled folds of Malaita. One day, a hero named Golo’au ventured forth from the mountain to discover the promised land, which was not land at all but a vast, reef-protected lagoon fringing the island’s northwest coast. Golo’au and his kin built rafts from bamboo and they paddled out onto that calm water. They pulled hunks of coral rock from the shallow bottom and piled them upon each other until they had created islands on which they could build thatch houses. The Lau raised their children on the water, safe from the headhunters and mosquitoes that populated the bush. Fish filled their nets. Life was good. When the ancestors died, their spirits did not leave the lagoon. Instead, they inhabited the bodies of sharks and birds and, together with other spirit creatures, they were able to protect their descendants with their magic.
For centuries the Lau people honoured the spirits by following their edicts and killing pigs for them. The priests of the Rere clan offered regular blood sacrifices to the speckled octopus that inhabited the reef near the island of Foueda, ensuring the octopus would protect them from the dangers of the sea. “The octopus took care of people,” the man with the scarified cheeks told me. “If they were lost at sea, he would bring them home. If they were drowning, he would save them.” Sometimes the octopus would crawl right up out of the sea into a priest’s canoe to let him know it was time for a sacrifice. It would crawl onto land, too. If you left a basket of food outside your door, the octopus would plunk himself down on top of it and engulf it. He preferred pork to fruit.
The Rere priests had kept the octopus’s name a secret so that lay people, fools, and enemies could not abuse its power. But, said my friend, all that changed half a lifetime ago. That’s when Maranda tricked the priests into giving him the secret names of their ancestors. He used those words to beguile the octopus, lure it through the reefs and away across the Pacific. The creature did not go willingly. It used its power to strike Maranda with a terrible illness and it killed his wife. But still it did not return. The octopus had not been seen near its coral sanctuary in years. Now, with no spirit to protect them, the people of Foueda have become vulnerable, falling victim to mysterious diseases or drowning inexplicably in the empty and unforgiving sea.
You could call this story a myth, which is to say that historical accuracy is irrelevant to its truths. The archipelago that surrounds the Lau Lagoon has gained a reputation as a veritable Disneyland for anthropologists interested in this kind of narrative. The big guns of early twentieth century anthropology—Bronisław Malinowski, W. H. Rivers, Maurice Leenhardt, and others—were convinced by their time in Melanesia that the real function of mythic stories was not to entertain but to serve as vehicles for moral and existential truths. They carried rules for living, values, messages from the ancestors. They told islanders about the most essential parts of themselves. They were metaphors, yes, but they were always sustained by lived experience. And as far as the islanders were concerned, whenever they obeyed the rules set out by their ancestors, they prospered.
You could call this story a myth, which is to say that historical accuracy is irrelevant to its truths. The archipelago that surrounds the Lau Lagoon has gained a reputation as a veritable Disneyland for anthropologists interested in this kind of narrative. The big guns of early twentieth century anthropology—Bronisław Malinowski, W. H. Rivers, Maurice Leenhardt, and others—were convinced by their time in Melanesia that the real function of mythic stories was not to entertain but to serve as vehicles for moral and existential truths. They carried rules for living, values, messages from the ancestors. They told islanders about the most essential parts of themselves. They were metaphors, yes, but they were always sustained by lived experience. And as far as the islanders were concerned, whenever they obeyed the rules set out by their ancestors, they prospered.
But in an era of global cultural convergence, myths can shift as fluidly as the tides that push in and out of the Lau Lagoon. Waves of Christian evangelists have now convinced most Pacific islanders, including the Lau, to trade their guiding myths for those of the Bible. The octopus story—which I heard over and over in the Solomons—signalled a rupture, a brokenness in the spiritual life of the Lau. But nobody was blaming missionaries for the theft of that mythical creature. They were blaming an anthropologist. Who was the foreigner ascribed the role of thief, villain, and myth-breaker, and how had he fallen into this story.
I met Pierre Maranda at Université Laval on a June afternoon nearly two years after first hearing his name. Maranda wanted to show me his backyard. As we roared through Quebec City in his 1982 Turbo Porsche it was hard, at first, to judge the then-seventy-four-year-old anthropologist’s reaction to the strange accusations levelled at him. Not because he was incommunicative, but because his eyes were necessarily hidden behind a pair of wraparound sunglasses. His left cornea had been permanently scarred by the surface glare of the Lau Lagoon.
I met Pierre Maranda at Université Laval on a June afternoon nearly two years after first hearing his name. Maranda wanted to show me his backyard. As we roared through Quebec City in his 1982 Turbo Porsche it was hard, at first, to judge the then-seventy-four-year-old anthropologist’s reaction to the strange accusations levelled at him. Not because he was incommunicative, but because his eyes were necessarily hidden behind a pair of wraparound sunglasses. His left cornea had been permanently scarred by the surface glare of the Lau Lagoon.
We reached Maranda’s home in Saint-Nicolas just as the sun was setting. He removed his glasses, squinted out over the St. Lawrence and gestured across his lawn. See No swimming pool. No octopus. He showed his empty yard to the bishop of Malaita on the bishop’s 2004 visit. Maranda wishes all the Lau people could see it.
“It is a very serious charge, that I would be responsible for the collective illness of people I have always loved,” he said, rubbing his scarred eyes wearily. “How could they entertain such thoughts about me”
By some measures, Maranda is eminently qualified to answer that question. As Canada’s leading structural anthropologist, he has spent half a lifetime reducing myths to mathematical algorithms in order to explain their function. But having fallen headlong into the mythology he once studied, Maranda can be forgiven for taking the story personally. Yet to follow Maranda inside his home and through the door guarded by two carved ebony spears is to begin to understand his place in the Lau narrative. Maranda’s study, his sanctuary, is arguably the greatest storehouse of Lau cultural knowledge in the world. The room is cluttered with mahogany ceremonial bowls, charcoal-blackened statues, rough-hewn pigs, and staffs adorned with serpents. One wall is dominated by a black-and-white photo of a naked Lau priest, eyes darkened in a state of ecstasy or possession. The rest are lined with audio tapes and folders jammed with notes on Lau myth, history, riddles, and linguistics. More than 100 musty notebooks contain scribblings from more than 100 Lau hands.
And then there is Maranda himself. The anthropologist probably knows more about Lau history and traditional cosmology than any living person in or out of the lagoon. He is the keeper of secrets and sacred codes that the Lau people believe are the means to control their spirits. He is the link between their past and their future. And so far, he has refused to pass the most sacred of those secrets back to the Lau.
This is Maranda’s version of history:
Having just completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University, he arrived in the Lau Lagoon in 1966 with his wife, Elli Köngäs-Maranda, and their two-year-old son. As researchers at the (now-defunct) Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, the couple had been captivated by the idea that myths could function as maps for charting the human mind. Maranda could not believe his good fortune when he was dropped on Foueda. He had beat the missionaries. The people rubbed his skin to see if the powder that made him white would rub off. They were not sure if he was a spirit, a ghost, or a man. As he arrived, a small octopus, barely the size of a lobster, rose from the depths of the lagoon and swam to shore. Everyone agreed this was an endorsement from the spirit world.
Maranda learned the Lau language and befriended the pagan priests, particularly those of the powerful Rere clan. It helped that his name echoed that of their holy mountain on Malaita. He gained their trust. Over the following two years, the priests permitted Maranda to observe their rituals and collect their myths. The Lau had a complex and dangerous relationship with the spirit world. Life was governed by strict taboos handed down by the ancestors. Women were associated with the earth and fertility; life-giving power flowed from their vaginas. Men were associated with the sky, and they were careful not to violate the cosmic order by coming into contact with menstrual blood or by placing themselves below a woman’s pelvis. The people built walls in their villages to protect the most sacred aspects of life. Women retreated to their sanctuaries to menstruate and give birth. Male priests made their sacrifices at rock shrines and skull pits in their own enclosures.
The ancestor spirits would not countenance the presence of a foreigner inside the sanctuaries where skulls were kept, but the Lau priests allowed Maranda to fasten his tape recorder to a stick and poke it over the wall when they made their sacrifices. The priests knew full well that Maranda was collecting their secrets.
“They kept telling me: kede, kede, kede: write, write, write!” remembers Maranda. “And at the very end, when we told them we were leaving, the most knowledgeable people came to me and said, “There are things you don’t know, but you must know. All the sacred names of the spirits, all the sacred names of the sanctuaries, extremely secret knowledge, sacred names that empower magical formulas and rituals.’ This information was given to me in a sacred corner of the men’s area. It had to be whispered in my ear, sotto voce.
”The Lau were proud of their culture. They hoped that Maranda would share it with the world. But these secret names were different: they were a means of communicating and controlling the power of the spirits. They were not for sharing. It was as though the priests knew their knowledge was in danger, that their world was about to change, that their secrets needed a guardian.
Maranda returned to the lagoon seven times over the next two decades. With each visit he found the pagan priests more anxious. Seventh-day Adventist missionaries had launched a crusade in the lagoon. The Adventists brought generators and loudspeakers so they could broadcast the Gospel for miles around. They said the spirits” —including the one that resided inside the Foueda octopus—were devils working to trick people on behalf of Satan. The priests told Maranda of the shouting matches they would have with Adventist missionaries on market days. The missionaries would arrive with colourful posters depicting heaven and hell. “If you remain wikita, this is where you will go when you die,” they warned the pagan priests, pointing at the fires of the underworld. “At least we will get to spend eternity with our own ancestors,” the priests would respond.
Maranda returned to the lagoon seven times over the next two decades. With each visit he found the pagan priests more anxious. Seventh-day Adventist missionaries had launched a crusade in the lagoon. The Adventists brought generators and loudspeakers so they could broadcast the Gospel for miles around. They said the spirits” —including the one that resided inside the Foueda octopus—were devils working to trick people on behalf of Satan. The priests told Maranda of the shouting matches they would have with Adventist missionaries on market days. The missionaries would arrive with colourful posters depicting heaven and hell. “If you remain wikita, this is where you will go when you die,” they warned the pagan priests, pointing at the fires of the underworld. “At least we will get to spend eternity with our own ancestors,” the priests would respond.
Christianity had its advantages: The children of Christian converts went to school. They learned to read in English, the new language of commerce and power. Christians didn’t need to spend time and energy raising pigs since the Adventists forbade the consumption of pork, not to mention blood sacrifices. Gradually, people switched allegiances, especially the young. Taboos separating men and women were dropped. The stone walls separating men’s and women’s areas were knocked down.
During a 1975 visit, Maranda was told by Laakwai, a senior Rere priest on Foueda, that the religion of the ancestors was dying. Laakwai could not find a successor, nor could the clan’s other high priest, Kunua. Not even the priests’ sons wanted the sacred knowledge. The young had all turned to the new god. After Maranda left that time, the two priests gave up hope. Laakwai swam under a canoe paddled by a woman, believing that such a reversal of high and low energy would be fatal. Kunua purposefully botched a ritual. Both priests were dead within weeks. It was suicide through metaphysical transgression. The people of Foueda’s primary link to their ancestors had been severed. More and more, they found themselves turning to Christianity. Meanwhile, at universities in North America and Europe, Maranda used his Lau data as raw material for his academic work, which was profoundly influenced by the pioneering French structuralist, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss argued that the most telling aspect of myths was not the unique meaning of words and symbols they contained, but the patterns they formed. He proposed that myths were part of a deep structure of binary opposites that direct how people connote signs and stories. When I reached him by phone at his Paris home, the ninety-seven-year-old Lévi-Strauss said that Maranda has been “paramount” in advancing his structuralist approach, particularly in the algorithmic treatment of anthropological problems.
Maranda’s method links language and stories—like those of the Lau—to the patterned activation of human brain cells. Reduce myth to an equation and you’ve begun to understand the human mind. For his innovative work in artificial intelligence, semantic mapping, and artificial imagination, Maranda was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and awarded the prestigious Canada Council Molson Prize in the Social Sciences and Humanities. The Lau storytellers were right: their myths did help propel Maranda to success and international recognition.
For all this, the anthropologist has yet to deconstruct the mechanism by which he has become the villain of the Lau octopus myth. “I have tried to understand how this story came about, who was responsible for it,” he told me. “It must have come through a divining, but who performed it I’ve never been able to get an answer.”
Yet the octopus story does contain elements of historical truth—and evidence of mythical thinking on Maranda’s behalf. Maranda did fall deathly ill a few months after his first stay in the lagoon. (He was diagnosed in Paris with falsiparum, a dangerous strain of malaria. Maranda promptly had money sent to the Solomons to pay the Rere priests for a sacrifice, after which he miraculously recovered.) True to the rumour, Köngäs-Maranda did die. She committed suicide in 1981.
After the suicide of the Rere high priests, Maranda came to be regarded as much more than an observer of Lau culture. During a 2003 stint working for the United Nations in the Solomon Islands, Luc Lafrenière, Maranda’s one-time research assistant, heard Maranda referred to as ngwane foa, a Lau term reserved for high priests. Henry Isa, the Solomon Islands’ chief cultural officer in 2002, put it to me this way: “The Rere clan has only one pagan priest left. That priest is Pierre Maranda.”
Maranda claims not to believe in the supernatural abilities of the Foueda octopus or any other spirit. He insists his faith is reserved for the laws of probability and the cognitive processes by which people constantly recalculate their trust rating for friends, colleagues, and myths. So it is especially curious to see him following a sacred code. Though the Lau Lagoon is a world away from Maranda’s favourite restaurants in Vieux Québec, though he once quite enjoyed the taste of, say, calamari, he now refuses to consume that or any other flesh resembling octopus. Maranda also refuses to reveal the secret name of the Foueda octopus to anyone other than a priestly successor. The man of science is, indeed, behaving as though he were the last of the Rere priests.
An essential element of the octopus myth concerns Maranda’s culpability. Does he deserve to be remembered as the hero or the villain of the story The answer surely depends on his willingness to keep the old knowledge alive—and in Lau hands.
In Melanesia, traditional knowledge has depended increasingly on foreign writers for its survival since the missionaries arrived in the late 1800s. Sometimes islanders forgot their pagan myths after their Christian baptism. Sometimes they censored themselves under pressure from missionaries. These days, some communities trying to revive old traditions have no choice but to turn to written accounts for guidance.
In Melanesia, traditional knowledge has depended increasingly on foreign writers for its survival since the missionaries arrived in the late 1800s. Sometimes islanders forgot their pagan myths after their Christian baptism. Sometimes they censored themselves under pressure from missionaries. These days, some communities trying to revive old traditions have no choice but to turn to written accounts for guidance.
Through their field research, modern anthropologists can become de facto custodians of local knowledge. Most agree that the least they can do for their informants is to give that knowledge back. But repatriating cultural secrets isn’t always so easy. David Akin, an American anthropologist who spent five years among Malaita’s Kwaio people, ran into an unusual roadblock when he tried to send his data back to Malaita. When Akin suggested creating a local cultural archive, at first some pagans were alarmed to hear that Christians might be given access to knowledge about their ancestral religion. It took a decade for those tensions to ease.
Maranda says he is keen to repatriate the bulk of his Lau knowledge, and he has been working since his academic retirement in 1996 to transcribe and catalogue his data. He has led construction of the Cultural Hypermedia Encyclopedia of Oceania (oceanie.org ), a database organized on his theories of semiotic association, and is writing a book on Lau culture. The half-finished manuscript is 600 pages. It would be satisfying to see this as the completion of a circle, the last set of transactions in the series of exchanges that began when Maranda first arrived on Foueda. But it’s one thing to return general knowledge and quite another to pass on powerful secrets. And as one Lau pilgrim learned in 2004, the greatest barrier to returning those secrets—including the name of the Foueda octopus—might well be Maranda himself.
Gabriel Maelasi was born during Maranda’s first sojourn in the Solomons. He carries the ritual scarification marks of the lagoon clans on his face: faint geometric lines, copper rays shooting out from a stylized sun. Like most modern Lau, Maelasi is a passionate Christian. He took the lifelong vows of the Society of St. Francis when he was eighteen. He attended an Anglican theological college on Guadalcanal, and, in 2003, was ordained an Anglican priest on Funafou, a short paddle from Foueda.
But like most islanders, Maelasi maintained a complex and ambiguous relationship with the spirit world. A couple of years ago, when he found the Funafou ancestral skull pits and pagan shrines in disarray, he took it upon himself to tidy up the shrine of one of his own ancestors. An uncle berated him and warned that the spirits would punish him for the offence. Maelasi replied, “No! These people are not strangers. They are part of my community, part of my own blood and bones. I talked to them. I said a prayer to them. You watch and see if I get sick and die for this!”
Maelasi was disturbed by the widening rift he saw growing between his kin and their ancestors. This is one of the reasons he came to Canada in 2004. He understood Maranda’s reputation, and he suspected the anthropologist might possess the means to heal the rift. Maranda took him on as a research assistant, and Maelasi spent the lengthening days of spring transcribing the stories in Maranda’s musty notebooks. It was laborious work, and the books did not contain secrets. But Maelasi did manage to gain entry to Maranda’s Lau sanctuary on the banks of the St. Lawrence.
On his first visit he was awestruck. There was the waist-high statue of Golo’au, his greatest ancestor, whom he remembered as a giant and a headhunter. The statue’s eyes, inlaid with abalone, seemed to stare right into him. And then there was the night in that study when Maranda turned on his computer’s audio player. As the two men gazed into the digital vortex, Maelasi remembers, the grunt and hum of a Lau high priest’s chants filled the room. “Maranda said to me, “Are you possessed by the spirit when you hear that Do you feel that the spirit entangles you’ I said, “No. Oh, no! I’m a normal man, a Christian! I can’t believe in these spirits anymore.’”” To this, Maelasi says his new mentor responded, “But they are powerful, and I respect them.”
Maranda told me the exchange never happened. But seeing them together in Maranda’s sanctuary that spring, Maelasi furiously smoking du Mauriers, Maranda drawing softly on his pipe, was to witness the lagoon’s mythical dilemmas encapsulated. Maelasi let flow the inquiries of theological college. Maranda, to my surprise, lobbied on behalf of the ancestors.
Maelasi told the story of how once, back at college, he and his friends had replaced the imported bread and wine of communion with locally grown taro and coconut milk. Now, to Maranda’s obvious delight, he was pondering the similarities between pagan pig sacrifices and the Christian sacrament. Both rituals promote peace and harmony, and both represent a communion with the spirit world, said Maelasi. “In Malaitan tradition, the pig was our Lamb of God. Pig sacrifice was a saving act for us, in the same way the death of Christ was a saving act. Can I put it like this: Christ is the perfect pig!”
“So instead of saying mass on Funafou, why don’t you sacrifice a pig and hand out the meat as a sacrament to everyone” responded Maranda. “Instead of saying “lamb of God,’ you could say, “pig of God!"
“I don’t think my bishop would like that at all.”
“But do you think it would make sense”
“When we look at it in a very pure way, yes, the pig is a sacrament,” said Maelasi, shifting in his seat. “But you must have the right theology about it. You must follow the Bible.”
“You have your own Bible! Malaitan custom is full of stories like the ones in the Christian Bible,” said Maranda, who did not take this conversation lightly.
“Gabriel’s ideas are anthropologically sound. They make sense. The pig is a sacrificial animal par excellence,” he said later. “Gabriel is creating a new Melanesian theology.”
Maranda said Maelasi had admitted to him that his guts ached when he heard the old stories, as though he was catching glimpses of his deeper self, a self he was compelled to “rescue and feed.” With that yearning, with his intelligence and charisma, perhaps Maelasi could return to the lagoon as a prophet, delivering a version of Christianity that respected the ancestral spirits, mused Maranda. If that was Maelasi’s intention, if he wanted to push the bounds of religious syncretism and revive the ancestor sacrifices of old, perhaps it would be right to share some of the secret names with him.“
If Gabriel decides that he wants to go and sacrifice pigs and do it in a framework of some kind of syncretic operation, then I could give him at least some of that sacred knowledge. But if the bishop of Malaita chastises him and insists he return to the rank and file of orthodoxy, then I can’t do it.”.”.”. The knowledge is there. It’s ready. It’s available. But I’m not going to disclose it without a proper recipient.”
Maranda insists he is not an interventionist, not for or against the forces of cultural change, which he says are inevitable. But there is more guiding the anthropologist than his theories of probability. Before his time in the lagoons, before his friendship with Lévi-Strauss, Maranda served as a Jesuit priest. He began as a novice at the age of nineteen, and followed the rituals of the Roman Catholic order for a decade. Then one night he dreamt that his brain had been encased in a wire net for all those years. He pulled that net off and felt suddenly free. He left the order and rejected the church.
Maranda acknowledges the peaceable influence Christianity has had in the Solomons. But in his work he consistently portrays Christianized villages as sad places full of listless, unhappy people whose “guts ache—“like Maelasi’s—from spiritual longing. With its emphasis on individualism, he says, Christianity is destroying the co-operative spirit that once bound Lau villagers. In his contribution to The Double Twist, a book he edited in 2001, Maranda used a Lévi-Straussian formula to assert that Malaitan men have used Christianity as a mythical tool to subvert the traditional power of women.
Maranda is as hostile to the church as the old pagan priests of Foueda were. Which is why Maelasi is not the successor Maranda might have hoped for.
Over a beer and a du Maurier at the Laval campus pub, Maelasi told me he had his own plan for Maranda’s secrets. He had already pestered Maranda for the names of the Lau ancestors, but not so he could beg for their magic favour or offer pig sacrifices on their behalf. Quite the opposite. Maelasi’s plan was evangelical. He wanted to identify all the skulls that crowd the shrines of Funafou, so that he could rebaptize them as he had already done for his own namesake. (Mae Laasi, the great fisherman to whom his clan once prayed, was christened Peter, after the Biblical fisher of men.)
“My dream is that we will baptize all these dead skulls,” Maelasi said excitedly. “We will Christianize all the shrines, rebuild them, then plant a cross in front of each one of them, to show that these heathens have now joined the Christian community.” The rift between the Lau and their ancestors would thus be healed, at least in Maelasi’s mind.
Maranda contends that the ancestors would be outraged at the thought of being baptized after their deaths. “They would feel that they had been contaminated, that they will have lost their power.” The plan would effectively paralyze the magic of beings like the sacred octopus, he believes.Maelasi left Quebec City in 2004, in the depths of winter, having gleaned a few magical incantations but not one of the secret names.
Nearly a year later, I reach Maranda by phone as he is preparing to fly to Paris for a meeting with Lévi-Strauss and then a team of information managers. The Lau data must be digitized, he says; it must be recorded, remembered. This is what anthropologists do.
Nearly a year later, I reach Maranda by phone as he is preparing to fly to Paris for a meeting with Lévi-Strauss and then a team of information managers. The Lau data must be digitized, he says; it must be recorded, remembered. This is what anthropologists do.
But to my query about the secret names, he responds that he still hasn’t found the proper recipient. And what if Maelasi was right, I ask, when he suggested that there are no pagans left in the lagoon, that none of the Lau are willing to betray the Christian god for the sake of the ancestors “Then they will never have those names,” Maranda says.
So there is truth to the myth of the stolen octopus, as there is truth in all myth. The Lau are experiencing a spiritual crisis. They have been estranged from their ancestors, and the key to their reconciliation is held by the most jealous of guardians. But their crisis is grounded not so much in thievery as in loyalty.
The Lau have pledged their allegiance to a competing god and a new set of myths. And Maranda, faced with a choice between fulfilling the aspirations of the dead or those of a new generation of Lau, has chosen the dead. By holding so rigidly to his promise to the Rere priests, Maranda has become their proxy. He is not an agent of change so much as he is a force for conservatism. Ironically, his intransigence might seal the fate of the Foueda octopus, and the victory of Christianity over the pantheon of ancestor spirits.
The Lau have always believed that the ancestors punish those who do not honour them. Those priests took a chance when they entrusted their knowledge to a foreigner. Would they have wanted the Foueda octopus to be guarded to death Would they have taken such cold revenge on the descendants of worms, of heroes, of island-makers The only answer that matters now is Maranda’s. The storytellers of Foueda may well be right in their assertion that the octopus, or at least its spirit, has left them forever.
As for Maelasi, he has traded the lagoons for the University of Queensland. He is following Maranda’s lead and taking up anthropology, though he still wears his priestly collar.
Charles Montgomery is the author of The Last Heathen (Douglas & McIntyre, 2004), which won the 2005 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction.
Labels: Mitología
Pulpo's Tattoo XV
Published Friday, September 01, 2006 by Spyder.
