Bath Toy Lost at Sea Found in Brooklyn?

Artist and serious beachcomber Willis Elkins sends news of a discovery he made on the morning of August 30, along the shoreline of Kingsborough Community College, in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn: A toy frog. And not just any toy frog. There's no doubt about it. That's a Floatee.

Compare for yourself. Here's a package of the toys:

Elkins writes, "I hardly believed it when I saw it, but instantly recognized the angular shapes I had seen in photos." He adds that it's "in fairly good condition, if we were to believe it to be an original from the infamous container spill some 20 years ago. There are no punctures, serious scratches or wear, and color is consistent throughout."

So is the frog an original from the infamous container spill? Or is it just a toy that some kid left behind on a trip to the seashore?  There's no telling. Could easily be the latter, and as Elkin notes, it is in dubiously good condition. We'll have to put more question marks on the map.  A number of correspondents have sent me pictures of stranded toys--for instance, of this duck spotted on Governor's Island (right).

But Elkins's frog is the first documented discovery of a Floatee on a North Atlantic beach I know of. A tantalizing one. I spent many hours beachcombing the New York City waterfront, and I'd given up all hope of ever finding one of the toys, and here one turns up in Brooklyn. 

Mystery of Ocean Currents, BP Spill Edition

A team of oceanographers is releasing 300 drifters in the Gulf of Mexico. The aim:

credit: NOAA

"In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill it became clear that understanding the various scales of oceanic currents and flows lies at the very heart of being able to improve our understanding and prediction of oil spills," explained Dr. Tamay Ӧzgökmen, University of Miami (UM) Professor and Director of the Consortium for Advanced Research on Transport of Hydrocarbons in the Environment (CARTHE), a project funded by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI). "In this case we are like detectives uncovering clues and following the 'trail' to find out exactly where pollutants might go."

Full story here. (Via Craig Pittman.)

Home Remedies for Rabies

Bill Wasik and his veterinarian wife, Monica Murphy, have published a book, Rabid, that I read and blurbed--enthusiastically--and will recommend again here. N+1 has a tasty review. A spoonful:

Wasik and Murphy’s subject might seem like a deliberately strange one, but they exercise nothing but user-friendly restraint when it comes to historical detail and medical explanation. It’s a rare pleasure to read a nonfiction book by authors who research like academics but write like journalists. They have mined centuries’ worth of primary sources and come bearing only the gems. My favorites were the archaic cures, some of which were reasonable (lancing, cauterization), while others were plain perverted. The Sushruta Samhita recommends pouring clarified butter into the infected wound and then drinking it; Pliny the Elder suggests a linen tourniquet soaked with the menstrual fluid of a dog.

Professor Diablo's True Review: The Video

There's now a snazzy video of the performance (music, video, Moby-Duck) that I posted about here last April.

Professor Diablo’s True Revue I: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea from Center for Documentary Studies on Vimeo.

Good-Bye (For Now) to All That

I've neglected this blog since last April mostly because I learned then that I will be heading to Ann Arbor in September on a Knight-Wallace Journalism fellowship, which will give me eight months to begin work on a second book--a project bearing little resemblance to Moby-Duck, at least so far as subject matter goes. (No more seafaring for me. I've had my seaward peep, and now will be trying to peep both eastward and into the past. More on this later--much later.)

The last few months I've been preoccupied with the logistics of leaving New York. The date of the move swiftly approaches. An Ann Arbor lease has been signed. A truck big as a boat has been reserved. Many boxes have been packed. We've built a ziggurat out of them in the living room. We've been trying to reassure M. & B. about the move by describing the delights awaiting them in their new home. We're in a transition, in other words, and my preoccupations are not the same ones that preoccupied me when I created this blog. They're still fatherly and bookish, but not as watery as they once were.

There are a few items that have collected in my file of things to post about. I'll try to get to them before September 1. Thereafter, the terms of the Knight-Wallace Fellowship (an eight-month sabbatical for journalists) wisely prohibit publication of any sort, including blogging. 

Professor Diablo's True Review

Next week, at the invitation of Duncan Murrell and Duke's Center for Documentary Studies, I head to North Carolina to join forces with the musician Django Haskins and the media artist Marina Zurkow. Details from press release below.

The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (CDS), in cooperation with the Durham's Casbah, is pleased to announce the launch of Professor Diablo’s True Revue, a collaborative performance of writers, musicians, visual artists, and others who make extensive use of documentary fieldwork and research in the creation of their art. The inaugural evening will begin at 7 p.m. on April 24th at Casbah.  The theme for the first show, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, will feature a writer (Donovan Hohn) whose first book is a story about rubber ducks, plastic, and the mysteries of the ocean; a Guggenheim Fellow and media artist (Marina Zurkow) whose latest work in animation and manga explores the agency of petrochemicals and plastics; and a songwriter (Django Haskins) of exceeding plasticity and range. Future performances of Professor Diablo’s True Revue will explore themes such as love, war, and food, and will feature all new artists, writers, and musicians. “We want to expand the audience’s idea of what a ‘documentary’ work can be,”  said Duncan Murrell, Writer in Residence at CDS. “And we’re going to do this with artists whose work relies on the immersive research and fieldwork that we champion at the Center. Something that’s more than a reading, more than an opening, more than a night of music— a performance that’s unique and unexpected, and yet seems harmonious and inevitable when it’s done.   “We hope that we’re beginning something that will have real longevity and become a valued and complementary addition to the growing literary and arts scenes here in Durham and in the Triangle,” Murrell said. “It’s going to be fun.”

NASA: Animation of Tsunami Debris

Another visualization from the wizards at NASA, this time illustrating the likely drift of the debris unloosed by Japan's 2011 tsunami. (via Julia Whitty's Blue Marble blog)

NASA's Earth Observatory captions:

This animation shows the output of the Surface Currents from Diagnostic (SCUD) model, an attempt to simulate where and how that debris would disperse. Orange and red shaded areas represent parcels of water with a high probably of containing floating debris. The deeper the red color, the higher the likely concentration. The debris field stretches roughly 5,000 kilometers by 2,000 kilometers across the North Pacific.