Confused Octopus

Tamaya, octopus are one of the favourite foods here, but in my opinion, Filipinos don't do the best by them.

The first one I ever tasted was in Cyprus, where an octopus attached itself to my bare white heel , as I was preparing to dive. My companion picked it off, bashed it on the rocks where we were sitting (to tenderise it), and told me how to cook it in slowly in red wine for a very long time (with the usual extras).

Octopus cooking is a very delicate art; it's one of my long-term projects to learn exactly how.

Blanch, raw, slow cook, rapid boil, or what?*

Somewhere along that gradient, there's a point where the meat will come out fresh, tender and tasty. That's the moment when the real cook will know he's got it just right.

I'll keep trying.

Meanwhile, consider these poor octopi, who are extremely good at doing camouflage, but have been wholly confused by being put out to expire on a chequered background.

Update 1: The answer to this is to get the first cooked point just exactly right, or stew the damned things for hours to get back to it.

Fidelity - Female Fruit Flies Only Fuck on the First Date

I'm not a lot interested in fruit flies, as such, but they (Drosophila) have been a great deal helpful to science in general and especially in the genetics corner.

It seems that female fruit flies are fussy. After the first time they have intercourse, they don't want to do it again.

Someone has discovered (or thinks he has) how.

Now this is how you find out the the details of the complicated and devious mind of the female fruit fly.

You feed them. With yeast that contains lots of heavy nitrogen. That isotope labels all of the female proteins.

Then you look at them after they've fucked. Anything that didn't have the heavy nitrogen was given by males. The researchers discovered some sixty-three proteins from fruit fly semen, which may suggest that the male fruit fly lacks confidence in his wife's fidelity, and is over-doing it a bit.

(Sorry to anyone who's offended by the fffour-letter word - the alliteration was just too good to resist).

Siargao Zingiber Project - Sidelining

For the first time, I got up off my bum, and went myself with my crew (Ron & Shedney), to find some new and exotic ginger plants reasonably nearby.
We went to Victor's Flying Fox Bar, built, like only a total crazy could do, out in the boonies, opposite a perfect jungle mountain, where the flying foxes do a grand fly-past every evening, dead on time at 2.5 minutes past dusk.

We walked along the edge of the mountain, and we did find a couple of new ginger plants (which I'm waiting to have identified).
But, more than that, we found some other strange plants that I don't have much of a clue about:

This is wild ubi, a purple yam, that, domesticated, is a great favourite here in the Philippines. It's even a top flavour for ice cream. Purple ice cream? It's delicious. Only in the Philippines.

And we found these, abandoned: Puso banana buds, but only the stripped skins, the buds taken off to make into a fabulous salad.

And then this one, known locally as padjaw. It's an aroid, but I don't know much more about it, and I don't know why it grows 'pretend peppers'.

Siargao Zingiber Project - 1

Following on from my Pano'on 1 and Pano'on 2 posts, I've got all enthused about ginger plants.

It seems, according to John Mood, a 20-year expert on ginger (Zingiber) plant taxonomy, that we may just have a new species on our hands.

Here, it's called kayaskason, and it's very common. John asked me to preserve the leaves and inflorescence (a la herbarium, pressed between newspaper sheets). This is a bit difficult, because we don't get newspapers hereabouts, and the big fruits don't really press very well.
However, I'll do my best.

I proposed, very strongly, based on the first specimens that Ron brought to me, that the damned plant didn't have flowers.

But it does.

Here's a picture of one, a bud popped into a vase of water at 5pm and open and greedy at 7pm.

I'm not a botanist, so I really didn't know that my photo was upside down.

It looked extraordinarily like the face of one of the local horseshoe bats. Even down to the two very small 'eyes' either side of its 'nose'.

Now, if I was a bat, I'd visit this flower, and land on the strong stem just behind it. Then I'd bend over, and find I was facing the thing upside down. I would be doing 69 face to face with a friend from another biological kingdom.

Probably, I'd lap up all the ants crawling around the nectar, and then lap up some of the delectable stuff for myself.

Morning Bakery

Every morning at 5am, as the sun rises, reluctantly, Bebot's wife makes bread rolls, and they're wonderful.

They're not the usual Philippines pan-de-sal, that are altogether too sweet and mushy. These are almost genuine, unsugared, bread rolls.

I buy them for breakfast (for dunking in coffee or Milo) or even, sometimes, as a special 'English' treat (sliced hot with plenty of butter and a bit of Marmite).

The oven is very high-tech. It's a galvanised iron box, with a folded corrugated-iron roof folding over. This one even has a heat shield at the front. It's fired by a pile of smouldering coconut husks on top. Bebot's wife manipulates the bread rolls with something like a bugsay (paddle), with which she whips them around like a flock of sheep.

But the main problem is that no-one in the Philippines has ever learned to make bread properly. They use soft flour; they don't mature their yeast, etc. There is nothing here remotely resembling the fresh early morning French baguette; they learned bread-making from the Spanish, who haven't a clue.

And that's a big disappointment; I would love to eat a fresh hot baguette every morning. Maybe I'll get out there one morning and start preaching. I love fresh morning-cooked bread.

Rabuls - Fighting Spider

The kids here find these spiders around the place. Then they set pairs of spiders to fight along a piece of silhig (that piece of the centre of a coconut leaf, that are normally used to make brooms here).

This is a huge thing amongst the local children (who haven't got many shop-bought toys, so they have to use their imagination in ways that spoiled Western brats could never do).

They keep their champions jealously, in empty match boxes, and even trade them amongst their friends. One good spider can be worth seven pieces of candy.


Then I think back to my own youth; we used to have conkers (horse-chestnuts) that we collected in the local woods. You strung the conker and slung it against your opponent's. If that broke, you won.

Pano'on - Local Candy - Bromeliad or What? - Part II

I first wrote about pano'on just a week ago, and things have developed rapidly. First I contacted Brandon McHenry, who identified my Dischidia or talikubo for me. He, in turn, suggested that pano'on was not a bromeliad at all, nor a relative of maize, but a relative of ginger, which was a total surprise to me.

Brandon also introduced me to John Mood, a world authority on ginger taxonomy, who confirmed the plant was probably Hornstedtia conoidea, which also grows in Borneo.

Well, I hadn't seen much more of the plant than a few ripening buds and a few leaves, which had made me think it was this: Zingiber mioga - Japanese Wild Ginger, which is commercially-grown in Japan (and now in New Zealand) for its young buds, which are a great delicacy.


The buds are shown here:
(Click photo to go to 'the scent of green bananas blog for recipes)

Well, this really got me thinking. If New Zealand farmers are canny enough to grow this stuff for export to Japan, why shouldn't we do the same here in Siargao? Looked easy to me; it's a perennial, so you plonk it in the ground, and pick a bit idly from time to time.

But if you look at the botanical drawing, you'll see that mioga has a white flower, whereas our pano'on's flowers turn out to have a brilliant deep red flower (top right). And the local people don't eat the buds, although they do eat the unripe berry pods (and so do rats and other forest rodents - we didn't find a single young bud on the specimens Ron brought back, from his second expedition on Thursday).

Ron also mentioned another ginger relative, locally known as kayaskason, which also has edible berries, growing at the top of a long stem, so I asked him to get some of those as well, plus anything else he could find. He came up trumps. Kayaskason turns out to be a species of Alpinia, or even a natural hybrid, and extremely rare. It seems strange that it is common enough here for the local people to give it a name.

Well, that's exciting enough, but this photo shows only the unripe seed pods. We've planted it in the garden, but I don't think I can wait for the flowers to come out, so I guess we'll have to go and get some, to finally find out what it is.

But the third wild ginger that Ron brought back turns out to be a little honey. You can see in this photo the yellow flowers and pink fruit. Here's another photo of the pink fruit.










This one, apparently, is an Etlingera fimbriobracteata.

Now that I know these marvels are to be found in the forests around here, I'll be looking out for them.

Pool Swimmer

People keep on writing to me about why I've lived in the Philippines for all of 12 years and still like it.

Look at the photo above - 'nuff said.

Strange Fig Tree

This is a strange fig tree that grows in my garden. The fruit grow directly on the trunk of the tree, in bunches, quite unlike other figs, and the fruit come along every three or four months.

Sometimes birds do try and eat them, but there is not enough surface for them to perch and peck. So I left the coconut frond that fell down to give them some purchase. On a closer look, I found that the yellow figs are unripe. They go dark red as they ripen, and the birds certainly go for those.

I'm interested to see if this fig has a life style dependent on insects, as so many figs do.

Tomorrow (or maybe the next day, life being a little bit lazy) I'll get one of the figs and dissect it.

If there is a story at all, I'll post it here.


[Day 2 Well, it's now tomorrow, and here is a picture of the fruit. The yellow one is unripe, and the red one was very ripe and sticky. I couldn't see any insects in either (some figs have friendly relations with tiny wasps).

Anyway, I ate it, and I'm not dead yet.

By the way, the two wires crossing the photo above are my electricity supply; great bit of junction wiring to the left.

[Day 3] I've now realised that the rest of the world gets up in the morning a lot earlier than I do, so this morning I got up and watched that bloody fig tree.

They're all there, from the sunbirds, to that-bright-yellow-bird-I-don't-the name-of, to the imported European sparrows (who chat with a Spanish, not a Cockney accent).

Wonderful sight, even through the haze of a normal morning hangover.

DH Lawrence wrote this about figs:

The proper way to eat a fig, in society,
Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist,
honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.
Then you throw away the skin
Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx,
After you have taken off the blossom with your lips.
But the vulgar way
Is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.
Every fruit has its secret.
The fig is a very secretive fruit.

As you see it standing growing, you feel at once it is symbolic:
And it seems male.
But when you come to know it better, you agree with the Romans, it is female.
The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part; the fig-fruit:
The fissure, the yoni,
The wonderful moist conductivity towards the centre.
Involved,
Inturned,
The flowering all inward and womb-fibrilled;
And but one orifice.
The fig, the horse-shoe, the squash-blossom.
Symbols.
There was a flower that flowered inward, womb-ward;
Now there is a fruit like a ripe womb.
It was always a secret.
That's how it should be, the female should always be secret.
There never was any standing aloft and unfolded on a bough
Like other flowers, in a revelation of petals;
Silver-pink peach, venetian green glass of medlars and sorb-apples,
Shallow wine-cups on short, bulging stems
Openly pledging heaven:
Here's to the thorn in flower! Here is to Utterance!
The brave, adventurous rosaceæ

I'm sorry, I can't go on with this. It's the plea of a Northern Englishman to a fruit he probably only tasted once in his life. It's nice stuff, but isn't he over-doing it a bit?
Rest of it at http://www.kalliope.org/digt.pl?longdid=lawrence2001061702

Siargao Pythons

I am running out of things to say about my life; it's a wee bit humdrum, so:

About two years ago, I started a temporary zoo of local animals and featured some of the photos I took in my website section on Early Human Diet.

That shows the obvious fact that along shorelines from East Africa to right out to here, the mammals and reptiles are very much the same.

See mammals here and this particular species of reptile here.

My first python died, before I could even get him home.

He'd been attacked by a bunch of local timber-stealers, and was moribund when we found him. He died, and decayed, on the 4 hour trip home, and we couldn't even recover his beautiful skin, that had been hacked around by the timber-stealers' machetes.

But we did render down his skull:

As you can see, he had vicious, back hooked, and very sharp teeth.

It was a bit too much trouble to reconstruct the bones. If we had, we would have demonstrated the very flexibleskull structure of the snake, with the bones joined by cartilage and sinew, and not rigidly fused together.

This allows the snake to stretch its jaws to the maximum when trying to swallow anything large. The back-hooked teeth ensure that anything it is trying to swallow has great difficulty in getting out again.

Pythons are not poisonous, but are not very friendly either. If you get a body part into a python's jaws, it's very difficult to get it out again.

Besides which, their 'wrapping muscles' are really, very very strong.

My second python was brought to me from Consuelo, just up the way, where it was caught trying to cross the (only) road.

He's the fellow shown top right. Only about 3 feet long, but he definitely didn't have a 'good' character.

I f***ed up the photo just following that, because he suddenly attacked, and I panicked. (I'd already been through the problem of taking him out of his chicken-coop, and having him wrap around my lower arm while he proceeded to bite my thumb).

After that insult to my hospitality (I had local kids bringing rats and mice for his dinner) I took him back to another jungle village and let him go.

Rain

The rainy season has begun.

A few years ago, I claimed that Siargao was the wettest place in Asia, based on a highly unscientific experiment.

Last night we had a shower, one of many over the past few days, so, this time, I set up a rigourously-controlled scientific measuring device, at about 9:45pm.
- A bucket, placed in the middle of the lawn.

This morning, the bucket was nearly full, so I measured the depth of water in it - 25cm.

Then I did various abstruse calculations to correct for the sectional conical shape of the bucket, but the difference was minimal.

That's right; about 10 inches of rain - overnight

Added - 14/12/07 - a bit later:

1 inch rain = 6.25 inches snow

This is an average value though. Colder areas will have a lower number while warmer areas will have a higher number.
http://forum.onlineconversion.com/showthread.php?t=225

But, earlier on, in the same discussion, someone wrote that his grandfather reckoned 10 inches of snow for every inch of rain.

Either way, you will get our equivalent:-
10" * 6.25" = 5 feet 2 inches of snow
or 10" * 10" = 8.3 feet of snow

Thank God it doesn't snow here. Five feet of the damned stuff would entirely cover Shedney, my 'companion'.

------------------------------
W Somerset Maugham wrote a classical story Rain
which starts out:
"It was nearly bed-time and when they awoke next morning land would be in sight. Dr. Macphail lit his pipe and...."

But even before that, Rudyard Kipling wrote: Mandalay:
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"
Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay:
Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!

I really don't think, now, that Kipling ever went to Mandalay, in the very middle of the country, or to the old Moulmein Pagoda, about 400 miles away. China was near, but never 'crost the Bay. It was, and still is, due north where the dawn is unlikely to come up, let alone noisily.

But the bit that really got me (although "There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me; For the wind is in the palm-trees..." does ring certain sentimental bells) was:

I am sick o' wastin' leather on these gritty pavin'-stones,
An' the blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an' grubby 'and --
Law! wot do they understand?

I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

And that got me into this mess, where I came to avoid the world-famous English climate .

Voyage To the Big City - Coin Divers

I haven't been to Cebu City since my last court hearings in July, and that wasn't much fun, although I had great pleasure in accepting the resignation of my lawyer; he was totally useless.

I decided to go at the penultimate hour; I had to go to Surigao City for some itsy-bitsies, and I hate the place so much that at 5pm I decided to take the 7pm boat to Cebu to get out of there.

The trip is overnight; it gets into Cebu about dawn, plus or minus a bit. So we don't get to see very much of the intervening trip. It follows Magellan's route to Cebu, from Limasawa Island on, and about dawn we pass Punta Enggaño (Enchanted Point) on Mactan Island.

Punta Enggaño is the prime shell-collector's source; everyone in the village is involved in the shell business somehow. Some specialise in rare shells, others in regular, pretty stuff for tourists and bathroom decorations, and others make some of the best fakes I've ever been taken in by. (If you've ever greedily bought a very rare shell at a bargain price, you can imagine your chagrin when you look at it again next day in daylight, and see that a tuppenny shell has been 'adjusted' with a hand file and some spray paint into a very great rarity. So you swallow your great pride in your infallible 'expertise', and endeavour to find the next sucker in line.)

You pass through the strait between Cebu City and Mactan Island a bit after dawn, and pass through the channel to Pier 1, in the heart of the city. With a bit of manoeuvring (hurling of anchor lines, etc) we end up with the bow pointing towards the dockside. But not before we've been visited by the local coin divers. They come out after every incoming ship, hoping for a few pesos.

The wife holds the coin collecting net, and the husband nonchalantly paddles, using only one hand and his ankle, to twist-paddle the boat along. If his wife misses the thrown coins, he dives in and gets them.

They have a classical bangka; long slim hull, two outriggers, and no motor, and he drives it like an extension of his own body, with consummate skill, just as you might ride a familiar bicycle.

A few days later, arriving in Surigao City, we are met by the local coin-divers, but they've gone all hi-tech. Their boats are rice sacks, stuffed with polyethylene foam chunks from broken fish-boxes, and each one wears a single or two ping-pong bat shaped paddles strapped to his feet.

But the little buggers still catch every coin I toss over the side, no matter how I try to obstruct them, by throwing coins out of reach.

Oh! What a Lovely Neighbour!

Would you rent a used seaside cottage from this man?

He is my friendly and cooperative neighbour., the owner of Patrick's-On-The-Beach, which surrounds me on three sides.

We haven't spoken to each other in over two years, ever since I went round to introduce myself, and he told me that he was just about to take over the quiet garden of the house I had just rented from Dado, demolish my thatched barn that I was about to use as a bead-craft sweatshop, and leave me with just the mere concrete shell of a house that goes with those two invaluable assets.

Next day, I used the back gate from my garden, for a swim. It leads about 10 metres through the cottages that Andreas rents from my landlord, Dado, to the sea. I was confronted by this fellow, who told me he was concerned about security for his 'resort' - Patrick's On The Beach, and unless I kept the gate padlocked, he would padlock it himself.
If he did, I said, I would effing cut off the effing padlock.
Next day, he marched up my garden to my bead works, where the girls were working away industriously, accompanied by the town's Chief of Police, and accused me of 'threatening' him.
Nothing came of that, of course; it was typical bluster.
But that summer, while I was away in Spain flogging beads to punters in the local markets, he reinforced the closure by boarding up 'his' side of the gate.

More on the lovely Andreas in later posts, including the intriguing tale of the source of the above smug self-portrait.

By the way, if you feel like you would like to donate to his orphanage scam, send a blank cheque to:

Messenger Of Joy Foundation
14721 S. Biscayne River Drive
Miami, FL 33168
Tel (305) 687-4107
Fax (305) 769-9924
andreas@mojf.org

Expensive Birds

I always knew there was one small tiny problem involved with keeping a pretty woman; decoration, maintenance and upkeep costs.
The town Fiesta is due on Friday, so there is a travelling fair of ukay-ukay stalls set up on the foreshore next to my neighbouring village of squatting fishermen, Mabua, between me and the creek. Ukay-ukay is basically second-hand clothes (yes - you know the ones you dutifully collect for the poor of the world? Well, they get bought up on arrival by Chinese traders, and farmed out to the local equivalent of Gypsies, who travel from town to town at fiesta time. They sell sheeting by the kilo, T shirts for 50p ($1),shorts for 100p, and so on.
On Monday night, I took Shedney out for our usual pub-crawl from Lalay's at the end of the Boulevard, to Nine Bar just up the road from me.
Only then did I notice that the short-short-shorts she was wearing had a broken zip, so when the tails of her shirt opened, everyone could see her her sweet little cotton-clad pussy.
So I blew up; just quietly exploded, thrust a 500p ($5) note into her hand and growled that she'd better get to the bulanon (ukay-ukay market) first thing in the morning, and get herself some new (and longer) shorts.

So what did the little minx do? She went straight up to Larry's Reef Break Shop (good website), where he has an enticing show of beachwear, and bought herself a grand new ensemble, plus a T-shirt and pair of short-short-shorts. The short-short-shorts have a hand-embroidered motto: "I AM A SIARGAO ISLAND SURF BITCH", and she blew the whole goddam' $5!

But she does look good in it, I must say.

And so thought Harry the Canadian Real Estate Millionaire, as he gazed, tongue lolling out, at that little area just below her collar bone.

Starting Out

This weblog will be an irregular notebook about my life (and occasional thoughts) on a small Pacific island, at the far right hand side of the Philippines. You can see what the place looks like at my website:
http://www.coconutstudio.com/GENERALLUNAfinX.htm

I change my obsessions with the seasons, and my current one is number systems in the Austronesian languages, of all things. I've been working on it for about four months now.

I thought, originally, that my findings would upset the entire current paradigm about the history of the people around me (the Austronesians), who managed to settle all the South East Asian islands, including the Philippines (where I live), Indonesia, and then went on to Easter Island, Hawaii, New Zealand, and west to Madagascar, just off the coast of East Africa.

Of course, I was wrong, but not all that wrong.

The Austronesian migrations were the widest spread of a distinctive human culture and anguage before the European expansions following the Age of Exploration in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The people who undertook this quite amazing migration share that culture and language with my island neighbours. Some of that culture is good; some very good, and some bad. (For a bit of the bad, see: http://www.coconutstudio.com/fishing%20expedition.htm).

I'll be writing a little about bits of that culture and language from time to time in this weblog. It will include random jottings that don't merit a full web page.