We celebrated Lunar New Year in Vancouver, staying on Granville Island and partying in the suburb of Richmond.
The large Chinese population in that city insured we'd see a lion dance, and because this is the Year of the Dragon, a wonderful
dragon dance. A team of ten very athletic men put on a vigorous dance with a fifty foot long dragon puppet. Afterwards,
the dragon danced through the assembled crowd, where this brave woman tried (unsuccessfully) to stop it.
Stop, Dragon!
News & Notes
As this is the first post of 2024, we would normally summarize our holiday celebrations, but we unfortunately both got a mild case of Covid-19, probably the JN.1 variant. So, we avoided socializing. Dan was home for the holidays, and also got it. It was an uneventful close to a very eventful year.
With great sadness we report that our friend and sister-in-law, Julie Jane Myers Shadle died peacefully at her Libby MT home in December. Julie was a kind, caring, generous woman, wife of Jim and mother of Stacy [Christie], Stephanie [Paradee] and Eric. She applied her great interest and talent in music to playing the organ in church and the clarinet in several long-running ensambles. Her degree from Iowa State University in Home Economics provided the knowlege and skill to be the perfect hostess to the delight of all her guests. "Huckleberry pie for dessert" was one of her best lines. We remember many happy times with her, skiing, back-packing, traveling to Europe, holiday celebrations, canoeing and camping, and ... down time, chatting and watching the river go by. She's been our Sunshine.
Julie Jane Myers Shadle (1941-2023)
When we returned from several weeks living in Florence Italy in 2017, we posted a web page titled The Annunciation in Renaissance Art showing our photos of paintings depicting that Bible story of Gabriel announcing to Mary that she would be Jesus's mother. Seeing dozens of artists interpreting that event over centuries revealed not only fascinating developments in representational art but cultural and religious trends, too. As we've continued to travel, we continued to see more Annunciations. And they, too, push the limits of variety and imagination. So, we've assembled another page, The Annunciation 2.0, that acknowledges the Renaissance, but then busts out.
A Newly Added Annunciation Painting in version 2.0
Dan and his co-authors (Carol J. Burrow and Susan Turner) just finished a substantial paper for his field's top publication, The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology: "A new gyracanthid from the Mississippian of Delta, Iowa, U.S.A.". In case you don't have a doctorate in Paleontology and years of research experience, the gyracanthidae are a family of extinct fish [Wikipedia] belonging to the class Acanthodii, known from early Devonian to late Carboniferous; members are characterized by large, broad-based, paired fin spines with the pectoral fin spines having a distinct longitudinal curvature.
Is This A Fish That Crawled Up Onto Land? Science Marches On
L visited Dan over Presidents Day weekend. The guys worked on a couple of projects, like assembling his grill and building a raised bed for gardening. A fun benefit of small town life is the Volunteer Fire Department charity breakfast, which by the end of the morning had probably attracted the entire citizenry. Of course, hanging out together was the main point of the visit.
Saturday Breakfast with the Volunteer Firemen
One last thing. It's the year of the dragon, so merchants in Richmond were selling "dragon dolls." Notice the features of the "dragons" in this display, and compare the dolls to the dragon used in the Dragon Dance. The dolls have the horns, they have the thin mustache and side whiskers, wild eyebrows, and an open mouth, though not always with teeth. Girl dragons have a little tiara of pearls. Curiously, they all seem to wear pants. Now, no one can be sure what a dragon looks like, so we're not saying these dolls are wrong. It's just, one looks more ferocious than the others.
An Assortment of Dragon Dolls
