Komodo Dragon

            On Wednesday morning my computer did not scream at me and refuse to start like it had the day before. On Tuesday it seemed to have been because my keyboard was plugged in. Perhaps when I replugged it I had put it into a different usb port. For whatever reason I was glad to not have the hassle this time.

I finished working out the chords for “Si ca peut te consoler" (If it’s any Consolation) by Serge Gainsbourg and began posting it on Christian’s Translations.

In the late morning I did my laundry and while it was in the wash I rode to Freshco to buy grapes. I had expected a line-up but there was none this time. There probably will be tomorrow when the shopping week begins.

I started listening to the U2 discography. From the very first song on their first album in 1980 they’d established their sound, and disappointingly they haven’t deviated very far from it ever since.

I brought my laundry home just before lunch.

I had my last slice of roast beef on a sandwich with cheese, cucumber and mustard.

In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish is in charge of the $380 that has been collected to pay for the annual lodge picnic. But Kingfish wants to find ways to spend less on the picnic so he can pocket the rest of the money. He decides to buy two week old buns and he instructs Andy that when people buy a hot dog he should palm the hot dog and then fill the bun up with sauerkraut and mustard so no one will notice there is no hot dog. Instead of paying $150 to rent a beach space by the seaside he finds a free park by a lake up the Hudson near West Point. But what he doesn’t realize is that the army is using that park for a mortar range. When they open fire everyone heads for the busses. They are all mad at Kingfish but he says he will refund all of their money. He doesn’t tell them that he is able to do that because after the incident he told the army that he was a farmer and that they had killed seven head of his cattle. They gave him $700 on the spot.

After that I took a bike ride up to Bloor, east to Yonge, down to Queen and home. There were not many cars out but in some places like Yonge and Bloor and Yonge and College there were quite a few pedestrians. Yonge-Dundas Square and the area in front of Eaton’s Centre, which is usually full of buskers and preachers, was empty. South of Dundas there wasn’t even much pedestrian traffic. Nathan Philips Square was also pretty sparse in terms of people.

            There were a few homeless people living in the doorways of Yonge Street stores that had been forced to close during this quarantine because they were considered non-essential. I suspect that when the weather gets warmer there will be more and more homeless people squatting on storefronts.

When I got home I’d worked up an appetite but dinner was two hours away. I was glad I’d bought grapes earlier.

For dinner I had the last of my bacon, an egg and a naan with a beer while watching David Attenborough’s "Zoo Quest".

I viewed the final part of “Quest for a Dragon". Before westerners first saw a Komodo dragon in 1912 the largest lizard they knew of was the monitor lizard. When David was on his way through Bali to Komodo he managed to capture a monitor. At the beginning of the program he shows the young, metre long lizard in the studio and tells us that in adulthood it will reach two metres in length. The Komodo dragon however can be as large as four metres long.

They had planned on sailing from Bali to Komodo but the trade winds would have been blowing against them and so they had to take a plane to 322 kilometres east of  Komodo in order to sail back west to get to the island. They rented a small fishing boat captained by a man and two boys. The captain refused to be filmed and he also turned out to be deaf. One night David woke up to the sound of grinding and discovered that the ship had sailed into a coral reef. After they were free of the reef David asked the captain how long it would take them to get to Komodo. The captain said, “I don’t know." David asked, "You've been there haven't you?" The captain answered, "No." David said, "But you know where it is, don't you?” The captain responded, “No, I though you knew.” Fortunately David had a map and they positioned themselves according to the southern cross. Later when David asked the captain to catch some fish for them he told him he didn’t have any fishing equipment, even though David had the impression from the start that he was a fisherman. After three hours of pushing themselves with poles away from treacherous whirlpools that the captain did not know how to deal with, they made it to Komodo. There was only one small and very poor village of thirty houses where David came ashore. David went to speak with the village leader who told him that one of the dragons had killed a villager a few months earlier. The leader, known as a “patingi" informed David that his captain wasn't much good. David already knew that but he learned that the captain’s main occupation was smuggling machine guns from Singapore to the rebel army in Celebes. He also told David that the captain had already tried to recruit three men from the village to come with him when they leave Komodo because that way he would have enough manpower to overwhelm, David, his cameraman and his helper so they could steal their money and equipment. But the villagers were not interested in leaving the island.

David learned that what the dragons most like to eat are goats and so the patingi sold him two carcasses. The jungle was full of the calls of cockatoos. When they made camp they roasted one of the goats in order to attract the dragon. They put the meat in a dry riverbed and they watched it from a distance. The dragon arrived along with a much smaller young one. The adult was three metres long. It tried to drag the goat away but they'd tied the corpse to a stake so it would have to eat it there. This had just been an experiment to see if the dragons were there and so before it ate too much of the bait they shouted to scare it away. Then they began to build a trap taught to him by the Dayaks of Borneo using materials cut from the jungle and a piece of rope. They put the remains of the goat inside of it and when the dragon returned it went for it and was trapped inside.

Next we are back in the studio in London at the point when David would normally be showing the viewer the animal that he has captured. We discover that the whole several episodes of this quest turned out to be a lizard tease, since because of bureaucracy David was not able to get a permit to bring the dragon out of Indonesia. So Attenborough is the first person to capture a Komodo dragon and the exhibit at the London Zoo is named after David but it was not until years later that someone else brought one back.

I watched the first part of the “Quest to Madagascar". Although it is an island bigger than all the British Isles off the east coast of Africa it has no typical African animals but rather its own unique fauna. It also has different climates. It has volcanoes to the north, mountains further south, jungle south of that and desert at the bottom of the island. Seven hundred years ago Marco Polo believed it was the home of a giant bird called the ruhk, which we have all read about in the tales of Sindbad the Sailor. Enormous eggs from the bird were rumoured to have been found. David began at the southern tip of the island to look for a ruhk’s egg because it was there that egg fragments were supposed to have been found. While exploring the dried up bed of a river he found small fragments of egg one centimetre thick. As he dug some more he found larger pieces. While David was looking a boy suddenly appeared to watch him with curiosity. He looked at David like he was crazy as he tried to explain what he was doing. Later when David was trying to piece together the jigsaw of the egg fragments to see if any of them had been part of a single egg, the boy showed up and gave him several large pieces that really had once been part of one egg. David put them together and they formed an egg about three times the size of a volley ball. The birds that laid these eggs died out three hundred and fifty years ago but they did not fly as Marco Polo imagined but were more like gigantic ostriches over three metres tall.

Madagascar is also known as the "Land of the lemurs" because there are twenty types of them there. Lemurs are believed to be directly descended from the evolutionary ancestors monkeys. In a strange forest not far from where David found the egg he saw a population of white lemurs known as sifakas. They live at the tops of ten metre tall plants called didiereas that only exist in Madagascar. The didierea is a stalk covered with sharp thorns and only at the very top is a crown of flowers. The sifakas live at the top and can leap thirteen metres from stalk to stalk. Their back jumping limbs are so long that it’s almost impossible for them to walk on the ground and so they have to jump along the ground with their feet together. Most lemurs can make a wide variety of vocal noises but the sifakas only sometimes produces one sneezing sound. Their food comes from trees only found in Madagascar and so they made no attempt to catch them.