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  Its harder to be tricked by the Devil when you can play the guitar as well as Ry Cooder. Here's the scene from the movie Crossroads where Steve Vai & Ry Cooder play the music for the hero's electric guitar duel with the Devil. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD4o3VDnftI #TrickOrTreat #JukeboxFridayNight #RyCooder

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  I was on an exciting meeting this morning of the iNaturalist Network. That's the consortium of 21 country nodes (and growing) that use the iNaturalist platform for their biodiversity recording. Until now, we've been a somewhat informal group, each working with iNaturalist to facilitate its use in our countries (e.g., iNaturalist NZ is at inaturalist.nz and defaults to NZ's people, places, and species). This morning we moved things up several notches by establishing a fo...

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  It's Day 28 of the Ink-Birdtober challenge, and the prompts are the bearded vulture and "trophy". I initially thought, "ha ha, let's do a bird winning a trophy in the best beard competition." Then I looked at photos of bearded vultures and, no, these birds are about as metal as they come. Their diet is mostly bone and they look bad ass. This bird ain't performing for any trophy. This bird knows it's the boss. #Birdtober #Inkt...

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  For the #PlayTime theme for #JukeBoxFridayNight, here's Jack Johnson performing Yusuf / Cat Stevens' classic "Where do the children play?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlYydA4KMcc

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  Here’s the instrumental track, “All Winter”, by Duke Boara, for the #PeaceAndCalm theme for this week’s #JukeboxFridayNight https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7JP6UzIX0c

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  Here's Hania Rani playing her track Komeda live for KEXP. Just incredible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H24NfGngaIc #PianoMusic #JukeboxFridayNight

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  For the theme #AWiderWorld for #JukeboxFridayNight, here's Swara-Kakali from Menuhin Meets Shankar, featuring Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar with America classical violinist Yehudi Menuhin. My Dad used to play this when I was young (intermixed with Zeppelin and the Stones). It's still good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKrmkFcyAy0 #classicalMusic #IndianMusic

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  Here's last night's sunset from Ōtautahi-Christchurch, NZ. The day ended with a thick easterly cloud bank across the city and Canterbury Plains but the sun did its best to peak through (spectacularly). I just uploaded my favourite two photos to Flickr. Pop over there if you want to see the full-resolution versions. https://www.flickr.com/photos/mollivan_jon/55551454051/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/mollivan_jon/55550427537/ #sunset #nz #Ōtautahi #Christchurch #photography

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  Here’s Dick Gaughan performing Pete Seeger’s “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” live in 2001 for the #dirty theme for #JukeboxFridayNight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZYCQVdtLYU #DickGaughan #PeteSeeger #livemusic

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  The music I find most powerful is the music that I don’t understand and briefly transports me to some bigger, different place. For the #PersonalPlaylist theme for #JukeboxFridayNight here’s an old example of a song I keep coming back to when I need to shove my brain away from normal: “Maze” by Mari Boine and Liu Sola, with Pol Brennan on the beats. That’s Norwegian Sami musician Mari Boine, Chinese classical vocalist Liu Sola, and Irish folk musician Pol Brennan (from Clannad), brought togethe...

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  Here are two reminders from my bike commute today that, despite all the recent high profile hand wringing in the NZ media about e-scooters, these are not the big reason why the streets of our cities are dangerous. Of course it's all the cars. It's a choice that we design our cities like this. #nz #roads #Transport #UrbanDesign

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  For the #History theme for this week's #JukeBoxFridayNight, here's "Prisoner" by Scottish folk singer Dick Gaughan. My father introdued me to this song and it's stuck with me. At the time I'd known nothing of German Nobel Peace Prize winner Carl von Ossietzky and his fate. Caution: it's a grim song, with an uneasy message. We cannot let this history repeat. "In the struggle against injustice He fought hard and he fought long Child - remember Ossietsky Peace w...

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  Here's the House Band's cover of Richard Thompson"s "Pharoah" "Pharaoh he sits in his tower of steel Around his feet the princes kneel Far beneath we shoulder the wheel We're all working for the Pharaoh" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ctVMkIOGGY #JukeBoxFridayNight #Royalty #TheHouseBand #RichardThompson

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  The curator of our university Entomology museum, John Marris, excitedly popped into my office earlier today to share this neat new study on ant-associated beetles, by Yu-Cheng Feng and colleagues. These small beetles live inside ant nests. Not only have they evolved cunning ways to co-exist with the ants, but they have also evolved *handles* to help the ants carry them about. The phyologeny of the subfamily Chlamydopsinae suggests that these beetles have independently evolved ant handles severa...

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  Jack Tame has a fantastic interview with Professor Marco te Brömmelstroet from the University of Amsterdam on how to make city streets better and do much more for societies than move people around in private cars. The biggest threat to children's lives in western societies is car traffic. There are other options. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPIjaWFrC5Q #nz #UrbanPlanning #BikeTooter #LessCars #cities #TVNZ #JackTame

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  On Thursday I watched this tarāpunga (NZ Red-billed Gull) on the edge of the ocean repeatedly doing a slow shuffle dance in the wet sand. It would shuffle its feet to make a wet puddle then stop and eat whatever little invertebrates rose to the surface. Then it would do its dance steps again. Definitely full marks for style and smarts. https://flic.kr/p/2stT4kF https://www.inaturalist.nz/observations/389180275 #birds #seagull #nz #beach #Chroicocephalus #gulls #AnimalBehaviour

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  The latest edition of the #PBS News show Horizons has an excellent piece on a science study published in Nature last month that found that over half of migratory birds globally are now in decline. Most of the show is a thoughtful interview with the lead author of that research, Peter Marra. The interview is quite sobering, although I appreciate Peter's hopeful response that birds have rebounded from stupid things we've done before (over-hunting of egrets and herons for feathers for hats...

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  It’s fantastic to learn that tiger numbers are surging, the result of many years of conservation being done right in Nepal and China. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/blog/tiger-population-surges-past-400-in-one-of-the-greatest-wildlife-comebacks-of-our-time/ #nature #PBSNature #wildlife #tigers #BigCats #conservation

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  “Slide” by Salmonella Dub “This time it can simply slide” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnadpyfMEIk #JukeBoxFridayNight #Waiting #NZMusic

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  Today I did my monthly biodiversity survey by bike along the Summit Road of the Port Hills of Ōtautahi-Christchurch, NZ. And, along it I found the first ever Canterbury record, and second South Island record, of the toatoa bud gall mite, *Aceria victoriae*. 😀 These native mites make distinctive galls on the NZ native plant, toatoa (*Haloragis erecta*). Yet, after they were described as a species from specimens collected in Wellington in 1956/57, nobody recorded them. That is, until Nicholas Ma...

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  Most of my afternoon today was spent in #QGIS with one of my Masters students Dee Patel. We're preparing my long-term bird monitoring data around Christchurch, NZ, for analysis. Today we gridded up my four standard bike transects into 1 km sections, surrounded by approximately 1 km square polygons. Dee's particularly interested in how the conversion of farmland to urban housing affects birds. Next Dee will be doing some clever analysis of my distance sampled bird counts to estimate th...

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  @rnzbot_political What a strange half-article to be headlining the #RNZ website, since it summarises ACT’s new policy without giving any historical context or conservationists’ views. I accept that game animals like deer are a valued resource in NZ and there need to be places to hunt them. Still, that cannot be the whole country. There are plenty of well documented and often massive impacts that deer, goats, tahr, and chamois have on the native species they eat, and many of these species are th...

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  This evening we discovered concert pianist Lord Vinheteiro’s unexpected prowess on the rubber chicken. Here’s his performance of Ah-ha’s “Take on me”. Hot or cold? 😄 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6uxMXaJoqc #JukeBoxFridayNight #HotOrCold

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  Here's NZ's Southern Alps at sunrise this morning, as seen from Ōtautahi-Christchurch city. My wife described the sky as "mega-pink." My camera isn't quite doing justice to the intense pinkness of it all. I've just uploaded my big versions onto Flickr if you want to zoom in and get lost in them. https://flic.kr/p/2sqE94B https://flic.kr/p/2sqDvhZ https://flic.kr/p/2sqFvm6 https://flic.kr/p/2sqDvhP #sunrise #nz #photography #Flickr

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  Here's something different for #JukeboxFridayNight."Katariina" by Finnish band Värttinä, set to an animated video by Noar Lee Naggan at some kind of village fair. I was lucky to see Värttinä live in Philadelphia many year ago and they were amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsOfUyh8EP0 #MarketsAndFairs #Värttinä

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  The moon seemed pleased to be setting this evening in Ōtautahi-Christchurch, NZ. 😀 🌙 https://flic.kr/p/2spfmQi #Moon #NZ #photography

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  This week was the 18th birthday of fortnightly run route through southwestern Ōtautahi-Christchurch, NZ. This is my 10.1 km route where I've been counting and mapping all the birds and butterflies and assorted other species. I started the route on 9 July 2008, while on parental leave, pushing my baby daughter around in a buggy during her afternoon nap. I wanted her to be able to know how the city's nature changes over her lifetime. I've been doing it ever since (and have added three...

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  Here's Midnight Oil live in 2018 performing "Power and Passion" "People, wasting away in paradise Going backward, once in a while Moving ahead, falling behind What do you believe, what do you believe What do you believe is true" "It's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-_s2UzdSek #PowerPlay #JukeBoxFridayNight

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  Here’s Nina Simone’s classic "Sinnerman” for the #PowerPlay theme for this week's #JukeBoxFridayNight. It's an old African American traditional spiritual song arranged by Nina. But the Lord said "Go to the Devil" All on that day So I ran to the Devil He was waitin' I cried, power, power https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r57J0jPyZRs #NinaSimone

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  Of all the headlines to all the internet articles you read today, can you top this one? "Two million years of Llamas" (It's an accurate title too, although the article's author @JKRevell@mastodonapp.uk goes on to clarify that they're "technically referred to as lamins", being the domesticated llama and alpaca, and their respective wild ancestors, the guanaco and vicuña.) Read on if you want the latest llama learnings. http://synapsida.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-...