Arts_&_Crafts_IV: Ball Boy and Chocolate Man

Pottery: It’s time to be ambitious. 

(Ball Boy is an author photograph a piece of meso-American pottery from the Harvard Peabody Museum. Chocolate Man is from here.)

 

I’ve been interested in meso-American pottery for the entire last year. I’ve tried various things (see here.) with some success. I decided to actually attempt to replicate some forms.

 

Ball Boy is a container I found in the Harvard Peabody collection. I’m sad to say I don’t have the identifying information from the collection. Chocolate Man is a Mayan cacao container. Both are pre-colonial.

 

Let’s start with Ball Boy.

 

I actually wanted to get fairly close to Ball Boy’s actual appearance, including the painting. I decided to hand build him by using a puki as described by Andy Ward. Pukis are essentially molds that pottery is pressed into. This particular puki was a bowl that was roughly spherical shaped. Then, once I had the shape made and properly smoothed, I popped that one out and made the second one. Now, I had two halves of a ball. I “glued” them together with slip, clay wet to the point that it’s more liquid than solid. Once that was done, I tapped it into a spherical shape.

 

Then, I made the features and used slip, again, to glue them into place.

 

 

By the time I was done, I had to show him upside down since there was a hole at the top where he rested. I didn’t want to flatten the bottom.

 

 

Then, I put his legs on.

 

Now, I had to paint him. 

 

It’s already clear that I had made a few mistakes on the face. The biggest one was making the ball too small. The original Ball Boy was quite large—basketball sized. This ball was about the size of basketball, too—if it was a basketball for toddlers. This meant that the size of the features were too large in proportion to the ball. I decided to continue with it.

 

Ball boy has some interesting features. First, was his color. I mixed up some underglaze to what I thought would be the right color. A lot of times, the underglaze shows its true colors before firing. Not so much this time. 

 

What came out of bisque firing was interesting but not quite right. Bisque firing is low temperature. It’s enough to turn clay into ceramic but it’s not chemically complete for what we do at the Arts Center. It makes the pot strong enough to hold conveniently, paint, etc. 

 

It’s not always clear what the colors are going to look like until the glaze firing. The temperature is considerably hotter. Glazes take on a glass like consistency. True color comes out. What goes into a glaze firing—

 

 

—isn’t necessarily what comes out.

 

 

I had a different goal for Chocolate Man. At this point, I can’t hope to equal the amazing painting. But I did want to approximate the form.

 

Again, I used a puki. This time, it was a bucket. When you look at the form of the original Chocolate man, it’s essentially a bucket with legs and a top. Once I pulled it out of the puki, I had to smooth it and put handles and feet on it.

 

The top I turned on the wheel. It was just easier.

 

While I didn’t want the original paint job, Chocolate Man needed some kind of decoration.

 

I’ve been reading a lot about the Nazca Lines lately. These are geoglyphs: human made images using the earth as canvas. The Nazca Lines are particularly interesting. They are elaborate designs of animals, people, or plants made by removing the topsoil over intricate paths. 

 

I used a DIY decal technique I read about. I traced out the image I wanted and scanned it. Then, I reduced it to the size I wanted and printed it out on newsprint. Then, I took the image to the studio and carefully “inked” over it with red underglaze—I’ve been enjoying using the red underglaze for a while now. Once that was done, I let it dry. Then, I wet the surface of the unfired Chocolate Man and carefully sponged the image onto the target pot. The whole process is described here.

 

The nice thing about this technique is that you do it all on greenware. Then, it can be repaired or enhanced by working over the image at the bisque stage. Again, you never know what you’re going to get at the glaze stage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But it came out all right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Obviously, none of these are perfect. I could have done much better handles on Chocolate Man. The top doesn’t have the same conical shape as the original. Pretty much the original is better than the copy in every way.

 

I’m not happy with the eyes on Ball Boy. Ball Boy came out as more of a parody of the original than anything else. He’s laughing at me. I can tell.

 

Still. I’m getting there slowly.

 

 

State of the Farm: July, 2023

 We’ll start with the bad news. All of our chickens have been killed. 

 

This happened a little over a month ago but I haven’t brought it up. It takes a little time to process this scale of loss. This is not an emotional loss like that of a dog or cat—these chickens are livestock: egg layers with meat at the end. We treat them well but they are not pets.

 

We had 5 adult chickens. These were our main egg layers. We were considering “retiring” them—meaning, turn to meat—in the fall. But we hadn’t fully committed to that decision. We had 2 Delawares and 3 Bielefelders. The Delawares were great. Good layers all year round except when molting. The Bielefelders were more problematic. They weren’t great layers and they had a tendency to be “broody”—hens that would sit on eggs trying to hatch them. We had already tried letting one of those broody hens actually hatch a collection and that failed.

 

In addition to the 5 adult chickens, we had 8 young chickens ranging from six to eight inches in height. These were to be the replacement chickens. The plan was to retire the Bielefelders—they really weren’t producing and, maybe, try to get the adult Delawares and the young Delawares to live together.  The last idea was tricky as chickens have a tendency to peck intruding chickens to death.

 

We had moved the adult chickens to our auxiliary coop and put the young chickens in the main house. 

 

So, it’s early June and my wife comes in quite upset: all of the chickens are missing or dead. There is one largish chicken corpse left in the main coop and two bodies left in the auxiliary coop.

 

We’d had a major incursion about ten years ago when a bobcat tore apart the PVC framed coop I’d built. At that point we’d had four survivors: two in the PVC coop and two that had been safe in auxiliary coop. I had torn down the PVC coop and built Stalag-17, that main coop, and reinforced the auxiliary coop. I figured I’d learned my lesson: when you build something resembling a farm, to nature it looks like a great buffet. We’d already refenced the main garden and topped it with an electric wire to keep out deer on the top and rabbits on the bottom. 

 

I even reinforced the main coop with hardware cloth to keep out mice and such. 

 

Upon investigation, we found one corner of the main coop that I hadn’t covered with hardware cloth. There we found scraps of feathers. From the evidence, we concluded we’d been attacked by a family of weasels: the right size and the right behavior. The largest youngling just wouldn’t fit through the fencing.

 

The auxiliary was a bit tougher. The weasel scenario didn’t seem to apply since these chickens were ten to twelve pounds: much too large for the fence gaps. I finally found a corner where some of the old chicken wire had rotted away and the predator had enlarged into a hole. 

 

We’ve had chickens for close to thirty years. As I’ve mentioned, this isn’t the first-time nature came calling. But this time is different.

 

Our son moved back in to the house last year and stayed with us. Up to that point, we’d been having a daily breakfast of eggs. For the two of us, this almost exactly matched the chicken egg output. But he can’t eat dairy and, to me, eggs without cheese are not worth eating. On top of that, my wife went back into the office three times a week after the first of the year. Commute times being what they were, this precluded breakfast of any kind, much less eggs. The eggs stacked up.

 

My son moved out in the spring and we started making a dent in the eggs. We also made some egg bread and other egg-based treats. But we were still producing more eggs than we were consuming. 

 

Now, we have no eggs coming in at all.

 

The chickens aren’t a lot of work but they are work. They produce a material we don’t eat as much as we used to. There’s a certain minimum number of hens we need for them to survive the winter and that minimum produces more eggs than we consume. Added to that, the chief impediment for us to travel is the chickens. The greenhouse only takes a minimum of effort in the winter. The garden is only active during the summer. 

 

Over the last few years, the maximum time we can leave the homestead is a week. While this is fine for some locations, it doesn’t make any sense to travel all the way to, say, Greece with that constraint: 1 day travel there, ½ day to recover, 1 day travel back, to get 4.5 days of visit. When we visited China for nearly three weeks, it took a great deal of planning to get someone to take care of things while we were gone.

 

So, we’ve been discussing whether we want chickens at all. That’s going to be a discussion over the next year and we’ll make a decision next spring.

 

But the rest of the garden is doing very well.

 

The picture above shows the main garden: cabbage, cold weather crops, beans, melons, tomatoes, basil, peas, turnips, and sugar beets. The Japanese beetles  have made a come back this year. So far, they haven’t eaten everything down to the bone like they did previous years. But it’s been raining so much I haven’t been able to spray properly. 

 

While the whole peach family didn’t blossom this year, we did get blossoms on paw-paws, apples, quinces, pears, and grapes. Then, a strange little freeze came through in April and burnt the growing plants selectively—one part of a tree had frostburn and another part of the tree would be fine. All of this was near the main road. 

 

The main house never registered a temperature for an actual freeze but we’re about thirty feet higher than the road and the other side of the road is lower still. My hypothesis is that area got quite cold at the road and below but that didn’t get up to the trees. Then, a truck drove by or a light, morning breeze and strands of freezing air wound over the lower property.

 

Anyway, looks like we lost the paw-paws.

 

The June rains were warmer this year and the fruit trees and grapes loved that. Then, warm rains came and everything liked that. We’re on a hill so the water didn’t pool anywhere and the slope isn’t so great that we had washout. We packed the last of this year’s chicken manure around various plants and were richly rewarded. The grapes that have been low producing the last couple of years told me that this is what they were waiting for.

 

And the potatoes are huge. We planted about twenty pounds of seed potatoes and we’re hoping for a five-fold return. That’s the hope anyway.

 

There are some funguses that I need to watch. Several raised beds have strong, and poisonous, mushroom crops and there is some kind of brown wilt on the grapes. Some spraying is required and I’ll do that as soon as we get a string of sunny days. There are some beds that look like they have a nitrogen shortage so more manure needs to be distributed. We were going to plant some pumpkins but the stores didn’t have varieties we wanted so that moment has passed.

 

So, aside from the chickens, it’s been good so far.

The Problem of Heat

In these hot days I thought it might be interesting to talk about how animals deal with heat.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

I went into graduate school to study environmental physiology, got side tracked, and ended up in neurophysiology. Then, of course, went into software engineering as one does. 

 

Temperature is a problem for any organism. The enzymes, proteins, nucleic acids—essentially, the chemistry of life—operate in a relatively narrow range of temperature. This range is shifted up or down depending on the animal heritage and evolutionary history—some organisms live close to the boiling point of water. Others operate a hair’s breadth from water’s freezing point. But there is an optimal chemical temperature range for the cellular chemistry as a whole. Outside of that optimum, and cellular operations lose efficiency. Further outside, they fail. 

 

A good visual example is a chicken egg. It has a temperature range in which the egg remains nice and liquid—a fertile ground for another chicken. Cook it and the egg proteins congeal into a rubbery substance suitable for consumption. 

 

Thus, organisms work to maintain that optimum range if they can. Or they change their internal conditions to survive as spores or other dormant conditions. Or they trust to numbers that only a portion of the population dies. Or they go extinct.

 

Some complex animals—fish, clams, lizards, humans—have mobility and can modify the conditions with their behavior such as ascending or descending a water column, migrating to a different area, or, as I saw one heat-stressed sea lion do, piss themselves to cause evaporative cooling. 

 

Such complex animals have a complex problem with thermoregulation. Remember, I said the cell had an optimum temperature range for its chemistry as a whole. A complex organism has a larger problem in that it has an optimum temperature range for the chemistry of the entire organism. These optimum temperatures might be different for different tissues. Muscles have one temperature range. Brains have a different one. 

 

Animals fall, roughly, into two categories of thermoregulation: endothermic, where there are important mechanisms that keep the internal temperature constant in a changing world, and ectothermic, where temperature is maintained behaviorally or endured through physiological means.

 

This is very rough. Placental mammals are generally endothermic, though there are significant exceptions for animals that hibernate. Non-placental mammals —marsupials and monotremes—are endothermic but the maintained temperature range is looser. Birds are endothermic. Other vertebrates such as amphibians, fish, and reptiles, tend towards ectothermic. This isn’t universally true since tuna and some kinds of sharks have developed the capacity of keeping some tissue significantly warmer than the surrounding water. 

 

Whether dinosaurs were endothermic or not has been an ongoing debate for over a century. It seems that there is a sort of consensus that they were, sort of. Certainly, some dinosaurs might have been as endothermic as birds. But others—especially the large sauropods—might have just relied on unregulated activity to keep them warm enough. True endothermy is expensive and problematic.

 

Every chemical reaction creates waste heat. This means every heartbeat, thought, muscle movement, alcohol metabolism in the liver, produces heat. This is in addition to any metabolism that is used to maintain body temperature. Animals can handle cold. Penguins regularly handle -40C temperatures. They have biochemical and physiological mechanisms that enable them to do this. But they also have a raging endothermic furnace that keeps their insides warm. The problem there is to prevent heat loss to an unforgiving outside world.

 

Heat gain is a different problem. There are two main sources of heat in the endothermic body: inside and outside. The problem is to cool the inside from both sources. But in this case, the mechanism of getting rid of the heat produces heat.

 

This is one of the sources of runaway heat exhaustion leading to heat stroke. Consider the problem if heat intake from the environment: air temperature, solar or other infra-red radiation. The problem is how to lose heat that is generated internally in an environment where the outside temperature is higher than the inside temperature. 

 

Remember, the whole point of thermoregulation in endotherms is to keep a constant temperature. When sweat fails—as in a high humidity environment—the system can’t keep the outside temperature from driving up the inside temperature. Worse, all of those lovely thermoregulatory mechanisms such as sweating, increased heart beat and circulation, panting, generate heat, too. This all adds up. As long as there is a net heat loss, the system works. If the outside conditions change that to a heat gain—or the system fails as in sweat exhaustion where the glands give up—things get difficult.

 

In furred animals, fur serves as a barrier to heat intake—certainly it interferes with heat output, but if the net gain from that desert sun is prevented by the fur, it’s a win. It’s part of the reason for the clothing style in some desert cultures. The bet is that the heat not rejected by the fur or hair insulation is more than that gained by the retention of internal heat. 

 

We’re not furred animals. When we’re out in the hot sun it transmits that heat right onto us. Unless we’re wearing special clothes, we take that heat in.

 

Humans do this in two ways: sweating and behavior. 

 

Sweating is astonishingly effective when it works. People talk about a “dry heat.” What they mean is it’s a heat state where sweat works. If the humidity is 5% in the desert, that sweat evaporation is often sufficient to keep much hotter temperatures at bay. Picking a number at random, let’s say a 98.6F human needs to keep the skin temperature at about 70F for a net heat loss maintaining that internal temperature. As the temperature climbs—maintaining low humidity—the human can keep ahead of heat stroke as long as the sweat production can evaporate that skin to 70F. 

 

The curve for that is fairly long in humans. In an effective 0% humidity, Army experiments were able to keep humans alive in an oven well in excess of any earthly temperature. (See here. I looked for the original paper and couldn’t find it but this high temp (~248F) is close to what I recall from Knut Schmidt-Nielsen’s excellent book, How Animals Work. The studies were done during and after WW II by the Army.) However, survivability drops quickly with increasing humidity to the point that a 95F temperature at 100% humidity is likely fatal.

 

This is what makes the current heat wave down south so incredibly dangerous. It’s hot and humid. In addition, many of the more dangerous places are heat islands, areas that by virtue of buildings, human activities, or reduced natural landscapes, magnify the problem. Buckminster Fuller once pointed out that the skyscraper structure of New York City resembled a heat sink—a attachment to a heat producing device that increases the surface area in order to radiate waste heat. In the summer, each building is not only reflecting solar heat on those outside, but also radiating its own heat from lights or air conditioning. Thus, the air temperature outside the city might be many degrees cooler than the city itself. Take New York City and transplant it to southern Texas and you have Houston.

 

Which brings us to the second mechanism: behavior. Humans have a huge range of possible behaviors from summering up in Maine, going inside to the air conditioner or under the shade of a tree, jumping in the pool, to drinking ice water. Other animals do the same, hiding in the shade during the heat of the day. 

 

Just like humans can engage in behavior to protect themselves from the heat, they’re also smart enough to engage in behavior that exacerbates the problem. Like going to a baseball game, drinking alcohol, working outside when it’s dangerously hot. 

 

So be smart and take this stuff seriously.