Stories from my life.
From Huben's Wiki
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My mother joked that she was a little disappointed that I didn't ask her to walk me to my Harvard extension school courses, holding my hand as she did in Kindergarten. I responded: "Children grow up so quickly nowadays." It tickled her just right, and she roared with laughter. I love when I can play along with and top a jest. | My mother joked that she was a little disappointed that I didn't ask her to walk me to my Harvard extension school courses, holding my hand as she did in Kindergarten. I responded: "Children grow up so quickly nowadays." It tickled her just right, and she roared with laughter. I love when I can play along with and top a jest. | ||
| − | ==Birds of Paradise== | + | ==First trip to Ecuador, 1987-8== |
| + | Local buses used to be much more colorful than the current modern buses. I rode on the top of one listening to the locals discussing the communist candidates. Another time, in one of the coach-style buses that were open on the sides, a woman in front held her little boy so he could pee off the side, and it blew back into our faces. In another bus, a little boy sat next to me and stroked the hair on my arm. He said: “como un mono!” I replied, stroking his arm: “como una rana!, and we both laughed. | ||
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| + | The soda boats don’t seem to be operating now either. They were 40 foot long dugouts that would carry Coca Cola between major cities on the Rio Napo. You had to bring a cushion, because sitting on the cases of bottles could cost you your virginity (not to mention being very uncomfortable.) At one stop, a very young indigenous child was crying. His older brother grabbed his mother’s breast and squirted his little brother. :-) | ||
| + | ==Harvard Stories== | ||
| + | I hung out at Harvard, predominantly at the Museum of Comparative Zoology Entomology Department, hanging out with a number of famous entomologists including Stefan Cover, Lynn Kimsey, Scott Shaw, Al Newton, Margaret Thayer, Jim Carpenter, and numerous others. I spent a lot of time working in E. O. Wilson's ant collection room on my [[Evaniidae]]. | ||
| + | ===Tea=== | ||
| + | I sometimes attended the high teas run by | ||
| + | ===Birds of Paradise=== | ||
I went to the Harvard MCZ one night to attend a guest lecture about Birds of Paradise, which are a showy group from New Guinea. I happened to sit right behind two of Harvard's most famous biologists, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson E. O. Wilson] (who wrote Sociobiology and invented Island Biogeography) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Mayr Ernst Mayer] (considered the father of the evolutionary New Synthesis and the biological species concept.) Mayer was about 100 years old then, but his early work included a major expedition to New Guinea to collect and study birds, including Birds of Paradise. I've got a personal policy of never speaking to an important person unless I had something to say that I thought would interest them. Thus, while I'd spoken to Wilson a few times, I'd never introduced myself to Mayer. | I went to the Harvard MCZ one night to attend a guest lecture about Birds of Paradise, which are a showy group from New Guinea. I happened to sit right behind two of Harvard's most famous biologists, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson E. O. Wilson] (who wrote Sociobiology and invented Island Biogeography) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Mayr Ernst Mayer] (considered the father of the evolutionary New Synthesis and the biological species concept.) Mayer was about 100 years old then, but his early work included a major expedition to New Guinea to collect and study birds, including Birds of Paradise. I've got a personal policy of never speaking to an important person unless I had something to say that I thought would interest them. Thus, while I'd spoken to Wilson a few times, I'd never introduced myself to Mayer. | ||
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So I was listening to their conversation during the talk, and when one species of Bird of Paradise was on the screen, Mayer leans over to Wilson and says: "And them's good eating too!" (Old time naturalists in the bush would make skins and skulls/skeletons of their specimens, but eat the rest to save on provisions.) I would have loved to hear what the speaker and audience would have thought if they had overheard Mayer. | So I was listening to their conversation during the talk, and when one species of Bird of Paradise was on the screen, Mayer leans over to Wilson and says: "And them's good eating too!" (Old time naturalists in the bush would make skins and skulls/skeletons of their specimens, but eat the rest to save on provisions.) I would have loved to hear what the speaker and audience would have thought if they had overheard Mayer. | ||
| − | ==Lou Roth== | + | ===Lou Roth=== |
Lou Roth was the foremost authority on cockroaches in the world. He was best known for his enormous book, The Biotic Associations of Cockroaches. Most of his life he worked in a lab for the US government, but I knew him after his retirement when he was a Harvard Museum Associate and worked daily in an office there. We talked a lot because he was very approachable and because I study Evaniidae, which are parasites of cockroach egg cases. | Lou Roth was the foremost authority on cockroaches in the world. He was best known for his enormous book, The Biotic Associations of Cockroaches. Most of his life he worked in a lab for the US government, but I knew him after his retirement when he was a Harvard Museum Associate and worked daily in an office there. We talked a lot because he was very approachable and because I study Evaniidae, which are parasites of cockroach egg cases. | ||
