Every year the number of songs I keep gets smaller and smaller, but I love the little unexpected miracles all that much more. In a world of manufactured stars and packaged entertainment, it's the surprises that creep out of nowhere and make you smile that you cling to.

Here is the most interesting bits of the last 400 songs.

Song	Artist	Album
Clementine	Sarah Jaffe	Suburban Nature
Freedom	Tyrone Wells	Where We Meet
Headlong Into The Abyss	We Are Augustines	Rise Ye Sunken Ships
Burning Up The Sky	The Parson Red Heads	Field Mouse Carnival - EP
You'll Be Mine	The Pierces	You & I
Song For Love	Plants and Animals	The End of That
You, Me & The Boatman	Quiet Company	We Are All Where We Belong
Mean Kind of Blues	Rachel Brooke	Down In the Barnyard
Memories From A Shore	Right Away, Great Captain!	The Eventually Home
Paper Tiger	Rosi Golan	Lead Balloon
Wild	Royal Teeth	Act Naturally - EP
Heavy Ceiling	Said the Whale	Little Mountain
Never Felt Better	Salim Nourallah	Hit Parade
Soma Kijana	Sauti Sol	Sauti Sol - Sol Filosofia
Dots On Maps	Say Hi	Um, Uh Oh
Like A Fool	Schuyler Fisk	Blue Ribbon Winner
So Within	Seryn	This Is Where We Are
Breaking the Yearlings	Shearwater	Animal Joy
Sun's Going Down	Shimmering Stars	Violent Hearts
The Garden	Solander	Passing Mt. Satu
Mexico	The Staves	Mexico - Single
Being Me	The Strange Familiar	Chasing Shadows
Honey Bee	Tea Leaf Green	Radio Tragedy
Si	Torreblanca	Bella Epoca
Portraits	Wheeler Brothers	Portraits
Kindness	Will Dailey & The Rivals	Will Dailey & The Rivals
Minxy	Winterpills	All My Lovely Goners

The caribou. Another in my series of Arctic animals.

I believe that we will be too far north, too far out on the ice, to see caribou on the trip in June. The rest of the group is talking about taking a trip next May to see the caribou migration where the deers as massed from horizon to horizon.

In 4 weeks, I will be standing in Ponds Inlet (or I'm told the original Inuit name is Tununeq) on Baffin Bay. And since I can't seem to find any nature books about the animals of the Arctic (marine and/or otherwise) that are not picture books for children, all based on the theme of "look at the wonderful not-really-understood creatures that used exist before your parents killed them with their automobiles and automatic toasters", I've sketched my own narwhal.

Two thirds through this year's SXSW RSS feed of songs (and just don't you don't think I've gone soft, this batch is a little bigger because I also included the NPR top 100 picks into the mix — which because they were curated were a better selection). These were the songs I thought were most interesting.

And to answer the question of why do I push my way through hundreds of songs when I'm going to throw most of them away, is that once this music bomb of 1300 songs gets put on the iPod and the iPod gets put into "Shuffle Songs" mode, those 600, 700 songs that are truly terrible are going to get in the way, they're going to keep coming up in the rotation until you clear them out, and you'll never know what you have and haven't listened to unless you go at it in an organized way. But the reward is that of the 54 songs out of the first 900 songs I've listened to and marked as good songs, only 15 of them are by artists that I already knew about.

Song	Artist	Album
Presidents' Song	Adam Arcuragi	Like A Fire That Consumes All Before It
The Stars In the Sky	The Black Watch	Led Zeppelin Five
Lost & Found	Eve 6	Speak In Code
Wait So Long	Motion City Soundtrack	Wait So Long / Disappear - Single
San Francisco	The Mowgli's	San Francisco 7" - Single
1957	Milo Greene	Milo Greene
Everyone Talks	Neon Trees	Picture Show
Little Talks	Of Monsters and Men	My Head Is an Animal
The Race	The Ragbirds	Travelin' Machine
Sleep	Allen Stone	Allen Stone
Metal Man	Electric Eel Shock
Punchline	The Farewell Drifters	Echo Boom
What I Wouldn't Do	A Fine Frenzy	Bomb In a Birdcage
Chasing a Rabbit	Folk Family Revival	Unfolding
I Must Be the Devil	Glambilly	White BBQ Sauce
Goodnight Moon	Go Radio	Lucky Street
I Want It So Bad	The Gourds	Old Mad Joy
Find Someone Else	The Greatcoats	Find Someone Else - Single
Never That Easy	Green Corn Revival	Say You're a Sinner
Finding Something To Do	Hellogoodbye	Would It Kill You?
I Told You Once	Howler	This One's Different - EP
Fireworks	Hudson Moore	Fireworks
Don't Break The Needle	J Roddy Walston & The Business	J Roddy Walston & The Business
Harlem River Blues	Justin Townes Earle	Harlem River Blues
Any Love (Cassandra Et Lune)	Ken Stringfellow	Soft Commands
Long Way Home (Back To New Orleans)	Los Po-Boy-Citos	Brand New Dance
Start To Go	Lukas Nelson & Promise Of The Real	Promise Of The Real
Submarines	The Lumineers	The Lumineers
One Of These Days	Lynhurst	One Of These Days - EP
The Half	Maya Azucena	Cry Love
Can't No Grave Hold My Body Down	Mike Farris	Salvation In Lights
Black Keys (Single Mix)	The Minutes	Black Keys (Single Mix) - Single
Wither On the Vine, Pt. 2	The Old Ceremony	Tender Age

Oh, once again I downloaded the music bomb from Google's SXSW 2012 music feed, 1219 music files. Every year I stagger through the list, deleting furiously, swearing that this is the last year I do it. The sweet discoveries, the songs that you're going to catch yourself humming as you do the dishes and take out the trash. The songs that you go "oh, yeah" when they come up in the middle of your workout. The songs that when they come on in the car, you think, sure, I could just miss that next turn on the way to work and keep driving. They are hard to find.

I'm a third of the way in, 400 songs to the wind, and here are the ones I thought were interesting...

Song	Artist	Album
Entrance Song	The Black Angels	Phosphene Dream
No War	Campodonico	Waxahachie
Richardson	Diego's Umbrella	Richardson / Downtown - Single
Coal War	Joshua James	Build Me This
Eyeoneye	Andrew Bird	Break It Yourself
It's Around You	ANR	Stay Kids
Where Not To Look For Freedom	The Belle Brigade	The Belle Brigade
Beautiful	Ben Caplan & The Casual Smokers
Mullein People	Boris McCutcheon & the Salt Licks	Wheel of Life
Best Year	Callaghan	Best Year - Single
Goldstar	Cashier No. 9	Goldstar - Single
Blackberry Light	Charlie Mars
La Danza del Millonario	Chicha Libre
Shoeboxes	David Ramirez	Strangetown
One Foot in the Grave	Head for the Hills	Head for the Hills
Hymn #76	Joe Pug	The Great Despiser
Zapata se Queda	Lila Downs	Pecados y Milagros
No Death	Mirel Wagner	Mirel Wagner

The books I read through the bright warm winter.

1. The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia by Anna Reid from my Russian reading list.
2. The Rum Diary: A Novel by Hunter S. Thompson
3. The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 by Laura Furman
4. Belzoni: The Giant Archeologists Love to Hate by Ivor Noel Hume
5. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce from my Modern Library Top 100 reading list
6. The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
7. Alice in Deadland by Mainak Dhar
8. The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
9. The Odditorium: Stories by Melissa Pritchard
10. Death in the City of LIght: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris by David King from my Paris reading list
11. Cloud Atlas: A Novel by David Mitchell
12. Eye of the Whale: Epic Passage From Baja to Siberia by Dick Russell
13. Paris Under the Occupation by Jean-Paul Sartre from my Paris reading list
14. Twilight in Italy by D.H. Lawrence
15. An Unexpected Twist by Andy Borowitz
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley from my Modern Library Top 100 reading list

I'm keeping my reviews and reading list here at Goodreads.com. Friend me there if you want to see what I'm reading now.

Every morning at breakfast we sat and watched the osprey that nested behind the camp as they flew in from the ocean with the fish to feed their young. And what I noticed was that each fish in the osprey's talons was facing forward, head first in an very aerodynamic way. And we joked about the fish's WTF reaction.



Now Janis claimed she saw on fish hanging backward in an osprey's talons, but I missed this. And I could find no evidence on the web of whether some scientist had done a study on how osprey gripe their food. Certainly a majority of the osprey griped their fish face forward which must mean that they juggle them in-flight after catching them.



We took the last boat ride for the trip out to the whale watching grounds. Again, I took a short video.



It was a beautiful morning, finally the warm soft Mexican morning we'd packed for, the puffy white clouds on the horizon, the warm breeze on your cheeks. The rainy cold front was finally gone. But we only had one last boat ride / whale watch before we had to catch the plane back north. We paid off our debts, packed our luggage and headed out.

  



The sea was full of spy hopping whales. As if they were jumping in joy for the sunshine and the calm warm water. Gray whales spy hop further out of the water than humpbacks. Humpback only get far enough that their eyes are near the surface, but gray whales will go all the way up so that their eyes are out of the water.

Gray whales are more primitive than the humpbacks I went to the Dominican Republic to swim with. They are less streamlined, they are bottom feeders rather than krill eaters like humpbacks, they have a low number of baleen plates (160 pairs) when compared to humpbacks (330 pairs), they have no complex songs like the humpbacks, just a series of clicks and short distance groans done with their blow hole.

In the middle of the spy hopping, breeching whales, the bobbing happy snouts of whales and their deep exhale of breath on the still water, was a mother and calf pair with the oddest wounds on the back of the calf.







Even the naturalist / guide was puzzled as to what caused these wounds. They are too irregular to be from a prop engine. Too deep in his skin for anything the calf would find in the lagoon.

We had a little love from a mother / calf pair, and we were gone. Back in the Cessna to Tijuana, the border crossing to San Diego, the San Diego airport to our Southwest flight and then home. I did have the van stop on the way to the San Ignacio airstrip because the ocotilla were in bloom and this is a very rare event. They can go years without blooming if they don't get exactly the right combination of rain and temperature. I'd tried to photograph them in Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California but never hit the magic sweet spot and here, and now, they were aflame.

Since this entry starts right at lunch time, let's talk about the food. We were eating local fish, local chicken, local shellfish, a bottomless basket of homemade tortillas, beans made the old fashion way with plenty of lard. But I found it fascinating that the food was so mild — flavorful, but the heat had been definitely left out, which is not what I expect from Mexican food. I think the camp was so used to cooking for tourists that the heat was presented on the side as "the special hot sauce" that only came out if you asked for it. (And, oh, I asked for it.) There was an open bar, but none of us were really drinkers. I'd have a margarita in the evening, but the fact that it took 15, 20, 25, 30 minutes to get the ice (as you would expect at the end of the world, I am still not clear where they had to go for the ice — I had the image of young men sprinting across the sand, face into the wind, to retrieve me the ice because it took so long) meant that you really only had one before you lost interest and moved onto something else.

The bigger meal was midday with soup and an entree, but with dinner you got a tablespoon sized dessert of mousse or a pudding, something sweet.

On the third day, we'd gone out for our boat ride / whale watch in the morning, so the afternoon was a drive out into town and the salt flats. They took us by the local oyster farms where people asked very detailed questions about oyster farming. The idea that a couple times a week a semi tractor trailer came from San Ignacio over 40 miles of bad, ungraded dirt road to take the oysters to the nearest commercial airport. We'd been eating the fresh, raw oysters all weekend — and when I say "we" I mean Dean and I because the Canadians would not touch raw oysters. These are people that have eaten raw seal and blubber, but drew the line at oysters so fresh they were still smiling at ya. Who knows, maybe you can't trust a bivalve, particularly a foreign bivalve.

One side effect of such unusual weather was the desert was thick with blooming wildflowers. And, ha, for once I had the right lens, my macro, for taking pictures of miniature desert blooms.

  







Of those 5 pictures, 2 of those species are invasive / non-native and we were in the middle of nowhere. There's no one planting gardens out here.

We stopped at the local mercado for snacks. And a small girl came out to show off her puppy.

There's a point in every journey now, where I start to miss my dog, Max, and this was it.



From there, they took us out to the natural salt flats to have a shot of tequila with the natural salt. (We ended up bringing a package home, but we haven't tried it yet in the cooking.) It was a wind-swept, cold place, the winter sun setting behind us.









I should mention that the stars that night were enormous, no light pollution, Jupiter and Venus in close proximity making each other look larger, like rocket ships headed across the darkness. The only sound, the waves slapping lightly on the protected shore and far off, the quick exhale of whales rising and falling in their sleep.

The second morning was cold (again) with leftover damp, the wind shifting between the land and the sea causing the little wind turbine to shift nervously like a bird protecting its nest from predators on all sides. But the sky was scattered clouds rather than a solid black barrier. Our naturalist, Jeff, fussed over "do we go now? do we wait?" while we lingered over our eggs and beans. He talked to the boat drivers. He talked to the guy running the camp. He went outside and looked at the sky. Eventually he decided that we were going now. And since there is no moment but now, now is always a good time. So, now we bundled up and headed out in the boat.

We were, in fact, the first boat out on the water. And in the morning stillness, you could hear the whales breathing from every part of the lagoon, the quick huff of exhale as they surfaced, the splash and smack of three, four whales rolling around mating.

And I could get used to this. Sleeping in, a good breakfast, and then go see what multi-ton aquatic mammals wanna give me their love.

I took a lot of pictures, but at this point I think I'd better not serve up the half mound of gray flesh floating in the water, the "trust me that's a whale down there somewhere" photos. If you'd made it to this point in the journey, you've become picky about your whale photos, so I'd better serve up something. The first day's calf was Jeff, the second's day calf was Lice-y, the third day's calf I think they called Rojas (or Red) but I'm not sure why.



We shared him and his mother with the other boat from the camp with a Mexican family who were also staying at the Kuyima camp. And the kids were having such fun with the whales, that I'm convinced all kids should be taken out to pet the whales.









This calf loved to hang off the side and roll slowly so you could rub his chin and his snout and his throat.

This was the whale that I had the longest interaction with. Mostly because I decided to change strategies. I'd been in the front of the boat because that gave me a higher platform (as a short person trying to photograph things, the higher ground is very important) but my arms had a tough time reaching the water to touch the whale. I kept trying to explain to the whales, "look, I'm short, work with me, meet me halfway", but that wasn't really doing it. Ron's biggest complaint is that we take these trips, we hire these naturalists, we pay a lot of money, but when it comes time to take the picture, to interact with whatever, to get in there, the naturalist guy who has his own agenda — whether it's taking photos that he sells either as prints or books or, whether like Jeff, he's trying to get photos and video footage for his non-profit organization to use — has always claimed the best spot. In this case, Jeff claimed the last bench on the boat which was the lowest to the water and the closest to the outboard engine (and the whales are attracted to the noise of the engine so tend to approach the boat from the end).

So, I moved backward to the bench in front of Jeff and brought my camera in the waterproof casing so that I was low to the water and not worried about whether the camera was going to get wet.



And I really focused more on having the moment with the whale because at this point I had a lot of photos. As you can tell, I wasn't going home without good photos, no matter what happened. And as the whales approached, I hung the camera over the edge into the water and tried to take some underwater pictures. A big part of the reason why we don't get into the water with the whales, like we did in the Silver Bank with the humpbacks, is that the water is very murky and visibility is poor. And you can tell that in these photos.









We begged for a little more time on the water because we'd taken a second whale watching session the day before in the afternoon, but it'd been so wet, cold, and rough that I didn't even take any photographs. The whales hadn't approached the boat at all. So, we'd only spent a hour of our hour and half on the water then, surely we could use a little of that now, right? But the guy on the radio said no and we had to head in much too soon.

While we killed time before lunch, we wandered down the beach from the camp. There was a beautiful curve of sand and mangroves, thick with shells and sea birds. I took a few panorama sequences.





The shells were clams, scallops and snails, with the odd seahorse skeleton thrown in.