#testudo turtle formation

[thefoilguy]

Testudo Turtle Formation - Aluminum Foil Sculpture

[sirswooshnoodles]

My Mom let me name her car! Her name is Marina! She is a pretty sea foam/aquamarine/aqua blue.

Marina (the car) reminds mom of sea foam, and green sea turtles, so I discovered the turtle by the tame of Testudo Marina Vulgaris. Vulgaris mean common, like how Marina is a cutie on the regular, and Testudo refers to the Roman shield formation with the shield on top, also called the tortoise formation.

Lemme know if you want a pic of the car

Edit: here’s some pics

[lone-wolf-no-more]

Fog of War

Thursday, February 23th, 2023

Day 12. This entry may end up turning into a cliffhanger of sorts, and possibly a very uncomfortable, real-life one at that.

Got a text last night from my pastor friend. He says he's working on a solution to this whole thing, and that it may take 1 to 2 weeks, and that he's also talked with my mother. Still not sure what she's going to do tomorrow (I'm afraid to ask just yet), and apparently, neither did he. But it's still encouraging, non the less, knowing that someone who doesn't know me well is trying to help me. 😢

Sibling took the day off today, so that regardless what happens, they’ll be there with me. That’s just them, being awesome as usual.

Making some progress with trading. Looks like I’m on track to pass Phase 1 of the prop firm challenge before too long. I already know that won’t be a deciding factor in today’s outcome, but it’s still a good thing, nonetheless.

Eissac’s blog post today was exceptionally good.

"There's nothing more frustrating that being a relatively social person whose afraid of socializing." Yup, yet again, I jive with that, and so much of what he said about "dropping the mask" and addressing and reframing fear and negative thoughts plays directly into what I deal with on a regular basis.

There’s times that you need to go through intense pain and fear to know what areas you need to strengthen up and re-assess, and improve. Goodness knows this whole ordeal is revealing one too many chinks in my armor. Funny dichotomy, that. We use terms like “letting your guard down” in the positive sense as well. So, I guess there can be both negative and positive “turtle shelling” (think the Testudo Roman shield formation).

Interesting, because that reminds me of a book I was reading around the time of my fateful leg and ankle injury, namely, "The Eagle of the Ninth". The main character, a centurion in the Roman army in 127 AD, suffers a terrible ankle injury during a siege on a Roman fort which ironically involved a chariot (if I remember correctly). Chariots were actually a "single" or "multiple horsepower" mode of transportation in those days, if you think about it.

The main character in due time embarks on a mission outside the confines of the official Roman territories (outside Adrian's wall) in an effort to regain the honor of his father, another Roman officer who disappeared some time ago, along with the men under his command, and very importantly, with their Eagle totem. Letting this symbol of Roman power and superiority fall into the hands of the "barbarian tribes" in the frontier was no small source of dishonor and disdain for his family.

Again, I don’t know what the rest of this day will hold, but I think that I’m going to post this early, so that I have an entry for today, nonetheless. Stay strong!

I'll end here with another of my all-time favorite triumphant pieces. If it sounds like movie music, it's because Holst was a major influence to the sound of film composers like John Williams.

Toodaloo!

[pwlanier]

Giant fossil turtle Testudo sp. ; Oligocene (34 million years old) Brule Formation, White River Badlands, South Dakota, U.S.A.

Sotheby’s

[augustus-scaevola]

Wait did I totally forget to mention that Augustus loves turtles too!? (Testudo) his beloved formation obviously. Their hard shell like his shield. Slow and steady, but are just so cute! He loved finding them near bodies of water as a kid. As an adult he'll watch them crawl along their merry way.

Also wolves for obvious reasons. He at the very least respects them. Kind of similar attitude towards them as he does dogs. "They're just forest puppies after all"

[davidjjohnston3]

The trees are straight and true here, and the help comes without seeming harpoons.  I considered some insane things which were ‘above my pay-grade’ and as is my wont reflected on the state and implications of my former profession and what old friends and pharons meant to me.  Right now think that my core goal in life is not to blow myself up.  As a former would-have-been SecState said, ‘I love so many people.’  I am only sad that trying as I did to uproot that carrot of love just now could have resulted in the demolition of an entire root-network, of at least my own excision therefrom.

‘Some people’ want revenge against life for not going their way or not being the color or fragrance or face shape they like or feel it ought to be - ‘no that is not what I meant at all.’  They will never hold a life reliable which doesn’t resemble their ideal, imago, or ‘soul-idol’ &c.  The meaning of the name ‘Cordelia’ as in King Lear is something like ‘heart’s ideal.’  I was driving and considering a novel that I feel touched absolute supreme greatness without knowing it or in a way that could mislead some readers Mrs. Mary HK Choi’s Yolk a novel I looked forward for a very long time.  I had all these references and fractal coreferences and forgot about actual birds, like what does the chick eat in the egg.

‘Blood is the life’ - I liked etymologies for a long time and my intellectualism caused me acute trouble in Confirmation Class at Morrow Memorial United Methodist Church in about 1998.  ‘Pastor’ Gretchen taught us the word root ‘consacramentum’ which comes from dipping the hand in blood in the concave of a Roman shield - those huge rectangular shields which could be used in formation as ‘testudo’ or turtle to stop projectile weapons and allowed soldiers to make pin-point stabbing attacks from a ‘matrix(?)’ of high protection.  I forget what kind of animal was killed to pool the blood in the shield but it might have been a rabbit.

I was reading ‘Revelation,’ I don’t recall what everyone else was talking about.  Some kind of community service project, interview your parents, buy a wedding-magazine and make a whole plan for how you would get married and how much it would cost (and while you’re at it describe how you would 1) restore a classic Shelby Cobra using newspaper and Krazy Glue 2) drive foresaid drop-top to the Moon).  

The Pastor was a pipe-smoker named ‘Painter’ who used the NY Lotto’s ‘Hey you never know’ slogan to describe sth like Pascal’s Wager; OTOH St. Paul teaches us that everyone is born knowing God exists (Romans).  The problem is that people fail or omit to glorify Him or subsequently ruin or betray their own best efforts through blasphemy, turning or falling away, cowardice, denial, attachment to certain sins or being ‘yoked unequally’ with non-believers.  

I reflected starting in 2008 that I was shy of my ‘first love’ (rather, the woman I fell in love with at 14); at the time I gloried or reveled in the shyness like a Wallace Stevens poem that ends, ‘And not to have written a book.’  I could’ve written a few books by now or walked away from book-writing or changed my mind / specified which kind of book I might have written and for whom.  

I remember always admiring the ‘magic’ of literature and feeling sad I had no characters or world of my own to work magic with.  Star Wars and my own life and later much else supplied ‘materia poetica’ and till the point that I began to think in fiction and became addicted to interpreting my own in ‘story-ideas’ although that is not to say that what happened around me didn’t happen.  

America is trying to become a better country in numerous valences, loving our neighbors, holding each other accountable.  ‘Justice’ with or without the marks is important.  It is a divine Judgment that Covid fell on the world even if eventually we all shall learn who devised the virus or leaked it or modulated its mutations.  I was eager to rejoin the world feeling I might overcome my mental illness but I mishandled specific questions and tests.  I ended up turning people against me and creating monsters more than ever as well as perhaps terminally sabotaging any chance I might’ve had of fulfilling a dream or making good on the past.  I have a lot of opinions on the CCP but should’ve focused on love and family and personal responsibilities as in the past or at least held to my long-standing feeling that Chinese people deserve better rather than associating myself with hard-liners and racists or those who would simplify issues in order to bring about ultimate victory without temperance or concern for the side-effects.

In Milwaukee where I lived for far too long everyone’s spirit - electric, intellectual, visory(?), informational et cetera seemed to be militating against everybody else’s.  There were fake vaccines, radioactive ice cream (or thermogenic ice-cream), gun-battles as usual, lines crossed, all kinds of scores that people tried to settle.  I also realized that the police were probably tracking for years my various attempts to obtain weapons from samurai-swords to handguns though the purpose was defensive and I can only trust at this point that some good lawyer will prevent the bad lawyers and cops from presenting the most damning circumstantial case they could.  People in Milwaukee own AK-47′s, automatic shotguns, probably all kinds of explosives, improvised chemical weapons and (’our Black brothers’ - Schopenhauer) biological weapons - the cops don’t stand a chance that I can tell and even the National Guard perhaps could get outclassed by retired military.  I had told myself for years that it was only the ghetto’s that bore witness to this paramilitary equipage and that the retired SEAL Team 4 member with the ‘Stop Socialism’ and ‘Jobs Not Mobs’ sign on his front lawn would protect me from the Maoist-Covid Night of the Long Knives but I feel I tempted God a lot in the past.  

I read all these books and took to heart that people thought I was just entertaining myself with but now as then I should’ve guarded my heart or not begged the question of what others thought about me or saw in me.  I literally felt of late ‘I am the anti-Christ’ - good-looking at times, preach world peace, ‘form of godliness,’ want to be friends with everyone, build bridges - and had to rack my brains to come up with an ‘anti-Christology’ and science / concept of the Whore of Babylon just to make sure it was more than me alone.  I also wished to simplify my past and help kids ‘get life right the right time’ doing battle with philosophies that opposed this consciously or otherwise but stepped into numerous minefields and also tried running when I should’ve flown over.  

Everyone’s trying to get rich and build back better and I profoundly admired the American President for doing, finally, apparently, what presidents had tried to decades even as I remember ‘Flowers 1881′ a poem that implies that basically teachers can do only so much before turning their kids loose in a world no one has yet fixed and which others keep breaking; from a California almanac that also instructed me that the same old debates and cross-fires and burdens plague teachers as always, not that it is an ‘impossible profession’ but honestly that God won’t let us establish Heaven on Earth or at least not me or at least not America or at least not teachers who savor the experience of being a teacher or the beauty of their students more than the outcomes or commitment or intrinsic value of the work or the confirmed identity / vocation / personhood of the instructor.  There are always new and old at any rate and different cultures all describe the teacher as needing to keep both alive; as do descriptions of higher education and scholarship.  

I questioned my qualifications / background and wondered about re-training but can’t afford tuition anywhere so I am trying to cling to the core of my capabilities / blessings.  ABC and XYZ.  The glory of the soul or souls.  

I kept theorizing Russian literature as well as weapons-systems and ultimate destiny, sailing ships, noble names, divisions, the flaming sword of Archangel Gabriel, the mission of Russia today with respect to the world order.  I am also simply trying to be healthy and stop for a while trying to parse out who was the love of my life or what it still left in terms of action or redemption or justice or surrender or mitigation or meeting new friends or propounding the kind of understand with carefulness I have believed in - ‘saving people from themselves.’  Driving up here I remember being distressed at a gas-station in California when I was about 5 or 6 since the pump was leaking, being very upset with my parents and family.  In those days I also disliked animal-cruelty though the world today seems so depraved and deprived with respect to human interests I would make no bones about neglecting most all animals outside of military or police use.  When I was about 3 I saw white kids set a frog on fire; my mother has a history of running over cats.

I dislike winging it and taking risks.  There is a song I call to myself ‘Run Away’ though its title is ‘Paradise.’  I am not a utopian communist for believing in secular justice and its instrinsic value... I wonder whether when I helped people in the past there were always strings attached or maybe I was just trying to close my case and discharge my responsibilities too rapidly without allowing others to gestate or make an abode in my heart besides and beyond what I could get out of them, glorifying myself, or tell others about.  

What is motherhood?  What is travail?  Is there a kind of problematic ‘female gaze’ as feminists talk of a ‘male gaze’ associated with sadism or fascination / fetishism?  It’s psychology which is not my first love at all since it appeared pretentious and distracting and retarding (in the literal sense of slowing down).

I also remembered reading various things about Victor Hugo whose ‘93′ is an important novel today due to its techno-utopianism, feminism or ‘new model egalitarianism,’ fusion of revolution and religion, etc.  But I had forgotten ‘Les Miserable’ with its themes of ransom or eventual recompense, genealogies, caution, and more none of which is to negate the various complains against me or death-warrant from China or my parents with their partial private readings of Proverbs (’Let’s stone David for embarrassing us / not doing precisely what we want’ - no mention of witnesses, tribunals, questions, mitigation-hearings, actual counsels of judges etc. but just American-German ‘coalitions of the willing’ ‘run and get my gun’ ‘team-building’ etc. which in my experience ends with tanks on the street and military dictatorships as when at the end of the CultRev PLA regulars were gunning down former justice-fanatics who’d been stripping women, kicking pregnant stomachs etc. as in The Vagrants).  Naturally having grown up in a family fascinated with Lee Kwanyew and Arnold Schwarzenegger and conflicted about ‘fascism’ I had reservations about the United States’ ability to suddenly dress up and ‘stand at perpetual moral attention’ but I guess my own problems are just that I am poor with a rich kid’s mind and no one really likes me except strangers and faraway friends who were easily spooked and/or just couldn’t be there.  ‘King of South shall attack and King of North shall crush them  with chariots &c.’ - in the end righteous will prevail whichever side of the line I end up on in the final assessment.  I also remembered today a novel called ‘The Old Capital’ about a bad artist father, a virgin daughter, straight and true pines.  Some other aspects of this novel are silly as well as criminally problematic and there's a lot of that going on in new-old old news America / Babylon or at least to quote my favorite lawyer / leave lawyering movie 'First let's get out of Milwaukee.'  Miss the land of June snow. 

[disbander-of-armies]

Today I went to a Roman festival that was held at a Roman excavation site in my country. It was so much fun and I want to share some impressions:

Actors in full Roman armor taking the bus at the site. The bus driver made an extra stop so they could leave which led to this conversation between a mother and her daughter: Daughter: “Are we here now?”. Mom: “No, that’s just for the Romans.”

A little boy with a spear screaming “Dacians!!” a few minutes before a reenactment of a battle between the Romans and the Dacians

A girl (during the reenactment): “Mom, are they gonna do the turtle?” (she meant the famous testudo formation)

During the beginning of the battle, Roman slingers threw “stones” (it was just socks) at the Dacians but some landed in the audience, which had the moderator comment: “Their purpose was to confuse the enemy, kill the audience and things like that.”

My best friend and I walking from one event to the next and greatly underestimating the distance. It was still fun, we walked past a a wheat field and reenacted this scene from Gladiator, while playing the soundtrack.

[snorkelblog]

Grand Cayman Dec 2018

Hello!

Great information here; it was extremely useful. I just returned from 10 days where I stayed near Rum Point, at the Sea Lodges. While this guide is tremendous, I can update.

Unfortunately there was an unusual front that came through midway into our stay that messed up the winds and the chop. But I got enough diving and snorkeling in to make some additions.

First and foremost, the Rum Point area is possibly the best fringing reef left in the Caribbean. Bonaire in 2013 outpaced what we saw at Rum Point now, but I wonder if the decline in Bonaire parallels what the rest of the basin has experienced.

From Sea Lodges all the way to the second bouy at Rum Point (going east to west) the variety and health of the goegonians, sea whips, sea fans, and LPS like brain corals, was fabulous and continuous. Stony corals was more mixed. The Elkhorn forest is gone….all dead remnants. There are maybe 5-6 small patches of both Elkhorn and Staghorn left. Also isolated patches of various purple and plating montiporas.

Large boulder formations were thriving. Saw a wide array of sponges and tunicate, and even a few purple tipped anemones. There are turtles and rays all over (did not see any.spottes eagle rays though). Saw also octopus and squid and all the expected reef fish. The Rum Point area is fabulous.

Starfish Point is sadly, now, gross. Too many ships and people destroying the Starfish, removing from the water. One jerk busted open a large conch then tossed the snail, defenseless, back into the water. Loud music. Just unpleasant. But there are Starfish, and pearly jawfish, there in abundance.

Spotts Beach is much nicer, turtles and rays abound. Sadly the current was too rough but others report very large healthy fringing reef to the east, out from the first large point (facing the water it’s too the left), maybe 150 yds out from the point. But I couldn’t swim against the strong current from the west side and didn’t much want to brave the rocks on a straight out attempt.

There were zero other good spots on the south end of the island. And as for snorkeling, zero else accessible from land.

What once were Barefoot and Queens Monument - Connelly are gone. There is no remaining beach, there are warning signs and chains, and trash/branches everywhere. People go to look but nothing much to see. There’s no access. I am sure there is good fringing reef out there. Need a vessel to access.

There is absolutely no way now to snorkel out to the reef from either location or from Turtles Nest. This from both the dive shop I used and locals. Too dangerous. Too far. And this was not due to the weather. It’s too dangerous and too far. You can snorkel it. But have a boat at the mooring.

East end is worse. Zippo to snorkel.

The diving, that’s another matter. I think the dives I did with Ocean Frontiers surpassed Belize and Roatan, the only non-Pacific area that could compete is Bonaire and that is because Bonaire is mostly shore dives.

I plan to return and will recheck these areas. But if you want to snorkel healthy reef from the beach on GC, I would say it’s pretty much limited to Rum Point and perhaps Spotts.

———————————————————————

Testudo Responds:

Thanks so much for your comments! Glad you got to experieince some of what I think is the better snorkeling GC has to offer. Agree it is some of the best in the Caribbean. While I think Roatan is overall a better snorkeling destination (not been to Bonaire), you get so much variation in environments in GC from Staghorn Forests to Boulder Gardens to Stingrays and Turtles spots, it’s hard to top.

Not sure of the location of the Elkhorn forests you referenced, but the Staghorn Thickets are absolutely thriving off Rum Point. I got worried and went out today to make sure they were not in any decline. They have quardrupled in areas over the last 10 years! You must have missed them on your snorkels. All the more reason to make sure you do return. Elkhorn has never been established in any great mass off Rum Point, at least since Ivan.

Agree Starfish Beach has sadly become a commercialized clusterfuck - floating play grounds, hucksters selling food and more boats than one can imagine. Add the folks removing the starfish from the water and I’m shocked there’s still one or two of these unique creatures left within a quater mile of the point.

As for Queen’s Monument, while the Connolly’s Cove access may be gated, there is a public beach access pathway immediately adjacent to the property folks can use to get to the water. There's never been any meaningful beach there, just a pebble shore. Just now need to park along the roadside.

Barefoot Beach is and reamins a public beach access, just as listed in the guides. While the beach may have eroded from its former Robinson Caruso splender, the snorkeling reamins unchanged and is certainly worth a visit.

Access to the Bodden Town area reef is easily accessible from Governor Morris Public Beach, as outlined in the guides.

Not sure what the dive shop communicated these three areas are only accessible by boat, but is seems in error.

East End’s Charlie’s Shoal is a close to shore, hidden gem and the barrier reef and other dive/snorkle sites like Sunset Reef are accessible for strong swimmers. Plus if you want to see reef sharks, the East End is the place.

Again, none of the spots listed in my guides require boat access for a strong swimmer and experieinced snorkeler, so realy puzzeled by those dive shop comments.

Other areas around the island can be worth a visit. I am partial to Eden Rock in George Town and Cemetary Reef on Seven Mile Beach. Heck, I even enjoy the patch reef at Govenor’s Beach on Seven Mile for the sheer density of marine life on an otherwise desolate section of beach.

When you return, plan a day trip to Little Cayman to enjoy what is in my opinion some of the truly outstanding snorkeling remaining in the Caribbean. I think you’ll be pleased. FWIW, I find the summer months to present the conditions most conducive to a positive snorkeling experience.

Thanks again for your contribution and hope you found the guides to be helpful.

Cheers,

Testudo