Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
The featured image looks across the stage of Taormina’s ancient amphitheatre, through to Mount Etna.
Unsurprisingly, this venue is often described as the most beautiful of all “ancient Greek” theatres.
There is a (Roman) reason for my inverted commas…
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Deploying a longer lens enables one to convey just how dramatically Etna towers over and dominates its vicinity.
This post’s photo involved a 200mm lens; the previous post’s was taken with a 30mm.
(it is generally reckoned that a “regular” 50mm lens delivers the closest approximation to a naked-eyed human’s field of view and sense of scale)
The building common to both images is Taormina’s San Domenico Palace, which is now a hotel.
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Even from some distance – and via a wide-angle, short lens – Mt Etna is very obviously big.
South of the Alps, Europe-proper has no higher mountain.
Etna is circa 1.5 times higher than Australia-proper’s highest mountain.
Unlike Kosciusko’s, from some vantage points, Etna’s full height is easily viewed, from sea to summit.
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The featured image was taken at 1.05 pm on 20 June 2023, in the final 15 minutes of a walk in Deep Creek National Park’s old growth stringybark forest.
This particular coral fungus fruiting body (and its particular positioning, midst leaf-litter – it was another “pushy bastard”/ “remover of obstacles”… or, in its case, an uplifter of them) was especially beautiful, I thought…and still do.
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I had never previously seen mushrooms with such spectacularly shiny, exquisitely coloured tops.
If you zoom in on/enlarge them, you should be able to enjoy some Dali-esque, distorted reflections of the old-growth stringybark forest’s canopy.
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Q: What does the appearance of this mushroom tell us about how it achieved its position and dimensions, as at 1. 07 pm on 20 June 2023?
A: I am not a mycologist, and my hunch/conclusions may be wrong, but….
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I have no idea whether a human could safely eat the pictured mushroom.
Clearly, however, at least one other fauna species relishes this fungus.
In any event, from a purely human-centric perspective, “edibility” is merely one of an enormous number of relevant descriptors of fungi species’ actual or potential uses.
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In this particular instance, I do not know the answers to the headline’s questions.
Some fungi are “edible, generally”, some are “toxic, generally”, whilst others could be labelled as “it all depends on which fauna species attempts to eat it, and/or on how and when they eat it and/or on how much of it they eat, and/or on how they prepare it”.
If you look carefully, you can see a little fragment at the bottom, apparently broken off from the pictured coral fungus’s fruiting body.
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The pictured fruiting body is a little bigger than was yesterday’s hero, but it looks rather more “delicate”, less “robust”.
Look closely, however…
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The pictured mushroom is quite large and its uppermost surface unusual…and lovely, to my eyes.
It is also, very evidently, “a pushy bastard”.
Have a close look at what has happened to the stringybark leaf atop the mushroom.
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