Aïda Rogers and Daufuskie Island author, Roger Pinckney

Perspicacious editor of Sandlapper Magazine for over two decades and my great friend Aïda Rogers introduced me to Roger Pinckney, as she has all of the best things about South Carolina. We took the ferry from Hilton Head and met with Roger in March for an article I wrote about him for the autumn issue of the magazine.

Gruff, Southern, handy with guns: Pinckney seems an unlikely environmentalist. Maybe it's time to ditch the stereotype.

Woven through all of the beauty and banter of his prose in three books of essays, a screenplay and novel, is Roger Pinckney's deep commitment to preserving Daufuskie Island. He'd like to see it the way it was before the oysters died and the Gullah rivermen had to leave for other jobs of work. Before the development boom in the 1980's that sought to make Daufuskie the Martha's Vineyard of the South. Before acres were uprooted to build golf courses and gated communities, and swampland was drained to create condos.

When the moon had to compete with floodlights, and leatherback sea turtles headed landward on what they thought was their age-old path to the sea, Pinckney got mad, got naked, and got busy. He sees Daufuskie as it is, still enchanting and wild in places, and he means to keep it that way. If you didn't know about all that, or about the no money root and Dr. Buzzard and the bald eagles that finally stopped the builders, then you haven't read Roger Pinckney. And if you haven't read Roger Pinckney, then there are some who'll say you'll never know Daufuskie Island. And that would be a damn shame.

It all started off with a wedding and a horse race

You know you're in Munich when young girls who normally lift nothing heavier than a lipstick start hefting liters of beer. This year, Munich has gone all historic, with the Stadtmuseum's show on the life of Oktoberfest through the centuries and the Wiesn opening one day early to celebrate its 200th birthday.

It all went down like this: On Sept. 17, 1810, Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen celebrated their nuptials. The army staged a show of the regimental horses to impress the couple and provide some fun for the masses, on a field now called Theresienwiese in the bride's honor. Beer-masters, dirndl-makers and wurst-sellers capitalized on the fun, unknowingly kicking off the yearly party that would make Munich a mecca to hops-lovers worldwide.

Hops might be the ingredient that makes this year's Jubilee Oktoberfest beer (Das Jubiläums-Wiesnbier) so special--but whatever it is, nobody's saying. Even the directors of The Association of Munich Brewers don't know what their chief brewmeister put in to make the stuff so rich and heady with history. All I know is, the beer is potent and a deep honey-brown, and I'll have to try a few more to tell whether it's really as good as the ones we knocked back in 1810.

Scanonization

The British Library announced today in less than poetic language that lovers of ancient newsprint should brace for a "mass digitisation." No longer will the 30,000 researchers who make the pilgrimage each year to the Newspaper Library have to traipse to Colindale: soon, 350 years of local, national and international news stories (52,000 titles and counting) will wend their way webward.

brightsolid, a subsidiary of Dundee-based publisher, D.C. Thomson, will scan up to four million pages in the next two years, gnashing ever faster through the pile. By 2020, they reckon they'll have all 40 million pages scanned in. The website will go live next year. Finally, you'll get to read about Napoleon being buried under the willows on St. Helena, look up the Whitechapel murders, or find an eye-witness to The Great Mutiny in India sans microfilm. But have your credit card handy, love: nothing in this life is free.

Unless you go online inside the library, of course. You'll have to go to London for that, but then, why not? Check out the marvelous map exhibit while you're there.

Queen of Poisons

Just take a gander at this website and tell me what you see. The ink stain that could be blood, the Sherlockian magnifying glass, and the ominous scientist looming over Manhattan on the book cover, all do their part to make you think Deborah Blum has written a crime thriller, right?

Even Blum's enigmatic smile in the author pic makes you wonder: Has the Pulitzer-winning science writer with four other non-fiction books to her credit started writing fiction?

Not at all. She's still, "Investigating Science One Story at a Time," as the tagline reads. But if the character-driven, true-crime history of poisoning in America in the '20s and '30s grips you like a thriller, that's okay with her.

And if reviewers insist on using the word, "enthralling" to describe the book, that's fine, too. Almost as good as the book is Blum's blog, a cornucopia of poison mysteries occurring in the news (watch out for those day lilies, wild-foodies!), history, and her own pretty fascinating life.

Writing about the site for my regular column on freelancing for NASW gave me the chance to talk with Blum about her work, her start as a journalist, and her tips for staying sane. What fun! The lady, as you will quickly gather from her bio: is a hoot.

A funny science writer? Now there's a mystery for you.

Hell: Frozen Over

It's official: White-Nose Syndrome has been found in Tennessee-- photo by Marvin Moriarty/USFWS

Biologists are calling it the most devastating wildlife decline in the past century in North America. Since White-Nose Syndrome was discovered in a New York cave in 2006, an estimated 5.7 million hibernating bats have died in the USA.

The hallmark of the disease is a powdery white fungus on bat noses, ears and wings. The fungus seems to irritate their skin, and bats rouse from hibernation months early. They either fly out of their caves during the daytime, dehydrated and dying, or use up all their fat reserves and freeze to death where they hang.

Over the past three decades, European bat specialists have reported seeing a small number of bats with white noses. But European bats soon groom the fungus off, and appear healthy. Is it the same fungus, and if so, why do European bats survive it?

In this article for Deutsche Welle, I spoke to bat disease specialist, Gudrun Wibbelt, at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin. Wibbelt is doing her best to find out.