Tom McIntyre sends this great Yoruba poem (song?) on Cape Buffalo. The buffalo is the deaththat makes a child climb a thorn tree.When the buffalo dies in the forestthe head of the household is hiding in the roof. When the hunter meets the buffalohe promises never to hunt again.He will cry out: “I only borrowed …
Month: June 2007
Doom
England is having a bad week. First, from The Daily Mail (HT Maggie’s Farm): omnipresent video cameras: “Britain has more than 4 million closed-circuit security cameras, more than any other Western democracy. “Police say the average Briton is on as many as 300 cameras every day, usually unaware. “The density of surveillance is significantly higher …
Happy Anniversary
It just occurred to me that today is the second anniversary of this blog.
Goats Love Kudzu
I couldn’t pass up this piece in the NY Times on the city of Chattanooga’s use of goats to control kudzu, that invasive vine that grows a foot a day and that covers large areas of the South. Us native Southerners have kudzu as part of our heritage, along with grits and barbecue.
Why Did the Chicken Cross the Pacific?
The NY Times and LA Times and all the wire services are carrying the story today of chicken bones recovered from an archaeological site in Chile that have been radiocarbon dated to between 1304 and 1424. DNA analysis shows that the chickens come from a breed common in Polynesian islands, which indicates they were brought …
Matt’s Stack of Books
I’ve been avoiding the book stand photo for sheer embarrassment. I’m the token short-bus rider at the Querencia School for Bibliophiles. For a long time I had no stack at all. I read one book at a time, and that one slowly. Lately I’ve been a more productive reader as measured in “books taken down …
Another New Acquaintance
As I said in an earlier post, as the season progresses, we are learning more about the denizens of our garden. Like this columbine on the south side of the house.
Hail Yes
A short-lived but very intense thunderstorm hit us yesterday afternoon, dropping hail that you can see all over our deck here. Garden and trees all seem to have come through pretty well and the cars were in the garage. Half an hour after I took this picture the sky was clear, the sun was shining …
Book Piles and Bookshelves
It’s tough keeping up with Steve and Dr. Hypercube but here goes. This is my nightstand pile. This is a bedside pile that should be classified as re-reads. When I was eight, the son of a friend of my grandmother’s left for college and gave me his science fiction book collection. It included these hard-cover …
A DDT Myth
Increasingly I have been arguing with public- health and some conservative friends re the bans on DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons. They seem to think that it is responsible for the increase in malaria in Africa. They mean well, but they are wrong. If DDt is used properly it is no threat– if it is …