Steve posted last month about his delight at discovering that the mascot of the Southern Illinois University athletic teams is the Saluki. We’ve since found more SIU Saluki stuff like this picture of a guy in a saluki suit who prowls the sidelines at their football games. Apparently local saluki owners take turns bringing their …
Author: Reid Farmer
California Fall Ritual
The New York Times today tells us of a Fall ritual in the town of Columbia, California: the Annual Poison Oak Show. Apparently there is fierce competition in a variety of categories: Best Arrangement of Poison Oak, Most Potent Looking Green Leaves, Most Potent Looking Red leaves, Best Photo of Poison Oak Rash, Best Poison …
Owl
I saw this Great Horned Owl while driving home from work yesterday afternoon. He (she?) was hanging out on a cottonwood limb waiting to fly out and hunt for breakfast. Connie and I had seen this fellow several times over the last couple of months. These birds are so big they really stick out. Here’s …
A Bodio Connection to the Whydah
Last month I posted on some new underwater archaeology discoveries at the wreck of the Whydah, a pirate ship that sank off of Wellfleet, Massachusetts in 1717. Steve’s sister, Karen Bodio-Graham, visits the Wellfleet area often, saw the post and sent us an e-mail and pictures about her and her family’s interest in the Whydah: …
More Mule News
Today’s Denver Post has a follow-up on their story of a foal born to a female mule in western Colorado. I posted on this back in July and we added Dr. John Burchard’s comments on it a bit later. Further research on the foal has shown that he is a genetic lawbreaker: “Genetic tests have …
Peaches
Our peaches ripened this week and we’ve started picking. We have a dozen peach trees but only one of them really bore fruit this year. Not sure if this is due to the condition of the trees or the vagaries of the frosts we had in the spring. But overall the trees have been neglected …
Air Force Academy
A couple of weeks ago Connie and I made a quick visit to the US Air Force Academy, just north of Colorado Springs. The Academy “campus” is a couple of thousand acres set in the Front Range foothills. The dormitories, classrooms, dining hall, etc are all set in a surprisingly compact area on a mesa …
Sacrifices to the Sky God
Matt found and sent along this item that tells how the Nepalese national airline deals with aircraft maintenance problems: “Officials at Nepal’s state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said Tuesday. “ We of course, found …
Possible Mastodon Petroglyph
A number of wire services have picked up the story of the discovery of a possible petroglyph of a mastodon, forty feet down in Lake Michigan off Traverse City. This is the best picture I have been able of find of it so far. Hopefully better ones will be presented soon. The assumption here is …
Gigantic Spiderweb
A gigantic spiderweb with millions of spiders covers a huge area in a Texas State Park 50 miles east of Dallas. Awesome! RTWT.