This is a guest post by my friend Patrick Porter of Massachusetts, botanist, flower grower, pigon fancier, hunter, and dog man. And did I say writer? It was an answer to a controversy but I think it stands alone: My credentials for this discussion are spotty. I am a botanist, not an animal behaviorist, but …
Author: Steve Bodio
Congratulations!
Larissa has won a well- deserved notice from my blogfather Michael Blowhard. I (ahem) predicted to Mattew and Reid that Michael would find, and be entranced by, Larissa’s blog. In other blogfamily developments, Peculiar has posted more pictures of his wedding at Odious and Peculiar, as well as a lot of other good stuff. But …
Spiders and Cladistics
This New York Times science story on a spider taxonomist is of particular interest because it does a good job explaining the matter of cladistics. Hoew do we know who is related to whom? “His logic is simple: find characteristics of spiders’ shapes that independently select the same exact group of organisms. “There are about …
Doom and Gloom– 3?
Another in the continuing series. “I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be …
Apples and Genetic Diversity
Ever since reading Michael Pollans’s wonderful The Botany of Desire I have been fascinated by Kazakhstan’s wild apple groves, the “Eden of Apples”. There might have been, at least until recently, more genetic diversity in a Kazakh grove than in all of North America. Such groves are threatened by the suburban sprawl around Almaty. Following …
Most Unlikely Career Path
Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, the brilliant guitarist who gave the pre-jazz version of Steely Dan (still in all incarnations my favorite Seventies band) its edge, is now a sought- after analyst on terrorism and defense. And he is self- taught!
…and the Bad
They have some for- real heavy duty capital- F Fascists. The Moscow Times (link may have expired or need registration) reports on one: “Last week the ultra-nationalist newspaper Zavtra ran an interview with Vladimir Kvachkov, who has been charged in the attempted murder of Unified Energy Systems CEO Anatoly Chubais. In the interview Kvachkov, a …
The Good In Russia
We forget sometimes that Russia, though not “like us” is not the Russia of the cold war. In The Corner (you’ll have to go into the archives for the whole post but I’ll put most of it here) Iain Murray writes: “My friend Paul Robinson attended the reburial ceremony for White Russian heroes Ivan Alexandrovich …
Ridiculous but Wonderful
A knitted, anatomically detailed, digestive system.
KIRAN OVER MONGOLIA
This is my formal review of a wonderful film. Joseph Spaid, the filmmaker, sent me a pre- release copy. Folks, this is the real thing. See it if you can. A Very Different Kind of Bird FilmBy Stephen Bodio “Kiran” is the Kazakh word for “golden.” It is also the adjective that the eagle trainers …