… but it appears that I am soon going to Kurdistan. Dogs, of course. More when I know more…
Category: Uncategorized
Another Ghost
A little late for Halloween, I present to you another of Connie Barlow’s Ghosts of Evolution, the devil’s claw. This one does better than some of the other survivors, like Osage orange and honey locust, because horses and other equids are “back” on their old home ground, and because humans and cows make pretty good …
Crowley’s Ridge Nature Center
While in Arkansas last month I visited the Forrest L. Wood Crowley’s Ridge Nature Center just south of Jonesboro. Their website is here. My father had been telling me about it since it opened last year, knew I’d enjoy it, and got us out to see it right away. Based on his description and with …
On the Nobility of Dogs
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 …
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 …
LPK Open for Business
There’s a joke among my friends, persistent but no longer very funny after fifteen years, that I’ll eat in only one New Orleans restaurant. It’s not true—I’ll eat anywhere, especially in New Orleans. But if you know The Pizza Kitchen, the one in the Quarter between the old federal mint and the French Market, you …
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!