Over the weekend, I finally got to visit Nojoqui Falls, located in a Santa Barbara County Park, off of Highway 101, just north of Gaviota. It’s one of those places I’ve driven past a hundred times and finally took the time to stop and look.The falls are not only pretty, but interesting geologically. They are …
Fire Season
It has started here. I don’t know if you can see clearly, but the white specks on the window and trim of my car are wood ash. Last week we awoke one morning to find our cars covered with ash that had blown in overnight from a fire about 40 miles north of us near …
“Sunbirds and Cashmere Spheres”
Pluvialis has another superb essay up. Here, she is describing Bearded “tits” (which are not tits): “Those pictures fail to show how glamorous these small birds are. They look like they’re made of cashmere. Very very expensive cashmere. And are wearing long, black velvet evening gloves. Their tiny waxen beaks resemble the heads of all-weather …
A Little Food Blogging for the Weekend
Prairie Mary sent a review of Bill Buford’s excellent new book Heat, which describes how a fancy New York editor (The New Yorker, Granta) decides to learn to be a Tuscan butcher under the influence of Mario Battali. Italians and others from Catholic cultures (Battali blurbed the hilarious Bad Catholic’s Guide to Good Living, which …
“Entering Human Lives “
A friend, a serious writer and reader of this blog, is now working on some tales of her life as an Animal Control Officer (“dogcatcher”) in a big city. Here is a tale of life at the sharp end. Take it away…. The early complaints about this case were about noise from barking dogs, a …
Working Like a Dog
A new trend in officedom seems to be bringing your pet to work. According to Ellen Wulfhorst of Reuters, several thousand US companies (possibly one in five) allow employees to keep animals at the office and/or telecommute in order to spend more time with their critters. Call it a quirky, dot-com startup kind of idea, …
Bull Market
This was too cool a photo-opportunity to pass up. Think they could get a job on Wall Street?
An Artist on “Hands- On”
Blogger and wildlife artist Carel Brest van Kempen had alot to say in this old post about his attitudes to “hands- on” interaction with the biosphere (see Matt’s post below). “A spoiled child of the west, I grew up in an area as sparsely populated as any in the temperate zone. Fences were few and …
Lemaitre
Father Georges Lemaitre, mathematician, physicist, and diocesan Roman Catholic priest, is generally considered to be the father of the cosmic “Big Bang “theory. This informative TCS article suggests that he had admirably sane attitudes about the relations between science and religion too– sometimes ones unexpected by his colleagues. “Back in the early 1930s, the Nobel …
Self- Pollination
Self pollination is not all that rare, but this newly discovered Chinese orchid appears to be an extreme case. “The orchid produces no scent or nectar, and the researchers did not see a single instance of pollination by an insect or by wind. “Instead, the pollen-bearing anther uncovers itself and rotates into a suitable position …