“Convenient mediocrity.” I mentioned it in an earlier post, and while it can be found in use here and there, it is not (yet) a common phrase, even if it is a remarkably common property. What it means (for my purposes here, anyway) is maintaining lowered standards because higher ones take too much effort. More specifically, it means accepting lower quality as long as it’s in a cool,
Author: Al Denelsbeck
I know you are but what am I?
Some time back I created the ‘Ask an Atheist’ page linked above, prompted by a similar effort elsewhere, to provide anyone the ability to fire away with any questions they might have regarding atheism, secularism, or perhaps just my own personal outlook on some issue. Some time after that, I amended the initial paragraphs to reflect the bare fact that very few people ever bother to try
Stick with fashion
So, right outside the same porch mentioned in the previous post has been a pair of large orb webs occupied by barn spiders (Araneus cavaticus), both females – it was only one for a few days, then another moved in. And curiously, their webs were almost stacked while the centers
Coming together
When The Girlfriend purchased this house a little over a year ago, it was of course necessary to begin personalizing it, which is one of those things that goes slowly and I don’t think ever really gets ‘finished.’ This means that I often have several projects on hand, either planned or in progress, and sometimes they’re not always known to her until they’re completed.
The
Monday color 31
Looking at how the day is shaping up out there, it seems like this is a pink kind of day, so this image has been specially chosen to fit in with the conditions.
[Which is nonsense. I set up the Monday color posts usually several days in advance, and they’re scheduled to post at 2 AM. I have no idea what Monday is going to bring as I’m typing this.]
Zelus luridus is a fairly common
Quick! Go here before midnight!
If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed that I have a tendency to post religion-bashing stuff on Sundays, because I’m perverse – we atheists are mean that way. I wasn’t really planning anything of the sort, and have been working on site updates today, but Professor Ceiling Cat has a fun post over at Why Evolution Is True, and you should
Just some casual shooting
Yes, it’s still been a slow couple of weeks, and I’ve been working on some other projects, so the photography is leaner. Hopefully this is not yet the start of the downward trend that autumn brings.
While out at the nearby pond yesterday, distant rumbles and the evidence of some towering thunderheads carried the threat of a storm, but it failed to actually hit here so I took advantage
Like Flames
It’s been a little while since we’ve had a musical break, and this seems like a good candidate. As I said, my music tastes are unabashedly mired in the 1980s, with the occasional contemporary popping up here and there (Coldplay will probably be along at some point or another,) and so we ride the wayback tortoise to 1987 to check out Berlin’s Like Flames.
Berlin and lead vocalist
Making change
One of the most confusing things to attempt is self-evaluation. It might be easy to think that if there’s one person we’re intimately familiar with, it’s ourselves, but when it comes down to it, we realize how hard objectivity is in such situations. Ego is such a loud voice in our minds, it’s hard to hear the little things which might be much more accurate.
Thus, I cannot
Monday color 30
This Monday color comes from the same outing related here, as a member of the Halictidae family, otherwise known as sweat bees, partakes of the flower of a partridge pea plant (Chamaecrista fasciculata.) It’s funny – I grew up calling them sweat bees like everyone