xkcd is great today:
Ophrys apifera.
Yes, I read xkcd before Why Evolution Is True, but the latter has more detail on the whole subject.
Author: Al Denelsbeck
Couldn’t hurt
At roughly 8 pm tonight (or I guess I should say August 31st, since this will undoubtedly post the next day,) The Girlfriend’s Younger Sprog mentioned a campaign where a vaccine is donated to a child in an underdeveloped country for every comment made on participating blogs. Known as the Shot@Life campaign, they feature a different post every day for a month, from different bloggers.
Which
Makmende amerudi!
I said I’d be coming back to this you were a fool to doubt me. The song I’m eventually going to get to was responsible for introducing me to the previously featured video by the same band, but has a great backstory itself.
“Go ahead make my day,” was a meme before the term had even been adopted, and before the intersnarl existed, courtesy of Clint Eastwood/Dirty
Booger nights
I am not going to apologize for what is to come I am only going to warn you. This post contains graphic images that are probably just fine for children (because they’re usually fascinated with this kind of stuff,) but may gross out the adult who realizes what they’re looking at. If that isn’t enough, some of the text might assist.
The area where I live is apparently ideal for gastropods,
Les chats du biologique
Yeah, that’s probably nonsense, but I had to pass this one along. When preparing to shoot the illustrating image for the previous post, I was doing lighting and pose tests. Kaylee (the one in the back) will hold still and can even be convinced to look interested with the right approach – obviously not this one – while Little Girl (the pressure is on to switch her name to “Zoe”
Book review: The Selfish Gene
When this book was first published, I was 10 years old, in that directionless, awkward stage between playing Bionic Man and shooting Stormtroopers with my blaster, so if you want to consider this review ill-timed that’s fine with me. There is likely nothing I say here that hasn’t been said before, but that’s probably true of the entire blog anyway. I also need to note that the
A whooshing noise high overhead
Following links just now, I began reading a post on what Vanessa Williams discovered about her DNA. The money quote:
My DNA breaks down as follows: I’m 23% from Ghana, 17% from the British Isles, 15% from Cameroon, 12% Finnish, 11% Southern European, 7% Togo, 6% Benin, 5% Senegal and 4% Portuguese.
Now, I can’t wait to go to Ghana and Cameroon and Togo and Senegal — it’s a great opportunity
Lessons learned
Almost two weeks ago, I spotted a couple of curious caterpillars on the undersides of some redbud leaves, right alongside the porch. Getting a good view of them required a particular angle, and I slid my legs off the porch into some deep weeds under the tree to crouch underneath my subjects. Soon afterward, I developed a sharp stinging sensation in my calf, similar to a honeybee
Okay, wait
After finishing that previous post, I just went out to survey the yard for other subjects and checked on the Argiope. The encased male was missing from the web already, curiously, but while I was looking to see if his carcass had been discarded underneath, found a male conspicuously at the edge of the web again.
Now I’m confused. Another suitor already making his move even
Could be worse
I know, even more arthropods, but that’s how it goes.
I’ve been keeping an eye on an Argiope spider in the dog fennel plants, probably a juvenile A. aurantia, sometimes known as a black-and-yellow argiope, or garden spider. These are the ones that grow fairly large, up to 8cm or more in leg spread, that throw orb webs with a white zigzag in the center across tall weeds