It’s after Memorial Day, so I should be wearing white instead of thinking about the white stuff. (Although if I were in the Arctic Circle or even in Vermont and New York, where a late-May storm dropped a foot or more in some spots, I might be thinking about snow quite a bit). Even when […]
I did a big run on Saturday morning. On Saturday afternoon, I stuffed my face, had a welcome beer after a training dry spell, and felt glorious. Sunday morning I spent in bed, reading the New York Times in a puddle of pure contentment. Sunday night, I went to an epic dinner and felt the […]
Guest poster Mary Caperton Morton wrote a lovely post about poison oak a few years back, but I just had this itch… I saw an old friend—or foe, I guess—on a run last weekend. Leafless during winter, the poison oak in a nearby park has started to push out shiny green triads along the trail […]
Most of the people I follow on Facebook are friends from high school and college, so I usually see photos of kids, drinking establishments, and scenic shots of the West. But recently I caught on to what 710,000 twitter followers and 219,354 Facebook friends (as of Tuesday) already knew–and started following Col. Chris Hadfield, a […]
An important decision faces Oregon’s lawmakers this week. It concerns a $2.4 billion industry, an organism that’s important in genetics and other research, and a ritual that boosts the happiness of the multitudes, starting around 5 o’clock in the afternoon. I know, I know. I could have just said that Oregon is considering making brewer’s […]
Let me start with the squid “penis” and get to the mysterious grooves on the seafloor later. Last April an ROV called Little Hercules, cruising around the seafloor in the northern Gulf of Mexico, spotted a distant, possibly cephalopod-like shape. As Little Hercules got closer, NOAA researcher Mike Vecchione reports in the mission log, “the […]
When I was a teenager, my dad installed a timer on my bedroom light. After 45 minutes, the light would flash a few times. Then, darkness. My dad was tired of me falling asleep with my light on. It was such a waste of energy. This, he said, was the perfect solution. I started thinking […]
We now return to our occasionally-scheduled Thank God It’s Penis Friday. The alligator harvest at Louisiana’s Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge happened every September, so in the fall of 2007, Diane Kelly packed her bags. She wasn’t hunting, but she still had to put her scalpels and knife blades and the rest of her dissection kit in […]