A version of this post first ran in 2013. In 2006, a puppy came to live on a small farm in Colorado. His name was Oskar, and he was the runt of the litter. Oskar was a playful little guy, but on one fateful autumn day, he would learn that he was living in the […]
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It’s been said and often quoted that 10,000 hours of doing anything will make you a master. Never mind the squishy definition of mastery that makes it apocryphal, I believe it. When the term mastery is used, I figure it’s not that you’ve risen flawlessly to becoming a great chef or engineer, but that you’ve […]
Imagine I was to describe a creature to you. Something truly terrifying. Something out of a nightmare that no amount of drunken elves could wash away. It’s small enough to hide almost anywhere in your house but big enough to crawl up onto your bed at night. It drools, shits and pisses everywhere it goes. […]
You know what I have a problem with? Every creature but us. With their membranes and slotted eyeballs, they make almost no sense. I couldn’t know a speck of what a chicken knows, or how to see through the eyes of a millipede as it clatters over fallen leaves. I can write as many times […]
The worst thing about having emotional support bees (ESBs), really, is getting them on the plane. Last Thursday was no exception. It was a rough day all around—trying to pack clothes around the hive without getting everything sticky, then arguing with the cab driver about putting bees in his trunk, and then the TSA dude […]
Late at night, after the campers at Puddingstone Lake RV park in Los Angeles County have gone to bed, Ted Stankowich and his graduate students set up infrared cameras and speakers around an open field. They open cans of cat food and fling chunks of it all over the grass. Then they wait. The skunks come in droves. Some wear metal ear cuffs and RFID tags. Others […]
We here at LWON aren’t opposed to a little snark now and then. In our annual homage to SHARK WEEK, we give the gentlest creatures daggers for teeth or in some other way flip them on their funny little heads. We embrace the stinky and dis the adorable. We make stuff up without apology. We […]
The murders began, as they usually do, with the coleus. I had walked out my front door on that May morning to sit on my porch swing. But I saw immediately that something was wrong, very wrong. Soil was spattered everywhere. A telltale sign of a massacre, as I knew from experience. Dark-chocolate dirt, flecked […]