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 […]
Special series
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 […]
Disclaimer: chiggers are not actually insects as the title suggests, but arachnids, and insects are not a kingdom, but a class. I personally classify them all together into one creepy kingdom of small mechanical exoskeletal pests up to no good. They wear their skeletons on the outside and inside are nothing but goop. They bite […]
Welcome to Snark Week 2018! Not all cute-but-scary animals are biological. Allow me to expand the remit of Snark Week to include the dreaded CryptoKitty. Adorable and fluffy? Absolutely. Existentially dangerous? Most certainly. This creature packs a triple punch. Once critically endangered, it is now trying to claw its way out of jeopardy – on […]
Welcome to Snark Week 2018! Many years ago I worked as an environmental consultant for developers looking to meet and/or skirt federal and state regulators. People used to tell me I was on the leading edge of environmental work – where the rubber met the road. It didn’t feel that way. Mostly I felt like […]
It’s been another year full of terror and destruction and to celebrate everything that makes us afraid, the Discovery Channel is hosting its annual fear fest, called Shark Week. But we at LWON have always felt that fear of sharks is just a cheap and easy way to tickle our amygdalae. And while we may […]
We haven’t had a post in our occasional ‘Thank God It’s Penis Friday‘ series in quite awhile, so here’s one that we first published in 2013. Warning: images in links may be unsuitable for some. (Oh who am I kidding? Images in links may be unsuitable for most). By the time dermatologist Sanjeev Vaishampayan met […]