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 […]
Miscellaneous
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 […]
There’s a little patch of horror growing along my weekly drive, a strange blossoming on the side of the highway. People can’t stop pulling over for it. Flowers have appeared in profusion, alpine firecrackers of penstemon and some blue-hooded species, maybe an Aconite, wolfsbane, not one I know because they are invasives seeded across a […]
This post originally ran January 5, 2016 In the quarter light of a few remaining bulbs in a decommissioned hall of the Smithsonian, Kirk Johnson, the museum director, pushed back drapes of clear plastic. The National Fossil Halls was being undressed for demolition, dioramas and murals half torn down, everything had to go. In his […]
On the eve of disappearing to the ever-warmer-every-year Bering Sea for a couple of weeks, I thought it a good time to re-post this piece I wrote after my first visit up there, in August, 2017. Each morning, when the fog was thin enough to see, I went to the cliffs. I’d park the white […]
To be a parent is to get jerked around. Toy manufacturers jerk you around into buying useless crap. Other parents jerk you around making you worry you live in the wrong zip code. The kids themselves jerk you around into buying that second scoop of blueberry brontosaurus crunch with rainbow sprinkles. And, of course, Hollywood […]
