Snark Week: People are Bitching about My Emotional Support Bees, and It’s Hurting My Feels

By: | July 23, 2019

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 confiscating not just my nail clippers (which I’d planned to use during the flight, since I have a middle seat and nothing else to do) but also my nunchucks.

But I’m sorry, Mr. Hairy Necked Security Guy treating me like a criminal, I have a doctor’s note that says this hive of 30,000 stinging insects is totally legit and necessary to my wellbeing, and I intend to get every one of them from O’Hare to LA whether the flight is oversold or not.

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Snark Week: Skunks Don’t Stink

By: | July 22, 2019
Illustration of a large striped skunk and her young, by John James Audubon. Source: Morgan Library & Museum public archive

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 are streaked with pink and purple dye, tagged in a previous run-in with the researchers. As the skunks nibble on cat food, Stankowich and his team cue up the sound of a coyote howling, or a great horned owl hooting. Then they watch to see if the skunks stand their ground, or scatter.

Stankowich studies how skunks respond to different predators, and how predators respond to them. Although skunks can easily fend off attacks at ground-level, they are much more vulnerable to predators that swoop from above, like great horned owls. The skunks seem more alarmed by the owl hoots, suggesting they know who they can and can’t tangle with, Stankowich says. His next step is to roll out more realistic models, including an owl glider that attacks from above and a robot named Obi Wan Coyote, he says.

Surprisingly little is known about skunk behavior for a simple reason: “People don’t want to get near them,” Stankowich says. Yet, “skunks are my favorite animal, and the most misunderstood.”

Among the many misconceptions Stankowich would like to clear up about skunks is that they stink. The oil skunks shoot from their anal glands does stink, he acknowledges. But skunks are so good at aiming their spray, using highly manueverable nipples, that they almost never get it on their own fur. Dr. Jerry Dragoo, head of the Dragoo Institute for the Betterment of Skunks and Skunk Reputations, concurs. Although the nipples do occasionally dribble, “the animal itself doesn’t smell worse” than any other furry mammal, he says. (Dragoo, it should be noted, has no sense of smell. He was born without one.)

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It’s Snark Week.

By: | July 22, 2019

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 hope readers enjoy our silliness, but, if nothing else, we entertain ourselves. And, damn it, that might have to be enough.

(For last year’s snark attack, go here to start. There are links there to other years, too. We think they’re pretty funny.)

Toxic Beauty

By: | July 19, 2019

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 toxic cleanup site that looks like a fireworks show.

The pullout in the mountains near Telluride, Colorado, has turned hard-packed and dusty, and I’m getting used to slowing as I round the corner, idiots ahead on a winding two-lane, cars half off pavement, or pulling out at two miles per hour.

I don’t blame gawkers and picture takers, families laying down hand in hand as if fallen into the fields of heaven. I’d stop here, too, snap off some facebooks and instagrams, if the dirt weren’t sitting on half century of leached mine tailings, cancerous heavy metals in acid-broken ore, crushed, covered over, and seeded with wildflowers. I just wouldn’t.

A driver told me that living here 25 years, she’d hold her breath when passing this spot. The EPA says it’s safe, because it might be, probably is, I think? I mean, this isn’t an investigative post, but over the next couple decades is there going to be a rash of melanomas and liver cancers untraceable because the only thing people have in common is that they breathed when they drove by here?

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Searching for the First Americans in the Smithsonian

By: | July 18, 2019

Smithsonian mural

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 business outfit, a coat and tie and polished shoes, he showed me through shadows of skeletons and cases unbolted from the floor. It was the end of the work day, the knot of his tie loosened.

“Watch the nails,” he said as he stepped across a floor stripped down to concrete and wood. “Some are still showing through.” Continue reading →

The ritual: When science feels like elegy in advance

By: | July 17, 2019

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 pickup down a grassy ATV trail. Or off the main dirt road on a pullout. Or in the turnaround at the island’s southwesternmost point, where, when the wind was up at sea, waves coming from the south and west slapped together in explosions of spray and sound that I could feel like thunder in my chest.

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How To Win Friends And Influence People, According to My Dog

By: | July 16, 2019

It’s my dog’s birthday today, so re-sharing this post from the winter felt appropriate. Also I am on deadline.

Last fall, when I was deeply in need of a warm, distracting project, I got a puppy. She is very cute, extremely soft, and really annoying. She enjoys chewing everything, but she especially loves my shoelaces and my wrist, both of which she would carry in her mouth at all times like a prized possession, if I would let her. She is also very good at making new friends.

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Richard & the Trouble with Gravity

By: | July 15, 2019

Ann:  After you’ve gone to the immense trouble of writing a book, having to sell it seems a bit much.  My own personal best was always with the radio interviewers who began with, “So what’s the name of your book again?”  So Richard, what’s the name of your book again? Oh, right, Gravity.  What’s it about?

Richard: Nice try, Ann, but no, the title isn’t Gravity. It’s The Trouble with Gravity: Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feet

Ann:  You were supposed to say, “It’s about gravity.” But I sidetracked my own setup, didn’t I.

Richard: Sorry. I do know a setup for a punchline when I see one, but in this case the set-up seemed to be along the lines of “Why did the chicken cross the t’s and dot the i’s?”

Ann:  So I won’t quit my day job and go into comedy.  And, yes, your book is called The Trouble with Gravity.  And I haven’t read it — I will, because what you write, I read—but I have a good excuse, which is timing this post as closely as possible to your pub date.  Now then, what’s the trouble with gravity?

Richard: It’s about gravity. Oh, wait—I was reading the wrong question. The answer to this question is that the trouble with gravity is nobody knows what gravity is, and just about nobody knows nobody knows what gravity is. The exception is scientists, and they know nobody knows what gravity is because they know they don’t know what gravity is. 

Ann:  I was maybe 35 when I realized I didn’t know what gravity was.  I mean, an effect should have a cause, right? You don’t fall down for no reason.  Then I learned in night school physics that gravity is something mass does, but honestly, that didn’t help at all.  

Richard: Exactly so. Gravity is what we’ve come to accept as the cause of various effects, but what that cause is, nobody understands. The book is about the history and philosophy of this concept we all take for granted, and how that concept has evolved, starting with creation myths, virtually all of which begin with a division between Earth and Sky—a distinction that wouldn’t be evident if gravity didn’t make us conceive of the universe as down here and up there. That division extends to later myths (think: gods), religion (angels and devils, heaven and hell), and Newton’s revolution in breaking that down here/up there mental barrier. But I have to ask: “night school physics”?

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