One Leptoglossus, two Leptoglossi

Spotted lounging on
our compost tumbler

By Moristotle

Are you interested in bugs? I spotted one of these on Monday morning, a Leptoglossus oppositus, or leaf-footed bug – at least according to Siri Knowledge, after it (or she?) performed the photo-search I requested on my iPhone (aka my camera).

Image from Siri Knowledge,
with link to Wikipedia

Goines On: Wind rushings

Image from
Juan de Valdés Leal’s
“Finis gloriae mundi” (1672)
Click image for more vignettes

In perusing his archives, Goines was reminded of something from thirteen years earlier. The passenger window in their car had stopped working, and as he was driving with both front windows open to a repair shop, a cattle truck passed him on the interstate, and he got a nose full of the aroma of livestock.
    The cattle were presumably on their way to a slaughterhouse, and Goines had felt bad about that.
    He still felt bad about animal slaughter. Those animals were related to us, as his 2010 reading of Richard Dawkins’ 2004 book, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, had underscored for him:

From Rus in Urbe Backyard Buck: On Coyote Patrol

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

[Columnist Paul Clark fashioned Rus in Urbe: Country in the City from his family’s one-acre suburban lawn, turning it into a wilderness retreat for them and their neighboring wild creatures.]

At our place in Virginia, our backyard deer have their fawns the last two weeks of May. Not coincidentally, our ever-present but seldom seen coyotes show up in greater numbers the first two weeks of May.

Life Goes On

By Victor L. Midyett

The temperature this morning is the coldest it has been to date this autumn at 33˚F, just one degree above freezing for my Aussie friends.
    The grass is covered in a white sheet of frost, but thankfully there is no wind or even a breeze to speak of. The best part is there are no clouds and the sun is beaming brightly.

11 Years Ago Today: Spiritual jocularity

By Moristotle

[Originally published on October 22, 2010.]

Mert really does sound almost exactly like Charlie Thomas. He called again yesterday, to thank me. He and his friend have reconnected by telephone and he is happy.
    “Morris,” he said, “do you believe that the Good Lord works in mysterious ways?”
    “No, Mert, I don’t believe any of that.”
    Even though [Mert] then said, “Ha! I don’t believe that!,” it’s true. I don’t believe it.

But Mert’s question made me realize that the texture of Wednesday (and of much of the next two days—and perhaps of today again) is in some ways similar to that of the days of my Youie Summer (1989). But with one saving, essential difference.
    In 1989, I believed that the things that were happening were “signs from UIE,” or Universal Intelligent Energy¹ (pronounced YOU-ie [“or YAH-weh?” my son suggested], and aka “God”). Now, I don’t believe that; now, I can just “be spiritual” naturally (if my friend Bill is right in labeling me so; perhaps it just means that I’m able to accept things as they are, and laugh about them) without any supernatural entities clothed by magical thinking.
    I liked to say “Praise Youie!” If I were to say it now, it would be ironically, and also perhaps a bit self-reverently, out of charity for the sad, manic person I was that summer.
    But in not very long, it won’t make any difference what I was then or what I am now. Or any of us after we’ve been dead a while.
_______________

1. In late spring of 1989, I had been reading Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time, in which he of course referred to Einstein’s famous equation. Let the following excerpt from Victor Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis (which is included in Hitchens’s Portable Atheist) serve to make the connection:

   ...in his special theory of relativity published in 1905, Albert Einstein showed that matter can be created out of energy and can disappear into energy. What all science writers call “Einstein’s famous equation,” E=mc², relates the mass m of a body to an equivalent rest energy, E, where e is a universal constant, the speed of light in a vacuum. That is, a body at rest still contains energy.

Are Children Too Smart for Their Own Good…

Or Just Too Smart for Disney?

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

[The first installment of this story, with the subtitle “Or Just Too Smart for Adults?,” appeared on October 30 last year.]

When my son was 2-years, 8-months old, he and I were getting on an elevator in Anaheim when a 40ish woman joined us. She was headed for Disney and was decked out in a bulging yellow and black tightly stretched lycra mouseketeer-like outfit and some sort of bee-like pseudo-princess headband with flashing lights - apparently a Junior Leaguer who had not taken an objective look in a mirror in quite a while. She looked at me, looked at my son, and practically screamed: “Is your grandpa taking you to Disney?!!?”

At Random: Infiltrator

By Paul Clark
(aka motomynd)

The deer accept me as their own,
rest easy an arm’s reach away.
They welcome me into the nursery thicket,
protecting them as the new are born.

They trust me,
think they know my mind,
but I’m an infiltrator,
I used to hunt their kind.

Are Children Too Smart for Their Own Good…

Or Just Too Smart for Adults?

By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

In using the word children, instead of kids – I was raised with the saying “baby goats are kids” or something like that – I’ve already put the age thing out there, so let me just say it: I’m 65, whatever. And I’m trying to homeschool my six-year-old son. Yes: 6, not a typo, whatever. And it isn’t going well. The method, as schools demand it, and as I originally envisioned it, has basically been blown to hell, but the results from the as yet undefined Plan B sort of seem to be happening. Which is a blow to the system I know and have long resented yet still believed in.

Review: David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet

Well into the sixth of Earth’s major extinction events, he believes it is still possible for mankind to save itself

By Moristotle

My wife and I watched Sir David Attenborough’s biography of his (and Earth’s) life yesterday afternoon. Attenborough is 94 years old, near the end of his own life. And much of Earth’s life is also near its end, including human life, if we don’t act quickly to halt the Earth’s sixth major extinction event in its last 2.5 billion years. (The fifth occurred about 66 million years ago, following the collision of a large asteroid or comet – 7 to 50 miles in diameter – with the Earth, which led to the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs.)

Goines On: All us creatures

Click image for more vignettes

Goines could still remember a dream he had the year he was twenty-two, while taking a nap on a delightful, rainy Spring afternoon in the Berkshires of Massachusetts.

On Franklin Hill Farm: Under foot (a poem)

By Bettina Sperry

In the fields, the grass, the hills,
I searched and wondered
And looked afar.
A fall, a winter, a quiet spring,

On Franklin Hill Farm: In the land of the great pastures (a poem)

With accompanying video

Posted by Franklin Hill Farm on Saturday, May 18, 2019

By Bettina Sperry

In the land of the great pastures
and fairy tale visions
of field flowers and blades of green
where mice and moles
and birds do play,

The Loneliest Liberal:Coping in our time

By James Knudsen

I can’t be the only one. There must be others struggling to cope. A nation of this size, there must be dozens of people like me looking for a way to deal with the fact that Donald J. Trump is our President. And unlike previous Chief Executives, who start to blend in with the hand-rubbed paneling, this one is just as front and center, just as exhausting, just as infuriating as the day he strutted down that escalator. Well, I’d rather shine a light than curse the darkness, so here are some coping strategies for those in a similar predicament.

Thunder Down Under: Spirit of determination

Detail

By Vic Midyett

I had breakfast with a friend a few weeks ago, after which we went for a walk along the Swan River, which runs through Perth and spills out at Fremantle into the Indian Ocean.

Thunder Down Under: Survival – separate yet together

By Vic Midyett

“In all my put together born days” is an old Southern (U.S.) saying that I suspect is not used much, if any, anymore. It means, “in my whole life.”

Five Years Ago Today: Cleverness of the Coyote

By motomynd

[Originally published on August 19, 2013.]

In Native American legend, and in real life, the coyote is known as a creature of crafty intelligence and humor. I’ve been around them enough in various parts of the country to give them great credit for above average intelligence and awareness, but I’ve dismissed much of their vaunted standing as hype.
    Now I’m not so sure. Case in point: I have no photos to contribute with this post, and I should.

Five Years Ago Today: 2012 highlights of Moristotle & Co.

When the United States had a President we could honor

By Moristotle

[Originally published on December 31, 2012, but with a different subtitle. It’s still my daughter’s birthday, but she’s more likely at home than on a boat.]

Yesterday I went through the blog's 2012 archive [accessible through the bottom section of the sidebar]. The blog began the year as "Moristotle: A sometimes ironic celebration of life on Earth" – or was it still "An ironic celebration of life, love, laughter, and learning" or "...of evolving life and learning on Earth"? However exactly it started out the year, you can see by the masthead how we think of it now.

On fanciful ideas

Reflections over the kitchen sink

By Moristotle

Spellbound at its revelations, my wife and I have been watching Ken Burns’s Vietnam War. Watching it is tearing at my heart, and hers too, I think. The war’s stupidity, our leaders’ pathological need to “save face,” the hundreds of thousands of deaths, square miles of beautiful land burned and bombed, the angst of soldiers, their families, their fellow citizens torn asunder by opposed stances on the war….

By simple domestic beauty...

...dazzled

By Moristotle

Last evening, as I was bringing in the bird feeders (to protect the seeds and thistle from overnight deterioration from moisture), the waning light was just sufficient to dazzle me with the beauty of our back yard. Thanks to my almost always-handy smartphone for its adequate camera:

Ten Years Ago Today

Even though...
still Nature....

By Moristotle

[Originally published on June 30, 2007, not one word different.]

Even though violent men continue to murder people and blow things up in Iraq,
and even though the Bush Supreme Court continues to subvert our Constitution,
and even though Cheenie continues to insist he is a law unto himself,