The Nature of Things

Greater Yellowlegs in flight at Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas Coast. The yellowlegs is one of the iconic birds of the Texas Coast in winter.

Did you see the appearance of President Obama at the Republican House members' retreat yesterday? I didn't watch it live, but I did see the replay of it last night on MSNBC. It was very interesting political theater. Several commentators made the analogy to the Prime Minister's question time in England when the PM stands before the elected representatives and takes their questions. The main difference between that and what we had yesterday is that any representative, including members of his own party, can query the Prime Minister, thus some of the questions are bound to be friendly. In yesterday's exercise, all of the questions were adversarial, if not downright hostile. Most of the questioners prefaced their question with long statements chastising the President. Happily for his supporters, the President did not give an inch and gave as good - actually better - than he got. He answered their questions, told them to their faces when they were actually mistating f...

For weeks now, we've been hearing about a planned convention of the "tea party" movement in Nashville next week. The organizers have touted the slate of true-blue (or maybe I should say true-red) tea partiers who would be speaking at the event. Among those heroes (or heroines) of tea partydom were Martha Blackburn (R-TN), Michele Bachmann (R-MN, or is it Mars?), and Sarah Palin (R-Fox News). Well, now, two of the speakers, Blackburn and Bachmann, have pulled out, citing belated concerns about congressional ethics rules. Only the stalwart Palin continues to stand four-square with the tea party convention organizers. The convention has all along presented problems for the truly grassroots section of the TP movement. You see, it is a "for profit" venture. Several groups have looked at the success of the TPers in stirring people up and thought, "How can we co-opt this movement and make a buck off of it?" (It is the American Way, after all - the fre...

I watched the President give his State of the Union address last night. It's a good thing I did because I wouldn't have recognized the speech as "analyzed" by many "experts" in the media. It was a good and honest speech, I thought. It was unlike many of the hyperbolic speeches we've come to expect on such occasions. I was convinced that he believed and meant every word that he spoke. If I didn't necessarily agree with him on every single point, still I honor his seriousness of purpose and his continuing attempts to talk to people, including the self-important puffed-up politicians that were in the room with him last night (yes, including the Supreme Court justices), as if they were adults, and intelligent adults at that. I was struck again that he refuses to give up on bipartisanship and on trying to change the toxic atmosphere in Washington. He talked about the deficit of trust and the need to reduce that deficit. He continued to reach out to ...

Late January is the time our most beloved swallow, the Purple Martin, makes its appearance throughout much of Texas, and indeed all the states on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. This year some of the birds didn't even wait for the page on the calendar to turn. They showed up on December 31 . The birds usually don't show up in my yard just northwest of Houston until early February, but since they have already been reported in the area, I am on the alert for them, ready to open the doors of my martin mansion and raise it high to welcome back one of my favorite birds of summer. Purple Martins have a long and remarkable relationship with human beings on this continent. The Native Americans were the first to put up gourd housing for the birds. This continued for centuries before Europeans arrived on the scene and took up the practice. Over time, this symbiotic relationship has become so strong that Purple Martins in the eastern part of the continent are totally dependent upon ...

I had a package delivered by FedEx yesterday. As I opened the box and started removing the packing, I discovered that my treasure had been enclosed in a thick layer of bubble wrap. That meant double pleasure for me: I got what I had ordered, intact and in good shape, AND I got to pop some of those little pillows of air in the bubble wrap as I unwrapped it. I have no idea why popping bubble wrap is such a pleasure but it is, and I feel sure that that, in part, accounts for its success over the last fifty years. Yes, it is true - coincidentally with the arrival of my package, yesterday was bubble wrap's fiftieth birthday . Funnily enough, bubble wrap did not start life as a packing material. It was invented to be a kind of wall covering. It was not a hit in the world of home decor, but soon another use was found for it and the rest, as they say, is history. Bubble wrap had an enormous impact on the way America and the world did business in the latter half of the twentieth and n...

The militantly ignorant State Board of Education of Texas has struck again. They have barred children's book author Bill Martin Jr. from being included in the state's social studies curriculum. Martin is the writer of such books as Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and another book which taught kids how to say the Pledge of Allegiance. Pretty dangerous stuff, wouldn't you say? We Texans certainly don't want our kids exposed to anything that subversive! The capital crime for which Martin was expunged from Texas' list of "acceptable literature," though, is that he has the same name as a philosophy professor at DePaul University who wrote a book called Ethical Marxism and it seems that the members of the "bored of education" are too lazy and incompetent to do the research that would reveal to anyone with access to Google that these men are two different people. Instead, they just barred all authors named Bill Martin. This group of peo...