The Nature of Things

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao  racked up most of the major literary awards when it came out in 2007, including the Pulitzer. It was hailed as a  tour de force  by most critics. Now that I've finally gotten around to reading the book, I have to agree. It is an amazing work. This was Junot Diaz's first novel. Of course, since then he's written another greatly acclaimed book,  This Is How You Lose Her . I'm putting it on my "to be read" list. We meet Oscar as an amazingly sweet-tempered, grossly obese teenage geek who lives in a fantasy world of gaming, anime, comics, and  Lord of the Rings  with his rebellious older sister and his Dominican mother in Paterson, New Jersey. Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien. Most of all, he dreams of finding love. He falls in love repeatedly, usually with the most highly inappropriate females, but his sentiments are never returned. He's never been kissed. Things are not easy for this immigrant Domini...

(Cross-posted from Backyard Birder .) Northern Spotted Owl  photographed at the Oregon Zoo. Photo courtesy of Slate.com. If you are a part of the agency charged with protecting endangered species, what do you do if one of those species is threatened by another species in Nature? If the threatening species is a non-native, invasive species, the answer is clear. Stop the invasive one by any means necessary, including lethal measures. But what if the threatening species is native with, arguably, just as much right to be here as the threatened species?  That is the dilemma  currently facing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in its decades long battle to try to save the Northern Spotted Owl from extinction.  The Northern Spotted Owl first came to the nation's attention in the 1990s when it became clear that if something wasn't done to stop the logging of the old growth forests of the Northwest that were its natural habitat, the bird would be extirpated. After studying th...

Alan Bradley's eleven-year-old, soon-to-be twelve-year-old, detective, the delightful Flavia de Luce is back in her fifth case and she is just as irrepressible as ever. The village of Bishop's Lacey is busily preparing to open the tomb of its patron saint, St. Tancred, and no one is more excited about the prospect of peering into the crypt than Flavia. She contrives to be present at the opening but the proceedings are cut short when Flavia discovers the body of the church organist, Mr. Collicutt. The man had been missing for several weeks and obviously has been dead for all that time. Almost as inexplicable as being found dead in a saint's tomb, Collicutt is wearing a gas mask! What does it all mean? Who would want to kill the church organist? And how did the murderer(s) transport him into a closed crypt? Flavia, of course, is determined to find out. And so we get to follow the young detective around the village as she interviews people without them knowing they are being i...

February BY  MARGARET ATWOOD Winter. Time to eat fat and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,    a black fur sausage with yellow Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries    to get onto my head. It’s his way of telling whether or not I’m dead. If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am    He’ll think of something. He settles on my chest, breathing his breath of burped-up meat and musty sofas, purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,    not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,    declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,    which are what will finish us off in the long run. Some cat owners around here    should snip a few testicles. If we wise    hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,    or eat our young, like sharks. But it’s love that does us in. Over and over    again,  He shoots, he score...

( Cross-posted from Gardening With Nature. ) Photo courtesy of Huffington Post Punxsutawney Phil has spoken . His prediction is that spring is coming soon. No six more weeks of winter ahead for us! The furry critter came out of his burrow this morning and didn't see his shadow, so we can get on with planning our spring gardens. Phil lives in Pennsylvania, of course, and I'm not sure how much validity his prediction has for Southeast Texas. If he had emerged from his burrow in my backyard this morning, he would definitely have seen a shadow. My world is full of bright sunshine. Maybe he would have blinked once and scurried back inside. On the other hand, it is 70 degrees out there. Perhaps he would have just curled up for a nap in the sun. It seems that all the signs of Nature, not just sleepy groundhogs but also birds, butterflies, flowers, insects and frogs, are pointing toward an early spring. Actually, in my part of the world, we have not had much of a winter, really only th...

It's been a long week of seemingly one battle after another and not much progress made. I think we all need a pep talk. I love it! I'd definitely vote for that kid president.