The Nature of Things

This is just very sweet. And very familiar. Especially the part about adding fun to daily chores and accompanying them at ALL times.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain My rating: 5 of 5 stars Billy Lynn is an innocent, decent but uneducated 19-year-old from Stovall, Texas, who found himself in the Army as a result of an encounter with the local police. He had a choice of going to jail or going to the Army. He chose the Army. And so, sometime later, he winds up in Iraq as a member of Bravo Company, and one life-changing day on Al-Ansakar Canal, his company is engaged in a fierce firefight from which eight members emerge physically undamaged. As circumstance would have it, there was a Fox News crew embedded with Bravo and they filmed the three minutes and forty-three seconds of the intense warfare on the canal. They got it all on film, including Billy Lynn defending his mortally wounded sergeant and personal guru Shroom as he was attacked by a number of insurgents. This played on Fox News over and over again and went viral until it was familiar to everyone in the country - a country that badly needed...

I am really angry and disgusted! There are plenty of things in the world to be angry and disgusted about, you may well think. Which one has set me off? Nothing so portentous as ISIL/ISIS or Russia/Ukraine or any one of a dozen other seemingly intransigent problems. No, I am upset because I have wasted five-and-a-half hours of my life that I will never get back watching dreck on television. I am generally pretty picky about what I watch on TV, but recently, I read about a new series that was starting on Masterpiece Theatre on PBS and the reviewer liked it, so I told hubby about it and we made plans to watch it. It was called "Breathless" and it started with two episodes back-to-back on Sunday of last week on our local PBS station. Fifteen minutes into the first episode, I was thoroughly confused and wondered what that reviewer had seen that I wasn't seeing. Still, it was Masterpiece Theatre which has provided me with a lot of quality entertainment and viewing pleasure over...

I spent much of the last week clearing out closets and drawers and divesting myself of extraneous possessions - clothing, household linens and other goods no longer used - and organizing what was left over. A lot of the stuff went into donation bags; some was not salvageable and went out with the trash. It's always a revelation to me when I do one of these clear-outs. I always come across things that I had forgotten that I had. So it was again this week. Tucked away in a corner of a shelf in the hall closet was a small wooden plaque with the inspirational poem Desiderata decoupaged onto it. Like many of my generation, I first became aware of this poem in the 1970s when a recording of the poem being read was very popular. It was meaningful to me then, perhaps because it came at a time when I particularly needed reassurance that I had "a right to be here." Since the universe sent me this message again last week, let's make it the poem of the week. Desiderata Go placidly...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : Greater Roadrunners are certainly present in our area of Southeast Texas, but I see them only rarely here.  This is one that I photographed on an autumn trip to Big Bend National Park, where they are much more common. They are very comfortable in rocky desert habitats. *~*~*~* A federal judge ruled this week that BP was guilty of "willful misconduct" and "gross negligence" in regard to the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 in which 11 people died and enormous damage was done to the environment. The company could face fines of up to $18 billion. *~*~*~* The big news (pun intended) in the world of Nature this week was the discovery of the fossil of a previously unknown and incredibly large species of dinosaur in Argentina. Called Dreadnoughtus schrani by its discoverers, the beast was 85-feet-long and still growing when it died. *~*~*~* A new study by a team of Korean and American scient...

The Bee: A Natural History by Noah Wilson-Rich My rating: 4 of 5 stars The argument could be and has been made that bees are essential to life on Earth as we know it. They are most certainly crucial to the reproduction and diversity of flowering plants. The creatures are known to pollinate more than 130 fruit, vegetable, and seed crops that we rely on to survive and those plants make economic contributions in the tens of billions of dollars every year. Therefore, it is very important on many levels that we have a healthy population of bees. But bees are in trouble. They are dying off at an alarming rate, and although in some cases the cause of the die-off has not been absolutely pinned down, scientists are pretty much in agreement that pesticides and the practices of modern agriculture are the main culprits. In The Bee: A Natural History , Noah Wilson-Rich explores some of the challenges faced by bees and how we can ameliorate them in order to aid the bees. This book primarily focuses...