The Nature of Things

It was announced by the Library of Congress last week that we are going to have a new national poet laureate. Juan Felipe Herrera, the son of migrant farmworkers whose writing combines experimentalism with reflections on Mexican-American identity and who just completed a stint as California's state poet laureate, will succeed Charles Wright in the national post. It is a very timely appointment in that immigration is a much debated issue in the country at the moment. The problems of immigrants are central to much of Mr. Herrera's poetry. Here is an example of that poetry. Every Day We Get More Illegal by Juan Felipe Herrera Yet the peach tree  still rises & falls with fruit & without birds eat it the sparrows fight our desert                    burns with trash & drug it also breathes & sprouts vines & maguey laws pass laws with scientific walls detention cells   husband   ...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : Image courtesy of the Glacier Institute and Glacier National Park. Since the outlawing of DDT and related pesticides in 1972, this has become an increasingly familiar sight around the country, wherever there is a body of water large enough to support their fishing habit. It is a nesting pair of Ospreys with mom sitting on the nest and pop hovering overhead and about to land. Mated pairs return to the same nest year after year, often adding new materials to it to enhance or repair it. Mom stays with the newly hatched chicks at first while dad does the fishing and delivers the food to her. She then feeds the chicks. Although their numbers are increasing, they are still considered uncommon in most areas, so count yourself lucky if Ospreys nest near you.  *~*~*~* Just when you think our Congress cannot sink any lower, they go and do something like this. The House of Representatives has passed an appropriation bill that would ...

Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope My rating: 5 of 5 stars It was with a keen sense of anticipation that I turned to Trollope once again to read the second in his Barsetshire Chronicles series, Barchester Towers. I had read the first, The Warden, in 2013 and found it to be a wonderful reading experience; thus, the bar was set high. I was not disappointed. In Barchester Towers , we again meet the humble clergyman and thoroughly good man, now ex-warden, Mr. Harding, and his family. There is his most beloved daughter Eleanor Bold, now Widow Bold with a young son upon whom she shamelessly dotes. And there is the older daughter, Susan, and her husband, Archdeacon Grantly, and their children. All of these characters are integral to the story told here. But this book introduces new characters who will put their stamp upon Barsetshire and particularly Barchester. There is a new bishop in town. His name is Dr. Proudie and he is certainly one of the most indecisive men ever to hold such a...

In September 2013, I read my first Anthony Trollope novel, The Warden , and I posted my review here. As I have mentioned here previously, I am now reading my second Trollope , Barchester Towers , and enjoying it immensely. I hope to finish reading it today and post my review tomorrow. But as a reminder of where the story started, here is my 2013 review of The Warden . *~*~*~* The Warden by Anthony Trollope My rating:  5 of 5 stars Most of the reading I've been doing this summer has been of murder mysteries. Noir. Police procedurals. Thrillers. Cozy mysteries. But always with a murder involved. It was time for a cleansing of my reading palette. The writers of those mysteries all tailor their craft for the tastes of typical readers (if such animals exist) of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. They feature short, pithy, undemanding sentences calculated to keep those pages turning and keep the reader from turning away to any of the other myriad of possible entertainments availabl...

There is an interesting report out this morning concerning family life in the United States. The information comes via a new geographic analysis from a University of Virginia sociologist, W. Bradford Wilcox, and a psychologist, Nicholas Zill. They did the analysis after reading recent information about upward mobility and marriage and realizing that the geography of the American family differed from the standard perception of it. In spite of the lip service that they give to family values, in general, politically conservative states have some of the highest divorce rates. On the other hand, bastions of liberalism like California, the Northeast, Illinois, for example, have notably low divorce rates.  What Wilcox and Zill found in their analysis, though, is that two-parent households are not just a blue state/red state issue. Rather, it seems to be more a North-South divide. An arc of states right across the northern half of the country make up the high-percentage states, while the s...

One of the fairly anonymous but very useful residents of my backyard is an adult Texas Garter Snake. The snake is seldom seen. I discovered him earlier this year when I was standing near one of my flower beds and looked down to see this seemingly large and very well-fed snake about to slither its way past my feet. Was I startled? You bet! But I managed to stand my ground without jumping out of my skin and indeed the snake did slither past and continued on toward the woodpile at the back of the garden. I suspect that is where he spends most of his time. Image of Texas Garter Snake courtesy of the Southwestern Center for Herpetological Research. These snakes generally range in size from 18 - 25 inches but can grow up to 42 inches long. My snake is definitely longer than 25 inches. I estimated it at about three feet long and, as I mentioned above, it appeared to be a well-fed animal. The natural food of garter snakes includes frogs, toads, salamanders, fish, tadpoles and earthworms. They ...

My mind wanders over the Tuesday landscape and digs up these random thoughts. *~*~*~* Lincoln Chafee doesn't have a snowball's chance of succeeding in the Democratic race for President, but he does have at least one interesting idea. It's probably not going anywhere either, but maybe it should. Maybe it is time that we joined the rest of the world and adopted the metric system. At this point, only the United States, Myanmar, and Liberia cling to our old-fashioned non-metric system. Myanmar and Liberia will most likely accept metric long before we do. Our political system is too hidebound to unbend itself to accept something as sensible as the metric system. After all, feet and inches, pounds and miles are all part of "American exceptionalism," aren't they? And that's something we are so inordinately proud of, as we beat our chests and trumpet it to the rest of the world.  Moreover, there is a lot of fear of metric abroad in the land. Many will agree with m...