The Nature of Things

We have the hope of some actual autumn-like weather in the coming week. The forecasters are saying that our high temperatures will be in the low 80s and may even dip into the 70s on one day! And nighttime temperatures could actually get as low as the high 50s. Those are the most pleasant numbers we've seen since April. We can only hope that they materialize. With such a prospect in view, let us dream on with one of the Romantic poets, John Keats. Here is his take on autumn. To Autumn by John Keats Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their c...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : The Scrub Jay is one of the iconic birds of the western United States. I took this (not very good) photograph in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado on an autumn trip there a few years ago. *~*~*~* There's some rare good news about the plastic polluting our oceans. The huge floating device that was designed by Dutch scientists to collect plastic debris from what is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch succeeded in picking up plastic from the high seas for the first time. That patch of rubbish in the Pacific is now three times the size of France. *~*~*~* But there's more evidence that any help in cleaning up plastic pollution may be too little too late. A comprehensive study of microplastics in California has turned up a mind-boggling amount in San Francisco Bay. Much of this pollution flows into the bay through storm drains. The scientists say that the plastics were found basically everywhere they looke...

I was thinking about this book earlier today and went back to read my review of it in 2014. Unfortunately, I found that, once again, I couldn't remember a lot of detail. The review brought it all back. ~~~ Monday, June 23, 2014 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A review One Hundred Years of Solitude  by  Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez My rating:  5 of 5 stars It's a good thing the writer and/or publisher decided to place a Buendia family tree chart at the beginning of this novel. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to keep track of all the Jose Arcadios, Aurelianos, Amarantas, Ursulas, and Remedios that keep recurring throughout the multiple generations of the family that we meet in  One Hundred Years of Solitude . Even referring to the chart with each new chapter, it was not easy to keep them all straight. But then there is nothing easy about this book. I first read it many years ago - in the '70s or 80s, I think - but when Gabriel Garcia Marque...

I've had this book in my reading queue for many months but just hadn't been able to work myself up to reading it. I was daunted by my experience with the author's previous book, the Booker Award-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings .  That one was a very difficult read for me. Did I really want to sail those waters again? Then on the very day that I finally decided to start reading, news came that the book had been longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for fiction. Black Leopard, Red Wolf , in case you haven't heard, is a quite surreal fantasy, the first book of a planned trilogy. It is set in Africa in an undesignated time and it draws heavily on what one is to assume are African myths. (Not being well-versed in those myths, I don't feel qualified to judge.) As in his previous book, James uses a lot of language for which I could find no reference or definition, and, once again, one is to suppose that the words have their root in African languages, but th...

As September fades into October, our thoughts turn to...baseball. Well, truthfully, for some of us, our thoughts have been on baseball for the last six months. Those were fun times, but now it gets serious. It's been a remarkable season for my favorite team, the Houston Astros. They've set a new club record for wins and several of the players have set individual records of various kinds. In addition to all that, they are just a fun team to watch. For those of us who suffered through those years of 100+ losses, the last three seasons of 100+ wins have been sweet indeed. And now we come to the playoffs where anything can happen and usually does and all of those 100+ wins mean nothing. Or at least very little. Baseball is a game where yesterday's hero can be today's goat and vice versa. But there is always another game tomorrow, a chance for redemption. Until there isn't. May Swenson understood. Analysis of Baseball by May Swenson It's about the ball, the bat, and ...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : A member of the very large wren family of birds, the Rock Wren is a resident in the Big Bend area of Texas, which is where I photographed this one. *~*~*~* There was another warning from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this week. They issued their latest report on the status of the world's oceans and it is not good . They are heating up so rapidly and their chemistry is changing so dramatically that it is threatening seafood supplies, fueling cyclones and floods and posing profound risks to people who live along coasts. *~*~*~* Climate change refugees are likely to become more widespread in the coming years. Already the effects of climate change are one of the major factors driving people out of Central America. *~*~*~* The decline of many bird species could be reversed with appropriate action from governments, businesses, and individuals. *~*~*~* One species of bird that is doing very, very well (than...

Another excellent Vera Stanhope Mystery. This is the fourth in the series and they just keep getting better. The overweight and out-of-shape Vera who likes her drink maybe just a little too much has recently had her annual physical and the "child doctor" told her she needed to make some lifestyle changes. That couldn't have been much of a surprise, but what kind of changes can Vera tolerate? She tried yoga but found that her mind wandered and she couldn't concentrate on the downward-facing-dog. She settled on swimming. It was something that she sort of enjoyed and she could fit it in before work every day. Or as often as she chose. She joined a local health club at an out-of-the-way hotel where she wouldn't run into any colleagues and committed to doing ten laps - well, more nearly eight - in their pool each day. Then, a few minutes in their steam room and a latte and she was good to go. But then one morning she found another woman seated in the steam room. When s...