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Thoughts du Jour

Posted in Miscellanea, tagged , , on April 11, 2023| Leave a Comment »

The Question

For a time, a question bobbed around in my head, but went unaddressed because loftier thoughts prevailed. When it finally rose in the hierarchy, I gave the matter some attention.

The question is this: why have humans subjected dogs to selective breeding so vigorously, to the point that over 300 breeds exist in a wide range of sizes and shapes, many of which are, I submit, senseless and cruel, YET the 40-odd recognized breeds of housecat have been subjected to very little selective breeding, and cats vary in appearance only in minor ways?

The answer, which I probably should have known, is simple and logical.

Dogs, in addition to being companions, are capable of performing many useful services for us. Hence, we have bred them accordingly — to herd, to guard, to hunt. The many and varied goals of selective breeding gave us today’s many and varied dog breeds. Poor choices and all.

Cats, on the other hand, perform only two tasks: they serve as companion animals, and they control pests (and, of course, murder an appalling number of harmless and useful living things). For those two tasks, cats perform perfectly well as they are; we had no need to modify them.

Simple and logical.

Origin Story 1

Is the world’s longest river the Nile or the Amazon? Well, it depends on how, and by whom, the measuring is done. And the answer is debatable.

For a long time, the Nile was considered the longest at about 4,200 miles from headwaters to mouth, compared to the Amazon at 4,100 miles. But even the experts can’t agree on a precise methodology for identifying a river’s source. For example, does a source count if the flow halts in dry seasons?

In addition, previously unknown sources keep popping up. In 2014, a team identified a spring in Peru as an overlooked headwater of the Amazon. Its discovery, they say, makes the Amazon longer than the Nile by about 80 miles.

It’s probably just a coincidence that the 2014 study was partially funded by the Brazilian government.

Origin Story 2

Wild cabbage (Brassica oleracea) is a hardy plant native to the rugged coasts of Europe. In most habitats, other plants easily muscle it out, but it thrives unchallenged along sea cliffs due to its high tolerance for salt and lime.

Wild cabbage is notable for producing a flower spike that is up to seven feet tall and topped with bright yellow flowers. It is even more notable for being the origin plant of a boatload of nutritious vegetables that are super rich in such good things as vitamins and fiber.

The ancient Greeks and Romans probably were the first to develop new varieties of B. oleracea. Today, its cultivars fall into eight groups: (1) cabbage, (2) collards and kale, (3) broccoli and cauliflower, (4) Chinese broccoli, (5) Brussels sprouts, (6) kohlrabi (turnip cabbage), (7) sprouting broccoli, and (8) Portuguese cabbage.

So, chow down on your choice of the many healthy cultivars of wild cabbage. I recommend kielbasa and cabbage, or roasted Brussels sprouts, or baked cauliflower. With cheese sauce.

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Useless Facts

Posted in Edutainment, tagged , , , on April 3, 2023| Leave a Comment »

More “Useless Facts for Inquiring Minds.”

● Wolf packs range in size from two to 30 members and average about 10. The number varies with such factors as the availability of prey in the territory. In most cases, a pack consists of parents and a season or two of offspring.

● Abraham Lincoln was a licensed bartender.

● Change for a dollar bill can be made in 292 different ways. 293 if you count swapping a dollar bill for a dollar coin.

● The rarest color combination among humans is red hair and blue eyes. Both are recessive traits; only about 17 percent of us have blue eyes, and less than two percent have red hair. Blue-eyed redheads make up about one percent of the population.

● The ears of an elephant radiate heat to help the animals stay cool. Elephants also spray water on themselves with their trunks, after which they may roll in the dirt to add a layer of insulation.

● The northernmost community in the US is Point Barrow, Alaska.

● The soft drink Sprite was introduced in West Germany in 1959 by the Coca-Cola Company. Back then, it was part of the Fanta line and was called Fanta Klare Zitrone (Fanta Clear Lemon). It was renamed Sprite when introduced in the US a few years later to compete with 7 Up.

● The world’s fastest animal is the peregrine falcon, which swoops down on its prey at an average of 185 mph. The highest measured speed: 242 mph.

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Trivia Questions o’ the Day

Posted in Regular Features, tagged , , , , on March 30, 2023| Leave a Comment »

The Questions…

1. In bowling, what do the terms turkey and hambone describe?

2. What was the maiden name of Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of Franklin Delano Roosevelt?

3. November 11 has been observed as Veterans Day in the US since 1954. However, the holiday actually dated back several decades under another name. What name?

4. In the play Romeo and Juliet, who was the Montague and who was the Capulet?

5. What is a group of foxes called?

The Answers…

1. Three and four consecutive strikes, respectively. The terms probably date back to times when food was presented to tournament winners.

2. Her maiden name was Eleanor Roosevelt; she and FDR were fifth cousins.

3. Armistice Day, which marked the armistice with Germany that ended World War I. Memorably, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.

4. Romeo was a Montague, Juliet was a Capulet.

5. A skulk or, less commonly, a leash. FYI, a female fox is a vixen, and a male is a tod.

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Useless Facts

Posted in Edutainment, tagged , , , on February 26, 2023| Leave a Comment »

More “Useless Facts for Inquiring Minds.”

● 94 percent of the organisms on Earth live underwater.

● Lincoln was the tallest president at 6’4”. Lyndon Johnson was 6’3”. Jefferson was 6’2½”, as is Clinton.

● The first televised athletic event in the US was a baseball game between Columbia and Princeton on May 17, 1939.

● The Basset Hound was bred in France in the 1500s as a hunting dog that could be followed on foot. This was a boon to the common folk, inasmuch as hunting from horseback was a pastime of the rich. Typically, Bassets hunted small game such as rabbits, foxes, and badgers. In French, the word basset means low or short.

● The concept of infinity has been understood since ancient times, but not until the 17th century did someone — English mathematician John Wallis — come up with the infinity symbol, ∞.

● Botanically, all varieties of the pepper plant — bell, pimiento, jalapeño, habanero, chipotle, cayenne, etc. — are fruits.

● Among the animals that mate for life are gibbons, wolves, coyotes, beavers, swans, bald eagles, ospreys, black vultures, barn owls, and pigeons.

● The invoice price of a Model T Ford when it was introduced in 1909 was $825.00.

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Thoughts du Jour

Posted in Miscellanea, tagged , , , , on February 5, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Happy Endings

My hair stylist of the last dozen years has retired early, for interesting reasons. When I met her, she was in her early 20s and newly married, but her doctors told her she was unable to have children. Except — oops — she turned up pregnant.

But complications arose. She had several scares when her blood pressure tanked. She almost died during delivery, and the baby was premature. But mother and son eventually recovered.

Two years later, against the advice of her doctors, she got pregnant again. After a difficult time and another scary early delivery, she and her second boy rebounded, albeit slowly.

Two years ago, against the advice of doctors, family, and friends, she became pregnant again. But this time, the pregnancy was textbook normal. No health issues whatsoever. After a full nine-month term, she delivered a healthy girl without incident.

My friend is now a stay-at-home mom, home-schooling the two boys. I see the family around town sometimes. My back-up hair stylist is now the primary.

This story makes me happy.

Pandemonium

A dramatic incident occurred recently in my usually quiet life. It consisted of 10 seconds of utter chaos, an episode that is etched forever in my memory banks. I chuckle out loud each time I mentally replay the scene.

Not long ago on a morning walk, my dog Jake surprised a squirrel — surprised as in met it eyeball to eyeball as we rounded the corner of an old shed. The startled squirrel leapt into the air, bounced off the side of the shed, zipped across Jake’s back, and scrambled up to the shed roof.

But the metal roof was steep and slippery, and the squirrel’s claws found no purchase. Running frantically, but sliding steadily backwards, the squirrel fell to the ground, landing at Jake’s feet.

Barely eluding Jake, the squirrel bounded into a tree, ascended to the uppermost branches, flung itself into the air, and landed with a thunk on the roof of a nearby house.

Fortunately, the roof of the house was not metal, and the squirrel made its escape.

The Rest is Cake

Becca Lawton, a river guide at Grand Canyon during the 1970s and 80s, has written several books about life as a boatwoman. In her most recent, she nicely sums up life in the inner canyon and how being on the river can affect you. As I can attest, the influence of the place is real and powerful. Becca wrote this…

The Canyon may appear vast and overwhelming when seen as a whole, especially when viewed in the mere 17 minutes the National Park Service notes as the average tourist’s visitation time to the rim.

What the mini-visitor doesn’t grasp in that time are the pockets of sanctuary tucked everywhere in the Canyon’s recesses. Deep green waterfalls. Pockets of shade and cool. Pools in red rock. Ferns, monkeyflowers, cottonwoods, willows.

“You only have to get them there,” Canyon guide Louise Teal says. “The rest is cake.” Get people to the river, earn their trust, and take them deep into what Louise calls the “zillion-year-old rocks.” She and I were passengers before we took up guiding. Then we never wanted to be apart from the Canyon’s soul-stirring sunsets, embracing rock walls, and endlessly flowing water.

Those we guided, too, found it a beautiful, intense, and, in Louise’s words, “completely fulfilling place.” It is — a place out of time and out of overwhelmed mind.

So take me to the river. Drop me in the water.

Experts say it usually takes about three days for a trip passenger to fully “arrive” on the river and mentally disconnect from their outside lives. Honestly, I don’t think it ever took me three days.

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This Just In

Posted in Regular Features, tagged , , , on February 1, 2023| Leave a Comment »

NAPLES, FLORIDA — Biologists have captured an 18-foot Burmese python in the Florida Everglades that weighed 218 pounds, the heaviest on record.

Burmese pythons are an invasive species from Southeast Asia first found in the Everglades in the 1990s. The snakes have no natural enemies and threaten a range of native mammals, birds, and reptiles.

The captured snake was a female carrying 122 developing eggs, which were destroyed along with the mother. A postmortem showed that the snake’s last meal was a whitetail deer.

Importing the pythons was banned by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 2012, but the snakes thrive in the South Florida wetlands. Their current population is about one million.

Over 1,000 Burmese pythons have been eliminated in Florida since 2013. Typically, biologists implant radio transmitters in male snakes, which always seek out the largest females, and follow the signals. Eliminating females is considered the best way to interrupt the breeding cycle.

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — A South Korean software engineer marked the demise of Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s much-maligned browser, by erecting a tombstone with the epitaph, “He was a good tool to download other browsers.”

The engineer said Explorer was “a pain in the ass,” but he was forced to use it because Explorer was the default browser for so many government and business offices.

Explorer was launched in 1995. It came pre-installed on billions of computers equipped with the Windows operating system and quickly became the world’s leading browser. But many considered Explorer to be sluggish and flawed, and by the late 2000s, Google Chrome took over as the top browser.

In June, Microsoft retired Internet Explorer to focus on the Microsoft Edge browser, which was released in 2015.

“I won’t miss it,” the software engineer said of Explorer’s passing. “Its retirement, to me, is a good death.”

WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND — The government of New Zealand and the country’s agriculture industry have jointly agreed to a tax on methane emissions by sheep and cattle, to be paid by farmers and the farming industry.

Currently, agricultural emissions are exempt from such taxation, and pressure has increased for industry and the government to take action.

New Zealand, population five million, is home to 26 million sheep and 10 million cows, which are the source of about half of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. The plan hopes to reduce methane emissions at manure treatment facilities as well as from the belching of farm animals.

Under the plan, farmers and agricultural businesses can reduce their methane taxes via such methods as using feed additives that minimize belching and placing covers on manure ponds.

Worldwide, agriculture is the largest source of methane emissions caused by human activity. In the U.S., agriculture causes about one-third of total methane emissions, and the oil and gas industry causes another third.

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Useless Facts

Posted in Edutainment, tagged , , , on January 20, 2023| Leave a Comment »

More “Useless Facts for Inquiring Minds.”

● Pink Floyd’s 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon was so popular, it remained on the record charts for 962 weeks — over 15 years.

● Six of the eight planets in the solar system rotate counter-clockwise, the same as the Sun. The exceptions are Venus, which rotates clockwise, and Uranus, which rotates clockwise while tilted on its side. For the record, the former planet Pluto also rotates clockwise and tilted.

● Disney World has 46 rides.

● Dolphins have the ability to go without sleep by resting half of their brains while the other half remains on duty. The halves then switch places. Studies have shown dolphins doing the resting thing for as long as two weeks before taking an actual full-on snooze.

● When the piano was invented in Italy in 1698, it was called a fortepiano or pianoforte. In Italian, piano and forte mean soft and loud, respectively, a reference to the volume level depending on how hard the keys are struck.

● In the 1963 film Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor changed costumes 65 times.

● Nephophobia is the fear of clouds. It usually manifests after a scary incident involving a storm, hurricane, or tornado. Nepho is Greek for cloud.

● On average, an ear of corn has 800 kernels arranged in 16 rows. For reasons undetermined so far, the ears almost always have an even number of rows. An odd number is rare.

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Thoughts du Jour

Posted in Miscellanea, tagged , , , on December 7, 2022| 2 Comments »

The Chaos of Evolution

Science, as you know, is willing to change its conclusions as new evidence warrants. Well, while I wasn’t paying attention, science made a whopper of a change about the nature of evolution.

As Darwin explained, evolution occurs through the process of natural selection. Namely, the fittest organisms survive, reproduce, and pass on their traits to the next generation. The idea also took root that the process unfolds as a rather neat and orderly progression, as if the species is changing by climbing a ladder, moving onward and upward.

That concept — that evolution is largely progressive — is now out the window. Instead, experts think evolution is less like a ladder and more like a big, gnarly tree, with lots of branches and numerous dead ends everywhere.

The new thinking is that a species evolves to adapt to a specific, immediate environment. For example, researchers once believed that the first horses had four toes, then evolved to three, then two, and finally to hooves.

More likely, toed horses evolved as more suitable in various marshy habitats, and hoofed horses evolved to navigate dry, rocky ground. Maybe one evolved from the other, maybe it didn’t. Think chaos, not orderliness.

Learning this made my head swim, but it makes sense. And it’s wonderfully objective.

I love science.

The Chase

My dog Jake sees deer all the time as they pass through the woods behind our house. It’s a thrill for him, but he’s inside a fence. You can bet he aches to be free, to give chase as nature intended, galloping in pursuit through the trees, unrestrained by fence or leash.

Not long ago, he got his wish. He and I went walking at Jefferson Elementary School on a Saturday, when he could go off-leash. The school property backs up to a multiple-acre woods.

As we walked along the edge of the woods, Jake suddenly froze and stared into the trees. Seconds later, a deer bolted and took flight. In a heartbeat, Jake was after it.

The chase lasted 10 or 15 seconds. Ultimately, 75 or so yards away, the deer leapt a fence into the safety of someone’s back yard. The drama was over.

When Jake came trotting back out of the woods, he was panting with excitement and exhaustion. A beaming dog smile was on his face.

Chickens

The chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) is the planet’s most common bird and one of the most widespread of domestic animals. More than 50 billion cluckers are raised annually as a source of meat and eggs. They are a crucial and relatively low-maintenance food source worldwide.

The modern chicken is a descendant of junglefowl that evolved on the Indian subcontinent about 8,000 years ago. Man has raised domestic chickens since the time of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians.

Early ocean-going explorers, including the Vikings, helped introduce chickens to all parts of the world. Typically, live chickens were kept on ships as part of the crew’s food supply, and the birds often were traded in foreign ports for needed supplies.

The origin of chickens in the Americas? Christopher Columbus introduced them here on his second voyage in 1493.

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Pix o’ the Day

Posted in Regular Features, tagged , , , on December 3, 2022| Leave a Comment »

More favorite photos I’ve taken over the years.

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If a Genie Appeared

Posted in Pets and Other Fauna, tagged , , , on November 25, 2022| Leave a Comment »

If a genie appeared and offered me one wish, and I were a better man, I would ask for world peace, or to end hunger and poverty, or for all Republicans to be raptured into the sky, never to be heard from again.

But no, I would ask to be 22 years old again, tall and handsome, financially secure, and with an IQ of, say, 200.

If the genie offered me a second wish, I would ask to be able to converse with my dog Jake.

I suppose it would have to be telepathic, since dogs haven’t evolved to speak. I’m fine with telepathic.

As it is, I talk to Jake constantly. But he only comprehends my tone and certain key words. I would want the genie to allow genuine two-way communication.

Jake and I understand each other pretty well, despite not being able to have conversations. As roommates of long standing, we know the other’s likes, dislikes, and boundaries. We have our routines and rituals, most of which occur smoothly.

But there is so much more I wish we could share.

I wish I could tell him, “Jake, we can’t go for a walk this morning because I have a haircut appointment. We’ll go walking after lunch, okay?”

And “I’m sorry, buddy, I can’t share these cookies with you. Chocolate is harmful to dogs. I got you some Alpo treats instead.”

And “Dude, I’m going on a road trip, and you’d be cooped up in the car all day. I’ll leave you at the kennel so you can play with the other pooches. I’ll be back before you know it, I promise.”

And “I know the thunder is scary, but it’s only noise. And it’s a long way off. It won’t hurt you, honest.”

And “Look, pal, when I sneeze, I’m not mad and yelling. It’s an involuntary reaction to a tickle in my nose. You sneeze, too, right?”

Jake also has information to share.

Such as “Rocky! We need to go out to the front yard, right now! A cat is out there! I saw it through the window!”

Or “Okay, this isn’t complicated. Leave the toilet seats up.”

Or “Look, you don’t have to keep me on a leash at the city pond. I know I get excited around the ducks, but would I chase one down and hurt it? Don’t be silly.”

Or “Uh… I ate some stuff outside, and I don’t fell so good. I think I’m gonna be sick.”

Anyway, I’ve given this considerable thought. I would be ready, if a genie appeared.

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