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A Time in the Heart

Robin

Robins look … well, silly. They stand on the grassy verge with heads upraised, stock still for indefinite periods like little feathered statues, than drop down and make lightning-fast dashes to some other part of the lawn. Where they again stand still for an unpredictable while.

And despite all the press they get in songs and stories, they’re not even all that pretty. An unattractive dull gray body, ugly yellowish bill. Okay, they do have that red breast thing going for them, but it’s not even really red, is it? More of a reddish brown. And when you live in a place where brilliant scarlet cardinals regularly visit your back deck – not to mention equally colorful blue jays, red-winged blackbirds, goldfinches, and several kinds of red-accented woodpeckers – robins are pretty tame fare.

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Happy 200th Birthday!

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Our Dear Mr. Darwin would be a very spry (I’m sure) 200 years old this Feb. 12.

The man did so much for us. Aside from the claims of the idiots on the godder side of history, people of reason don’t worship him. But we do give a boatload of credit to a guy who worked so tirelessly, throughout his life, to understand and explain this most beautiful and fruitful idea: that all living things are interrelated. Man, how cool is that?

Here’s a painting of him done by premier natural history illustrator Carl Buell.

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Lest we forget: This is also the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln. And bravo for that, too!

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PS: The above image is COPYRIGHTED. If you snake it from my site, after my friend Mr. Buell was so kind as to allow me to post it, I’ll hunt you down and feed you to the invertebrates. AFTER I superglue hungry ferrets to your knees.

If you want a copy of the painting — which is fully life-sized — for your own Darwin Day celebratory use, contact Carl Buell directly at Carl [at] olduvaigeorge [dot] com.

At least one college I know of is printing out the full portrait and mounting it on a cutout backing so that students can pose with it for pictures.

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Broken Links

xmas-trees-3.jpgA major ice storm. Forty-two hours without electricity. A tree-fall in my neighbor’s yard, and because the base of it touches the property line, the expectation that I’m somehow on the hook to help get it removed. The breakdown of my truck.

And yet it was just about the most perfect two days I can remember in a long time.

I’m moving in with a friend, fellow bachelor-buddy Carl. I’ve been painting and preparing the ground at his house, transferring a few boxes as I go. I got my office moved over earlier this week.

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Thank You, Mr. Darwin. Again.

tree-of-life.jpgI grew up in Texas. Spent part of my childhood in Alabama. And I grew up among racists.

So I was a racist. When you grow up when and where I did, you can’t not be.

By the time I was in high school in the late 60s, racism was passé. It was no longer okay to hate the people who had progressed from being n*****s – also called, among my own relatives, “Negroes” or, given our accents, “niggrahs” – to being “black” people, or “African-Americans.”

But just because society changes, that doesn’t mean you do. I’m afraid the racism was still there in my head. (I like to think I can admit this not because I’m evil, but because I’m honest.)

Continue reading “Thank You, Mr. Darwin. Again.”

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When Coyotes Danced

coyotes.jpgIt was hot, the day the coyotes danced.

It was about 1990, and I was ranch-sitting at the Schober Ranch in Bishop, California. The owner was up in the mountains all summer, but there were cattle at the ranch, and somebody needed to be there to look after them.

In this particular case, ranch-sitting was a minimalist job. The cattle were out in a pasture with plenty of water and grass, and cattle don’t need much more than that. Really, all I had to do was walk the pastures once a day and make sure nobody was sick or injured or dead.

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Carl Buell Rocks. That is all.

titanotylopus_abc.jpgSome pretty neat news (and I hope I have all the details right):

Good friend and paleontological illustrator Carl Buell will have art on ABC Evening News with Charles Gibson on Friday night, July 4th, 6:30 p.m. Eastern time.

The news piece has something to do with American expatriots, and will somehow weave in the fact that the recent diaspora is not the first. It happened as far back as the Oligocene, as long as 33 million years ago, with camels. Originated in North America, moved elsewhere; died out here, succeeded there.

Five of Carl’s paintings of camel ancestors will be featured.

The one shown here is Titanotylopus.

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Fun Diseases & Big Cats

lion.jpgComedy is where you find it.

Diseases that sound funny (but probably aren’t): Amnesic shellfish poisoning • Arenavirus infection • Black Creek Canal virus • Brainerd diarrhea • Cat scratch disease • Cat flea tapeworm infection • Chagas disease • Crabs • Delusional parasitosis • Dracunculiasis • Endilomax nana infection • GBS infection • Hansen’s disease • Hib disease • Hot tub rash • Kala-azar • La Crosse encephalitis • Lassa fever • Monkeypox • Orf virus infection • PCP infection • Pediculosis • Pontiac fever • Rat bite fever • Rhinitis • Rift Valley fever • Scrub typhus • Shingles • Slapped cheek disease • Sleeping sickness • Swimmer’s ear • Thrush • Undulant fever • VHF (Viral Hemorrhagic Fevers) • Whipworm • Wuchereria bancrofti • Yellow fever • Yersinosis

Others that sound even funnier (but still probably aren’t): 

Astrovirus infection sounds like it would lay Astroboy up for days with a high fever.

New York-1 virus infection is probably something only the governor of the state of New York can contract.

I hear American Express is suing to have a disease named after them. For everyone else, there’s VISA (Vancomycin Intermediate Staphylococcus aureus).

Kawasaki syndrome can only be caught by wussies. Real men get Harley Sickness, or they get nothing at all.

I had mumps as a kid, and I know it’s serious, but it still sounds like something only Eeyore would come down with. It’s even fun to say: Mumps. Mumps. Mumps.

Q fever is particularly virulent among Star Trek: The Next Generation fans.

And finally, a decidedly unfunny one: Anytime you read about it in the news, it’s usually prefaced with the phrase “antibiotic-resistant superbug” — MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus)  killed about 19,000 Americans in 2005, most of them in hospitals, according to a report published in October in the Journal of the American Medical Association. According to Wikipedia, that’s more people than AIDS. Each year. And you can catch it from touching people.

And we worry about mountain lions.

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Happy Darwin Day!

buell-friend.jpgDarwin Day is an international celebration of science and humanity held on or around February 12, the day that Charles Darwin was born on in 1809. Specifically, it celebrates the discoveries and life of Charles Darwin — the man who first described biological evolution via natural selection with scientific rigor. More generally, Darwin Day expresses gratitude for the enormous benefits that scientific knowledge, acquired through human curiosity and ingenuity, has contributed to the advancement of humanity.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. —Charles Darwin

Thanks to the fantastic Carl Buell, paleontological and natural history illustrator, for the pic above — a self-portrait (of Carl) raising a bottle to Darwin with one of our ancestors. And then there’s this birthday card he did for Mr. Darwin a year or so back.

… And happy Lincoln’s birthday too!

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Non-issues, and Other Dangers

crusades2.jpgThis is a bit of a discussion I’m having with another blog commenter over at Unscrewing the Inscrutable, a nice Christian who seems sometimes open-minded, sometimes not, but always quite a bit not, if you get my meaning. I’m posting it here because the discussion that my reply evolves into is something I want to have heard in more than that one place.

He says:

The whole thing of Darwinian evolution, to me now it is a non-issue. The development of the physical world, whether through the eons of cosmology or a magical “Poof!” make no difference.

And I answer:

And there’s yet another way in which we differ.

Rich, in this and some of your other comments, I’ve noticed that you have that typical religious “doorstop” in your head. You’re willing to have the door swing so far – say in accepting “microevolution” – but no farther.

Yet I begin to wonder if the underlying real reason you’re here is that you, too, realize it, and you’re searching for some reason to let it go, and accept that some of the stuff in your head is useless and counterproductive … and FALSE.

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