I’ll be futzing with it for a while, seeing if I can add captions, rearrange images, enable comments, figure out the difference between a “gallery” and an “album,” determine the optimal file size, etc. So don’t be surprised or miffed if it doesn’t look the same the next time you visit.

And now, without further ado: the dogwood we planted about 15 years ago as it manifests itself through the seasons, plus the critters that visit it.

[Show as slideshow]

Then the “blizzard conditions” arrived, on top of the snow that had fallen so recently, on top of what we’d already shoveled into rather large piles, and things threatened to become interesting again.

Drifts. Now that’s something I miss here in DC. It’s happened a couple of times since I’ve been here, and it’s happening now. The snow is still arriving pretty much horizontally, although the end of the precipitation is supposedly in sight. The winds, however, will continue, if we are to believe the weather mavens (and they’ve been pretty accurate this year).

I know, it’s trite to talk about the weather so much. So here’s a picture of a bird hiding under our back deck during the onslaught today:

For all I know, the sparrows are still hunkering down in the bush by the front porch (two of them flew out Monday while I was talking across it with a neighbor, me down on the ground, he on his porch—he didn’t even notice).

Almost time to start shoveling again …
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*I refuse to call it Snowmageddon, or Snowpocalypse, or Blizzacane, or whatever everybody’s calling it. Good grief, as if.

Five male robins were rummaging around in the dead leaves under the front porch and shrub this morning. It looked like they were looking for food. The leaves were flying left and right, and one of them made an angry open-mouthed gesture when another got too close. One guy made a brief dash toward the window where I was sitting and thought better of it. This does not look good, folks. It’s winter. What the hell are the robins doing?

My alma mater got a little cute the other day, sending out a sample admissions essay that they thought would help calm applicants down a bit as the January 2 deadline approached. While most people seemed to think it was just fine, others thought it went over the line. You decide. I think it was classic U of C.

When a big corporation does something right, we should acknowledge it, right? Way back at the beginning of 2009 my trusty Canon A95 started acting funny. Eventually the funniness turned into a permanent inability to take a picture—the image had a magenta cast and bunch of horizontal lines all over it. I kept fiddling with it, hoping it would “fix itself” (yes, I do believe in magic), but also decided to buy a newer model. I ended up with the SX10 IS, which I really like. In late summer I decided to sell the A95′s wide angle lens on eBay, but while I was researching what such things might go for and the A95 in general, I learned about a problem some A95s had with their CCD (the imager): some units supplied by Sony had an issue with the connector, which Canon eventually concluded was not caused by user mishandling, and the company was replacing them for free whether or not the camera was still covered by the warranty (I bought the thing back in 2005). Long story short: talked to a Canon rep, got a free FedEx label, sent the little guy to Illinois, and got a working A95 back two days later. So now I have a nice second camera I can carry around and not worry about anything. (My recent wandering-around-town pics were taken with the A95.) Kudos to Canon. Customer for life here.

Oh, heck: one more testimonial. The Roland Micro Cube is really nifty. I use it with a Yamaha electric violin. You can plug in your guitar if you want. Either way, you can mess around with straight amplification or an array of classic amp decks (JC Clean, Black Panel, Brit Combo, etc.). It’s a gas. Not a lot of power, but enough—it’s really a practice amp. But get this: it runs on batteries, and for a long time (I bought it over a year ago and still haven’t swapped out the rechargeables I put in it). If you need more power, get the bigger model. But this little thing is great just as is.

Okay, that’s enough. Goodbye, 2009.

Addendum 2010.01.20: Turns out the feisty robins are from up north; “our” robins have headed south.

“This is the worst crisis I’ve ever seen,” says Merlin Tuttle, founder and president of Bat Conservation International. “I think anytime you have animals as ecologically essential, and as distantly related, as bees and bats dying en masse, it should send a canary-in-the-coal-mine signal.”

We look to science for answers, but if you listen to Scott Darling, a biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, science has been asleep at the wheel:

Cracking the mystery is proving particularly challenging because scientists know so little about healthy bats. “We haven’t known much about basic bat biology before this,” Darling says. “That is science’s little secret: We really don’t know a lot of what people think we know, or what people think we should know.”

One might worry that we’re seeing the beginning of a long and ultimately anthropocidal cascade of ecological disasters—ever accelerating species loss with ever expanding and cross-amplifying ripple effects. The overarching question is: Are we screwing up this place, or is all this “nature’s way” and it just looks bad to us because … because … well, because we’re so special?

Addendum 2008.08.02: Another canary in the mineshaft: jellyfish. Not that it means anything, but at the Outer Banks a couple of weeks ago I experienced a stinging sensation on my thigh after I’d come back from the beach. Eventually I discovered a little glob of sticky black goo in the pocket of my trunks. A piece of jellyfish. There were a few days when the kids reported a jellyfish problem, but this has happened just about every year we’re down there, and the jelly-in-the-trunks trick could’ve happened any time. The Times article is worrisome, though:

From Spain to New York, to Australia, Japan and Hawaii, jellyfish are becoming more numerous and more widespread, and they are showing up in places where they have rarely been seen before, scientists say. The faceless marauders are stinging children blithely bathing on summer vacations, forcing beaches to close and clogging fishing nets.

But while jellyfish invasions are a nuisance to tourists and a hardship to fishermen, for scientists they are a source of more profound alarm, a signal of the declining health of the world’s oceans.

“These jellyfish near shore are a message the sea is sending us saying, ‘Look how badly you are treating me,’” said Dr. Josep-María Gili, a leading jellyfish expert, who has studied them at the Institute of Marine Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona for more than 20 years.

The explosion of jellyfish populations, scientists say, reflects a combination of severe overfishing of natural predators, like tuna, sharks and swordfish; rising sea temperatures caused in part by global warming; and pollution that has depleted oxygen levels in coastal shallows.

Initial speculation centered on cell phones—supposedly the radiation is at just the right frequency to disrupt the bees’ navigation. That hypothesis seems to have few adherents now. So what is it? Pesticides? Genetically modified crops? Climate change (or just the vicissitudes of weather)?

While the experts try to figure this out, try to find the busy bee in the strange flower:

You may need to look at the big version.

[C D B by way of William Steig]

The Danube. The Mississippi. The Yangtze. And now, the Amazon. Never mind the piranha and the candirú.

It’s the Slovenian red wine that keeps him going—he laughs when he says it, but he drinks it as he floats on his back down whatever river he happens to be in.

He set out on February 1, and you can follow his progress online. Like all modern nutcases, he has a personal website.

His motto: “Plavam za mir, prijateljstvo in čiste vode” — “I swim for peace, friendship, and clean water.” Nothing crazy about that.

In 2005, we all witnessed, via the international media, the devastation that hurricanes caused in property damage and loss of life. Katrina alone almost destroyed New Orleans and flooded other portions of the US Gulf Coast; other hurricanes ravaged parts of Mexico and the Caribbean.

Scientists the world over are aware of the butterfly effect: A butterfly flaps its wings in some part of the world and starts a chain of nonlinear effects that can result in a hurricane striking anywhere on the planet.

That butterfly must be found and stopped!

Mr. F. Alex Nava offers some timely steps we should take to prevent further butterfly-induced devastation.

I checked my calendar and it’s not April 1, so I think we should take this seriously, don’t you?

No, the most interesting thing WoWiWe has seen is this family of spiders:

He was particularly charmed by the markings on the big one’s belly:

WorldWideWeber does not expect everyone to share his sympathy with spiders. It seems to be in his genes.

P.S. Holy cow! What a coincidence (posted today as well).
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*Ah, but do they know a porpoise when they see one?
**High.

The critter’s got a good eye.