Who’s Visiting Your Garden While You’re Not Watching?

...am on for a period of five days, pointed at our backyard shed, to see what animals are visiting. The motion sensitive camera picked up seven visits from a possum, six birds, four skunk visitations, two rats, one raccoon and two house cats. I need to let the camera run for a longer period to get a better sense of what times of the day or night are the most active, but so far the hour of 2 am picked up the most activity (after the bars have closed o...

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“Interstellar”: Leaving the farm for the stars

...ng monocrops going. We seem to be living on an all-corn diet. There are no animals to be seen, anywhere. Not even a cat. I’m assuming we ate them. There seems to be plenty of gas left, perhaps because there are so few people. At any rate, things aren’t good–there are constant dust storms and disease threatening the crops. It seems that humanity isn’t out of hot water quite yet. And our hero, Cooper, who is a ex-NASA pilot forced to play farmer, di...

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The problem with polar fleece: it’s in the ocean, it’s in sea creatures, it’s on our plates

...w and again–from fleece blankets to underwear to stretchy jeans to stuffed animals. What to do? I think the quick take-away here is that your instincts about the superiority of natural fibers were always right and you should stick with them and phase out synthetics as much as you can, at least until we either figure out how to make a non-shedding synthetic or figure out how to filter waste water more effectively. I find it interesting that none of...

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The Blue Bear

...ship with Blue Bear is an odd one. He was never one of my favorite stuffed animals, and yet I have kept him with me all these years, while the others have fallen by the wayside. He was never particularly soft or cuddly–though age has softened him, as it does all of us– and he did not meet my arcane childhood standards of cuteness. I had my favorites; he was not one of them. I never even gave him a proper name. But he formed the reliable back cente...

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Saturday Tweets: Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

...blela) March 16, 2018 Happy belated birthday to the "plant wizard" Luther Burbank. See my tribute to his life love of plants here: https://t.co/rnPMhrszzj — Fruit Cornucopia (@ValenzuelaJohn) March 15, 2018 The Florida International Bridge Collapse Is About So Much More Than a Failed Structure https://t.co/6YiMCjEqjg via @StreetsblogUSA — Root Simple (@rootsimple) March 17, 2018 How Can Vision Zero Work When L.A. Continues to Prioritize Speed? htt...

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