The Mushroom Umbrella

"The entire Dog Park sits on a play mat and Dixie can walk and carry the babies and accessories using magnetic features on his back and tongue that extends when you push his tail in. "

07 July, 2007

G'night, Jim-Bob

Here we all are, watching the fog roll in together.

A tout a l'heures...

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.

Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.

We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err.

For the animal shall not be measured by man.

In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.

They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

from The Outermost House , © 1928, 1956, Henry Beston

Bitter

I have become that woman. I called the cops last night and after being hung up on three times by their automated phone tree system (it is Oakland, after all) reported a group of teenagers "standing in the middle of the street, setting off firecrackers. It's scaring the crap out of my animals."

Actually, it was just interfering with my television volume.

Yep. I have become that woman.

06 July, 2007

Out to Pick up a Gross, Honey

Is there a gender corollary to the forty years of life during which a woman finds herself leaving the house only because she's completely out of Tampax?

Do those of you with male sigoths ever hear "Hey--just popping out to buy a urethra blotter," or "Be right back--discovered I'm completely out of vas deferens ointment?"

Perhaps the only thing in my life which truly can accept no substitute. Why don't they have Tampax stands on every corner? Like mailboxes, or FedEx deposit receptacles.

I mean.

Fungi: The Microbial World

Question. If you leave your blue cheese in the refrigerator for, say, a year or more, and it grows hairy: is that bad? Was there a necessary mold management or mold control step that went missing?

I guess what I'm saying really is, is moldy mold a de facto bad thing? Or can one actually promulgate fungal plethora with a clear conscience betimes? In your response, please cite references. Or examples from your personal life. Please, no examples from your professional life: I'm not sure that would be applicable.

This is obviously a theoretical question--I would never have, say, things that were a year old or more in my, say, vegetable compartment. But, I think, an important one. For us all.

Fungi. On everyone's minds.

www.bact.wisc.edu/themicrobialworld/Fungi.html

The Mushroom Umbrella

27 July, 2007

Nappers Without Borders

12 July, 2007

I want this. What does that mean?