Damianita daisy (Chysactinia mexicana) is all over my new neighborhood. It hadn’t yet made it into my old neighborhood, just 7 miles away in Tempe, AZ, so it was new to me. Once I saw it, I had to find out its name. First off, it is obviously a DYC (aka, Damn Yellow Composite – fellow botanists, you know what I mean). Thousands of these kinds of species dot the landscape, making it a bit of a challenge to nail down the correct identification. Now that I know what it is, C. mexicana turns out to be a pretty cool plant, especially if you are a sad little mouse. Read more… »

In this age of high-tech drivers that are big enough to double as flotation devices, how can you NOT hit as far as you used to? After all, every issue of Golf Digest tells you how to boom your drives like Dustin Johnson. Or some other guy (or gal!) who is younger, stronger, and more flexible than you are. Read more… »

Flat-pack furniture is cheap. DIY assembly requires more than I thought, though. Such as pain and blood. Read more… »

If I’d paid more attention in my first zoology course at Shasta Junior College, this wouldn’t have come as such a shocker to me. Ever since I was kid, I called certain cute little bugs ‘roly-polies’ – since they roll up when threatened.

Today it finally hit me that my trip to the Children’s Science Center in St. Louis last year scarred my psyche beyond repair (unless the marijuana initiative passes in Arizona today – you know what I mean) based on the actual truth about pill bugs.

I just buried it in denial until now. Read more… »

Still looking for that edge over your weekly golf buddies? In the immortal words of Paul Hornung, “Practice, practice, practice.”

No sense in waiting any longer for one of these game changers, since Groupon has a deal on them now. Supplies are probably limited: Link here.

Of course, you could probably find a used set on Ebay or Craigslist. Imagine that! Used restroom equipment!

Only for the very frugal.

The monster elephant in the room – overpopulation – is apparently a taboo topic. Anyone paying attention to this mega-problem, though, saw it coming in the Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich (1968!). Global starvation and social upheaval are the result.

Ehrlich saw it coming and predicted the consequences. He was mostly right. If anything, he was overly optimistic. Read more… »

Yay! I won! (I think. Maybe. Sort of. We’ll see.) It was a spine-chilling experience to get an email from The Mighty Google that my websites – all 14 blogs, plus my Rotary club blog – got blacklisted due to all the malware and malicious code on them. You never, ever, ever want to piss off The Mighty Google. Read more… »

Oh, those jokesters in North Korea are at it again. Apparently they haven’t updated their school physics textbooks since before 1952. North Korea’s announcement that they have tested an H-bomb has physicists around the world chortling in their beer. (Yes, my fellow geeks … we can, indeed, chortle in our beer.) Read more… »

Hey, guys … do you really need 1.6 gallons of water to flush down a few ounces of pee? Probably not. Even more so if you still have an old-fashioned (now illegal) 3.5 gallon tank smuggled in from Canada. Read more… »

Never in my half-century of studying plants have I seen what I saw on this morning’s dog walk. Bees were visiting and collecting pollen from bermuda grass! These must be desperate times for bees. Read more… »