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… »

Buster the cat proudly brought in his second roof rat. Live. After a bit of excited screaming and teeth-gnashing (by Eve) and barking (by the dogs), we were all in a great mood for bedtime, as you can imagine. Read more… »

Just found out about a new verb – to decrapify – while absorbing abuse from my new laptop. According to UrbanDictionary.com, it means to remove crap or unnecessary items from something, i.e., pre-installed software on a new computer. Read more… »