“It’s the wrong time to go, folks. It’s a warm spring day, but there’s a Devil Wind a-blowin’,” said a ladybug to the hundreds of others huddled together waiting for the right time to emerge from my shed. “Eat shit, you woke pansy. I’m gonna go find a rose garden, chow some aphids and bang […]
Life + Outdoors
Posted inField Notes
Wallace’s Problem with Evolution
In an ironic turn of history, two of Charles Darwin’s most ardent supporters ended up disagreeing with him. The first was Robert FitzRoy, captain of the HMS Beagle and Darwin’s senior by four years, with whom Darwin had a great relationship during the sloop’s 1831-1836 round-the-world voyage of exploration. At the time, both men hewed […]
Posted inGet Out
High Spirits and Higher Winds at the Kite Festival
Wind gusting from 20 to 30 mph and faster made for very challenging kite flying at the free, family-friendly fifth annual Redwood Coast Kite Festival and Artisan Fair held along the Humboldt Bay waterfront at Halvorsen Park in Eureka on Saturday, May 16 and Sunday, May 17. The Family Fly kite field open for all […]
Posted inField Notes
Canals on Mars
“Lowell always said that the regularity of the [Martian] canals was an unmistakable sign that they were of intelligent origin. The only unresolved question was which side of the telescope the intelligence was on.”— Carl Sagan, Cosmos “Canals on the Planet Mars,” read the headline of The Times of London of April 13, 1882, in […]
Posted inField Notes
Why Isn’t ‘Eleven’ ‘One-teen?
And why isn’t twelve “two-teen”? Why do bagels come in dozens? Why are there two sets of 12 hours in a day? And why 12 inches to the foot? Like much of northern Europe, England once had a hybrid system of counting based on both 10 (decimal) and 12 (duodecimal). Today, almost all our daily […]
Posted inHumboldt Nature
Caution: Construction Ahead
With spring arriving and fruit trees starting to open their buds, it is time to think about pollinators. Among the first to visit my orchard are the mason bees (genus Osmia), often considered the best general pollinators, delivering much more pollen from flower to flower than honey bees. Mason bees are extremely efficient pollinators because […]
Posted inSeriously?
AI for the Planet
The inescapable truth is that generative AI is the future, laid out before us like a swirling, slightly-off carpet of AstroTurf in a dream where it kind of turns into water. In fact, after checking Chat GPT, the survival of which depends on its ubiquity, it assured us everyone is already using it. Late adopters […]
Posted inField Notes
’Twas Brillig
“‘It seems very pretty,’ she said when she had finished it, ‘but it’s rather hard to understand!’” — Alice’s reaction on reading, in mirror writing, “Jabberwocky” in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass ’Twas brillig, and the slithy tovesDid gyre and gimble in the wabe;All mimsy were the borogoves,And the mome raths outgrabe. So begins […]
Posted inSeriously?
Prominent Male Figures Who are Not Sexual Predators
A tentatively confirmed list in progress CORRECTION: Following information submitted by a reader, the Journal is compelled to remove Garfield the Cat from its list of Prominent Male Public Figures Who are Not Sexual Predators. In the comic strip called to our attention, Garfield, leaning against a lamppost, says to a female cat, “Hey, Arlene, gimme […]
Posted inGet Out
Redwood Region Logging Conference Branches Out in Ferndale
Under warm, sunny skies, the 88th Redwood Region Logging Conference filled the familiar outdoor spaces of the Humboldt County Fairgrounds in Ferndale from March 19-21 with a shiny array of washed and polished logging trucks, and a noisy mix of old and new equipment demonstrations turning logs into sawdust, shingles, lumber and firewood. Jeannie Fulton, […]
Posted inField Notes
The Five Colors of the Rainbow
“The seven notes of the scale before the return to the octave are analogous to the colors of the rainbow — red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet, plus the strangely superfluous indigo which made the number up to seven.” — Ian Bostridge Tenor Ian Bostridge, quoted above, reminds us we are supposed to see […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Ghost in the Abalone Shell
Hi. My name is Able. I was once a magnificent red abalone. Now I’m just a junk bowl on the desk of the dipshit who normally writes this column. I contain some presumably reusable toothpicks, an expired condom, probably a raisin and a smelly glass pipe. And my partner here is a red abalone shell […]