A year ago, lying in bed at 3 a.m., I had what I think of as my “Putin Moment”: I couldn’t remember the name of the Russian president. Not that I’m a hypochondriac but I asked my physician the next time I saw her if she thought this might the start of cognitive decline, along […]
Life + Outdoors
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Kambing and Kennedy
It was probably early morning but it felt like the middle of the night when we were awakened by the guards. We had only been in bed a few hours because of the vigil for Kambing, the baby goat who had magically joined our household one day, tiny and spindly legged, marked just like our black […]
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Light Pollution
“The thought of light traveling billions of years from distant galaxies only to be washed out in the last billionth of a second by the glow of the nearest strip mall depresses me no end.” Sönke Johnson, Ecologist at Duke University Are you appreciating the Milky Way these winter evenings? Beyond your dark-accustomed eyes, you […]
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Look! Up in the Sky!
While we’re caught up in the daily grind here on the ground, there’s a lot of great birding happening above our heads. That’s where the big birds fly: the eagles, hawks and vultures that quicken the pulse of birders and nonbirders alike because of their sheer bulk and massive wingspans. However, conditions are seldom ideal […]
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Barnacle Envy
Hello. I’m the mayor of Schlong Beach. Despite my town’s name, you won’t find any “phallic symbols” here. We are fully phallic. For example, the monuments to our heroes aren’t ambiguous columns. They are massive marble boners. However, our town’s women rejected this sensibility, calling it “puerile” (whatever that means). So, they built a wall […]
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Lobster Girl Finds the Beat
For three glorious months in 2019, it seemed like it was finally going to happen for me. I was attending a dance fusion class at the Arcata HealthSport led by an amazing instructor named Jovonne. Once a week I’d stand at the back of the class with my friends and try to keep up. Never […]
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Entropy and Order
“You can find many different diagnoses in death certificates, but they’re just details. What really kills us is entropy increase.” — Sabine Hossenfelder, Existential Physics Along with the Big Bang, entropy is probably the most cited and misunderstood concept in popular physics. It usually goes something like this: Everything tends to a state of disorder, […]