Happy Football Season!

Depending on your definition, the 2012 NFL season may or may have already begun! If you count it by the first day of training camp, then we are officially on! WooHoo! Yay football season! The Pack is back!!! I am so excited! I have miss football, and am glad to have it back.
In celebration of this exciting event I thought I'd catch you all up on some Packers news you may or may not know.
As I mentioned earlier this year we no longer have Matt Flynn as a backup QB. While this still makes me very, very, very sad, I (guess) am (reluctantly) happy for him in his new starting role in Seattle.
Packers 1st pick in the draft this year was USC linebacker Nate Perry. Hopefully he will balance out the linebacker position so Clay Matthews can get back to sacking QB's with his gigantic muscly arms and ridiculous flowing hair. I missed that last year (the sacks not the hair).
Donald Driver with his wicked ripped abs, and brilliant smile won Dancing with the Stars! I was shocked at how good he was. And his enthusiasm was something to behold for sure. I feel like he is the kind of guy that would be good at anything he set his mind to. Glass blowing, needle point, sculpting bonsai trees...he'd be awesome at them all.
Packers let Charlie Peprah go. I'm not sure why. I thought he played pretty well the past couple years, but maybe we just have too many guys at the safety position? Or maybe it's because Charles Woodson seems to have taken up residency in the safety spot so far in training camp? I like Woodson at safety, and am interested to see how it goes.
Nick Collins, who sustained a neck injury last year and had to be carted off the field is OK, and fully mobile, but his NFL career is over. So he won't be back. He was an amazing player, and while I am sad that he will no longer be on the field, I totally think he made the right call (unlike Payton Manning and his decision to keep playing after having his neck vertebra fused together).
Rodgers seemed to have a busy summer after an amazing year last year! He won league MVP because of his ridiculously unbelievable QB rating (and glorious lack of interceptions!) AND he was crowned #1 onNFL Networks Top 100 Players of 2011. Way to go AR! Of course all us Packers fans already knew how awesome he was;) Over the summer I saw him at the ESPYS looking sharp. (No I wasn't there, I mean on TV), and he was at some golf thing in Tahoe with Tony Romo a week or so ago. That's cool. I think it's good to get a break from the game, especially for QB's. He seems pretty confident in his interviews, also good, but I hope the success from last year doesn't go to his head. Not that I think it will, I'm just saying that it would be unfortunate if that were to be the case. He seems like such a level headed, "regular" guy, and I like that in a quarterback...in anyone really.
Well, that's it for now. We still have a ways to go before the first real game of the season, but we are on our way! I can almost hear the soft chant of "Go Pack go!" on the wind...
Happy football season everybody!!!

John Muir

As is my wont to do, I was aimlessly perusing the bookshelves at the library the other day and came across a compilation of nature essays by the naturalist, and early conservationist John Muir.
This past winter while visiting the Visitors Center in Yosemite Valley I had a chance to look at an exhibit about him, and thought to myself that I should look up some of his writing...it only took me six months!
Anyway, he is a wonderful writer. I especially loved his essays on Yosemite. His writing style is a mix between textbook accuracy and a romance novel (the old-fashioned kind, not the seedy modern ones), and you can really sense the love he had for all things natural and wild, and the gentile, quiet, no-frills kind man that he was. His  flowery way of describing the wilderness is sort of peaceful to read, and is such that I can picture it easily in my mind. The sharp blue of the sky, the specific degree of fluffiness of a squirrels tale, the sound of a  stream as it flowed, all clearly imaginable and at my mental fingertips!
He was a great nature writer, a precursor to the likes of Barry Lopez, and Edward Abbey, and a true lover of the wild. (If you are interested I am sure you could find examples of his essays on the Internet.)
Here are a couple quotes that I jotted down while I was reading two essays about Yosemite. One was about the High Sierra, and the other about the kinds of animals in the Park. Enjoy!

"Former experience had given good reason to know that passionate storms, invisible yet, might be brooding in the calm sungold."


What a fine traveling companion [the creek] it proved to be, what songs it sang, and how passionately it told the mountains own joy!"


"In so wild and so beautiful a region was spent my first day, every sight and sound inspiring, leading one far out of himself, yet feeding and building up his individuality."


"But the darkest scriptures of the mountains are illuminated with bright passages of love that never fail to make themselves felt when one is alone."


"How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains. To behold this alone is worth the pain of any excursion a thousand times over!"

Modern Art or...

...sandwich?

Notes to Self

"Stuff"

I am not sure what this is but it looked so cool! I found it on the underside of my grill.

A Primate's Memoir

I just finished reading A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. I've read some of his other stuff, and even purchase a neuroscience lecture series he did for the Teaching Company. But this was by far the most entertaining. Some of his other books are more informative, but this one was..pure pleasure to read. I got a happy feeling every time I flipped it opened and started the next chapter.
The book is generally about his years working in Africa studying baboons. But it's so much more than that as well. It's about him personally, the transition from starry-eyed grad student to Stanford professor. It's about the recent history of the African nations, it's about the native and indigenous people he met and befriended.  It's about triumph and tragedy, human nature, and animal nature. It was both super funny and incredibly sad.
Sapolsky is a scientist, but he's also hilarious. And he has a no nonsense, no embarrassment sort of approach to everything whether he is talking about injustice, death, race, sex or feces. Sometimes it's sort of shocking, other times it's really funny. I found the paragraph where he describes getting horrible diarrhea in the middle of the night while his camp was being overrun by curious elephants to be particularly entertaining.
It was a wonderful book, and I 100%....no, 200% (if that were possible)  recommend this book to anyone who likes travel writing, science writing, or just a darn good read. You will not be disappointed!!!

Culinary Escape

We were grilling the other night when one of the burgers decided to take a flying leap off the spatula and over the plate in a attempt to escape being eaten for dinner. We believe his plan was to hide behind the grill then make a break through the living room. But he was thwarted by the sliding glass door (which he apparently didn't see). The good news is we caught him. Bad news is he tasted a little like pine needles and dirt.

What in the World?

So my BF and I went for a walk downtown on Saturday and somehow found ourselves behind this guy, who had....well, we are still not sure what exactly, hanging out of the back of his shorts. I don't have much experience in identifying man thongs (lol neither does my BF), but I think that's what this was. I have no idea why it was on the outside of his shorts, or how it was staying put there, and I couldn't (and wouldn't want to) even hazard a guess as to how they got there in the first place. But what else could it be? Some kind of new belt? Or a really poorly constucted fanny bag? There was an air of mystery surrounding it for sure, and unfortunately that mystery was never solved. What do you think?

Little Black Dress

I've written about this before...How I get in these moods where I feel suffocated and overwhelmed with all the "stuff" we have in our tiny apartment. In all reality it is hardly anything. Enough boxes and books to maybe fill a minivan with the back seats taken out. But in a 600 square foot apartment, it seems like a lot.
Anyway, yesterday at work I read an article about a couple who lives in Brooklyn New York in a 250 sq. ft. apartment. They had all these really neat tips for living in small spaces, on of which was don't buy a bunch of crap! Ha. But it got me in the mood to try once again to weed out the excess, if there even is any, among my meager possessions. I think I did pretty good on my closet. I managed to get rid of about six dresses that I haven't worn in a while, 7 pairs of shoes, including one pair that never fit me to begin with, but I've been unwilling to part with because they are designer.
The hardest part is to really think about everything. I mean, those items have been in my closet for years, so I tend to not to notice them after a while. Or I just start to feel like they somehow "belong" there, and so it never occurs to me to get rid of them.
I've had this one black dress in my closet for about two years now, and I almost feel like we are friends. I've never worn it out in public though. I bought it because while it didn't fit me at the time it was only $5. And I thought to myself on the off chance that some time in the future I might loose weight the $5 I paid for it would become an incredible deal. And it's been hanging in my closet ever since. I just tried it on recently and the good news is it fits a little better. The bad news is I never noticed before how the ruffles at the top make me look like Batman. I've attempted to wear it at least three times in the last month, but changed at the last minute into something else. The only accessory that I own that wouldn't clash with that dress is a black mask I wore to a Halloween party. Despite all of that it never occurred to me that maybe we should maybe be parting ways...until about fifteen minutes ago. That's when I decided that even though I'd gone through my closet twice, I was going to force myself to get rid of one more thing. And there it was. Hanging there, the same as it has been since I've lived here. I pulled it off the hanger, realizing that I'd never wear it, that it is hideous, and that I should never have bought it in the first place.
And then I felt sad and a little guilty, like I'd somehow betrayed it, even though it's a dress and has no feelings. So in order to appease my inexplicable guilt, I decided to post a blog about it, to commemorate it in the 1's and 0's of cyber space, and to acknowledge my fault in the matter. All in hopes that I can move on and not hang it back up in my closet.
It was an ugly dress. It never fit right, and had those awful before-mentioned ruffles. But it was reliable. It was there for me every time I opened my closet. It never complained, and it did a fine job of making me look like a caped crusader. The fault is mine, and the blame goes to me. I'm sorry I never wore you little black dress, and I'm sorry that I led you on for so long. I didn't mean to. Goodbye.

Nieces and Nephews

I talked to my brother yesterday. (The one that looks like a dog-sledding lumberjack). And he informed me that he is now the proud owner of not three dogs, but a new total of 18! I am an Auntie 18 times over! Yippee! And I have even met most of them. Their previous owner is moving down to the lower 48 and only took the older dogs with him. That means that Bella, Lightning, Butkus, Birdie, Gracie, Winnie, Stella, Winchester, Rocky, Tatonka, Bacon, Jenna, Cash, Leo, and....one more that I can't think of are staying with Jay. Isn't that so AWESOME?!? Woo Hoo!

Christmas In July

It happens to me every year! And right around this time too. In the dead heat of July. I get in this mood where I am wistful, and sad and long for Christmas, and rain, and windy, cloudy, days, and football, and long evenings by the fire, and holiday music playing everywhere! I spend all my time daydreaming about it, and everything seems to remind me of it. The store where I bought my cowboy Santa ornament, the scrap of wrapping paper I found under the couch when I was vacuuming , a funny line from a well loved Christmas classic that I recently recalled, the Reeses peanut butter cup that I just found in the snack drawer of my desk! Oh how I miss Christmas!!! And it's still so far away! There are still 167 days, nine hours and forty-one minutes left until that moment when Christmas Eve becomes Christmas Day. That's almost like...forever!
I'm not trying to say that I hate summer, or July, or anything like that, I am just saying that I miss Christmas. I miss Santa, and snowmen, and twinkly lights. I miss baking cookies, and wrapping presents, and humming holiday tunes. I miss my reindeer slippers, and candy canes, and having the family around to celebrate....
I miss Christmas so much I actually re-folded all my holiday tissue paper the other day....and listened to my Jingle Bells CD in my car on the way to Trader Joes...
Am I the only one afflicted by this sad state of affairs?! Well, on the bright side (if there is one) I guess now there are only 167 days, nine hours and thirty-eight minutes left! Woo hoo! Until then...

Let me be the first to wish you a Merry Christmas!

Are Mermaids Real?

FYI

I have been meaning to write about this for a while, and then just the other day I saw something in the news about it, and so I'm going to do it. Because I for one find it appalling, and a betrayal of trust.
First of all, it all started a few weeks ago when I was perusing the channels on TV. There was nothing good on. Between Swamp People, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, and Jersey Shore I'm surprised our country hasn't been overtaken by squirrels. But I digress...
So I was flipping through the channels and I see this show on Animal Planet called "The Body Found" and for as best I could tell when I started watching, it was some kind of documentary about mermaids. And I thought to myself "Someone is claiming they found a mermaid body? WTF?" So I started watching. It had to be some kind of joke right? They showed some fancy animations, and they were cool, but...obviously a product of someones imagination, but then they interviewed these people who supposedly worked for NOAA but got fired for...giving away the secret that the government was trying to keep from rest of the world. And it was at that point that I got totally confused. Why you might ask? Because I was sure it had to be a joke, but...they weren't being funny. Because if it was supposed to be for real  it was totally ridiculous! The things they were saying were sending up so many red flags in my brain I could barely see the TV screen. How could these people be ex-government scientists? It wasn't possible. And the way the whole "documentary" was crafted, the "evidence" that they were showing that I'd never heard of or seen before in my life, and the conclusions they were reaching based on stuff that didn't even qualify as...data did not fit with any of the things I know about oceanography, science, or scientists! What the hell was going on? The things they were saying couldn't be substantiated or verified. I know become I looked some of the more plausible of them up. There were a couple times they said used some fancy term, or stated some "fact" that sounded sketchy, and I looked it up on the Internet and there was no such thing. How could the "documentary makers" not have realized that? There were even glaring inconsistencies between their story line, and reality. For example two little boys supposedly caught a video of a mermaid. But in the video there was a zoom on the camera (which doesn't happen on cell phones) and besides that they showed the supposed phone, and those older models didn't even have video capability! But who would make a false documentary on purpose? It was a hoax I realized. It was the only thing that made sense.
I literally sat there on the couch for an hour, watching the whole farce and talking to myself, voicing my disappointment mostly in Animal Planet, but also in the people who conceived a show that was so obviously meant to deceive. I thought about all the people that were going to be freaking out tomorrow, and telling their parents and friends that mermaids are real, and that the government has been hiding them from us.
I also could not for the life of me understand why anyone would make such a...show. Was it to see how many people would believe it? If so why? Was it to see how stupid and gullible we are for what we see on TV? Was it supposed to be a prank? If so it was a terrible one. And in my mind Animal Planet has lost what credibility they had with me over this. And finally, I was just really pissed me off.
Your average "American Joe" isn't a scientist, and isn't going to pick up on the subtle inconsistencies in a show like that. They aren't going to sit there and say "Wait a minute...those hieroglyphics they showed don't look real. And why can't I find any reference to them on the Internet?" They are not trained to question, and seek out answers to what they don't understand. They just sit there and think to themselves "Holy shit! If government scientists are telling me this, and cave men knew about mermaids a hundred thousand years ago then they must be real! I need to tell everybody!"
For those that are even remotely interested in science, they trust "documentaries" to tell them the truth, or at least some close a version to it as possible. That is the whole premise of a documentary, to inform.  And networks like Animal Planet, and National Geographic have had some really great ones.  But to have a trusted source of information air something so completely fabricated, such a blatant and utter lie (not only was the science false, but they also falsified quite a lot of history as well), is unforgivable. It was a gross breach of trust to the American people, and children especially.
Because now, what do you think is going to happen? The millions of people who saw this stupid show, and jumped on the phone, or twitter, or Facebook to tell their friends, feel like idiots. They feel betrayed by whom they believe to be scientists, but are in reality just some actors. They will now view real science with misplaced skepticism, and real scientists with distrust. And we are back to square one. We end up with a society that is afraid of science. AND IT PISSES ME OFF!
I know that a little skepticism is good. And I am certainly not trying to say that everyone should believe what they see in a "documentary" (I've seen ones on UFO's), but this was different. It was a total lie from beginning to end, meant purposely to fool people. This wasn't just a little faulty data, or a misplaced opinion of the facts, this was a start to finish freaking deception! Real science, and real scientists might not always get the right answers, or correctly interpret what they observe, but they NEVER, EVER falsify information purely to deceive those who understand less than they do. But I'm sure there are lots of people who would disagree with that now!
Thanks a lot Animal Planet. And shame on you for airing this show. At the very least shame on you for not making it clear that it was all a farce. I don't like you anymore. Go away.

P.S. If you think I am blowing this out of proportion then how do you explain the fact that NOAA had to issue a public statement denying the existence of mermaids because enough people were freaking out about it for them to think it necessary...don't believe me? Look it up.

P.S.S. I just read an article says that the US Center for Disease Control has issued a statement only recently denying the existence of zombies...really? For all of you with kids- Please do me a favor, and encourage them to pay attention in science class. You'd be doing them a great service.

Spare Me!

I enjoy cooking. I love it actually (this seems to shock my mother every time I say it). If you have ever seen the Disney Pixar movie Ratatouille (which I watched twice yesterday!), I am like Remy, the cute little rat with an insatiable love of food, particularly cheese, and Paris. I am fascinated by the millions of creative food combinations that are possible. And when you combine that with the scientist in me that loves to experiment...well, my kitchen becomes my laboratory and I make some pretty..."inventive" stuff.
Sometimes my experiments center around what I can combine with what. Like can I put honey in a vinaigrette? Or grilled broccoli with pineapple? Can I combine a honey-viniagrette with grilled broccoli and pineapple?! Then sometimes it's about where I can use certain foods and spices. Can I put pepper in ice cream? (Answer is no by the way.) Can I put hot dogs in crepes? What about apples in shis-kabobs? Then sometimes it's just about cooking something I've never tried before, like my pie the other day, or some hither-to-unknown vegetable, or in this specific case, short ribs.
This past weekend I tried one of the most time consuming recipes I've ever attempted. And I started out using an actual recipe. And it was a disaster. This all came about, by the way, because I found a nice pack of short ribs on sale at the store the other day and decided to give it a try. (This is how many of my culinary adventures begin. I see some weird thing in the store or at the market and think "Hu. What in the heck is this? I don't know...it looks sketchy....but I'm totally going to by it and figure out how to cook it!")
I had to cut veggies, cook them, puree them, braise the ribs take them out of the pan, then make a sauce. Wine, tomato sauce, thyme, bay leaves etc. The sauce alone required mixing, boiling, reducing, simmering, more reducing. After which I added the meat back in...cooking longer..forever practically...and then finally when I tasted it it was...horrible!
It was really bitter for some reason. I guess I can't speak for anyone else, but I personally considered it inedible. I threw it in the crock pot and went for a run to think of what I could do to salvage my hard work. I opted to add brown sugar, a squeeze of honey, and some hazelnut coffee that was left in the pot from breakfast. I also added a ton more garlic salt and FINALLY it tasted...like food. Not great, but not as bad as before either.
We ate it. And neither of us died. So that's good. But I'd spent about $10 on extra stuff, including the whole bottle of wine the recipe called for, four hours of my life, and almost all of the minimally-allotted brain power I reserve for Sundays, on this less-than-satisfying meal. Boo. And I think I used every pot, pan, bowl, mixing instrument, and wooden spoon in my kitchen! And to top it all off, I don't even have a decent picture of it to post. No matter which way I shot the photo, it just looked like someone threw up red wine and pizza on pile of mashed potatoes! So frustrating. Sigh...you can't win 'em all I guess.

A Universe From Nothing

Last month's book for book club was called A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss. It was an interesting book, one of those astrophysics type where half of what you read you can't quite wrap your brain around, and the other half seems like it should be physically impossible, but apparently it's not.
Our book club was undecided about whether they loved it, but we are a pretty critical bunch, and I think over all it was a pretty good book. And ,since it was fairly short, I'd recommend it to those of you that are interested in the history of the search for dark matter and energy, and the origin of the (our) universe as well.
One of the biggest questions in cosmology is what produced the Big Bang? Most of us generally think in terms of cause and effect, and it only makes sense to us that if there was a Big Bang it had to come from somewhere, and be made out of something that was there before...only it's turning out that may not be true.
(See, this is what I mean about seeming physically impossible!) It certainly isn't true on a quantum scale where in the empty space between quarks (which make up protons and neutrons) particles pop into and out of "thin air" all the time! (The photo below was borrowed from a website called omnispace.org and if you click on the link below the image you can see a gif file animation that's pretty amazing!) That was one of the most interesting things I learned from this book. That empty space isn't really empty at all. WTF? Right?!

Click here to see animation!

So the idea is, if it can happen at a small scale, then why not on a scale the size of the universe? The only thing that seems to matter is that the total energy of the universe must always remain at zero, which apparently does.That might seem counter-intuitive too, but it's not once you begin to think about it. Stephen Hawking likened it (loosely) to making a hill out of dirt. In order to do that you must dig a hole of equal mass. So even though the hill might be high, it is balanced out by a hole equally deep. You are not bringing anything into the system or taking anything out of it either, you are just sort of shuffling it around. Yet still you appear to "make" a hill where there once was none. And so it might be with the universe. There was nothing needed, no outside cause to make the Big Bang, as long as the total energy remained at zero.
Now you might be thinking "Well, where does..."dirt" come from? Where does the system that totals zero energy come from?" And that's where it gets a little tricky. Because maybe the answer is that it comes from nowhere. Just like the particles and antiparticles that appear between quarks, so might our universe be. How could that happen you wonder? No one is exactly sure yet, but many think they are close. And it's all based on solid science, and observation (which the book goes into detail on, things like the Cosmic Background Radiation, and gravitational lensing etc...)
Part of it though, depends on which theory you buy. And each involves ever more complex physics . There is M-Theory and multiverses, string theory and so on, all of which can only truly be understood through some pretty hair-raising mathematics (and so becomes quite difficult for a lay-person such as myself to understand). It also depends on how you think the universe will end: with a"Big Crunch" or a "Big Freeze"? Will the universe collapse in on itself and form a giant black hole encompassing everything? Or will all the galaxies keep moving farther and farther apart until space cools, and all the starts die out? Does it even matter? Well, certainly not for us, or our grandchildren, or the rest of the human race, or any other living thing on our planet, or our sun, or our own home-sweet Milky Way galaxy. But for some distant future galaxy and  civilization it might. Krauss says in a mere trillion years (if the universe keeps expanding as it is now) those aliens will look up at the night sky and only see the stars from their own galaxy. If they develop the technology to gaze father out into the universe they will see....absolutely nothing.

NOT Cool: Part 2

(I can't remember if I already posted this or not. If so...sorry for the repeat.)

Say What?

OH...OK.THANKS.

Pretty As Pie

My very first pie!

As I stated in the last post I did a little baking over the weekend. My mom gave me a bunch of plums before leaving for Michigan, and I was at a loss as to what the heck to do with them before they got rotten. Then I got my new apron in the mail from my brother and I was inspired to bake a pie. I've made pumpkin pie...I think...But I've never tried to make a fruit pie in my life. I usually prefer my fruit fresh, and so am not too into pies unless its Thanksgiving. But I had a 15 plums and a designated baking apron, so...
It came out pretty good. It's a little tart. I should have added more sugar, but served with homemade vanilla ice cream it's actually pretty tasty. It was really easy too. I used a mix to make the pie crust, the filling was just plums, sugar a little flour and some salt I think, and the top crust was flour, sugar and butter. Just an hour in the oven and it was done! Easy peasy!
And I LOVE the way the house smelled when I was baking it. So...homey. It did make me kind of miss Thanksgiving, and long for cool fall days, but it was worth it!

Embrace Your Inner Nerd!

Aye aye Captain!

Just in case I felt like I was loosing touch with my "nerdy-Star Trek/Star Wars/Big Bang Theory" side my brother bought me this totally AWESOME Captain Picard baking apron for my birthday! LOL...I had to try it out ASAP. I normally don't do much baking in the summer, but I made an exception just so I could wear it.  "Bake it so!" it says and so I did.

(I'm not sure what is more weird...That I own a Star Trek apron, or that I actually have an extensive collection of aprons from which to choose from everyday?)

Not Enough Time!

I have so many things I have been wanting to write about, but not enough time to do it! I thought I'd get some solid blogging in this weekend, but nope. It never happened. I am three book reviews, two recipes, and 4 general topics behind! And it's not like I am sitting around watching TV, I am actually busy. I started a couple projects at home, and had some other chore like responsibilities to take care of. There was house cleaning, and the gym, and a couple hours at the pool. There was yoga, and my weekly morning at Panera reading. There was company visiting and grocery shopping, and an hour spent at Music in the Park. I even went to the library somewhere in there!
People tell me that I'd get bored if I didn't have to go to work. And I guess they could be right....but I seriously doubt it. I am never bored. I am always up to something. And I ALWAYS have more ideas than I have time for!

The Way I See Things

SOAP!

Happy (Late) 4th of July!

You can't get more American than this!

I meant to take some time to write yesterday, unfortunately it was at the bottom of my list. And I have too many closets. I spent the morning at the gym, and then decided to tackle a chore I've been wanting to do, but dreading at the same time...cleaning and organizing our apartment! It's so tiny you wouldn't think it wouldn't be a big chore, but I have so much...stuff hidden away that the task was really quite formidable. So I spent the afternoon cleaning, and organizing, and drinking beer (American beer;) and listening to music and singing along. It was actually pretty fun!
But I decided I wasn't being patriotic enough....I mean it's the 4th of July! So I ran to the store and got a pack of hot dogs and buns, and made some potato salad. It was a gorgeous day outside and as I ate my classic fare, I thought about how lucky I am to live here, and to have the rights and freedoms that go along with that. And I realized, it was a wonderful day to be an American too.
Happy (late) 4th of July everyone!

Petals

My birthday flowers are fading, and every day I find more petals on my table and less flowers in the vase.  If only I could keep them forever! It makes me sad to see them wilt and die, so I am trying to enjoy the heck out of them before they become compost. Here beautiful petal from a lily that I discovered yesterday.

Goodbye

Farewell old friend.

They say death is never pretty, and I have to agree. Even when it was never alive in the first place.

Quote of the Day

I saw this on a bumper sticker and it made me smile. It said:

If you're doing it right, heaven is right here.
It's so true!

The Birds and the Bees...Literally.

Chapter 2 in The X in Sex

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was reading a book called "The X in Sex". Well, I finished it. And I know I say this about almost every book I read (and it's true!) but this was so interesting! Plus it was well written, and even funny in parts....I mean who can't appreciate a chapter entitled "The Duke of Kent's Testicles?" It's even more amazing to me because the subject of the book (minus the portions about testicles of course) is actively, at this very moment, doing all the things that I am reading about...inside every cell in my body. It's weird feeling to learn about my insides, and understand myself in such a way. I mean, there are processes going on in my body right now that...even with the aid of a book, I'll probably never understand. But somehow it's still me. How could I not know myself?!? Ha ha...It's just so weird...and awesome. I love it.

I learned so many cool things from this book that I am afraid if I try to cram them all into one blog it will be...sort of long and unfocused. So instead I am going to try to break it down into a few segments.

But before we start talking about the familiar males and females, X and Y and all of that, I thought it might be worth while to go into a little more depth on the multiple ways a living thing can create progeny. Bear with me if it seems a little redundant to the last post about this book. I'm going to try to be a little more specific.

Sex happens to be the one us mammals and many reptiles and birds use, but it is by no means the only (or even most efficient) way to produce offspring. And some of them are pretty incredible, at least as strange as our own way. As most of you probably know reproduction is broadly divided into sexual and asexual.
Asexual can be broken down into parthenogenisis, binary fission, budding, fragmentation and many other, but more obscure methods.
Fission and budding are mostly accomplished by bacteria, some viruses, and plants, and while they are interesting in their own right (and have many advantages), I'd much rather focus on parthenogenic species, because they are just so neat. They are animals that can reproduce without a male (or an opposite sex). Primarily they are mother/daughter species (although some can produce males once in a while, or be all male species) where the genetic material from the mother is passed directly and completely to the daughters. The classic pathenogenic species are aphids. But science has now discovered that some bees, lizards, hammer head sharks, Komodo dragons, and boa constrictors also reproduce this way!
When we move onto sexual reproduction things might become more familiar because there are boys and girls, but the methods of producing the XX/XY or ZZ/ZW (in birds and reptiles) can be totally foreign still! Besides our "normal" way of reproducing there are hermaphrodite species, like snails and many amphibians that can have both male and female sex organs at the same time (and fertilize their own eggs) or have the ability to change from male to female during their life cycle. Some species of frogs, when the ratio of male to female gets disrupted, can convert many of it's population to the less dominant sex to balance things back out again!
Or there is what is called "external fertilization" in contrast to our internal method. Salmon do this. A female will lay her eggs in the water, and a male will come by later and fertilize the eggs, and all the mating happens outside the body of the female.
Even when we finally get to talking about sexual reproduction where there are distinct males and females and the females are internally inseminated by males, the process can be wildly unfamiliar.
Humans (and all mammals) use genes to determine sex. XX and you have a girl XY and it's a boy. But there are many sexual species (with males and females) who don't use genes to determine sex! What do I mean? Well, here are two examples.
Bonellia is a kind of worm that lives in the ocean. They have males and females, but it is not genes that determine the sex of the offspring, rather it is the environment. The female creates sexless larvae that float around in the ocean. Eventually they drop to the ocean floor, and it is here that they decide what sex they will become. If the larvae falls and there are no other Bonillia around then it will become a female and root. If the larvae falls and there are other Bonillia around then it becomes a male, burrows into the side of the larger female, and essentially becomes a symbiotic...testicle! (Angler fish, as I mentioned before, also have a symbiotic relationship with each other.)
A second example is that of the Nile Crocodiles.They don't use genes or environment to determine sex, they use temperature! The sex of the baby crocks is determined by the temperature of the eggs during the middle of the third incubation period. If the temperature is above 34.5 degrees C or below 31.7 degrees C then the offspring will be female. But if the temperature falls within that 4 degree window, the babies will be male!

Often times we view the natural world with the idea that it is somehow perfectly designed, that there is an methodical simplicity in it, but I disagree. Especially when it comes to reproduction.  It seems to me life will try anything and everything. Males/females, females/females, males/males, male-females, males-then-females, non-sexed to sexed, non-sexual, clones, spores...etc. It reminds me of the game Boggle, where you use a discrete number of  letters to make up as many words as you can. So life has done with reproduction. Using the building blocks available, life tried every combination it seems,without bias. And the ones we are left with are the ones that worked better than the other possible combinations that are no longer with us.
Our human sexual reproductive ways have many advantages (primarily genetic diversity) and it is truly amazing how our bodies reproduce, but our strategy is far from perfect, and far from being the only way to get things done. And there are many weird, dramatic, and often unfortunate concequences embedded in our chosen methods. I will begin to discuss those in the next post.
But the take away point here is that there are pros and cons to every method of reproduction. None is perfect, none is flawless, and most of them are not even ideal. But the one thing they have in common (and the only thing they need to be viable forms of reproduction) is that they do in fact create survivors. You and I are one of them, and so is every other living thing on earth. Groovy. Yay for reproduction!