secret wonderful

frowned upon

today i found the beehive demolished by the wind and rain. lying in pieces on the sidewalk, bees in puddles and scattered all around. there is a small piece of the hive still active on the limb but most of them were wearily wobbling on the ground or dead on the mud.

pals

pigeons. what do you think of when you see a pigeon? is it rat with wings? is it poop on my head? is it great telephone pole photo-op?
i love pigeons and when i see clouds of them circling in the sunrise or one laying dead in the road i think of how hard the life of a pigeon must be. they live on the streets eating what they can, sleeping where they can, constantly avoiding imminent danger. pigeons have a struggle similar to the homeless in a way. detested wonderment you'd rather not have to look at, city blocks make a tough nest.
so today's joy was found through a glimpse of compassion from dirty hand to raggedy wing. a perilless pair indeed but a safe one still.

save me from my glee!

haha! rember pax?

puppy whipped

going to the dog park is the best. who needs therapy when you have dogs running around like little kids freakin out on kool-aid and nerd ropes? the joy spreads like mange. the greatest. the best part of it is that most of the dogs have absolutely no interest in you. they're too busy sniffin butts and bitin balls. love it. saturdays are usually days to avoid at the dog park because of the copius amount of humans present but i could care less on a day like today. aside from the occasional shitty shoe and sad but true dog owner no-no's it is absolute bliss. plus bella's evil twin was there. so fun. i want one of these next......a newfie!! a slobber slinger! a poop machine! a pony!

fallen

this morning i brought home five bees under what i've coined the dead bee tree. there were about seven more undead and as i crouched down to gaze and gather one fell right from above and smacked down onto the cement. what the fuck? i am so curious about this. six feet ahead and behind lie the same kind of tree surrounded by the same kind of everything. i've tried looking up into the tree limbs but haven't really been able to see anything. are the bees gathering pollen from this tree? do they have a hive up there? i'm gonna have to climb up there or something when the court closes-yeah right in front of bankruptcy court-what a metaphor.

can i get a collective ahhhhhh

sidewalk cemetary

early yesterday morning was a nice time to walk. it was about 6:30. foggy. crisp. there wasn't anyone around either which made it that much better. i ended up finding 14 dead bees scattered all under one tree on the sidewalk. the 5 that i was able to pull up from the cement made it home in my hand and as i gazed down at them i noticed one still moving a little-the last seconds of life. i thought for a second maybe they would all come back to life when reaching the warmth of my apartment. that didn't happen of course but reminded me of the phenomenon where flies are able to hibernate in a way-coming back to life after being frozen. try it. or don't.

past and present-the present

watched a bee die today. reminded me of the dead albatross i tried to catch in my secret ob spot last summer. weird. i never caught it, as i got really close the overwhelming odor kept me on shore. it would have been the best of my collection for sure, or maybe the dead seal my sis found that same summer would have been. too big? touche!

eel bait

did you know that moray eels have two sets of jaws? when a moray catches something to eat it holds onto it with its mouth and the second jaw springs forth from the throat, attaches to the prey, and retracts back into the throat leaving the catch on its way straight to the stomach. the visual reminds me of alien. it's so bad ass!

disecting genius

the master: mr. walton ford

toxoplasmosis, sea otters, and toilet training this cat

i have recently acquired a cat-i kind of had to do it. she was a stray-hungry, sweet, and oh so pathetic. i named her cleo and soon she will have a bitchin gold collar and a proper scratching post. i'm glad i was able to give her a home and she and bella dog get along fine. bella watches her nightly freak outs with an equally amused and unimpressed attitude. they are both adjusting well i suppose and the only real issue is that bella like most dogs, loves to eat cat shit. she lurks around the corner waiting for cleo to take a dump-hilarious and disgusting. i've created a barrier but the whole cat box thing has always bothered me so i thought i would train cleo to go to the bathroom in the toilet. how great would that be? i wouldn't have to buy litter, i wouldn't have to smell or clean up piss and shit clumps, and i wouldn't have to strategically place the box out of bella's reach plus it's the best thing ever to see a cat take a pee in the toilet. however, in my research i found that flushing cat poop down the toilet is a serious threat to sea otters. WHAT?!
you've probably heard of toxoplasmosis as it relates to pregnant women. the parasite can cause serious birth defects and is transmitted by eating meat that hasn't been cooked all the way, drinking contaminated water, or having contact with cat feces. cats become hosts to the parasite after eating other infected animals like mice, rats, and birds and after ingestion the oocysts or eggs of the parasite are passed in the feces. aside from being harmful to fetuses, toxoplasmosis is not a threat to humans. it is however, a reason for concern among scientists studying the cause of death in coastal sea otters. not to bore you with too much information, the basic point of concern is that a large percentage of sea otters (as well as other marine mammals such as dolphins and whales) are dying of toxoplasmosis and there is a direct link to contaminated cat feces.
so basically, flushing cat poop down the toilet living so close to the ocean is not cool. here's why according to Report on Toxoplasma Gondii: Its Sources and Impacts on Sea Otters, and What Municipalities Can Do to Help Reduce or
Eliminate These Impacts: Oocysts may survive up to 18 months in soil under favorable conditions, and wastewater treatment practices are not designed to destroy the highly resistant oocysts of Toxoplasma gondii. Cat owners should be urged to bag and dispose of cat feces and cat litter in approved sanitary landfills where runoff is controlled, rather than flushing it down the toilet.
Crap!

new banksy=dope!

http://www.woostercollective.com/2008/10/the_village_pet_store_and_charchoal_gril.html

our present day mass extinction event-holocene vs. history

1 in 4 mammals will go extinct in our lifetime. does this seem like an absurdly high number or is it relative to what we know about the history of mass extinction events?

65 million years ago during the cretaceous-tertiary extinction event 75% of earths flora and fauna went extinct, including the dinosaurs (which ironically enough in this particular post, made room for mammals to dominate).

251 million years ago the "great dying" or permian-triassic extinction event occured where 96% of all marine life and 70% of life on land (plants, insects, and vertabrates) went extinct. the great dying was huge!

We are presently living within the era of the holocene extinction event, which biologists are deeming the most accelerated mass extinction event in history. It is estimated that half of the species alive today will be extinct in the next 100 years.

that reality is a harsh one to accept and conjures up a lot of emotion. who doesn't cringe at the notion of gorillas and orangutans being extinct?! maybe you don't. is that a bad thing? maybe not.
most people are empathetic-we experience the feelings, thoughts, and attitudes of those around us which in turn influence our actions. during catastrophic events like 9-11 or hurricane katrina thousands of people not even in new york or new orleans felt the sadness, the anger, and despair of those in the midst of it all. so in a world where half of the species we have grown up to know or at least be aware of dissapear (a world that would also nonetheless be struggling with a myriad of other harsh changes related to global warming, over population, etc.) is it a disadvantage to be empathetic?

colony collapse disorder

my mind has been wondering and wandering about the possibility of life without honey bees. each day i find at least one bee dead or circling the pavement as they do right before the proboscus rolls out at its last breath. honey bees are by far the biggest part of my collection and the sole inspiration for keeping track of my thoughts and my findings in this blog. i'm not sure if my sudden affinity for bee collecting and what scientists have coined colony collapse disorder are in any way related but, timing has made me take note nonetheless and the fact that the bee population is dwindling right before my feet is a bit unsettling. hives are begining to look ghostly with just the queen and a few attendants in house. this a relatively current phenomena which spans the globe but one of the biggest losses in population has occured in the hives of the U.S. could it be the IAP virus? mites? global warming? electromagnetic waves? i'm sure these are all factors and one thing to point out is that scientists are studying colony collapse disorder in harvested hive sites so is this happening in the"wild"? are the bees that i find in my neighborhood dying of the same things effecting domesticated bees? are the bees in my neighborrhood even wild?

death head

zaque brought back a pigeon skull he found in oregon for me. it's great. it still has the black tissue tips on the end of the beak-about 1/4' long. i put it on the window sill with the other one we had found about a month ago. what a pair.

do i really need another one?

i'm gonna try and bring this blog back around to the objects of expiration tip and keep it dead centered and a la naturale as much as possible. oddities and such.....

checkout bryan's work in the catskills-so good

"in the comfort of crickets"
http://www.fecalface.com/nyc/

tko

yesterday i watched a bird get knocked out. it slammed into a glass door and dropped straight to the ground. brutal. i watched it laying there helpless, motionless, except for it's little torso racing up and down with each dazed breath. for a good ten minutes it remained like that and we just stared. and then it opened its beak. i thought outloud "oh no! it's gonna fucking die!" (i tried to rescue a bird once that a neighborhood cat was having a go at and it opened its beak right before it croaked). as i waited for the chest to drop and be still it started to blink. it came on real slow and it was still just lying there then out of fucking no where little tweety flipped around and onto its feet! it was a bit startling-especially since i was just looming over it waiting for it to stop breathing. it was kind of funny. it stood there on it's feet-maybe with a sore leg or wing and eventually hobbled over to some shade. it seemed like it was going to make it. poor thing got messed up!! i'm glad i didn't have to bury it-there were no dandelions around.

mad respect

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26436974/wid/18298287/?GT1=45002

objects of expiration/existance

today i found a fresh, plump cricket. it was so cool until i lost it in the crack of my sisters VW-sorry sis. guess it wasn't very good luck after all-oh well. i found it at the ashram this morning up at swami's. such a pretty place. the living things i saw today were just as cool as the lost dead one i found including a hellicopter huge orange dragonfly, some wicked spiders, and some old fox tails like the ones i used to grow in colorado. as the girls did their paharanas or indian meditation- aka really strange breathing/arm girations, i practiced what i like to call my chicken breast pose. i woke up to ants tickling my arms and the sun burning the soles of my feet-much like what a raw chicken breast might actually experience when left out in the grass. anyway, it was good times all around and then we went for some waves.

Crapper

You've always wanted to know the origin of this word right? Lucky for you i found some craptastic information on it.....
Popular wisdom attributes the derivation of this slang term for lavatory to Thomas Crapper (1836 - 1904), the supposed inventor of the flush toilet. Unfortunately, Thomas Crapper didn't invent the flush toilet. He holds nine patents for plumbing-related inventions, including three for water closets, but flush lavatory, properly called the "Silent Valveless Water Waste Preventer" was patented in 1819 by Albert Giblin. Nevertheless, Crapper is the name that people remember. He was certainly well-known in his day as a sanitary engineer. He had a thriving plumbing business and was sanitary engineer for several members of the royal family. Poopin good times!

mmmmmm wood!

so i'm not clairvoyant. that was pretty clear. but in insecty news (buggy news sounds way better but as you all should know, bugs have mandibles and not even half of the insect population does, so it's kind of not proper to use bug when refering to an actual insect-k?-k!) i neglected to collect any of the three gut laden sidewalk specimens i found today including a caterpillar :( and a wasp-damn! but this morning i did watch a carpenter bee remember his hole in an old wooden telephone pole, fly into it, mosey around in some sod, fly back out, and give bella dog a "kiss" before flying up into the sky. it was great. i know you're jealous.

of another way

i had another vivid dream last night. this one involved lightning. it was so real. so cool. kind of scary. apparently we're supposed to have a thunderstorm this evening in san diego. have i become clairvoyant?

objects of expiration/manifestation

found a couple things today. a fairly large honey bee in my neighborhood this morning and a really small, really pretty moth on broadway and 13th this afternoon. both on the sidewalk as usual-just about to get squished by my ratty shoe. over the weekend i was in colorado and while picking wild raspberries in the middle of no where i remembered a somewhat creepy dream i had the night before. there were strange and colorful insects crawling all over the greenery-somewhat similar to the landscape that triggered my memory. i didn't find any insects hiding beneath the raspberry leaves but on another day later i helped my friends' 4 year old catch grass hoppers in their vast backyard of fields and hills. we ended up catching about 5 and i learned that the brown stuff all over my hands wasn't blood or guts but spit up. they're defense is brown spit. how cool. anyway, we found a rock hard frog that had turned black in the sun along with various bones of who knows what. sugar, their beautiful white pitbull pup came running up to us and the marks on her back reminded me that there were coyotes that ran around here. that night i had another dream-more like a nightmare. instead of insects and greenery i was back in the office at work being bombarded by not usually bitchy co-workers. it was so real. and here i am this evenging typing away from my desk. i hope i dream of ice cream and money tonight!

where my bugs at?

no new dead stuff to write of latelly :(

friends or food-we can have both right?

a refreshingly honest article
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/opinion/31kristof.html?em

objects of expiration:

bee # 3 found today-noonish near corner of union and f. an excellent specimen-fresh from the sky.