The year is almost over, and I feel as if I should write some final post. But I feel too exhausted to say anything worthwhile. This time of year always makes me feel exhausted. Of course, I feel exhausted all year long, but even more exhausted now, maybe due to the lack if light.
It makes me wish that we could all go into hibernation for the winter. I know that I have blogged about that before, but I am too exhausted to track down the post to link to it.
When I look at this Walgreens Christmas bird, I have to wonder—is its plumage supposed to be plaid? Or is it wearing a plaid coat that is form-fitted to its wing and tail feathers?
Also, I find it somewhat ironic that the Christmas bird is not considered suitable for children. So remember, kids, you may admire the Christmas bird from a distance, but do not approach!
Cormorants on the pilings . . .
. . . an airplane in flight . . .
. . . the Woodrow Wilson Bridge illuminated by the setting sun . . .
November is over.
(When I came up with the idea for this post, I guess that I must have forgotten that November has only thirty days, because I thought that I would be writing on the last day of November, and I would start with “November is almost over.”)
But anyway, November is over.
The political text messages for Breana have (mostly) stopped coming.
The Halloween decorations have all come down (except for that one house that I drive by occasionally that has had a twelve-foot skeleton in the front yard for over a year).
And I have reached the point when I realize that I have done pathetically few blog posts for this year, and try to make up for it. I will probably do that with photos. I didn’t start this blog to post pictures. I start it to write. But I haven’t had time to write much in recent years.
And so I will post pictures, like this tree:
or perhaps the long view of the tree:
Or maybe I will do nothing at all.
Well, another Halloween has come and gone. In the past, I have blogged quite a bit about Halloween, which one can read by clicking on the appropriate tag below.
This year I don’t have too much to say. Once again, Halloween did bring out the brief flickering of my old desire to write weird fiction. I happened to read the Wikipedia entries on the jack-o’-lantern, and from there the entry on the will-o’-the-wisp, and all the attendant legends, and thought that there was a lot of material there to inspire a story.
But, once again, I came up with nothing.
Also, I have been wondering when people should take down their Halloween decorations. As of yesterday and earlier today, I was still seeing numerous ghosts, skeletons, and giant spider webs in people’s yards. The situation is starting to feel a little like the phenomenon of people leaving their Christmas lights up well into January or February (or March . . . ).
Perhaps the answer would be to leave decorations up until the end of the similar but unrelated holiday, the Day of the Dead, which is, um, actually two days.
In light of my last post, I have been thinking that I should note, for the sake of bipartisanship, that there are probably also a lot of crazy text messages being sent out by the Trump campaign—and I really, really, really, really don’t want to know what any of them say.
A few years ago I go a new cell phone. And, as I suppose is bound to happen, at least one other person had the number before me. And, as I suppose is bound to happen, I continue to get messages for that person or persons.
Some of the messages are intended for the parent or guardian of one of two children, a boy and a girl, both of whom have Turkish-sounding names, and who are presumably brother and sister.
The messages concerning the boy are only rare texts from his healthcare provider, offering resources should he be having trouble navigating puberty or whatever.
On the other hand, I get a surprising number texts and recorded phone calls from that Fairfax County Public School System about the girl having unexcused absences. And since it is all automated, I can’t talk to a real person to explain that I have no connection to any of it.
And then there are the messages for a woman known only as Breana.
Is Breana the mother of the children with Turkish-sounding names? I don’t know. But I do know, thanks to the text messages intended for her, that her two major passions in life seem to be handbag fashion (there are many texts from the Coach outlet) and Democratic Party politics.
(I should note here that, although I have been deeply interested in politics since middle school, I do my best to keep any politics off the blog. And, as I get older, I have mostly lost the desire to talk about politics even with my closest friends. But now must bring in some political content in order to finish telling this stupid story that I have for some reason decided to put on my blog.)
As it is now the end days of a presidential campaign, I get text messages multiple times daily intended for Breana from the Kamala Harris campaign asking for money. They are very annoying, yet I do get some entertainment out of the ones that sound as if they were written by some kind of unhinged stalker, for example:
[Failure to respond will result in an automatic “NO” answer] Are you voting for Kamala Harris? [URL]
Begging on my hands and knees: We need 1 more gift to boost turnout for Kamala! Donate $20=$200: [URL]
We’ve asked you SIX TIMES if you support Kamala Harris…but you still didn’t complete the poll?! Reply via personal link>[URL]
And then there is my personal favorite, which was sent not once but twice:
We asked you to sign Kamala Harris’s birthday card, but you ignored us. DON’T ABANDON HER: Sign LINK>>[URL]
The next logical step would seem to be a message stating that if Breana doesn’t donate $100 in the next hour Kamala Harris will commit suicide.
Here is another pigeon. I had a pigeon picture in June. I find that pigeons are one of the few small birds that will stand still to be photographed.
If you look closely, you will see that the pigeon is standing on a nail, which doesn’t look comfortable.
I took this picture many years ago. At the time, one of my friends wrote a food blog, and I thought about sending the picture to him, but I don’t think that I ever did. And I doubt that it was the kind of food that he would have been interested n anyway.
An Osprey sits on a piling in the river.
A Five-lined Skink hides under a board.
A Red-bellied Turtle looks kind of smug.
Today’s illustration comes from “Ontogenetic mechanisms of size change: implications for the Lilliput effect and beyond” in the journal Paleobiology. The paper concerns such topics as ontogeny, phylogeny, heterochrony, allometry, and taphonomy, and can be viewed here or here. (The journal is subscription-only, but maybe you are one of the lucky few who has access!)
One of the examples considered in the study is an animal called Lystrosaurus, which lived during the Permian and Triassic. It was once considered a reptile, but is now know to have been more closely related to the mammals.
Although Lystrosaurus is not nearly as well known as some of the more charismatic prehistoric animals, it did gain a certain measure of fame because its fossils are found on what are now several separate continents, thus providing evidence for the theory of continental drift.
I never knew that Lystrosaurus looked like such a doofus.
I had been thinking about making my next blog post about another item of paleontological art, but then O. J. Simpson died. And, as one of the few people left alive who is old enough to remember the Nineties, I felt obligated to comment. (And then, of course, it took me a few weeks to actually do it.)
As I noted before, the O. J. trial gave Saturday Night Live its greatest Weekend Update moment ever.
Perhaps my most significant personal O. J. memory is that, during the trial, I had no idea that Simpson had been regarded as one of the best professional football players of all time. I have never been a sports fan at all, and during his football career I was too young to be aware of popular culture in general. Thus, though I had some vague knowledge that he had played football, I knew him mostly as an actor and rental car spokesman. And I really didn’t understand why everyone was making such a big deal about a guy who was in The Naked Gun. (If Leslie Nielsen had been accused of murdering two people, would that have been the Trial of the Century?)
And then there was a Hertz commercial that aired a few years before the murders, in which a line toward the end proved rather prescient:
“Brutal, Juice, brutal.”
As I’ve discussed before, I don’t usually blog about paleontology, even though that’s the field in which I work ( . . . kind of . . . sort of . . . somewhat . . . ). But recently I’ve been noticing illustrations in scientific papers that might provide good blogging material, without requiring much effort on my part.
The illustration under consideration today is from the cover of the July 2023 issue of the journal Rivista Italiana di Paleontologia e Stratigrafia. (You can read the relevant paper here.) It depicts Megalancosaurus endennae, a drepanosauromorph reptile from the Triassic of Italy. Megalancosaurus was not very big (as one can see from the fact that it is perched on the end of a tree limb), and is generally assumed to have been similar to a chameleon (in terms of its arboreal and insectivorous lifestyle, though not necessarily in terms of changing color).
What strikes me about the picture is how evil Megalancosaurus is made to appear. It has an absolutely crazed expression on its face, and its claws are poised to grab someone or something.
It definitely looks to be up to no good.
If the Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl, will they pour Gatorade on Taylor Swift?
I don’t normally take pictures of people, and I definitely don’t post pictures of people on this blog, because I don’t want to have to deal with indignant people who don’t want their pictures taken.
But I have to assume that this guy wanted to have his picture taken.
He was playing heavy metal guitar while wearing a Ghostface mask in a park by the Potomac in Old Town on the Saturday before Halloween.
Of course, his vibe is somewhat undercut by the fact that his guitar is pink . . .
. . . and (for those who know about metal) by the fact that it’s a Strat.
In honor of the new Mean Girls movie, my browser apparently tried to make fetch happen.
And, of course, my browser failed.
(I have to admit that I never saw the original Mean Girls, and thus I am not 100% sure of what “fetch” is, or what would be required to make it happen.)
(I also have to admit that I don’t know very much about computers, as not only do I not understand what a “backend fetch” is, but I also have no idea why the error message involves “guru meditation” and “varnish”.)
