That would be the Brown Recluse spider, ha very ha.
So many years...! So many years I've spent patiently explaining that your aunt in Pacoima or your grandfather in Carmel was actually not, I repeat, not bitten by a Brown Recluse spider, because the Brown Recluse doesn't live in California, and even where it does live, it isn't running around biting people. It's shy and, well, reclusive. And did I mention that most medical doctors are not arthropodologists? May I add that most medical doctors do not spend their days researching bacterial infections, Staph infections in particular? Here's someone who does. Oh, kids, how this makes me smile:
California does have a Desert Recluse. [Spider!] It's shy, reclusive [quelle surprise] and reluctant to bite. Just for you, Californians: Brown Recluse and Other Recluse Spiders
Hot tip from Diane at DeltaBluez Stockdogs: these stainless steel pails are on sale from Jeffers Equine, half-ish price, today only. [Doctors Foster and Smith link here, for comparison shoppers.] If Diane recommends these, they're the real deal. I love pails like this and have a bunch of 'em, all sizes.
Again, Diane says these pails are on sale today only. You snooze, you lose, etc. Thanks, Diane!
More Dog Doogity goodness here [and a free sticker!].
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"Corporate personhood": much like a dog turd, it smells nasty, fosters parasites, and needs proper disposal. Consider that one little house on the prairie serves as the headquarters for 2,000 different corporations, some linked to criminals:
[The Reuters article] shows how critical these secrecy jurisdictions are to making corporations a vehicle of crime and other abuse. And, as [Nicholas] Shaxson has shown, secrecy jurisdictions are also a key tool for corporations to avoid paying their fair share and for dictators to loot their countries. These kinds of incorporation services are a key tool to sucking the money out of the legitimate economy.
At a time when SCOTUS is giving corporations –- even flimsy entities like the scraps of paper at 2710 Thomes –- more rights than actual citizens, it pays to understand how easy it is for people to avail themselves of corporate personhood.
The good folks at Move to Amend have the novel idea that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights. "End corporate rule. Legalize democracy," is their motto. Good luck [wry face]. Seriously, it would be nice if some vestige of government of the people, by the people and for the people rose up and kicked corporate personhood's fat butt to the curb.
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Poop Week over at the most excellent 10,000 Birds was totally awesome.
"First of all, every birder backpack, rucksack, or other holder of materials should have toilet paper, or, failing that, tissues. Don’t resort to what I had to do once in the vicinity of the East Pond of Jamaica Bay and emerge sockless from the bushes."
You knew possums are resistant to snake venom, right? Turns out their ossum super power has to do with one blood protein:
Since the evolutionary origin of the family, the vWF [von Willebrand Factor] of opossum species that prey on snakes has accumulated more changes than vWF in non-snake-eating species. That's circumstantial evidence for the effect of natural selection continuously acting on vWF over millions of years. Jansa and Voss picked out several specific changes that are unique to snake-eating opossums, and found that they're associated with a region of vWF that is known to bind with one of the toxins in pit viper venom.
Read all about it at Jeremy B. Yoder's terrific Denim and Tweed science blog.
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India's vultures have all but disappeared. Feral dogs have filled the void:
In the decade of major vulture decline, from 1992 to 2003, one estimate showed dog populations increasing by a third, up to nearly 30 million. The escalation of the dog population corresponds perfectly with the disappearance of India’s vultures.
Read about the dogs and the last Indian vultures here.
During his years as an RCMP officer in the northern communities, Clare Kines recognized the important role of the sled dog in local history and culture. "But because of the ubiquitousness of dogs in the north there have been attacks," he writes. "Too often I've seen the results of children and adults severely hurt or even killed by a group of dogs."
An attack earlier this month involved a dog he knew.
I played with that dog a lot, it bounded with energy and I never saw a hint of aggression from it. It was engaging, and although untrained would easily be led by the collar. Hell, my children played with it. A couple of weeks ago it was off its lead, bounding amongst kids never touching them. It came quickly to my whistle and walked back with me to its spot on the ice. It was playful and gentle, and yet it participated in a savage attack on a little child. Of that there is no doubt.
And that is why this won't escape from my mind. If this is a dog that can do this terrible thing, then any dog can. That the wild in their ancestory must lie in them underneath. Since the attack I look at my children playing with our big gentle puppy, Bolt, and wonder, if the circumstances were just right, what might happen?
In Clare Kines's photo, above, his children Travis and Hilary play with their dog Bolt. See more photos in the post Sledding. The beautiful, unnamed sled dog at the top of this post was also photographed by Clare. As always, click photos to embiggen.
ETSY artist Kozue makes wonderful custom pet portrait stamps like the one on the left, which is totally awesome. I want a bunch of these. Kozue is on vacation at the moment, but you can see more of her dog stamps here, courtesy of Design Milk's artful canine sidekick, Dog Milk.
True story: while riding through a remote meadow in the Colorado Rockies, a mountain biker who is not Rick Perry startles a mother bear with cubs. The mother bear is hella upset. Did I mention that the mountain biker is not Rick Perry?
Peter Houser of Living with Birddogs visited China earlier this month and caught a glimpse of the future:
[N]early all of the enviroment that I saw was horribly damaged. During the entire time in country I saw only a handful of songbirds, a few magpies, no rodents, no hawks. Certainly no game birds. Anything that looks green is under mono-species cultivation. Most of the country is covered by a cloud of smog from the coal-burning electric plants. 5,000 years of human occupation have left a mark on the land and the animals that will not disappear until the next ice age. So, get out your checkbook and send some money to your favorite environmental advocate group. This trip really brought home to me how much we stand to lose if we do not learn to live in a balanced relationship with our environment.
Peter is just one of a number of fine hook-and-bullet bloggers to sound an alarm. Check out Chad Love here and here and here [and, heck, just nab Chad's RSS feed. He's good].
In the past month, the nation’s focus has been on the budget battle in Washington, where Republicans in Congress aligned with the Tea Party have fought hard for rollbacks to the Environmental Protection Agency, clean air and water regulations, renewable energy and other conservation programs.
But similar efforts to make historically large cuts to environmental programs are also in play at the state level as legislatures and governors take aim at conservation and regulations they see as too burdensome to business interests.
If we hope to save our country from the big oil billionaires business interests that control so many of our politicians, we better get busy. Don't wait until the next Ice Age. Get busy now.
That fresh hell in the photo at the top of this post? Not China. It's Canada. And it kills me to think of it, but that toxic landscape used to be a boreal forest. Did I mention that Canada is the #1 supplier of oil to the US? Countless wildfowl die in those tailing ponds. The air, the rivers and the people — the men, women and children — who live nearby are being poisoned. But we mustn't burden the business interests! Oh, no, mustn't do that.
