Nostalgic Reverie
bushwells | March 6, 2008A conversation with a fellow raptor fan and Kevin's recent entry pertaining to the injured bald eagle congealed and triggered a few of my geriatric neurons, prompting the following nostalgic reverie about a former pet: an American kestrel.
I think I have mentioned that I grew up on a farm in east central Illinois, not far from Champaign-Urbana. Our yard consisted of an acre of land with a variety of mature trees - sugar, Norway and silver maples, American basswood, shingle oak, flowering crab apples, sweetgum and a few specimen trees - plus open areas where we set up the croquet set, the…
bushwells | October 23, 2007I'll hop on the sea cucumbers bandwagon along with Sheril of The Intersection, Coturnix on Blog Around the Clock, and Benny of Zooillogix (be sure to check out the boffo cartoon in Benny's article).
In that netherworld between undergrad and graduate school, I thought to become a marine natural products chemist. One of the faculty of my undergrad alma mater's organic chemistry department had a keen interest in compounds from marine critters and plants. To this end, he and his coterie of post-docs and grad students (at least those with scuba diving certifications) traveled to locales like the…
bushwells | September 4, 2007Since Labor Day weekend has passed, it's time to put away those white shoes and to take note of the late summer orb weaver spiders.
Orb Weaver spiders are members of the Araneidae family. These include the ubiquitous yellow and black garden spider and familiar genera such as Mangora spp. and Araneus spp. When my kids were little, they referred to the more common Araneidae as "Charlottes" after E.B. White's Charlotte's Web.
Chimp Refuge field observers, Dawn & Bobby, recently shared a photo of an Araneidae arachnid that has set up her shop behind their house:
This is a pretty spider to…
bushwells | June 8, 2007An e-droog recently waxed poetic about a single malt Scotch that she gave to a friend on the occasion of his thirtieth birthday. If I recall correctly, this was an especially rugged Islay beast, and stronger than the infamous Laphroaig. The subject of single malts triggered an avalanche of nostalgic reverie, not uncommon for us geriatrics, so I will inflict you with my aged yammering...and photos... here.
A British friend, then a post-doc in the lab next door and now a chemoinformatics guru, introduced single malts to me back in my grad school days. My previous experiences with Scotch had…
jfiore | April 5, 2007With all of the recent content ragarding the DI and other purveyors of hokum, I thought it would be an appropriate time to post an entry from a pre-scienceblogs version of the Refuge.
...and pretty soon there won't be no streets
for dummies to jog on and doggies to dog on
religious fanatics can make it be all gone
I mean it won't blow up and disappear
it'll just look ugly for a thousand years
-Frank Zappa
Did you ever wonder what the world would be like today if Western culture had never suffered through the Dark Ages? What if, given the controls to some omnipotent time machine, we could…
bushwells | February 14, 2007I took a pretty circuitous path to becoming a biochemist.
When I was six, I wanted to be a paleontologist, influenced by the "dinosaurs are cool" factor and my older (much older) sister's college textbooks which I attempted to read, trying to get a grasp of evolution. Then, I wanted to be a zoologist, specializing in mammology. Next, I imagined that I would be an astrophysicist (my brother's a physicist...not an astro- kind but a solid state physicist), and by the time I was in high school, I thought I'd be a good psychiatrist what with all my angst-ridden teenaged friends coming to me for…
bushwells | January 18, 2007Last Sunday, my son, who is home for his rapidly waning semester break, and I met a couple of friends in New York City where we enjoyed breakfast at good enough to eat followed by a visit to the nearby American Museum of Natural History. We dedicated ourselves to the fossil halls on the fourth floor of the museum. The halls were teeming with families. While we stopped in front of one of the big cladograms, we overheard a young father matter-of-factly telling his young children that "birds evolved from dinosaurs" as he gestured toward the dino family tree. Even if the museum was…
bushwells | December 18, 2006Re: Ask a Science Blogger - Harsh Criticism, Did It Help or Hinder? Warning. My response contains offensive material. Oh, you're not surprised? Well, OK, this is the Chimp Refuge. You already know that there are piles of bonobo scat everywhere. So let's get to steppin' and squishin'...
During my first "real" job out of my post-doc, one of my colleagues told me this joke, repeated here with my embellishments:
Two explorers stumble into a wild unknown land, and are captured in the bush by the fearsome indigenous inhabitants. They are brought before the tribal chief, who conveniently…
bushwells | December 13, 2006Ever the provocateur, Christopher Hitchens tells us Why Women Aren't Funny in the January 2007 Vanity Fair.
Mr. Hitchens believes that humor in men serves as an attractant to women, sort of a laff riot version of the male peacock's tail:
Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, she equips many fellows with very little armament for the struggle. An…
bushwells | November 28, 2006Over at Terra Sigillata, Abel Pharmboy dissects the deeper meaning of the Rozarem ad which features Abe Lincoln, a beaver and a scuba diver telling an insomniac how much they miss him. The ad is hawking Takeda Pharm's latest little sleeping pill. The Rozarem campaign is a departure from the usual direct-to-consumer drug advertising. It's certainly edgier and more surreal than Mandy Patinkin looking sincerely into the camera and urging you to "ask your doctor about Crestor."
I am not a fan (to say the least) of pharma's DTC advertising, but I'll leave my frothing rant on that subject for…
bushwells | November 27, 2006So this morning when I walked into the corridors bisecting our labs from our offices, I was greeted by yellow "caution wet floor" signs and my staff scurrying about like industrious, yet annoyed, ants. Apparently, a major leak developed during the night in a lab on the second floor. The water made its way into another group's tissue culture lab adjoining my department's facilities. Fortunately, none of our equipment was affected, and our offices were dry in spite of copious puddles of water on the tile floors of the hallways. I did not arrive early enough to witness the full comedy of the…
jfiore | September 16, 2006Jason over on EvolutionBlog has some interesting commentary regarding Greg Easterbrook and string theory. Like Jason, I find Easterbrook to be tiresome and a less-than-worthy commentator on topics scientific. I had written my own frisking of Easterbrook with respect to Richard Dawkins on a previous incarnation of the Refuge some time ago. It follows, below.
I was reading an interview with Richard Dawkins the other day. Quite nice. Dawkins is his usual clear and straightforward self regarding the public's take on evolution versus so-called intelligent design. What caught my eye, however, was a…
bushwells | August 24, 2006My elder kid will leave for college this weekend. I'm going to miss the sprog something fierce. I'm sorry. I'm a little verklempt. Please talk amongst yourselves. Here's a little story about our mother and son camping adventure which you can read while I go wail and rend my garments.
Addendum: pre-departure photo (08/26/2006) of my college bound sprog included.
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Growing up on a farm brought me into close contact with nature. I was not, and still am not, the kind of woman in whom snakes, bees, wasps, or mice strike gut wrenching fear. Instead, I harbored a keen…
bushwells | June 21, 2006and a nod to a new comic strip.
Yesterday evening as I drove along the allee of American elms which marks the passage from US Route 1 to Einsteinville's famous campus, I saw fireflies rising from the grass in the adjacent fields. On the eve of the summer solstice, here were the true harbingers of summer.
Fireflies at dusk invariably evoke the memories of my childhood summers. During the humid warm evenings of central Illinois Julys and Augusts, one could literally hear the corn grow as the fireflies blinked among the leaves and nascent tassels. Without the whiff of a breeze, rustles…