Summertime Coming

On my hustle in this morning, I cut across San Francisco’s civic center, walking around the northeast corner’s large underground garage entrance. Looking down two stories, I could see where the park and rec workers had set up rows of boxed flowers inside the immense roll-up door.

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Plan Bee

Did you know that most bees do not lose their stingers when stinging other insects, but will lose them when stinging large mammals? It’s something to do with responding appropriately to the threat. Other insects can be repelled, but a large mammal can cause real destruction to the hive, so the stinger is instinctively driven so deep it’s barb breaks off as deeply into the invader’s hide as possible and all the venom is injected into the perceived threat.

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Minding Our Own Beeswax

When the missus first proposed adding a beehive to the back of our long backyard, it was somehow abstract.

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Ecliptical Shadows

 

I’m not really much for eclipses. I get the whole astronomical fascination with the topic. But the aspect of eclipses that interests me most is how predicting them was used to mollify or terrorize other cultures — pretty devious.

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Return of the marching bands

Every May our street is closed off for a marching band competition. A minor nuisance, as we all have to move our cars elsewhere in the neighborhood, but mostly it’s great fun to see the kids come down the street playing their hearts out (sometimes well, sometimes not so) as they pass the reviewing stand, which is located just up the block from our house.

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Firing up a Metaphor

If being in the frying pan is bad, but jumping into the fire is worse, what would the opposite analogy be? 

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