Category: Nature

P(achy)casso? — Elephant Painting an Elephant

An excited correspondent sent me a link to this video of an elephant painting a picture of an elephant.

[youtube _LHoyB81LnE Elephant painting an elephant]

It is an engaging video, and comments on other websites from eyewitnesses (most often reporting their visits to Thailand) to such “artwork creation” give good evidence that this is not a fraud. The elephant is actually holding the brush to the paper and moving it with precision. Continue reading “P(achy)casso? — Elephant Painting an Elephant”

Mephitis Mephitis

skunkThe odor of skunk is very different up close than it is far away. A wee bit-o-skunk is sharp and somewhat lemony…stinky, definitely apprehendable, but not outrageously offensive. Full-skunk, however, clouding thickly outward from the furry hotness of a thoroughly swacked pet dog, is an altogether different experience. It holds back for an instant, then slashes across your senses, hitting much further back, more on the reptilian neurons, with a cutting edge that noses in like the sound “chank-chank” composted with hot lye. There’s no meat to this stench. Nothing rotted. It is knife-edge, bluish-green, maybe bluish-gray, and you cannot stay with it long before gakking.
Continue reading “Mephitis Mephitis”

Flowers Bugged Me

zinniaEverything grew easily where I grew up. In the long Southern California seasons of sun and moderate warmth, there was no challenge.

I suspect, looking back, that such gardening ease actually produced a glory of flowering plants, but there are only two in my childhood memory: zinnias and nasturiums. When I was eight, I planted zinnias Continue reading “Flowers Bugged Me”