July 26, 2003
Sometimes luck is with you
So last night I was utterly and completely out of soda, except for the bad kind, and fruit, except pears, so I took a quick trip to the downtown Shaw's. Behold! instead of the $4 a twelvepack that the semiprecious nectar has been fetching all sumer (while every other brand around it was on some kind of sale), Diet Dr Pepper was at 2 twelvepacks for $5. I gout four.
I still don't like the new long skinny boxes though.
July 17, 2003
In living color
This is one of the baby frogs, basking among some pine needles. That dark shape at the top right? Tadpole. (Sorry for the size, but I didn't want to resize since the picture is dodgy enough already)
Frog Confront
Who had any idea something half the size of my thumbnail could be so territorial? This morning I spent about an hour waiting for the sun to come back out and watching tadpoles and newly-metamorphose froglets (they're smaller than many of the tadpoles -- think conservation of mass and the hard work required to completely revamp your body plan and internal organs) wandering around the edges of the pond.
The froglets moved with frenetic speed much of the time, as opposed to the sedate pace of a swimming tadpole. I guess it might have somethng to do with suddenly being without gill and still spending much of your time underwater. Whenever another froglet or tadpole approached, they would leap out at it and then either back to their spot, the invader repelled, or off to another perch.
I saw one climbing up the rock wall of the pond, resting ever inch or two, falling back and scrambling out of the water again, slowly making its way up to a ledge with a patch of moss on it. When what should appear out of the nearest crevice but another tiny frog, ready to do battle. I left them staring each other down.
July 12, 2003
The more things change
While I was in New York this weekend, I chose Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 for my airplane and bedtime reading. (I got it for $1 at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library summer book sale -- suggested donation for old paperbacks was 50 cents, but what the heck)
Much of the utopian socialism rings foolishly today, although many of the descriptions of the corporate depredations that Bellamy's fictional American outgrew are spot on. But one of the things that struck me as particularly prescient was the notion that each citizen had a claim on the nation's surplus by virtue of their status as a shareholder in the corporate body politic. Just as a share of IBM entitles you to a fraction of its corporate income, so a share in Bellamy's socialized USA entitled you to a fraction of the national bounty. His version of socialism was in some ways not about the abolition of property but its apotheosis.
Of course, Bellamy was writing at a time when much of the national wealth was still largely untapped -- land unecumbered by peppercorn oil, gas and mineral leases, grasslands and forests not pledged for cheap grazing and clear-cutting, and a national debt that amounted to a pittance. Now the typical share of the national wealth is somewhere south of a $20,000 debt with interest payments to match.
July 01, 2003
Tadpoles, Part XVII
We have limb buds!
This is a good thing, because what with the hot fair weather the pond is heading down to nothing (I might have to bring out the hose).
I'll try and take pictures soon, but there's this minor problem the digicam has with focusing on things in the middle of the water when the stuff on the surface and the bottom are so much clearer.
Oh, and we also have an adult frog, and a rather shy newt/salamander/whatever:
