The Backyard Science group regularly features the Daily Bucket. Some of us are scouring the garden for late-ripened cukes. Or we may be catching up on our weeding.
Others may be hiking or kayaking or simply observing, at their favorite places.
Please add your own observations in a comment. Insects, weather, meteorites, climate, birds, and more are all worthy additions to the Bucket. Include, as close as is comfortable, your location. Your viewpoints will enrich the lives of everyone who reads the Bucket, for greater or lesser.
I've just finished a short vacation, visiting two lovely urban parks, and the adjoining museums. I was admiring painting of critters in which the artists use a great deal of their imagination, to create "improbable" creatures.
Yet Nature itself has created some mighty improbable creatures. Let's look at some ceramic frog jewelry first.
They are so beautiful, but these are not jewelry, they are real Central American frogs, and virulently poisonous, a living display at the New York Natural History Museum. Other exhibits told tales of frogs who lay eggs on branches over water, and when the tadpole hatch, they fall into the pond. But I digress.
In the art museums, I tried to see the portrayed critters the way the artists do.
Having a fecund pear tree, and multitudes of wasps, I liked this Gerald Murphy picture because it seems to reveal the pure predator nature of the wasp, matched with the alluring nature of the perfectly ripe pear.
I remember the days I've watched, fascinated, as the swifts dart back and forth, up and down, blurs in the sky, and this Giacomo Balla painting seems to capture part of that feeling.
I wish I could say why this Picasso blackbird captivated me. Picasso did paintings where he painted his subjects as planes and angles, and this is one of them. The bird seems friendly to me. I figure it was a common blackbird, because there's no colored ring around the eye. But the red beak? I dunno.
I filled this Bucket with improbables, but that will happen sometimes, when there's an empty Bucket at midnight, Pacific Daylight Time. Now it's your turn to help fill up the comments Bucket with your own thoughts and observations. I'm be replying about 11 am, PDT.
"Green Diary Rescue" is Back!
After a hiatus of over 1 1/2 years, Meteor Blades has revived his excellent series. As MB explained, this weekly diary is a "round-up with excerpts and links... of the hard work so many Kossacks put into bringing matters of environmental concern to the community... I'll be starting out with some commentary of my own on an issue related to the environment, a word I take in its broadest meaning."
"Green Diary Rescue" will be posted every Saturday at 1:00 pm Pacific Time on the Daily Kos front page. Be sure to recommend and comment in the diary.