Continued from Part III The time-lapse episode I remember most vividly involved the delightful horror of watching a perfectly lovely bowl of fruit shrivel, go gray with mold and turn finally to a black liquid–a natural, everyday process of decay…
The first time-lapse segment I saw on Disneyland was the closest thing to magic I had ever experienced. Normally slow-changing objects or scenes were filmed over hours or days or even weeks with an umoving camera to reveal  glacially-slow and…
The nuance and precision and beauty in the motion of living things and landscapes is often lost to our eyes, because too few frames a second can be processed in our brains. All we see is a blur of action…
I am a child of the age of Disneyland, and my brain’s view of time was permanently altered by what I saw there for the first time. Sunday nights, home in front of the round-screen television set (the size of…
The only similar feeling of horror and sadness and disbelief that I feel this morning was when Ronald Reagan won in 1980. Reagan was an actor, a pretender and an environmental despot who vowed to turn back a decade of gains since…
Towards the end of writing elsewhere about the start of the writing habit–and later, the shift toward writing from, for and about nature–I’ve been revisiting the earliest days of the blog via the Wayback Machine. So don’t say you weren’t…
Once there was a man who lived on the island of Pangea. The man owned two head of cattle, one bull and one cow. But he owned no land on which to pasture them. But as fortune would have it,…
So I may have mentioned (and perhaps one reader noticed) that I am accumulating draft pieces toward a third book if all goes well. (All never goes well, sometimes something does, OTOH, and I’ll take it.) The working title changes…
There was a time when, on this blog, I posted a couple of times a week about some new discovery from the natural world or about some oddity or creature feature that amazed me. That, after all, is who I…
Crestwood–the Birmingham neighborhood where I lived during my four years at Woodlawn High–was indeed, once upon a time, a wooded crest at the tip of the very southern-most Appalachian Mountains. Baby boomer demand for houses turned it, in my childhood,…
I slept today until nearly six o’clock. Now this would not be news most places– that someone pushing 70 would get 9 hours sleep. But on Goose Creek, this is, if you’ll pardon the mixed message–a personal wakeup call. Since…
Make-believe was our most important entertainment equipment, our XBox mindcrafting soft technology some six decades ago. Graphic display was called “imagination” spontaneously projected on the screen of the visual brain. Sound effects were produced on the spot. Some–like rolls of…
You’ll be happy you clicked through the images produced by “Flora Forager” from natural bits of color and shape. At least taking time to appreciate the details of these creations perked me up after spending way  more time than was…
[su_youtube_advanced url=”https://youtu.be/X1RWfhGBFyc” rel=”no”] I really must take control of the morning coffee-browse, because it invariably sends me off down rabbit trails other than the intentional path I thought I was going to take, and really should have gotten right on,…