Very interesting pattern on this rock

Found in a creekbed in Montana and posted in the whatsthisrock subreddit, where there is a detailed explanation of how such a complex pattern could evolve.

Posted for the delightful image, which as an old rockhound I find fascinating.  The explanation about how cracks can form in quartz because of differential strain between hard quartz and soft(er) surroundings is well over my head, and I will never remember that this is "the very first phase of boudinage," but it is a cool image and belongs in the blog.

Asbestos-bound version of Fahrenheit 451

New York: Ballantine Books, 1953. First edition, #106 of 200 copies with limited issue asbestos binding, hand-numbered and signed by author on colophon. [viii], 199, (3) pp. Johns-Manville Quinterra asbestos binding, lettered in red. Fine, with light wear to crown heaviest to the rear, light bumping to bottom corners, trivial soiling. Two tiny spots to the textblock edge. Issued without a dust jacket. The classic dystopian, anti-censorship novel, plus two short stories "The Playground" and "The Rock Cried Out." A sought-after signed limited edition extremely uncommon in such stellar condition.

Image and description from a listing on eBay.  I did not know (or had forgotten) that such versions existed.  A tip of the hat to Neatorama for the info.  I'll keep my eyes peeled for one at our next library extra books sale.

The "cool S"

The Cool S, also known as the Universal S, the Super S, the Pointy S, and the Graffiti S, is a graffiti sign in popular culture and childlore that is typically doodled on children's notebooks or graffitied on walls. The exact origin of the Cool S is unknown, but it became prevalent around the early 1980s as a part of graffiti culture.

This cultural icon is cited as an example of "childhood folklore" in an interesting article at Cup of Joe, where the extended discussion thread (350 comments so far) cites other examples of childhood folklore that are more familiar to me ("Rabbit rabbit" on the first of the month, "step on a crack...")

Via Kottke.

Debunking the myth of American exceptionalism

Late last night I was browsing the Al Jazeera English channel, looking for early clues as to whether to expect any change in the adamant position the Iranian leadership has taken (short answer: no), when I encountered this video.  This is a longwatch (25 minutes) interview with Richard Wolff, who is emeritus professor of economics at UMass, and was a schoolmate of mine back in the 1960s (tho I never met him).  Wolff is a self-described Marxian economist, which is evident in his views on American capitalism.  

This video is a thorough takedown of claims of the United States as a world-leading empire.  The language is harsh, but the content is supported by relevant facts.  

Remarkable losses suffered by the U.S. in the war

This is a brief report on France24 (equivalent to PBS in U.S.) about the unreported losses by the U.S. in its current war with Iran.  Losses that already put the country at a disadvantage in the war and for the future.

No time for that?  6 minutes is too much time to spend?  Try just looking at two screencaps:

Backyard woodland garden in springtime

About 25 years ago when we arrived in Wisconsin, this wooded area behind the house was wall-to-wall buckthorn and honeysuckle.  I spent two summers grubbing those out, and within a year or two the native plants began to appear, presumably from dormant seeds that were being shaded out and starved of water by the invasives.  Jack-in-the-pulpits began popping up, along with native violets and other spring ephemerals.  I added some cinnamon fern, which loved the thick leaf litter.

We planted a few white trillium, which went on to form clusters and then metastasized to distant parts of the woods.

Red trillium are doing the same, and also the yellow trillium (here popping up in a bed of Lilies of the Valley).

For dramatic color in a woodland setting, nothing beats bleeding hearts (Dicentra), but TBH I have never seen the native bees or the bumblebees visiting these introduced flowers. The bluebells next to them get visited, but AFAIK not the bleeding hearts.

The champion of the woodland garden in the opinion of the pollinators is the vinca, which has spread as a groundcover to such an extent that I need to restrain it by pulling it out at the perimeters I want.

One other favorite of the bees is the wild ginger, which multiplies and spreads readily.  The blossoms are net to the ground and not visible to casual human visitors unless you pull back the overlying leaves.  But the bumblebees find them - and perhaps other insects as well.

For beautiful foliage, my overall favorite is the pulmonaria - so named because the leaves were once thought to resemble diseased lungs (and that is not a bad analogy, to be honest).  The flowers (not captured in this photo) are small and delicate and are visited by bees, but I like the plant for the foliage, which dramatically adds patterns to the woodland floor.

"Age is no barrier"

At a time of national and international turmoil, there is a certain comfort that comes from watching senior citizens enjoying bodysurfing.  (A "grommet" is surfing lexicon for a "newbie")

Via Nag on the Lake, where there's always something interesting.  

Black Swallowtails (Papilio polyxenes)

This one eclosed late this afternoon; when I photographed him, he was still fanning his wings to dry and stiffen them. (Males are characterized by prominence of the yellow pattern on the forewing and subtlety of the blue spots on the hindwing above the eyespots).

This one is a little small in body size, as is typical for the late-season ones which overwinter here as a chrysalis (the caterpillars often don't get very fat in the fall before the cold weather forces them to pupate), but the outstanding beauty of the wings is wonderfully characteristic of the species - click to enlarge to bigger-than-screen size.

He will spend the night on our screen porch, then warm himself in the sunshine before heading out for whatever adventures await. Five more chrysalids from last autumn's batch are still waiting to hatch.

Reposted from last month to add a photo of the latest one to eclose:

The color patter on the underside of the wings is truly remarkable and not usually visible when you see them soaring around your garden.

Reposted from 2022 to add the first BST of the year for 2026:

This fellow showed up in our garden as a caterpillar on the rue by our mailbox (see link for pix including cat and chrysalis).  Last autumn he was wandering on top of the rue looking for a place to form a chrysalis, so I brought him into a terrarium in our screen porch and within a day or two he did his magic transformation into chrysalis form (file photos below):

He then proceeded to tolerate late-January temperatures to -20 degrees Fahrenheit on the unheated screen porch.  My only contribution to his welfare was to spritz the chrysalis with water mist on those days when in nature it would have been snowed or rained on.

The photo above on the wire porch screen was taken with the wings backlit by the morning sun while he was drying the wings and letting them harden.  After about an hour I moved him out to a branch of an oak tree that extends over our back porch and took another photo -

This time the full afternoon sun was behind him and me.  Note he has those wings spread horizontally to the max to soak up the solar energy.  And note how the color spots are more vivid with reflected light rather than the transmitted light in the earlier image.  That color pattern is different from that of the female, who has more subtle coloration presumably to make her less susceptible to predation.

Truly magnificent creatures.  I don't know how anyone can not be in awe of their beauty and the incredible transformations they undergo in their life cycles.

Congenitally blind people don't get schizophrenia

In 1950, two researchers noticed something that didn’t quite add up. Hector Chevigny, a writer who had lost his sight in adulthood, and psychologist Sydell Braverman were studying the psychological lives of blind people when they stumbled upon an intriguing pattern: schizophrenia, a serious mental illness affecting people across virtually every known society, appeared to be entirely absent in people who had been blind from birth.

The observation sat largely ignored for decades, held back by limited understanding of the disease and a lack of patient data. Then, in the early 2000s, large national health databases allowed researchers to follow entire populations from birth into adulthood, and the pattern held up.

The most rigorous evidence comes from a 2018 whole-population study tracking nearly half a million children born in Western Australia between 1980 and 2001. Of those, 1,870 developed schizophrenia, but not one of the 66 children with cortical blindness did.

That sample of blind children is small, but the pattern holds across more than 70 years of evidence: not a single congenitally blind person with schizophrenia has ever been reported. The protection seems to be specific to cortical blindness, which is caused by damage to the brain’s visual cortex.

People who lose their sight later in life, or whose blindness is caused by damage to the eyes rather than the brain, can still develop the condition. This makes it clear that blindness itself isn’t the deciding factor. Something specific about the visual brain is.

This might seem odd. Schizophrenia is most commonly associated with hearing voices or holding unusual beliefs, not with vision. But the explanation lies not in what people see, but in how the brain uses vision to make sense of the world.

Fascinating and new to me.  You learn something every day.

Text and cropped image from The Conversation, where there is more explanatory text.  Via Neatorama.

Details regarding the "Trump phone"

Lots of outrage expressed in various media stating that Trump sold phones to his supporters, failed to deliver them, and pocketed the $ without refunds.  The details are more complex, as summarized in the cartoon above and expressed by Heather Cox Richardson below:

As Judd Legum of Popular Information explains, on June 16, 2025, Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric announced the launch of a new, gold plated, Trump smartphone, “proudly designed and built in the United States.” It would be available in August 2025 for $499. Its website urged customers to “pre-order” the phone by depositing $100 toward it. Don Jr. said the phone would be “American hardware, built in America, without the potential of…[a] backdoor into the hardware that some of our adversaries have installed in there.”

And yet a disclaimer on the website said the Trumps and the Trump Organization were involved only in the branding of the phone; they had nothing to do with the design, development, manufacture, distribution, or sales of the item. As Legum notes, the idea of a superior U.S.-made phone was always a fantasy, and within two weeks the phone’s description changed from “MADE IN THE USA” to “designed with American values in mind.”

The phone never shipped, and on April 6, Trump Mobile updated its terms to say the $100 deposit was not actually a deposit for a pre-order, but rather “a conditional opportunity if Trump Mobile later elects, in its sole discretion, to offer the Device for sale.” It went on to say the deposit “does not lock in pricing, promotions, service plans, taxes, fees, shipping costs, or other commercial terms” and that “[e]stimated ship dates, launch timelines, or anticipated production schedule are non-binding estimates only.”

A new phone has recently gotten clearance from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Trump Mobile executives say they are waiting for approval from T-Mobile, the company whose network Trump Mobile wants to use. Legum points out that T-Mobile relies on the federal government for approval for business activities, creating an enormous conflict of interest.

Medical movie mistakes

Screencap from an otherwise enjoyable movie I watched recently.  This scene has not been recorded at the classic Movie Mistakes website, but I can guarantee that the height of those IV fluids is worthy of mentioning.

Reposted from 2024 to add this howler:

Those are screencaps from a decent program I watched recently (the name of which I can't recall).  Documented because the medical error is so egregiously bad that even non-medical people in the viewing audience must have cringed.  Does nobody fact-check scripts any more??

See also Incorrect masks used in the movie 'Alien'.

Calamint for your pollinator garden

Several years ago while visiting Olbrich Botanical Gardens here in Madison, we saw several unfamiliar mid-sized plants that were hosting a virtual cloud of small native bees.  The name tags read "Calamint" (Clinopodium = Greek "bed" + "little foot).  We found a baby one in a 4-inch pot at a local garden store.

The photo above is from this week after cleaning the winter debris in a front yard south-facing garden.  The calamint has grown to the size of a basketball.  It has a nice conformation, with dense tight foliage that has been spared the depredations of local rabbits.  The photo below shows the same plant in the autumn of 2024 when it would have been a quarter of its current size, and in full bloom...

It is my understanding that bees and other pollinating insects do not share with humans an interest in large showy flowers.  The double ("peony") tulips by the mailbox draw more views from local people walking by than they do from bees.  Bees and beetles love the garden plants with thousands of minute flowers (the goldenrod is an autumnal favorite alive with insects in September).  I'll try to remember to get a followup photo of this calamint this fall, especially if I can figure out how to embed a small phone video of the bees.

A cure for forbidden love

"If you are enchanted by forbidden love of a woman, you must put on a pair of shoes and walk about until the feet sweat. But walk quickly, so quickly that the feet do not begin to smell. Remove then the right shoe and drink from it some ale or wine, and at once all love for her will be lost."

I found that remedy in Olga Ravn's The Wax Child, which has been longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize.  I won't be reviewing the book for the blog, but thought I'd post this tidbit now, in case any readers are having relevant problems.  Sounds like it might work...

Rat kings, squirrel kings - and their relation to a Christmas tradition

"Rat kings are cryptozoological phenomena said to arise when a number of rats become intertwined at their tails, which become stuck together with blood, dirt, and excrement. The animals consequently grow together while joined at the tails, which are often broken. The phenomenon is particularly associated with Germany, where the majority of instances have been reported...

Most researchers presume the creatures are legendary and that all supposed physical evidence is hoaxed, such as mummified groups of dead rats with their tails tied together. Reports of living specimens remain unsubstantiated…

Specimens of purported rat kings are kept in some museums. The museum Mauritianum in Altenburg (Thuringia) shows the largest well-known mummified "rat king", which was found in 1828 in a miller's fireplace at Buchheim [above]. It consists of 32 rats. Alcohol-preserved rat kings are shown in museums in Hamburg, Hamelin, Göttingen, and Stuttgart. A rat king found in 1930 in New Zealand, displayed in the Otago Museum in Dunedin, was composed of immature Rattus rattus whose tails were entangled by horse hair.

The term rat king has often led to the misconception of a king of rats... The Nutcracker, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, adapts a tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann that features a seven-headed Mouse King as the villain..."

Image and text from Wikipedia. Credit to Neatorama.

Addendum #1:  Reposted to add this example of a "squirrel king" -

The Animal Clinic of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, got a surprise this week when a city worker brought in six squirrels fused together by their tails...

This particular group of six were nesting near a pine tree and sap fused their tails together. A city of Regina worker found the young squirrels and brought them to the clinic. The animals were sedated and the veterinarian team worked to untangle the mess of tails. Their tails were then shaved of the matted fur and they were given antibiotics to prevent infection.  (Via Nothing to do with Arbroath)

Addendum #2:  Reposted in order to add this related interesting phenomenon found by my wife at the Buck Manager website:

[T]hese three white-tailed bucks were found locked during the rut. The bucks were located on a ranch in east-central Texas and, from the information that I received, one of the bucks was still alive when the trio was found. Apparently, the antlers were cut from the dead deer and one very tired buck was lucky enough to run back off into the woods.

There are lots of comments at the site, some opining that the event was faked and arguing the method of death, and one who reported seeing a buck attack a pair that was already locked.   My wife found another example at the same website:

 "...there is nothing worse than finding a dead buck that you did not shoot, but how would you feel if you found not one, but three dead bucks on your property? Okay, it gets worse. What if those three bucks totaled 450 inches of antler? That is exactly what a hunter in the mid-West found on his Ohio farm..."

"They had the bank of this creek all tore up."

Addendum #3: And reader Lisa knew of a ancient example of the phenomenon involving Ice Age mammoths.

Addendum #4:  Reposted from 2013 to add this image found by an anonymous reader -

- of a squirrel king in Nebraska, with the victims, as in the example cited above, fused at their tails by pine tree sap.

Addendum #5:  Reposted yet again to add this "squirrel king" found locally here in central Wisconsin:

Their tails had become entwined with "long-stemmed grasses and strips of plastic their mother used as nest material," the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center wrote on Facebook... "It was impossible to tell whose tail was whose, and we were increasingly concerned because all of them had suffered from varying degrees of tissue damage to their tails caused by circulatory impairment," the post read.

See also: A squirrel king, which has this explanatory note -

In the wild, squirrels make their nests of dried leaves and branches...  A strange natural accident that sometimes occurs is sap from pine branches that the nest is constructed of can adhere to the squirrels' tails and ultimately to each other's tails. Squirrels normally have litters of 4 to 6 babies. As they are fed in the nest, they are quite "squirmy" and move around frequently. Once their tails become stuck together, movement is limited amongst them and they jump under and over each other trying to reposition themselves. In the process, they literally knot or braid themselves together. The squirrels pull in many directions, thereby worsening the situation. They can actually live quite a long time like this, as the mother continues to feed them.

Reposted yet again, to add some information from a Longread article "All Hail the Rat King" -

The Thuringian town of Altenburg houses perhaps the most spectacular exemplar. A mad bramble of no fewer than 32 rats sits mounted on a plexiglass pane in the entrance hall of the Mauritianum, the town’s small natural history museum. It was found in a village not too far away, in a warm space underneath a chimney...

The first visual representation of a rat king is in Johannes Sambucus’s Emblemata, from 1564, a collection of moral truths “wrapped up in certain figures.” Sambucus introduced the rat king as both natural phenomenon and symbol, and a sense that its sheer bizarreness has something to tell us has never gone away...

Some have considered the joke to be literal: as old as the discovery of rat kings is the suspicion that they cannot possibly be real. “We present it as a natural phenomenon,” says one of the curators in Strasbourg. “If someone made it a sport to tie rat tails together, it would be a major effort, unless you have steel mesh gloves.” The rat king is just as inexplicable when you think it’s a fake as it is when you assume it’s authentic...

One element that stays mysteriously stable across the centuries is rat kings’ geographic spread: the history of the rat king is uncannily, at times uncomfortably entwined with the history of Germany. Rattus rattus exists across the globe: it spread across Europe and North Africa with the Romans, then across the rest of the globe with European colonizers. And yet rat kings come from a curiously limited area. All but one of the specimens preserved today are from Western and Central Europe. Marten t’ Hart notes that “from 1564 to 1963, fifty-seven rat kings were discovered and described.” The vast majority of those discoveries took place in areas that make up present-day Germany.  This curious geographic concentration has led some researchers to suggest that rat kings are cultural, rather than natural phenomena. More bluntly put, they could be elaborate, centuries-old hoaxes...

In 1816, two years before Arndt published “Rat King Birlibi,” E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote Nutcracker and Mouseking, which inspired (via Alexandre Dumas père) Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s inescapable ballet.

If you watch The Nutcracker today, the mouse king has gone missing several times over. He has disappeared from the title, only shows up in one of the acts as the leader of an evil army of mice, and goes through a busy and less-than-iconic mass scene before exiting the stage as Masha explores the Land of Sweets with her nutcracker-cum-prince. But Hoffmann’s rendition not only lavishes a great deal of attention on the army of mice and their vicious battle with the nutcracker’s tin soldiers, but also makes it clear that the mouse king is a close relative of the rat king. This is how we first meet the monarch:

Seven mouse heads with seven shiny crowns rose, hissing and whistling dreadfully, rose out of the ground. Soon after the mouse body to which these seven heads were attached emerged fully, and three times the entire army squeaked in triumph at the great mouse garlanded with seven diadems…

So, just in time for Christmas - a new way to interpret the "Nutcracker." My next step was to search Google Images for Rat Kings in the Nutcracker.  Most of them are benign and cuddly.  At NPR I found Maurice Sendak's version -

- which has a certain menace to it, but this one at Deviant Art was the best:

Your choice how much of this to share with your impressionable children before taking the family to a Nutcracker performance at your local school or concert hall.

Merry Christmas to all !!

Reposted from 2019 to add this image of "rat king dumplings" -

- which you can read about in John Farrier's post at Neatorama.

"What a wonderful world" (David Attenborough)

My rule of thumb: if it's a David Attenborough video, it's worth blogging.

BTW, if you've never used the "fullscreen" button on a YouTube video [lower right corner], now would be a good time to try it...

Here's a background on the lyrics:

"What a Wonderful World" is a song written by Bob Thiele (as "George Douglas") and George David Weiss. It was first recorded by Louis Armstrong and released as a single in 1967...

The song gradually became something of a standard and reached a new level of popularity. In 1978, Armstrong's 1968 recording was featured in the closing scenes of the first series of BBC radio's cult hit, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and was repeated for BBC's 1981 TV series of the same. In 1988, Armstrong's recording was featured in the film Good Morning, Vietnam and was re-released as a single, hitting #32 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart in February 1988. The single charted at number one for the fortnight ending June 27, 1988 on the Australian chart

Via truthdig.

Reposted from 2012 (!) to insert the Louis Armstrong version:

Reposted again in honor of David Attenborough's 100th birthday.