Category: nature

A Prehistoric Mystery

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Here’s a bunch of hands stenciled onto a cave wall by prehistoric artists with a lot of time on their… er, hands. But the hands in the Sahara cave are too small to be human.

In many places throughout Europe and elsewhere, cave-dwellers used to blow a mist of paint through a tube to create stencils of their hands on the walls. It was a very common pastime. Well, it was still the Ice Age outside, they had to find something to do to stave off cabin fever (before cabins were invented).

Scientists exploring a cave in Egypt were puzzled by hand stencils made of very, very small hands, smaller than a baby’s ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3469858/Tiny-handprints-Stone-Age-shelter-NOT-human-8-000-year-old-baby-stencils-Cave-Beasts-created-lizards.html ). Having ruled out human hands, the best theory they could come up with was that these are the outlines of lizard hands.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it for a while.

There was no Ice Age in the Sahara, and back when these paintings were made, it wasn’t a desert. There are lots and lots of paintings here of people and animals, lots and lots of stenciled hands–and these little bitty stenciled hands.

Why would anyone go to the trouble to stencil-paint a bunch of lizard hands? We take it for granted that the lizards didn’t do it themselves. I have a lot of experience with lizards, and I can tell you it’d be hard to get a lizard to hold still while you made a stencil of his paw. A dead lizard would suffice–but why would anybody do this?

We are not told whether the scientists have bothered to rule out space aliens, gnomes, or fairies.

My money’s on the gnomes.

When Lizard Etiquette Fails

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Hi, Mr. Nature here! No more politics for a while, eh? Let’s look at lizards instead.

Here is an adult male bearded dragon–they’re from Australia, and have become very popular as pets–getting upset with his reflection in the mirror because it doesn’t seem to know the rules that govern lizard interaction. It just copies whatever gesture the real lizard makes. Anyone who has had a kid brother or sister knows how irritating that can be.

A lot of unrelated kinds of lizards use head-bobbing as a means of communication. The polite response, among bearded lizards, is to answer the head-bob with a submissive gesture, which keeps everything nice and peaceful. If you bob back, as the reflection does, you’re looking for a fight.

Note the lizard running around, trying to see if he can get behind the mirror to take a bite out of the supposed newcomer. Like most animals, lizards can’t recognize a reflection for what it is. Unlike some people, they won’t fall in love with it.

When I was a kid, I had a dime-store “chameleon” (not a real chameleon, but a Carolina anole) who went absolutely postal whenever he saw his reflection. You wouldn’t believe how mad he got.

In real lizard life, though, head-bobbing, arm-waving, stomping, push-ups, and other gestures often preserve the peace and keep lizards from getting injured in fights. Once they get to know each other better, and decide they can get along, they stop the head-bobbing.

My iguana never head-bobbed because he got along with everybody–except for a certain cat who would come into the room for no good purpose, and the iguana knew it. Her he would attack on sight, never mind the head-bobbing. With the other cat and the schnauzer he was the best of friends.

The Death Dog from ‘The Thunder King’

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

This is the monster Ryons and Cavall encountered on their way to Obann, as told in The Thunder King, Book 3 of my Bell Mountain series. (No, it is not about Labor & Industrial Relations: that is an amazon.com error that has cost me sales!) You might want to turn down the stupid music, which adds nothing to the presentation.

I wanted to give you a video of the “knuckle-bears” seen by Jack and Ellayne at the edge of Lintum Forest, in Bell Mountain, but the only one they had on youtube was literally two seconds long.

What? You haven’t read any of these books? (He shakes his head in painted disbelief.) Well, click “Books” at the top of the page and see what you think.

A Live Woolly Mammoth?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

When I was a little boy, I used to dream of woolly mammoths. I refused to believe they were extinct.

If I had ever seen this…

This film was supposedly shot in Siberia in 1943. Who knows? It sure looks like a mammoth. It could also be a hoax.

But it’ll give me something to dream about tonight.

The State of My Mangled Elbow

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I was going to display a photo of a road burn injury, which is what I have, but all those pictures were really too disgusting. So here’s a nice, pretty Fiji Island iguana instead.

Ah! I get to sit down! That is, somewhere other than behind the wheel of my car.

The doctor says my elbow is coming along okay, and the time has come for starting to move my right arm and do a few things with it. I just bumped it a few minutes ago and the pain gave me an out-of-body experience. It also deterred me from my plan to wrestle with the vacuum cleaner. I mean, it was inevitable–right?–that sooner or later I was bound to bump this elbow.

You can help me feel better by getting someone, anyone, to order my books. Use trickery if necessary, or even threats. Just kidding.

Well, back to work–gotta cover some nooze.

A Prehistoric Lollapalooza

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I’ve been trying to find you a video of one of my all-time favorite prehistoric animals, Uintatherium, and the best I can do is this old soup commercial. Actually, this Uintatherium looks pretty good, although its size is, shall we say, greatly exaggerated–unless it’s the mob of hungry humans who’ve been downsized.

This is the critter, the sight of which causes Lord Orth to lose his mind in The Last Banquet. It also caused me to lose track of 17 or 18 Temple servants, but my editor fixed that before the book was published.

Uintatherium was about the size of a full-grown rhinoceros, with a huge rectangular head full of horns, knobs, and tusks. I’ve always enjoyed it, and I hope you will, too.

Winter Ain’t All Bad

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Hi! Mr. Nature here, with a comforting thought.

Don’t be entirely down on winter: because, if you’ve got cold days and colder nights, snow on the ground, ice hanging from your gutters, and teeth chattering, there’s one thing you absolutely, positively, don’t ever have to worry about. Not ever.

Army ants.

Watch these bugs devour everything in their path, and reflect on the fact that a nice big snowman would stop them in their tracks.

So much for life in the tropics!

Global Warming Strikes Again

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

As you can see, I’m running very late today: had to shovel several tons of Global Warming off my car. Yes, I know–all the cold and snow is caused by all the warming. That’s why I heat my soup in the freezer. Global Warming also causes Homophobia, Transphobia, Income Inequality, Ableism, and a bunch of other stuff.

But not to worry, the government will take care of all of that. As long as we give them undreamed-of powers over every aspect of our lives and sign away the last vestiges of our liberties. Oh, and also submit to Global Government.

I must say those couple of months of riding my bike every day, they’ve paid off. I have much better wind than I had before I got the bike. Eat your heart out, Planet Fitness.

When Snow Time Was Happy Time

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Well, we’ve got 28 inches of snow here in Central New Jersey this morning, and I don’t reckon to be going anywhere.

Whenever it snows any serious amount, I remember what a pure, intense delight it was to wake up in the morning and discover there would be no school that day. I’ll never forget that feeling.

Ah, sledding! Whooshing down the hill at Tommy’s Pond on the ol’ Flexible Flyer. We could keep that up for hours.

The pond was a lot of fun at night, too. Everybody came out for the ice-skating. There was a fire to warm your hands, a bench or two for when your ankles gave out, and whole families gliding around on the ice.

Snowmen standing guard in every yard, snowball fights and snow forts–and oatmeal never tasted so good as it did when you had it for breakfast on a snow day. My wife adds: “Pancakes for breakfast, and we could all have breakfast together because it was a snow day and my father had to stay home from work. That was when he could spend all day playing with us.”

Yeah–and my aunts took me to every lake and pond for miles around for the ice-skating. We got to be true connoisseurs of frozen bodies of water.

I guess I ought to point out that a lot of cities, towns, and counties have banned sledding in recent years, because every human activity in which one just might get injured ought to be banned for our own good, and it’s been many a year since I’ve seen anyone ice-skating on Tommy’s Pond–or anywhere else outdoors, for that matter.

Oh, well, maybe I dreamed it. But if I did, it was a good dream.

Here Come de Snow! Panic Time

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

We’ll take a break from Global Warming this weekend, here in the Northeast, to experience what weather forecasters are calling “a colossal snowstorm” that will dump either a foot or two feet of snow on us ( http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/snow-storm-travel-disruptions-aim-for-nyc-dc-boston-philadelphia-friday-saturday/54870622 ), depending on how badly the guy on TV wants to scare his audience.

Here in suburban New Jersey, what that forecast means is total panic. For some reason, people pay no attention at all to the fact that no one in these parts has ever been snowbound. So they descend in crowds upon the supermarkets and frantically buy up batteries, milk, toilet paper, and loaves of bread–like they’re gonna need weeks’ worth of basic supplies, otherwise they’re gonna wind up like the Donner Party. (You know–the wagon train trapped in the California mountains by snow, had to resort of cannibalism, etc.)

I remember one time, some years ago, on a Sunday afternoon, when the weathermen predicted “the mother of all snowstorms” and everybody took it seriously, and you had businesses and public agencies announcing right away that they would have to be closed on Monday, can’t expect them to remain open during Snowmaggedon. And, oops–not one flake fell. That caused some hard feelings.

We shall see if it really snows. But I’m not looking forward to our regular Friday morning grocery shopping.