From October 20, 2013
Over years of fishing in Barnegat Bay, NJ, my wife and I caught hundreds of small sharks which we and everybody else called “smooth dogfish.” But were they really smooth-hounds? Could they have been the young of another kind of shark? Curious to find out, I consulted the Internet.
So what’s wrong with that?
A question-and-answer site called “Cha-Cha” blithely informed me that there are no sharks in Barnegat Bay. Yup, that’s the answer from the high-tech oracle. That the answer happens to be completely, 100% wrong would not be noticed by someone who had never fished in Barnegat Bay.
Above the stupid answer, among the ads by Google, was an exhortation to “vote for Peter Barnes,” Middlesex County, NJ, Democrat, because “He believes tax money should be used to fund education instead of CEOs’ retirement packages.”
“To fund education,” translated into English, means to pump colossal sums of money into the teachers’ unions, who will continue to support Democrat politicians by funneling union dues into political campaigns.
So the ad is no more truthful than the phony phacts on Cha-Cha, and certainly no more informative.
Or have we reached the stage in our cultural development where “to inform” means “to provide with false or incomplete information”?
P.S.–They were dogfish, all right. As my wife reminds me, they have the flat, shellfish-crunching teeth of dogfish. So I didn’t need the Internet for this, after all.
New Jersey has quite a population of bears for a small crowded state. The mild winters (usually) are a factor.
From March 15, 2015
If our smartest scientists and our cleverest politicians had had the job of creating the world–a thought engendering almost unimaginable horror–there is a lot they never would have thought of including in it.
Consider some of the extras which God included in His creation, none of which would ever have occurred to any human being.
1. Beauty. Look at a spider web in the grass in the morning, festooned with dew-drops that glisten like pearls, and consider your response to it. Probably you are struck by its beauty. That response is a gift from God. I can’t imagine it having any of that “evolutionary survival value” they’re always going on about in National Geographic specials. Cows while grazing probably see a lot of dewy spider webs. Do you think they appreciate the beauty? Read any nice odes by cows lately?
2. Food and Drink that tastes good and really satisfies. For me it’s fried scallops. How did the Lord ever think of making scallops taste like this? And don’t say it’s the chef, not God: replace the scallops with chunks of pineapple, and there’s nothing the cook can do to make them taste the same. But of course pineapple can be delightful, too.
If humans had been in charge of creation, realizing that you need food to stay alive, they would have created food designed for that purpose. Imagine how blah that would be! Nor would scientists have bothered with the incalculable diversity of taste and color and texture, etc. It would all be this grey gel that keeps us able to fog a mirror–not that I’m trying to give the President’s Wife any more ideas to make school cafeteria food even more unappetizing.
3. Cats and Dogs that love us unconditionally. It doesn’t have Evolutionary Survival Value, so who needs the love of pets? No pug dog ever helped a cave man kill a mammoth, and there’d be no point in even suggesting it to a cat. But he is poor indeed who has never been loved by an animal! Only God–of whom it is written, “God is love”–would have ever thought of that.
God’s world is full of extras that we take for granted. But if we do try to listen to what these say, we begin to understand that they aren’t really extras, after all.
Look. Taste. Love. And listen: there is something here worth hearing.
From August 21, 2014
Hi! Mr. Nature here, this time with a startling encounter.
Now I know some of you who live in normal parts of the country are going to wonder why I’m making such a big deal of this. Well, this is the central Jersey suburbs. Democrats rule here, and the natural world is always in their crosshairs. We here don’t expect to see much wildlife.
So there I was, outside in my chair, enjoying a last pipe before bedtime, when I heard a rustling of the leaves in a nearby tree. It sounded like squirrels, but they’re not up so late. Could it be a possum?
Then I heard the sound of claws on bark, and down the tree-trunk, face-first (a cat would climb down tail-first), shinnied a great big raccoon. He climbed up the adjacent tree, whose branches overhang my chair. I know it’s silly to be afraid of a raccoon, but I kept thinking “rabies, maybe?”, so I got up and moved back a few steps.
The raccoon tight-roped out on a branch and looked me in the eye. He messed around in that tree for several minutes before climbing back down. He paused to treat me to another staring contest, then turned and ambled off into the night.
Yeah, OK, sure, it’s not a leopard or something. But it’s been over 30 years since I’ve seen a raccoon in this neighborhood, so I was a bit excited. (I’d just watched some X Files, but I’m sure that had no influence on my state of mind.) Again I thought of the world of Bell Mountain, where long-gone animals turn up as a sign from God.
We could use a sign, these days. But then Jesus Christ Himself is our sign, and God will not detract from His Son. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. I Corinthians 1:22-24
There’s nothing a raccoon can tell us that the Holy Spirit hasn’t already tried to tell us.
Hi! Mr. Nature here again, with another keen observation of our infinitely complicated natural world, also known as God’s Creation.
Yesterday I watched something I’d never seen before. Along the fringe of Patty’s garden, yellow-jackets were flying just an inch or two above the ground, looking like they were trying very hard to find a place to land. And every time one of them did land, one or two ants would attack and drive it off.
This went on for quite a while. A yellow-jacket is many times the size of one of these little brown ants, and could easily bite an ant in half with one clash of its jaws–but that seemed to make no impression on the ants at all. Later I found some videos online (just search for “ants vs. yellow-jackets,” and you’ll find a few of them) showing ants attacking yellow-jackets, usually in competition for food, or else because the yellow-jackets were trying to steal food already collected by the ants. In one video, a single black ant tries to repel half a dozen (!) yellow-jackets from a fallen pear.
It made me wonder–can ants feel fear? Do they know anything we would even recognize as fear? Or has God created them utterly without it? What would it be like, to have an ant’s consciousness? You can’t get any mammal to behave like that. Imagine one jackal trying to drive away five lions from the carcass of a gnu. He’d only try that if he had a mind like an ant’s. Or a very creative death wish.
Last week we found an unusual thing in the garden: a yellow-jacket crawling around because it had no wings. I think we can guess now what happened to its wings. Patty was worried about yellow-jackets making a nest in the garden; but the place is full of ants, and I don’t think the ants will allow it.
Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: which have no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest. –Proverbs 6:6-8
Observe the ways of living creatures. You’ll never run out of things to see–or think about.
Behold the massive Uintatherium, brought to life in this painting by Charles R. Knight, the master painter of prehistoric life. As a bonus, he threw in a few Eohippus (“dawn horse” in the foreground.
And Lord Reesh got a fleeting glimpse of one in The Last Banquet.
Look at that skull, all knobs and fangs. They used to have a Uintatherium skull in the Rutgers Geology Museum. The skull alone was as big as a full-grown German shepherd. I could never walk past it without stopping to wonder at it. The whole animal was about the size of a car.
I never could figure out how it got by with such a tiny brain case. Maybe that didn’t matter much, back then. The animals that competed with it for food weren’t exactly College Bowl material.
I would be very happy to dream of Uintatherium tonight.