Stop your tittering.

Boys, stop that giggling or I shall have to separate you. As I was saying, the tufted titmouse is not a mouse at all, but a charming little bird in the tit and chickadee family. Its familiar song can be described as a lilting “peter, peter, peter” – Boys! I’ll not warn you again! – a lilting “peter, peter, peter” in the trees. It is not to be confused with the edible dormouse, a small rodent that was considered a delicacy by the ancient Romans. It is consumed to this day in Slovenia, where the fur is used to make traditional hats.

It was a living heck.

Every generation has its cross to bear. Like, my grandparents had the Great War and Spanish Flu and their kids had the whole Hitler unpleasantness, and certainly I appreciate that many folks today are concerned about waves of viral infection scrubbing the entire human species from the globe although personally it’s too late for me to die young. But we boomers had our own trials. It wasn’t all Twinkies and Tang. It’s probably difficult for a person who didn’t come of age in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s to truly understand just how snugly our trousers fit back then.

In which Dave dreams big.

Travel is overrated. Most places are about the same notwithstanding variations in temperature and ambient light levels. But dang, I feel like I’ve been missing out big time because I’ve never been to Logan, Ohio. Friends, when the Reverend Paul A. Johnson died in 2010 he left a collection of about 3,400 pencil sharpeners which are now displayed at Logan’s Pencil Sharpener Museum. Plan your trip for Father's Day weekend to enjoy the annual Washboard Music Festival. (Logan is home to the Columbus Washboard Company, our nation’s only extant producer of said implements.) My bucket list has exactly one item.

an enviable lifestyle

There is this critter, a salamander, that lives in cold water in deep caves in the Dinaric alps. It’s called the olm, which is fun to say, and it lives its whole life underwater in the dark. It eats sparingly, sometimes going for a decade between meals, and it spends a lot of its time just relaxing. It’s very good at swimming but that’s not what it mostly does. It mostly rests, as I said. I like to think it has a rich inner life, that sober contemplation on being a blind pale aquatic amphibian is all the olm needs.

Sound and fury.

The author and critic Damon Knight generally gets credit for introducing the term “idiot plot” to describe a story that can only be sustained because the protagonists are idiots. If they weren’t, the story would be over. Like Superman, where, if you think about it, the moment Clark took off his glasses to clean them the whole secret identity thing would collapse although I myself wear glasses and so far when I remove them nobody has ever said, “Who are you and where did Dave go?” So here’s the challenge: Try to construct a non-idiot plot explanation for human history.

spores are yellow-brown and distinctly warted.

Commonly known as the tapioca slime mold, the species Brefeldia maxima is a nonparasitic Amoebozoan that looks, as you may have intuited from its name, like a slimy layer of white goo. It goes through a lot of interesting life phases, as do we all, but I want to highlight what they call the plasmodial phase, during which the whole damn thing is a single cell which can be like a yard across and weigh up to 40 pounds – a pale, brainless, soggy mass. They are most commonly found in forests after a rain, and in the United States Senate.

Bloody Kansas

Should I be upset that more people take off the day after Super Bowl than do Martin Luther King Jr. Day? Should I bother mentioning that by simply moving a space we can have a Sunday devoted to the Superb Owl? Or that adding a space can turn a well-known chicken franchise into Pope Yes? But that’s not what I want to discuss. I want to point out that although there’s a lot of loose talk about how terrible it is to be led by a stupid person there is little historical evidence indicating that smart people do any better.