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"There was a highway ahead - a hidden highway leading deep into some unknown land. There were secrets which might disclose themselves to him if he was clever... and if he was lucky. He had left his home in the light of dawn, and what lay ahead was some great adventure."
- Stephen King, The Wastelands
A month or so ago, Ben Gibbard, frontman for Death Cab for Cutie, played unplugged and solo at the 9:30 club in Washington DC. Normally I would have had no opportunity to listen to such a thing, but fortunately NPR's Bob Boilen was there for All Songs Considered to cover and record it.
If you're already a fan, or just happen to be interested in finding out more about a band named Death Cab, you can find the real-audio version at the NPR link above... or you can just download the MP3 formatted version from me here. Last but not least, feel free to subscribe to the All Songs Considered podcast, and experience a weekly sampling of the latest in new music and the occasional live concert.
Scirtothrips dorsalis is small even by thrips standards. A large female chili thrips is pictured above with a distant cousin, Frankliniella occidentalis, the "western flower thrips", on a sample of "thrips proof screen". While this screen is usually sufficient to keep all but the most persistent and determined of flower thrips off of your plants, you can see that a chili thrips could potentially squeeze between the gaps offered by the nylon, and sneak inside. This is an important finding because some rose growers use this screen to protect their precious flowers from thrips, and it turns out that chili thrips also like to feed on the buds of growing roses. If growers are faced with an infestation of chili thrips, they will have to find and use other methods to protect their flowers.
On the other side of the coin, I may be able to use this mesh to create an exclusion barrier for flower thrips to determine if they in turn are excluding chili thrips from adult flowers through competition (and possibly predation!), or whether my thrips just like the growing buds of flowers and leave them once the flower matures.
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Today my good friend and brother-in-arms Mark Houck was wed to the most excellent Peggy Varniere in a small ceremony at the courthouse in Grenoble attended by their families.
I wish I could have been there. It is not merely that France is reputed to be a beautiful country for travel, or that I really could use a vacation - for while both are true, my reasons for wanting to have been there are far more personal. The ceremony was attended by family, and after more than ten years of friendship, Houck has certainly earned that title in my home.
He was the first person I actually met on my first day at Grinnell, and with his ubiquitous hat and broad smile, I rather hoped that he would turn out to be my still-missing roommate. No, instead he revealed with an enthusiasm for life that would become familiar to us all that he was from Oklahoma(!), and he essentially ended up living across the hall from me for nearly all four years of our undergraduate education. Houck's insufferable good nature and occasional earnest obliviousness in the face of subtle social faux-pas were the subject of much ribbing over the next several years, but those same qualities led to a steadfast friendship in the face of any obstacle... including his good friend's occasional lapses into melodrama or hyperbole. The Houck ancestral residence also became a home away from home, and a stopping point on the biannual caravan from Texas to Iowa. His family showed incredible generosity to a bunch of indolent and hungry college students, and won our hearts with their baking and love for complicated technological gadgetry. Houck became family, another of the band of brothers who fought through heartbreak and finals stress to graduate somewhere on the other side. Through sadness and joy, Houck stood firm by his friends, and kept them standing upright.
Mark would go on from college to accomplish any of a number of things, the most recent of which was to encounter one Peggy Varniere, lately of France. Her enthusiasm and appreciation for the strange and obscure but wonderful matched his temperament, and after some nervousness and many cups of coffee... the pair fell in love. As Mark is my brother, so Peggy is now a sister.
They are an amazing bunch of folks, and I wish I could have been there to share that afternoon with them. May fortune find your path, Mark and Peggy - and may happiness follow you relentlessly for the rest of your lives.
June 8th, 1974 to the present and beyond.
Happy anniversary, and congratulations on thirty-three amazing years for my mom and dad!
"I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space."
- Hamlet: Act II, Scene 2
Thank heavens my sense of humor is still intact.
The locals remember when these trailers really were a place to crash at night after a long day of hauling discarded palm fronds out of the wreckage that used to be your living room. Now I complain that the distribution for the air-conditioning is irregular, and that the temperature can be freezing at one end of the building while tropical at the other. I guess what one really needs is a sense of perspective. I have the fishtank up and running, and I am putting in additional shelving. Rent is cheap, and I get free laundry, power, and water.
This does not change the fact that someday I would like to own a house with a kitchen large enough for two.
It is a good thing I like scope-work, because lately - I've been doing a whole hell of a lot of it.