take this survey

my friend gabe is a biologist and an artist (i think many of you know him). he got a biology masters at IU while i was there, and now he's working on a master of fine arts at the university of michigan. he's working on a creative "rebranding" of evolution, to make it more palatable (my word, not his) to the general public so we don't have to keep dealing with religious folk trying to ban it from science curricula. in that vein, he's conducting a survey.

from gabe:

"I am conducting a brief survey of people's perceptions of evolution and competing discourses as part of my MFA thesis research. Please take a moment to respond. There are 29 questions. Your responses are completely anonymous and highly valued."

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=924892514416

its interesting and short, so you should do it! you'll be contributing to both art AND science, in one shot. at the end of the survey, you'll be taken to gabe's web page if you want to learn more about him and his art and all.

fauna (revised)

we also went camping in the superstition mountains (just east of here) this weekend. it was pretty nice weather, although it was really windy most of the time. here is what we saw:

kangaroo rat
scorpions
pseudoscorpions
great plains toad
desert banded gecko
army ants (found by me, not tim!)
some other ants
quail
great horned owl (we only heard it, but still)
phaenopepla
tarantula
some other birds we didn't know
several kinds of lizards
meteors from the orionid meteor shower (liz = 3, tim = 6)
moths and butterflies
grasshoppers

my personal favorites were the toad and the gecko. tim had a strong preference for the ants. the quail were also quite amusing, making their funny little noises and quick running across the road, then hiding in the bushes. can you see this one? they are hard to take pictures of!!

when we first started looking at the sky, around 9pm, we basically didn't recognize any constellations. which seemed weird, since we are not that much further south than we were in the midwest. but as we sat there, we finally found the big dipper. it was just rising, which is why we couldn't see it earlier. after that, we saw orion rise. (we put our scientific minds together to figure out that, yes, stars do rise in the east just like the sun.)

here are some other pictures for your enjoyment.


(that is not me or tim holding the tarantula, but some guy named rick)

one last thing, we went to the bee facility so tim could do some bee work. look what i found living in the ladies' room.

learning

today we visited the thai cultural festival in downtown phoenix. as we have come to expect, it was not that great. not terrible, but not great thai food either. not like a free trip to thailand. tim got a laotian sausage--it was the grossest sausage i've ever had. at least our expectations were not that high this time. we are learning.

for the 6th largest city in the u.s., turn-out to these sorts of things is amazingly low. and i'm sure it is not because so many other things are going on in town and everyone else is there. i am trying to figure out if it is because the people here are lame and never leave their subdivision, or if it just that most of them have already learned that none of these festivals are very good and don't bother trying them out any more.

yee-haw

ok, the rodeo was pretty fun! i'm glad we got to go. it was not action-packed, but it was entertaining. i didn't know there were so many events. but overall, the fair was a disappointment. it was a combination flea market and carnival sort of thing. we somehow managed to overlook the actual animals (i heard there were some, but i only saw the giant hog below, and a couple camels giving rides to kids.) here are some pictures.

no comment

the other day, i saw a guy sitting in a folding chair in his driveway, no shirt, drinking a beer. at first i thought it was weird. then i realized that he was working on his tan. i'm not sure which is weirder, just sitting there (in the middle of the day, mind you) or deliberately working on your tan when you are a 55-year-old man. (on my way home, he was reading a book, which i thought was an improvement)

about a block away from that, there was a dead pigeon in the road. which made me recall a tv news commercial i heard, to the effect of, "west nile is really bad this year." which made me think, "well, that is what you get for building a lake in the middle of the desert for mosquitoes to breed in!"


the state fair starts today. we are going tomorrow, to see a rodeo. i am really trying not to get excited, because it sounds like fun, but i don't want to be disappointed.

another negative

i'm trying to be positive and all, but i thought of a negative thing i left off my initial list (i just want to be thorough). fire ants. they are no fun, especially when tim neglects to tell me i'm sitting right in on of their trails.

oktoberfest

it was oktoberfest in tempe this weekend. tim and i went, thinking, "sausages, polka, beer, how can we go wrong?" i tried to keep my expectations low, given my previous experience with a salsa festival here (tomato sauce does not count as salsa, ok?)

well, the sausage collection consisted of johnsonville brats. like you can buy at kroger. you could get them with saurkraut, which tim said was, "not that saur." i can't claim that there was no international beer, because there was a variety of types. but there was also a lot of budweiser, which sort of cancels out the international stuff in my mind.

the polka band was the most interesting. it was fun to watch the people dancing. but then, they played the chicken dance 3 times in an hour. again, sort of cancels out the rest of the polka. two bands played, both claimed the chicken dance was "by request". come on now.

have i just been spoiled by all the german heritage in the midwest? i thought this was a terrible oktoberfest.

a new ecosystem

so as you all know, i have recently moved to the valley of the sun. it is an interesting contrast to my previous midwestern life. this blog will serve as a place for me to update all of you i left in the midwest (and all of you who live elsewhere) on my life in the desert.

so far, i can't highly recommend it. i rate it as "OK."

Pluses: you don't need raingear as a mainstay of your wardrobe, you don't need to wear socks, you might have a citrus tree right outside your house (i am patiently waiting for the lemons to turn yellow), cheap massages at the massage school.

Minuses: you should buy stock in sunscreen companies, dust, the air is so dry it makes your mouth all dry and then you drink lots of water and have to pee all the time, there is no good produce and the farmer's market is a joke (literally less than 1/4 of the one in bloomington), dust, unless you really like to sweat you should become nocturnal if you want to go outside. i also hear there are some crazy scorpions around, but i have yet to see one. (don't worry, they are not deadly.)

i am also stunned by that fact that this is the year 2006 and people here still insist on watering their lawns (why do they have lawns in the desert is another question) in the middle of the day. are they unaware that they live in a desert? that it is over 100F during the day most of the year? that water evaporates?

ok, that is all for now. more later. whenever i feel like it or have something to update you on or need to amuse myself.