Weekend Critter Blogging

Les animaux du Paris, courtesy of jet-set friends J & S. Pigeon eating dinner, rabbits waiting to become dinner.

Feminism, Environment

A posting at Feministing brought up the topic of reusable menstrual products.

One of my pleas for the environment is for women to reduce the amount of disposables they use. Even if menstrual cups or flannel pads aren't for you, choose products that use the least toxic, polluting, or non-biodegradable components as possible. Especially don't use plastic applicator tampons - cardboard or manual insert only. You don't need pads individually wrapped in plastic - to carry supplies with you, keep a few pads or tampons in a clean zippered bag that gets reused and can be washed.

Plastic is forever. Once a plastic product is made, it persists in the environment forever as trash. Plastic items accumulate in areas of the open ocean where currents create eddies, creating an ugly soup. Beaches on remote islands have pill bottles and tampon applicators wash up on them. Plastics don't "biodegrade" but they do leach chemicals into the water and soil. Some of these chemicals are suspected of being endocrine disruptors. See Science Blogs and Deep Sea News for more particulars.

Weekend Critter Blogging

A butterfly from the botanic garden at Golden Gate Park.

Weekend Critter Blogging

More pictures from California - I remembered mostly taking pictures of plants, but there's quite a few critters in there, too. These are sea anenomes, of a beautiful seagreen color. Don't know the species. I want to take a course in marine invertebrates! I need a course in Marine Invertebrates!

Weekend Critter Blogging

Haven't been taking many pictures lately - busy with gardening and a new job - so here's another picture from California, taken last fall. These are the famous sea lions at Fisherman's Wharf. They're like big fat cats, stretching and snoozing in the sun.

Critter Blogging

You need to click on this picture to see the detail. The light-colored duck has a sort of ruff of feathers on the back of its head - a deformity that is apparently bred for by some duck fanciers. Odd, but no harm to the duck if it has the gene from only one parent. If it has the gene from both parents, it will die in the egg stage and never hatch. The picture was taken in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, fall 2006.

Grammar Czarina

I'd been musing about a post on bad spelling, punctuation, and grammar when I found this link, thanks to Twisty:


The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks

Making Fun of Bad Punctuation since 2005.


My own pet peeve is the misuse of the apostrophe, not just the ubiquitous confusion of it's and its, but the random sprinkling of apostrophes like parsley on mashed potatoes. Or should I say, the random sprinkling of apostrophe's like parsley on mashed potatoes'.

My grammar alarm was set off by a particular blog writer who posted a snivel (not up to the rate of a rant) about those nasty, snobbish guidelines for good writing. His/her blogulation in general is rather muddy, and shows a need for those aforesaid nasty guidelines. Reading the rambling sentences, illogical topic jumps, poor proofreading, and misused apostrophes made this English major's head hurt. (I'm not linking to the post, since it is by just one poor writer on an otherwise excellent blog.)*

So, to keep me from getting the vapors, remember these simple rules:

• its is a possessive pronoun; it's is the contraction for it is
• plural nouns do not use apostrophes: books, not book's
• singular verbs do not use apostrophes: Poor grammar bothers me, not Poor grammar bother's me

Of course, by the Murphy's Law of Blogging, there will be at least one egregious misspelling or grammatical error in this post, and Wild Roses will finally get a hit.

*Yes, I know I tend to use a lot of comments in parentheses and dashes, but this is informal writing meant to more-or-less sound like conversation. I am much more persnickety in formal writing.