Just the other day I was thinking back to that great TV show Bosom Buddies , starring Peter Scolari and Tom Hanks. I knew Peter went on to fame and fortune in The Bob Newhart Show , but I was wondering what ever happened to Tom Hanks. Timely as ever, The Brunching Shuttlecocks have the answer.

Happy Birthday to Poor Clio!

Globalization doesn’t just mean a McDonalds on every corner. It also means some plants and animals are being introduced to places they could have never reached on their own. Sometimes everything works out OK, but often new species throw everything out of whack, invading their new homes and driving native plants and animals to extinction. The government maintains an excellent web site documenting invasive species. How many do you have in your yard?

The Red Elvises will be in town Wednesday night, and you can bet that I’ll be there. I’ve been a big fan since even before I saw them in Six-String Samurai.

A year ago, I posted this picture of a flower I stumbled across in my yard while mowing (with my non-motorized push mower). It’s very small, less than an inch high, and I almost mowed right over it. I didn’t know what it was, but I liked it, so it stayed. I’ve since found that the little fellow was a Grape Hyacith, a woodsy wild flower native to these parts. When they find a spot they like, they multiply quickly. Last year there was one. This year there was sixteen. I’m hoping for several hundred next spring.

To help you better prepare your finances, I will now disclose that the Dow will continue to fall until it reaches the 7200 mark, will then level out, and will slowly climb back up again. The NASDAQ will do the same, levelling out at the 1200 mark. I’m not certain how long it will take to reach the low-water mark, but I expect it will be late next winter.

Eeeee ooooo eeeeee whoooo eeeeee oooooo eeeeeeeeeeee whooooo eeeeeeeee oooooooooooo eeeeeeee! (From Backup Brain)

Here’s an interesting weblog portal. I’m on there twice: an edge-on spiral galaxy near the lower right (the one with a bright red star just above it), and again as a single white point (either a star or a distant galaxy) just above and to the right of my other link. Unless your memorization skills are grand, this would be a good randon-weblog selector.

Call Me Trimtab. I adore R. Buckminster Fuller. He’s most famous (to the average person) for inventing the geodesic dome, but he was exactly the kind of person I try to be. His tombstone is inscribed with his guiding phrase, “Call me tribtab.” The trimtab is a small moving extention of a ship’s rudder. By moving the trimtab just a litlle bit, expending very little energy, the rudder is compelled to follow. And after the rudder, the ship. So changing something very small can change the course of something very large, like an aircraft carrier. Or society. Call me trimtab. A fellow has written a one man show about R. Buckminster Fuller, and it’s gotten rave reviews in California. I’d love to do it here sometime. I’ve finally gotten the contact information for the author, now I need to follow through.

Livestock are burning across Great Britain and Europe. British poet David Anthony has written a villanelle, a formal poetic structure, about the events. I post it here, unapproved and copied from a mailing list I’m on: Plague The guns are loud across the land tonight. Grim beacon flames flash out from shire to shire and horror groans without an end in sight. Best not to look as marksmen expedite such slaughter! Hired to empty every byre, the guns are loud. Across the land tonight Spring flinches at the foulness of the blight that lurks within the pall above each pyre, and horror groans without an end in sight of pallid flames where all is darkly bright. So draw the drapes and turn the music higher– the guns are loud across the land tonight! Take up the children; tuck their blankets tight: try not to let them see that life’s a liar and horror groans. Without an end in sight there seems no point, why carry on, why fight? --not only cattle perish in the fire. The guns are loud across the land tonight, and horror groans without an end in sight. -- David Anthony, 2001