Old man take a look at my life
I’m a lot like you.

FWIW not only the people here in Lemmingham think the weather is wacked, but the plants as well. Knowing the sequence of how things bloom and come into leaf around here, I’ll note that on today , Cinco de Mayo, the currant, forsythia, Asian Pear and Spiraea are still in bloom, the flower buds on the apple tree are showing the first hints of color, two separate varieties of cherry which never bloom at the same time are blooming simultaneously, the lilacs in the dooryard are close to bloom, tulips in my garden have only just opened, one of my rhododendrons is blooming and the perennial alyssum is blooming.

I know this means nothing to the non-horticulturally inclined, but the blooming sequence is way off. The tulips are incredibly late, the currant, forsythia, spiraea and Asian pear should have shed their blossoms several weeks ago, and the apple, lilac and alyssum are early as is the rhododendron.

Most disturbing of all, is this: I haven’t seen a single honeybee yet. Not even one. Bumblebees, yes; honeybees, no. But there’s an explanation, of sorts, for that: the Honeybees are dying.

This comes to mind, suddenly:

The trees budded prematurely around Nahum’s, and at night they swayed ominously in the wind…. When the early saxifrage came out it had another strange colour; not quite like that of the skunk-cabbage, but plainly related and equally unknown to anyone who saw it….April brought a kind of madness to the country folk, and began that disuse of the road past Nahum’s which led to its ultimate abandonment. It was the vegetation. All the orchard trees blossomed forth in strange colours, and through the stony soil of the yard and adjacent pasturage there sprang up a bizarre growth which only a botanist could connect with the proper flora of the region. No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the green grass and leafage; but everywhere were those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the’ known tints of earth….In May the insects came, and Nahum’s place became a nightmare of buzzing and crawling. Most of the creatures seemed not quite usual in their aspects and motions, and their nocturnal habits contradicted all former experience.–H.P. Lovecraft, “The Colour Out of Space”

If you want to see what an Ascaris lumbricoides worm (AKA the roundworm) looks like trucking around in someone’s guts, click here. You’ll find a page of info and some time to prepare yourself.

If you don’t want to see the above, don’t click.

For rain-soaked Western Washingtonians, spring and summer are the blessed seasons. Particularly summer, because that’s our dry season. Unless you’re into winter sports, spring and summer hereabouts are the seasons where people throw off their raingear, throw on shorts and flip-flops and frolic in the sun, trying to get rid of the fish-belly-white pallor they developed during the fall and winter.

And there’s a lot going on throughout W. Washington/British Columbia/Vancouver Island/The San Juans during the blessed seasons. Yet, it’s been my experience in past years that I’ve ended up missing lots of cool stuff, simply because it is poorly publicized, and because there’s no central clearinghouse which attempts to provide a comprehensive listing of festivals, fairs, concerts, etc. Information on such events is scattered haphazardly across the Web, if it’s on the Web at all, and you literally could surf for hours before discovering half of it.

I’m tired of that routine. There’s no reason for it in this age of advanced information technologies, and so I have developed greatnorthwest.info to remedy the problem. The idea is simply to get all the good stuff into one place, in an interactive format (Google Calendar) where interested parties can add an event to their personal calendars with a mouseclick.

Check it out. The calendars are updated on a daily basis, and it’s only going to get better. Plus there are more goodies waiting in the wings.

All this banana talk reminded me of this classic clip.

Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort present the thinnest (and most homoerotic) argument for creationism I’ve seen in quite some time.

But then there’s this response that’s just perfect.

Oh Kirk, were the years on Growing Pains really that damaging?

MountainFinger sent me a link to Phreequeshow, a page dedicated to cataloging the sideshow oddities of times past.   There was a time when it was absolutely commonplace to relegate oddities and the visibly diseased to the circus sideshow.  In browsing the bios of some of these people, it seems more than a few were rescued from asylums and other forms of captivity.  It would seem that a life of showbiz, albeit at the expense of a deformity, was an improvement.  These days, however, people like this are often cared for meticulously (one can hope), so the sideshow is considered a demeaning alternative.

Still and all, WEIRD!!!

The series of images after the jump are collectively entitled “The Office,” and it/they came from imagechan.com.

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My buddy Joe decided to get some coffee beans that were eaten, digested, and SHAT out of some kind of monkey-cat-weasel-looking-thing called a Civet.  People walk around the jungle and collect the poop, then roast it up.  This stuff goes for about $400.00 a pound.  No shit.  (pun indented)  We got a VERY small amount and it was $60.00.  We bought a new grinder, we brought distilled water to 180 degrees, we pre-heated a french press, and brewed it up.  I figured that you buy this $400 dollar a pound coffee and some ass in New Jersey goes to Costco and sells you some “Kopi Luwak” which is really Columbian coffee roasted by some guy named Fred in Jersey City.  Well, I was wrong.   One taste of this coffee and you are 100% positive that it’s NOT normal coffee.  Without a doubt, the finest coffee that I have ever tasted, and the 6 or so people that got a taste all agreed.  It’s freaking incredible coffee.  All flavor, no bitterness, no aftertaste.  It’s perfect.  I highly recommend trying it, so that like me, your next cup of $10 a pound coffee that you’ve loved for years will taste like asphalt comparatively. We took pics of the process and also of Thumb enjoying his $20 cup of coffee Read about the poo-coffee!