How does a tick know when it has reached the back of my dog's neck?
The best suggestion yet, from my friend Massimo, is that ticks feed on arterial blood and they use some sort of heat-seaking mechanism to go where the vessels are nearest the surface. Plausible, but I don’t buy it. Not yet. Not...
It’s funny how little links grow into a chain. A couple of days ago I was reading a post on Paul Butzi's blog in which he quoted a stanza from his favourite poem, Robert Frost’s Two Tramps in Mud Time. I know very little about poetry; I don’t even know what I like. But the piece was enough to se...
So the apostrophe — that key orthographic distinguisher that protects Western civilization from confusion between the genitive case of the 3rd person singular neuter pronoun and the result of attaching the clitic form of the 3rd person singular present tense form of the copula to that pronoun — is...
This post is number 35 in a series.
Moonflowers. Hyacinth beans. A Mandevilla I got from the big garden on Saturday. A sweet-scented white-flowered shrub that makes glaucous, dark-blue berries, nabbed from friend Cini's terrace. My own cannas, years old. An Ipomoea, ditto. And a tomato from some...
Hands up all those who noticed that instead of a misty bloke in a boat, collecting pond scum on the lake at the Summer Palace in Beijing, the header image for this site now sports a springtime view over the domed roofline of Rome?
It is, I think, a little more appropriate. It is also not too racy...
