Why Evolution is True Feed

But this is a reminder to send in your photo of cats with a Christmas theme (or Hanukah theme, as we now have three Jewish cats.  The instructions are here and we have only about ten photos. (Note: the cat below is AI generated; we don’t want those!)

Remember, one photo per submission, please!

Welcome to sabbath for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, December 14, 2025, and National Bouillabaisse Day.  It is very cold today: 2°F, which is -17°C.  Your hands start freezing within 15 seconds of exposure (I forgot my gloves!).

Hanukkah starts tonight at sundown and ends on Monday, December 22.  Here’s Gal Gadot and Noa Tishby, two of my heartthrobs, discussing the holiday:

Here’s a bowl of that fish soup from Wikipedia, with the caption, “A version by three-star Lyon chef Paul Bocuse from his restaurant ‘Le Sud’.” You can bet this will cost you some. . .

Arnaud 25, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Screwdriver Day (the drink), Monkey Day, Roast Chestnuts Day (where can I find them?), and National Biscuits and Gravy Day, a great indigenous American food.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 14 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Two shootings occurred yesterday: one at Brown University killed two people and injured nine, and at last ten people were killed by snipers on Bondi Beach, Australia, during a Jewish celebration; it appears to be a targeted attack. More in tomorrow’s Nooz.  Things are horrible everywhere.

*The government closed because Congress could not agree on whether to extend Obamacare subsidies. Now that Congress is back in session, it’s clear that this doesn’t mean a compromise is in the works. The Senate has rejected both Democratic and Republican plans, guaranteeing that premiums will go up at the end of the month, and presages yet another government closure in 2026.

The Senate rejected dueling health care bills Thursday, all but guaranteeing that Obamacare subsidies used by more than 20 million Americans will lapse at the end of the year.

Senators voted 51-48 on advancing a GOP health care plan that would have expanded health savings accounts as an alternative to the expiring tax credits. Democrats’ plan to extend the Covid-era enhanced subsidies for three years also received a 51-48 vote. Both proposals fell well short of the 60 votes needed to vault a key procedural hurdle.

The votes both went largely, but not entirely, along party lines. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the only Republican to oppose the GOP plan. Meanwhile, Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Dan Sullivan of Alaska voted to advance the Democrats’ health care plan. Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who would have voted for the GOP plan, missed the votes.

. . . Thursday’s Senate votes were part of a deal Senate Majority Leader John Thune made with Democrats to end the government shutdown that ended last month. Senators have widely acknowledged for weeks that the votes were aimed more at messaging than forcing through passable bipartisan compromise.

Still, a deal in the Senate was likely Congress’ best shot at preventing the subsidies from lapsing and raising premiums for many Americans who buy their insurance directly through Affordable Care Act exchanges. While the lapse will not completely eliminate the tax credits, they will revert back to pre-pandemic levels and many families could still see their premiums rise by $1,000 a year or more.

If you look at how much people’s healthcare premiums will go up if a bill doesn’t pass, a fair estimate would be a doubling of the monthly rate, but for some people it will be much more—perhaps fourfold.  It’s not right to play hob with people’s health for political gain, but it looks as if a compromise is not in the works.

*Over at The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan celebrates “Ten years of marriage equality“: the right of gays to marry which, a great moral advance, Sullivan largely helped to forge.  He assesses what the movement gained and what it lost.

And then, of course, we’ve had ten years of nationwide marriage equality since 2015’s Obergefell decision — a cause I imagined, helped kick-start in 1989, and spent a quarter century arguing everywhere I could. It included my own civil marriage and, in true American fashion, my sad but amicable divorce more than a decade later.

“If you live long enough” is a cliché for a reason. And, against the odds, thanks to protease inhibitors, I did live long enough to see these two evolutions in media and society unfold. “Did they do more good than harm?” is a question I’ve found myself pondering in my third trimester of life. The media revolution? A truly mixed bag, I’d say, especially in the iPhone and now AI era. A story for another time.

But gay marriage? Personally, I feel I failed in my own journey, but nonetheless tried hard, and treasure the enduring love and deep friendship I still have with my ex-husband. My marriage helped me mature, grounded me more firmly, taught me what sacrifice and generosity can be. Maybe it will happen again.

And collectively? A much higher grade surely — with the caveat that we’ve only had a decade of evidence. My opponents feared it would destabilize marriage more generally. It didn’t. Marriage rates were 6.9 per 1,000 in 2015 and 6.1 today — a decline in line with the previous half-century. Not great, but there’s no sign that gay marriage had any serious impact. Divorce rates? They have actually improved since 2015: from 3.1 to 2.4 per 1,000 in 2023.One small contributing factor is that divorce rates among gay men are actually lower than that for straight couples. Who predicted that? Certainly not Bill Kristol.

How has marriage affected these gay men and lesbians? It’s been a boon. Married couples have higher household incomes, lower poverty rates, higher levels of employment, better health than unmarried ones, higher home-ownership rates — and report greater social acceptance. Gay men have been thriving in education. . . 

. . . . The queer activists, of course, loudly insisted that same-sex couples rejected the institution of marriage and would never join it. But the number of married gay men and lesbians more than doubled from 390,000 in 2015 to 823,000 now; and nearly 60 percent of same-sex cohabiting couples are now married, compared with 40 percent in domestic partnerships.How has this reform been greeted in the country at large? Gallup shows that support has grown from 58 to 69 percent. In 2024, the GOP removed opposition to gay marriage in its platform. A married gay man with two sons is now the Treasury Secretary in a hard-right Republican administration — a more senior position than any openly gay Dem has ever held.

As social reforms go, it’s hard to do better than this. It sure hasn’t been a panacea for marriage as a whole, but it has shored up the thing a bit and broadened its base. And then there are things for which there are no statistics. The young mercifully don’t know much of the immense psychic pain, deep spiritual anguish, emotional trauma, and intense self-hatred that the past contained for so many of us — a pain far worse for the countless generations before.

And the downside, involving the alphabet characterization:

The trouble, of course, is that success breeds its own set of problems. Successful civil rights movements — think of the mid-1960s — can radicalize and curdle. And as most normie gays got on with their lives, queer extremists duly took over the gay infrastructure and institutions, and the era of more general woke madness set in.

The goal was to re-marginalize us as “queer” again, to indoctrinate kids with leftist lies about human biology, and create an entirely fake history of gay and lesbian rights. Dissent was punished, old leaders ousted, and an ever-expanding alphabet of ever-more bizarre and niche identities — often approaching mental illness — replaced any idea of gay and lesbian identity.

They changed the flag and merged its colors with the BLM movement; they pioneered untested medical experiments on pre-pubescent children with gender dysphoria, including gay and lesbian kids; they sterilized them and rendered many incapable of orgasm for life; they perverted the English language — “chest-feeding” anyone? — and tried to abolish the whole idea of homosexuality as a distinct human experience, in favor of their generalized, post-modern, intersectional queerness. And they replaced the principles of live-and-let-live by forcing others to take the knee to their radicalism. No-enemies-to-the-left syndrome became a pandemic. Sore winners.

. . . I remain deeply proud of what we did. Nothing will ever take that away. The current madness is based on lies about human nature, and lies always fail in the end. We will emerge from it because it’s built on sand. Meanwhile, you carry on, hoping some kind of moderation will happen, but seeing no sign of it at all. I realize don’t belong in this intolerant “LGBTQIA+” community any more. And it doesn’t want me or any gay men like me. The price of success is always failure, I suppose. But the success was real.’

Well, I apologize for the long excerpt, but Sullivan is an eloquent exponent of the unpredicted attacks on gays by the whole “intolerant “LGBTQIA+” community.”  Still, he did well in life. No matter how much I disagree with Sullivan over things (increasingly it’s limited to religion as he moves towards the center), I could never hope to have improved the well-being of society as much as he did by promoting gay marriage. And that will not go away.

*After several years of calling Israel genocidal while keeping silent on Hamas, Amnesty International finally admitted that Hamas committed crimes against humanity (h/t Stephen). It’s a measure of the degree of anti-semitism that this happened only this week.  Amnesty International, like Doctors Without Borders (DwB) or even the UN itself, has a horrible record of persistently criticizing Israel and ignoring Hamas, though it did accuse Hamas once of committing “war crimes”, ignoring the humanitarian crimes.

Amnesty International on Thursday accused Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups of crimes against humanity, including extermination, during and after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel that sparked the Gaza war.

“Palestinian armed groups committed violations of international humanitarian law, war crimes and crimes against humanity during their attacks in southern Israel that started on 7 October 2023,” the human rights watchdog said in a 173-page report.

The group has previously accused Hamas and others of committing war crimes.

War crimes are serious violations of international law against civilians and combatants during armed conflict. Crimes against humanity can occur in peacetime and include torture, rape and discrimination, be it racial, ethnic, cultural, religious or gender-based. They involve “a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population.”

Amnesty has also accused Israel of genocide, an accusation that Jerusalem vehemently denies. However, Amnesty said any Israeli wrongdoing, or Palestinian groups’ crimes against other Palestinians, were outside the scope of this report.

Amnesty said that the mass killing of civilians in Israel on October 7 amounted “to the crime against humanity of extermination.” Among the other crimes listed were murder, imprisonment, torture, enforced disappearance, and sexual violence.

Hamas rejected the report, saying it contained “inaccuracies and contradictions.”

Israel also critiqued the report, noting that it came out more than two years after the attack, with the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Oren Marmorstein, saying it “falls fa

Crikey! They did not even condemn Hamas for the October 7, 2023 massacre of civilians as well as kidnapping.  What has happened to organizations like Amnesty International and DwB? How did they lose their moral compass?

*The NYT reports that the CIA enlisted a team of climbers in 1965 to put a plutonium-generated device on the top of the famous Himalayan peak Nanda Devi, designed to spy on China. There’s a lot of plutonium in it, but it was abandoned and never used. It’s still spewing radioactivity somewhere on the peak:

The mission demanded the utmost secrecy.

A team of American climbers, handpicked by the C.I.A. for their mountaineering skills — and their willingness to keep their mouths shut — were fighting their way up one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas.

Step by step, they trudged up the razor-toothed ridge, the wind slamming their faces, their crampons clinging precariously to the ice. One misplaced foot, one careless slip, and it was a 2,000-foot drop, straight down.

Just below the peak, the Americans and their Indian comrades got everything ready: the antenna, the cables and, most crucially, the SNAP-19C, a portable generator designed in a top-secret lab and powered by radioactive fuel, similar to the ones used for deep sea and outer space exploration.The plan was to spy on China, which had just detonated an atomic bomb. Stunned, the C.I.A. dispatched the climbers to set up all this gear — including the 50-pound, beach-ball-size nuclear device — on the roof of the world to eavesdrop on Chinese mission control.

But right as the climbers were about to push for the summit, the weather went haywire. The wind howled, the clouds descended, a blizzard swept in and the top of the forbidding mountain, called Nanda Devi, suddenly disappeared in a whiteout.

From his perch at advance base camp, Capt. M.S. Kohli, the highest-ranking Indian on the mission, watched in panic.

“Camp Four, this is Advance Base. Can you hear me?” he recalled shouting into a walkie-talkie.

No response.

“Camp Four, are you there?”

Finally, the radio crackled to life with a faint voice, a whisper through the wash of static.

“Yes … this … is … Camp … Four.”

“Come back quickly,” Captain Kohli remembered ordering them. “Don’t waste a single minute.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Then Captain Kohli made a fateful decision. He needed to, he said — to save the climbers’ lives.

“Secure the equipment. Don’t bring it down.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The climbers scampered down the mountain after stashing the C.I.A. gear on a ledge of ice, abandoning a nuclear device that contained nearly a third of the total amount of plutonium used in the Nagasaki bomb.

It hasn’t been seen since.

And that was 1965.

Every mountain-lover knows of Nanda Devi, India’s second highest mountain at a height of 7817 m (25,646 ft). It was notoriously hard to climb, and infamous for being the mountain that killed 22-year-old Nanda Devi Unsoeld, the daughter of Willi Unsoeld, who conquered Everest via its West Ridge in 1963 and named his daughter after Nanda Devi.

From 1965 to 1968, attempts were made by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in co-operation with the Intelligence Bureau (IB), to place a nuclear-powered (SNAP-19C RTG) telemetry relay listening device on the summit of Nanda Devi.This device was designed to intercept telemetry signals from missile test launches conducted in the Xinjiang Province, at a time of relative infancy in China’s missile program. The expedition retreated due to dangerous weather conditions, leaving the device near the summit of Nanda Devi. They returned the next spring to search for the device, which ended without success. As a result of this activity by the CIA, the Sanctuary was closed to foreign expeditions throughout much of the 1960s. In 1974 the Sanctuary re-opened.

But now, because Nanda Devi has religious significance, nobody of any stripe is allowed to climb it. If the device ever turns up, it will be inside a glacier, and that is unlikely to be found given the new restrictions.

Sumod K Mohan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

*Amherst College has to get the prize for the most bizarre student orientation of 2025. Luana sent me this article (yes, from the Washington Free Beacon) of the stuff that transpires when first-year Amherst students are indoctrinated oriented.

Amherst College was founded over two centuries ago to prepare young Christian men for the ministry. Today, however, the prestigious college has become a hotbed of administratively sanctioned sex performances and “sexual skills” programs, with a focus on “queer” and transgender students and on free-sex practices such as polyamory. The graphic nature of school-sanctioned sex events has made many current Amherst students deeply uncomfortable, according to students who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.

Amherst, in central Massachusetts, is one of the country’s most exclusive small liberal arts colleges. The acceptance rate for the class of 2029 was 7 percent and annual tuition plus room and board exceeds $93,000, making it the sixth-most expensive college in the country.

Every year, first-year students are instructed, as a part of orientation, to attend an event—dubbed “Voices of the Class”—in which they are familiarized with Amherst’s “code of conduct” through a theatrical performance scripted using out-of-context excerpts from their own admissions essays. An entire section of the performance is dedicated just to sex.

The event takes place in Johnson Chapel, which Amherst calls its “most important building,” and is used for worship services, convocations, senior assemblies, and other significant gatherings. Johnson Chapel displays 36 portraits of the college’s most notable figures and alumni—including all 19 former presidents of the college, influential trustees, clergymen, civil rights leaders, poet Emily Dickinson, and former U.S. president Calvin Coolidge, who all likely would have looked on in horror if they saw the event on August 31st, 2025.

On the chapel’s chancel, students performed mock sex acts including oral sex, masturbation, and group sex. A young woman bent over while another student pretended to penetrate her from behind. Others pretended to do drugs and shared their “high thoughts.”

Every first-year was urged to attend the performance by their orientation leader. The administration advertises the event as a “lighthearted tradition” to “celebrate the humor, creativity, and individuality of your class.” The school funds the performance, and Amherst administrators work closely with the student performers, offering feedback and approving the script.

. . . . Following the event, the Office of Student Affairs asserted in an email that “Voices of the Class” is “not graphic.”

Um. . . .

Niemi, who’s from Idaho, describes the skits as simulated sex, with students moaning and thrusting under a blanket, and says that the peer educators “showered handfuls of condoms on students like confetti.”

“I thought about leaving 10 minutes in. I’m not someone who breaks rules or skips mandatory events, but it was disgusting enough it almost forced me to leave,” Niemi recalled.

But Amanda Vann, Amherst’s “director of health and wellbeing education,” told the Free Beacon that the skits help students build up their skills when it comes to sex. “The skits are part of our broader commitment to promoting wellbeing and sexual respect on campus,” she said

Right.  The script is written by juniors and seniors taking excerpts from admissions essays written by first-year students (or maybe those who didn’t get in as well).  Here are two videos of the event:

I don’t consider myself a prude, but I just don’t get this.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are again discussing Andrzej:

Hili: He’s not paying any attention to us at all.
Szaron: All we can do is pretend we don’t care.

In Polish:

Hili: On w ogóle nie zwraca na nas uwagi.
Szaron: Możemy tylko udawać, że nas to nie obchodzi.

*******************

From The Dodo (click to enlarge). DO NOT FEED BEA A MUFFIN! (And read it if you can.)

From Give me a Sign; notice that all ursids are prohibited in the sixth bullet point for having bear feet:

From Stacy; a great wrestling match:

From Masih, another brave Iranian woman, singing without a hijab, breaking two rules. She did this in Iran, I think, and had been arrested for it, but released in the face of national outrage.

The translation:

The virtual concert by Parastoo Ahmadi, which impacted millions of Iranians inside and outside Iran and, despite the danger, prompted many Iranians to visualize and break out of the dictatorship’s bubble. This courageous move by Parastoo is a stand and a fight against the Islamic Republic. Everyone should take a step in their own way and challenge the Islamic Republic until the day all the pieces of the puzzle come together and the Islamic Republic is forever removed from Iran and Iranians. If male singers inside Iran stand alongside brave women like Parastoo, Zara, and the young rappers who are currently fighting for their natural rights these days, they will reduce the cost of the struggle for female singers. #بدون_زنان_هرگز

كنسرت مجازى پرستو احمدى كه ميليونها ايرانى را در داخل و خارج از ايران تحت تاثير قرار داد و با وجود خطر ، افكار بسيارى از ايرانيان را وادار به تصويرسازى و خروج از حباب ديكتاتورى كرد.
اين حركت شجاعانه پرستو، ايستادگی و مبارزه عليه جمهورى اسلامى‌ست. هركس به سهم خود قدمى بردارد و… pic.twitter.com/Vx7Vzhu7i1

— United Against Gender Apartheid (@UAGApartheid) December 13, 2025

Larry the Cat presents a poor, frustrated kitty:

Happy #Caturdaypic.twitter.com/hRoijzSBWs

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) December 13, 2025

From Malcolm; I’m sure they don’t make these any more:

The Motocompo: Honda’s 1980s foldable scooter that fits in a city car.pic.twitter.com/o4HMajt8ES

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 21, 2025

From Simon, who asks, “Who even lets them drive?”

GWAS pic.twitter.com/OuDcNbeTdy

— Oded Rechavi (@OdedRechavi) December 12, 2025

One from my feed. Crows are not dumb!

Taking the leaves off strawberriespic.twitter.com/HehaSJ1zMn

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) December 13, 2025

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was seven years old and would be 89 today had he lived. https://t.co/iRkNe4jCO5

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) December 14, 2025

. . . and two from Dr. Cobb.  First, a headline you don’t see every day:

We don’t do court reports, especially when it comes to violent crime, but there’s always an exception.

— Angry People in Local Newspapers (@apiln.bsky.social) 2025-12-09T14:30:20.280Z

Second, the late ecologist Sir Bob May takes issue with how this famous story is related:

There is a story, possibly apocryphal, of the distinguished British biologist, J.B.S. Haldane, who found himself in the company of a group of theologians. On being asked what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation, Haldane is said to have answered, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”

Looking into a paper about beetles reminds me of Bob May's firm riposte to his account in Nature about God's famous inordinate fondness for beetles.

— Roland Pease (@peaseroland.bsky.social) 2025-12-08T15:35:15.535Z

From Inside the Magic comes a story I’ve known for a while—but you might not. It’s about the feral cats that roam the original Disneyland at night, taking care of the rodent problem. Click below to see the story; excerpts are indented:

Excerpts:

It’s no news that Disney parks hide some special park features in plain sight, like the hidden suite in Cinderella Castle, Walt Disney’s apartment at Magic Kingdom in Disneyland Park, and the private members-only Club 33, also located in Disneyland Park.

However, Disneyland Resort in California focuses much of its attention on a “secret attraction” in Disney park 24/7, and they manage to hide it in plain sight. [JAC: Disneyland Resort comprises two parks, one of them the original Disneyland, which I went to once as a child.]

To be more exact, around 200 of these “secret attractions.” Yes, you read it right — There are about 200 feral cats at Disneyland! The adorable feral cat colony lives in the happiest place on earth.

. . . . There have been sightings going as far as 1955, soon after Disneyland opened.

The story goes: When Walt Disney decided that there should be an attraction inside the Sleeping Beauty Castle — what we know today as the Castle Walkthrough attraction — he brought engineers into the castle to begin the planning. But to his surprise, he was greeted by a feral cat colony that had made the court their home.

But the cats had brought a huge problem — an infestation of fleas. Walt Disney knew he couldn’t just get rid of the cats without sparking public uproar, so he adopted each cat and made them all Cast Members. By doing so, the problem seemed to be solved in the best possible way.

Unfortunately, things weren’t that simple. Due to the theme park’s rustic design, Disneyland had ironically brought unwelcomed guests to the park — rodents.

For Walt’s luck, not all feral cats had set home in the castle but other places around the park property. Those cats found their wonderland inside the park with a good source of food — the rodent population — plus, the park was a place free of the typical dangers that a stray cat faces. They would come out at night and hunt inside the park in peace.

Someone at the Disney company had a brilliant idea; allow the cats to live in the park. By nature, feral cats are scared of humans. Therefore they wouldn’t bother the park’s guests, and apparently, they were doing a better job at pest control than human exterminators.

The idea worked so well that the cat population at Disneyland still exists with over 200 felines! The kittens received a forever home at the happiest place on earth, and the theme park guests are always surprised and glad to spot one of the felines around the park. So, next time you are at Disneyland, keep an eye out for some whiskers, bushy fur tails, and significant cuteness.

Note that these aren’t really feral cats, as the park takes care of them and adopts some out.

After deciding to keep the cats, the Disney Company established protocols and ways to keep the cats and guests safe. Disney placed feeding stations around the property, the cats were all spayed/neutered, vaccinated the entire feral population, and Circle D Ranch Cast Members were assigned to care for the furry batch of Disneyland Cast Members. The cats a very well taken care of at Disneyland!

Mostly, the cats stay hidden during the day and roam around at night. But not all cats follow that rule. Park guests often spot the feral cats sleeping around the park or wandering around the park property during the day. For that reason, and as a general rule, Disney does not encourage guests to try to get too close or even pet the cats. They are better off remaining solitary and admired from a distance. But, by all means, take some pictures!

If, by any chance, a Disneyland cat starts getting too comfortable around park guests, Disney adopts the feline out to a Disney cast member. The same goes for any new litter of kittens accidentally born within any Disney property. So, please don’t encourage the cats to lose their permanent home inside the happiest place on earth.

If any of the Disneyland cats start to get too friendly around the park’s guests, or if a new cat litter is born, Disney decides to put them up for adoption to a Disney employee — So they are always part of the Disney family.

I knew that any company that makes its living by extolling animals would take care of cats this way! Has any reader who’s been to the original Disneyland seen these cats?

And here’s a video showing them, including Walt himself, holding stroking an orange moggy:

*********************

The other day I got an unexpected package in the mail, and, opening it up, I found a wonderful picture book, large and full of glossy photos of domestic cats (both moggies and purebreds) as well as wild cats like tigers and lions. It’s published by Abrams Books, where the hardcover goes for $70 (only $49 at Amazon); the fantastic photos were taken by Tim Flach, and the text is by evolutionary biologist and ailurophile Jon Losos.  I figured out quickly that, because I reviewed Jon’s book The Cat’s Meow in the Washington Post, and favorably (I called it “the definitive book on the biology, ecology and evolution of the house cat{“). Jon had the book sent to me. I was right: Jon told me, “The publisher asked for suggestions about whom to send it to, and you immediately came to mind.”

I was delighted, and sent the photo below to Jon that day.

Flach, a British photographer specializing in animals, does spectacular work here’s a video he produced about the book:

View this post on Instagram

One of Flach’s photos from the book, somewhat degraded as I took it with an iPhone. But even so it’s mesmerizing.

Here’s an eight-minute video aired on CBS about Flach and his photos of cats (and other creatures):

This book would make a great Christmas present for ailurophiles, and you can get it for less than fifty bucks on Amazon. Have a look!

**********************

Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire has some of the worst weather in the United States. Located atop the eponymous 6,288-foot mountain, it has human residents who stay for a week at a time, but also a cat, Nimbus, who’s a permanent resident.  The Observatory is a private, nonprofit organization aimed at producing scientific data, and Wikipedia says this:

The U.S. Signal Service, a predecessor to the Weather Bureau, occupied the summit and kept records from 1870 to 1892. Starting in 1932, the current observatory began keeping records. On April 12, 1934, the observatory staff recorded a wind gust of 231 mph that at the time was the highest recorded wind speed in the world, a record that was held until 1996. [JAC: the new record was set in 1996 “at Barrow Island, Australia during Typhoon Olivia. According to the report, the new record stands at 253 mph.”] The observatory’s weather data have accumulated into a valuable climate record since. Temperature and humidity readings have been collected using a sling psychrometer, a simple device containing two mercury thermometers. Where most unstaffed weather stations have undergone technology upgrades, consistent use of the sling psychrometer has helped provide scientific precision to the Mount Washington climate record.

The observatory makes prominent use of the slogan “Home of the World’s Worst Weather”, a claim that originated with a 1940 article by Charles Brooks (the man generally given the majority of credit for creating the Mount Washington Observatory), titled “The Worst Weather In the World” (even though the article concluded that Mt. Washington most likely did not have the world’s worst weather). The Sherman Adams summit building, named for the 67th Governor of New Hampshire, houses the observatory; it is closed to the public during the winter and hikers are not allowed inside the building except for emergencies and pre-arranged guided tours.

It’s dire up there in winter; here’s a photo from 2004:

 

User:{{{1}}}|{{{1}}}]] at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The observatory has a page on “History of cats on the mountain,” showing that they go back to the 1930s, and there has been one ever since I can remember. The current resident, Nimbus (formerly “Greg”) came from The Conway Area Humane Society, and while he goes out in summer, he’s always well taken care of and well fed. You can read “20 FAQs about Nimbus, the Summit Cat“, and here’s an excerpt (Nimbus wrote it himself):

10. What does Nimbus like to do all day?

When I am not outside, I enjoy begging for treats from the Observers and taking naps on the couch or on someone’s lap. At night, I like to hunt for mice and I take that role very seriously; after all, it is my purrsonal responsibility to keep the rodent population in check.

11. What is Nimbus’ personality like?

I consider myself a sociable cat and I like to use meows, chatters, and purrs to get the attention of staff members and visitors.

12. Does Nimbus live at the summit year round?

Besides my occasional routine visit to the doctor, I do live at the mountain year round. When I do take a trip down to the valley, though, I always forget how there is 20% more oxygen at the base of the mountain than at the summit.

13. Does Nimbus like the winter season at the summit?

I am less than thrilled when the weather turns colder, snowier, and windier at Mount Washington in the winter. So, most days, the observers will find me enjoying the warmth of our living quarters. Sometimes, I’ll even lay directly on the heater in the living quarters when I am not warm enough.

Here’s Jen, the “Good News Girl,” narrating some video and facts about the Summit Cat:

And an Instagram post from the Observatory showing all the cold-weather gear that Nimbus has acquired. I seriously doubt, though, whether he ever dons this stuff. But look at his booties!

************************

Lagniappe 1: Larry the Cat in a photobomb

Lagniappe 2:  Cat vs. d*g (cat wins!)

Lagniappe 3: Cat vs. snow. Click on the picture to go to the video:

h/t: Andrew, Phil

But this is a reminder to send in your photo of cats with a Christmas theme.  The instructions are here and we have only about eight photos. (Note: the cat below is AI generated; we don’t want those!)

This is the second part of a batch of photos sent in by Neil K. Dawe from Vancouver Island, British Columbia. (His first batch, showing a visit to Darwin’s Down House is here.) Neil’s captions are indented and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The Eurasian Magpie (Pica pica) is a fairly common species in Britain. It was formerly considered conspecific with the Black-billed Magpie (Pica hudsonia) of North America and many authorities still consider them the same species. The magpie belongs to the corvid family, a group of some of the smartest birds including crows, ravens, and jays. The magpie is one of the few animals that is known to have self-awareness: an individual can pass the mirror test, recognizing itself in its mirrored reflection. Here’s a link to Ian Tyson’s descriptive song about this “pretty bird”:

 The Eurasian Jackdaw (Coloeus monedula) is another member of the corvid family, a common species throughout most of Britain. Jackdaw means “small crow”:

The Eurasian Blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) is common at feeders and was a familiar bird everywhere we went in Britain. It is known for its habit, first observed in the 1920s, of pecking through milk-bottle tops to sip the cream. Other blue tits quickly learned this behaviour through observation and by the 1950s most of Britain’s Eurasian Blue Tit population had learned this behaviour. However, with the advent of supermarkets and the stopping of doorstep milk delivery the habit has since died out. Interestingly, some European Robins (Erithacus rubecula) also acquired this behaviour but it never spread to the entire robin population as it did with the blue tits.

Blue Tit

The Great Tit (Parus major) was a common bird in most of the places we visited on our travels. Since spring temperatures have been increasing due to climate heating, a mismatch has occurred between the hatching of nestling tits and the peak caterpillar hatch, an important food for nestlings. This has caused a selection for earlier Great Tit egg-laying dates by up to 11 days and a shortening of the fledging period by 3–4 days. Second broods are also now more common:

The European Robin (Erithacus rubecula) gave its name to the American Robin (Turdus migratorius) whose reddish breast reminded early European Settlers of this familiar European bird:

The Dunnock (Prunella modularis), nicknamed the “hedge sparrow” has cooperative nesting behaviour, most often in the form of polyandry with two males and a female tending the nest and young. Polygyny has been reported to a lesser extent:

In Britain, males of the Common Chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs) tend to overwinter near their breeding areas while the females migrate further south, hence the male nickname “bachelor finch”:

The European Goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis) is a favourite cagebird in parts of its range. One study found it to be extinct or very scarce in the wild in much of Algeria and Tunisia but estimated a captive population of 15.6 million across the entire western Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia). The practice of catching and keeping caged migratory birds is no longer allowed in Britain:

Yes, it’s that time of year again: time to send in photos of your Christmas cats (or, if you have a Jewish cat, a Hanukkah-themed photo). If I get twenty pictures, I’ll put them together for a Christmas Day/beginning of Koynezaa post.

The rules are simple:

a. Email me a photo of your moggy/moggies with a Christmas theme. If you don’t know where to send them, go here

b. One picture per customer, even if you have multiple cats.

c.  Give the name or names of the cats, and say a few words about them.

Have them to me by Dec. 23 or so.  Now’s the time to make your cat famous and show it off.

Thanks!

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “tree2,” is actually described as “A resurrection from 2006.” The barmaid, ever critical, points out that God is not a helicopter parent.

I do appreciate readers “liking” posts or comments, but the problem is that each one generates an email to me, and there are many of them. The result is that my inbox is even more clogged up than usual, and that sometimes makes me miss messages.  So I’ll kindly ask readers to please refrain giving “likes.” If you especially appreciate a post or something I said, please show it by leaving it in the comments after a post, or sending me an email if you want direct contact. Many thanks!

I was of course appalled by the assassination of Charlie Kirk, just as I’m opposed to the assassination of any innocent person and nearly all “non-innocent’ people. And no, I didn’t agree with most of what Kirk said or stood for, but we can disagree with people without suggesting that they be killed, or celebrating when they are killed. I did agree with Kirk’s view, which some thing was phony, to promote discourse and exchange of views with one’s opponents.

But when people like Kirk push religious behaviors or values, I can still criticize their proselytizing. For Charlie Kirk was a Christian, and pushing Christianity was an important part of his message.  Yesterday he was helped along by the Free Press, which, along with other “mainstream” sites like the NY Times, is increasingly trying to tell us how religion is good for us—it fills the “God-shaped hole” in our being.  Notice that Kirk’s recommended Sabbath rest is part of the book’s message, and we’re supposed to kick back on the weekends, not to rest from the travails of the world, or because it recharges us, but because God tells us so. (Granted, Kirk does point out research showing the benefits of resting, but to Kirk, religion is central to this rest.) And Kirk’s new book from which the piece was taken is called Stop in the Name of God (an alteration of a Supremes song). From the book’s website:

In a world that never slows down, where busyness is worn as a badge of honor and screens dictate our every move, Stop in the Name of God offers a radical yet profoundly simple invitation: pause, rest, and reconnect. Through the transformative practice of honoring the Sabbath, bestselling author Charlie Kirk guides readers to reclaim a sacred rhythm that restores balance, nurtures the soul, and strengthens relationships. This book is not about escaping modern life-it’s about living it more fully, intentionally, and meaningfully.

Yesterday’s article, touting “Charlie Kirk’s final message to America,” is telling us to keep the Sabbath, and keep it in a way that the Bible recommends in Genesis and Exodus. (Presumably Kirk didn’t agree with the Old Testament’s approbation of genocide, though.)

The whole article, consisting of a bit by Kirk’s wife Erika followed by an excerpt from Kirk’s book, is introduced with approbation by the FP editors, who link to his book on a site where the FP may make a profit. The intro (bold and italics are from the original).

In the final years of his life, Charlie Kirk wrote a book. It’s about the importance of observing the Sabbath in our increasingly frenetic age; of resisting, for one day a week, your smartphone, your work, the distractions of modern life—and dedicating yourself to what’s truly important.

Stop, In the Name of God will be published posthumously on December 9. We’re honored to share an exclusive excerpt with you today. But first, there is no one better to introduce Charlie’s final message to America than his widow, Erika Kirk. —The Editors

Many people think their work is truly important, though. I know of many writers who didn’t take a stipulated day off to rest. Yes, they took time off, but not because God said so.

Click to read the article:

There’s an intro from Kirk’s widow Erika, and I do feel horrible for her, seeing her husband killed in front of her along with their two children. Kirk was only 31, and their kids will grow up without their dad.  Erika gives an introduction, and I do admire her for continuing one important part of her husband’s message: to have free discourse with your political opponents:

This, I think, is what saved him from burnout. Charlie didn’t write a book about the Sabbath because he wanted to learn the impact that it would have on his life. He did it because he knew it worked. The Sabbath saved him.

Writing it wasn’t easy. In every page, you can see the depth of theological and scientific research that went into it. There’s an area in our home with lots of plants in it; that was his secret garden. After work, very late at night when the kids were asleep, he would go there. And even if it was 30 minutes, 10 minutes, five minutes a day, he would write.

. . . There is a reason this book isn’t political. Charlie wanted to heal the country, and he saw his conversations with students on campus as a piece of the puzzle. But when he was on campus, if someone was screaming at him, he knew they weren’t actually listening. When you’re constantly combative and fighting, you have no time to treat other people like human beings. Charlie genuinely felt that if the world had a weekly day of rest, just one, it would be the ultimate game changer.

First, note that Charlie’s way of healing the country is not a way that many of us would follow: he was pushing the Christian Right. Further, although his message isn’t political, it is based on Christianity, and that’s the part I oppose. In the part of Kirk’s book excerpted below, he deals with six objections to taking a Sabbath rest. Again, perhaps most people already do benefit from a weekend rest, but they are having it anyway! There’s no need to do it because God thinks it’s good when you’re doing it.. Just leave out the God part, since there’s no evidence for Him anyway. (I hate capitalizing “Him”, as it implies God exists).

Here’s how Kirk answers people who say they feel guilty taking a day or two off (the rest are excerpt from his book, and all bolding is mine):

If taking one day off makes you anxious or ashamed, then you must ask, What am I really worshipping? No idol condemns rest like the idol of productivity. This is the golden calf of the modern age. We bow to output, chase metrics, and sacrifice our joy on the altar of efficiency.

But our identity must be anchored in something far greater than toil. Work is good—it reflects God’s creative nature. But rest is holy—it reflects His sufficiency. The same God who calls us to labor for six days also commands us to rest for one. That’s not weakness; that’s worship.

Here’s part of his answer to people who say “I’m too busy to take a Sabbath”. The bold part is mine:

About five weekends out of the year—sometimes more—it becomes genuinely difficult for me to take a Sabbath. Occasionally, I’m asked to speak at conferences, churches, or public forums that fall squarely on weekends. And in those moments, I face the same tension many of you do: How do I honor God when life won’t slow down?

Here’s my answer: I do everything in my power to plan around it. But when that’s not possible, I get creative and deliberate. If I have to work on Saturday, I take Sunday as my Sabbath. If both days are booked and filled with travel or obligations, I plan ahead to block off the following weekend for extended rest—phone off, no emails, no output.

The goal isn’t a rigid formula—it’s a reordered life. The Sabbath is not meant to shame you into rest, but to awaken you to how much you’ve been missing.

You are also teaching your family something profound. Every time you pause your productivity and make room for stillness, you are discipling your children. You are showing them that faith isn’t confined to church pews but is woven into time itself.

And from the finale:

Don’t be afraid to turn off your phone. You’re not falling behind—you’re catching up to what matters most. The people in front of you. The presence of God. The peace you’ve been craving.

Now don’t get me wrong: it may be useful for some people to abstain from work or take phone calls on the weekend. (Kirk also reads scripture, sleeps, plays with his kids, and abstains from alcohol.) But for others, and those include me, I enjoy working (mostly writing and reading now), and I don’t spend that much time on the phone. Remember, many, many people don’t like their jobs and would appreciate time off, regardless of why one gets it. But I think you can see that this article’s publication is of a piece of what seems to be a new movement: cure the perceived malaise of people today by imbuing them with religious (often Christian) values.

In fact, Kirk’s message is pretty much the same as Jon Haidt’s, who’s long recommended that people abstain from devices, particularly kids. And that is to make us more social, more connected with each other. But you don’t need God to do that: Haidt is an atheist.  So you can get the benefits of rest, if you need it, without doing it in the name of God.  Religion may make people do some things that they need but wouldn’t do without it, but is that a reason to embrace Christianity. Humanists can certainly run their lives in a way not centered on a fictitious being and his fictitious book. You can also find a secular reason for the Sabbath in Jesus’s words (Mark 2:27): “And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.”

Here’s the central placement of Kirk’s message on the Free Press site yesterday.  I’m wondering if Bari Weiss and Nellie take a Sabbath, and I’m worried about what happens when Weiss becomes a big macher in the CBS News.

Remember, if Kirk transformed the country in the way he wanted to heal it, we would be living in a Christian theocracy and following the dictates of MAGA, but with strong religious overtones. That would not “heal” us.

Rik Gern is specializing in mushroom photos lately. Here are some photos from Wisconsin, though Rik lives in Austin, Texas. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Here are some more mushroom pictures from my recent trip to northern Wisconsin. This is the first of two batches dedicated to the ubiquitous Pinewood gingertail (Xeromphalina campanella). These technically edible, but bitter-tasting mushrooms are usually found in large clusters.

Here are some on a fallen tree:

This cluster was found at the base of a living tree:

A closeup of this group of Pinewood gingertails in an old tree stump gives the impression of giant mushrooms at the mouth of a cave!:

These mushrooms growing in the crevice of a tree look like more giants, this time growing on the side of a rocky cliff:

The rest of the pictures are of individual and clustered mushrooms growing on mossy logs. I don’t know what it is about this species that I find so beautiful, but to my eye they represent the Northwoods as much as the ferns and pine trees:

One more batch of these beauties is on the way!

At the Honest Broker website, writer Ted Gioia has an article summarizing his friend’s view of the bet and worst hit songs of the 1960s—perhaps the best decade in the history of pop and rock music. The article is below, and I’ll simply list a few songs from each category selected by his friend Chris Dalla Riva (he has a book on them, too). Dalla Riva also runs his own site, “Can’t get much higher“, which deals with a lot of interesting musical questions like “The greatest two-hit wonders”, e.g., Pink Floyd, Jimmy Buffett, and “Which music stars [of the Sixties] are being forgotten the fastest?” e.g., Peter & Gordon, jan & Dean.

At any rate, here is an excerpt from Gioia’s article and Dalla Riva’s selection of best and worst hits (songs that made #1) of the Sixties.  Quotations are indented, and my own comments are flush left. Click screenshot to read:

Excerpts:

Chris Dalla Riva is a guru of data analytics on popular culture. He’s been a longtime friend to The Honest Broker, and I’ve learned a lot from his work.

And now Chris has released a fun and fascinating book, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. This is the closest music writing gets to the freewheeling conversations ardent fans have among themselves about bands, songs, and rising or falling reputations.

But Uncharted Territory also draws on the scrupulous research that is Chris’s trademark. (You might have seen some of it on his Substack Can’t Get Much Higher.)

With his permission, I’m sharing an extract below on #1 hit songs of the 1960s. The entire book deserves your attention. You can learn more at this link.

This is from Dalla Rivia’s book:

When I decided that I was going to listen to every song to ever get to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, I wasn’t in a great spot. My mental health was suffering greatly, and I was working a job that I hated. Every waking moment outside of my job was spent with my guitar. Some nights I would literally fall asleep playing. Still, I did not feel good. And nothing seemed to help. Therapy. Medications. Exercise. Socializing. It was all a wash.

For some reason, I decided that a musical quest might help. I set out to listen to every number one hit since the Hot 100 was started in August 1958. Why? Again, I was a musician. I thought it might help my songwriting. Maybe I could unlock some secret to writing a hit and use the knowledge to quit my job. At the same time, I thought it might be good for my sanity. I would only listen to one song a day. Listening to one song a day is an easy thing to accomplish. Maybe one little win could right my mind.

And it kind of did. A friend soon joined me on my journey. Each day, I would text him the number one hit. We’d both listen a few times. I’d play along on my guitar. We’d talk about it and rate the song out of ten. I started tracking those ratings in a spreadsheet. Slowly, that spreadsheet began to balloon as I tracked a ton of other facts and figures. Trends began to emerge, and I started to write about them. My musings became Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. It’s a data-driven history of popular music that I wrote as I spent all those years listening to every number one song.

That’s an interesting task, and here are the author’s highlights with a few of them giving his comments:

“Georgia on My Mind” by Ray Charles (November 14, 1960)—The reason this song has been recorded hundreds of times is because the melody sounds like it was delivered from the high heavens. That’s not a shock. That melody was written by Hoagy Carmichael, the man behind classics like “Stardust” and “Heart and Soul.” But the reason you know this version of “Georgia on My Mind” rather than any other comes down to a different person: Ray Charles.

To state the obvious, Ray Charles was a talented piano player. You can hear that talent shine on the jazzy fills he sprinkles throughout this song. But his greatest instrument was his voice, a voice whose subtle slides and slurs could make Georgia feel like your home even if you’d never been within a thousand miles of it.

“Runaway” by Del Shannon (April 24, 1961)

“Running Scared” by Roy Orbison (June 5, 1961)

“He’s a Rebel” by The Crystals (November 3, 1962

“My Girl” by The Temptations (March 6, 1965)—When Smokey Robinson wrote “My Guy” for Mary Wells, I imagine he thought he’d never write a better song. “My Guy” is just so expertly crafted that burgeoning songwriters should study it. But then a year later, he decided to write a response to “My Guy” for The Temptations. Response songs were very common during the 1960s. Chubby Checker hits it big with “The Twist.” Joey Dee jumps on the bandwagon with the “Peppermint Twist.” Only one name made sense for Smokey’s response: “My Girl.”

“My Girl” is not just the greatest response song of all time, it might be the greatest song period. I’d go so far as to argue that if a random DJ in the twenty-first century cut off whatever booty-shaking track they were playing at the club on Friday night and put on “My Girl,” nobody would complain. Decades later, the ascending guitar riff and finger-snapping rhythm that drive this track remain as fresh as ever.

“Ticket to Ride” by The Beatles (May 22, 1965)

“You Keep Me Hangin’ On” by The Supremes (November 19, 1966)

“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of The Bay” by Otis Redding (March 16, 1968)

“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” by Marvin Gaye (December 14, 1968)—This song is about humiliating heartache. It’s about finding out your lover is done with you indirectly, through rumors circulating on the streets, rumors you are the last to be privy to.

That rumor starts with the keyboard playing a circular riff in its lower register. Then it moves to the drums, a soft thump, your heartbeat. Then it finds its way to the guitar and strings echoing the initial whisper of the keyboard. With each step, the truth becomes more apparent. Then Marvin Gaye arrives, the pain dripping from his voice, a voice whose range and control are nearly inhuman. He knows the truth, and even if “a man ain’t supposed to cry,” he can’t hide his pain.

Sadly, I don’t have time to look at the #1 songs myself, though I have to say that there are better songs by these groups or singers, but they may not have made #1. For instance, Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” is, to me, a lot better than “The dock of the bay,” and “Stop! In the name of love” by the Supremes beats “You keep me hanging on.”  There are others, but let’s go on to the worst songs.

“The Battle of New Orleans” by Johnny Horton (June 1, 1960)

“Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” by Brian Hyland (August 8, 1960)—This song is about a girl who is embarrassed by the yellow polka dot bikini she is wearing and runs from place to place to stay covered up. She starts in a changing room, then runs to a blanket, and then into the water. While in the water, she’s described as “turning blue” before the final line declares that there isn’t anywhere else for her to go. Call me crazy, but I think this irritating song might have a sinister, deathly undertone that everyone else has missed. And even if I’m imagining it, it still makes me feel sick.

“Moody River” by Pat Boone (June 19, 1961)

“Wooden Heart” by Joe Dowell (August 28, 1961)

“Go Away Little Girl” by Steve Lawrence (January 12, 1963)—My sister Natalie was walking through the room while I was listening to this song. 27-year-old Steve Lawrence crooning the words “Go away, little girl / I’m not supposed to be alone with you” stopped her dead in her tracks. “Is this by a pedophile?” she asked.

Despite how creepy that couplet might sound, the lyrics are not anything criminal. The song was composed by Carole King and Gerry Goffin about a man tempted to cheat on his lover. Albeit patronizing, the term “little girl” was common fare in pop songs at the time. In this era alone, it’s used in five additional songs, including The Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” (e.g., “I’m so glad that she’s my little girl”) and Tommy Roe’s “Sheila” (e.g., “Man this little girl is fine”). But when you need this many words to explain why a creepy-sounding song actually isn’t creepy, you’re probably not going to have people lining up to listen to it.

“Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” by Herman’s Hermits (May 1, 1965)

These last three are real stinkers, and they’re on my own personal list:

“The Ballad of the Green Berets” by SSgt. Barry Sadler (March 5, 1966)—When looking back at the 1960s, we often remember the scores of artists who wrote songs in protest of the Vietnam War. But there really were people who supported it. “The Ballad of the Green Berets” is proof of that. Topping the charts for five weeks on its way to becoming the tenth best-selling single of 1966, SSgt. Barry Sadler’s military march is an unabashed celebration of the armed forces, the soldier in his song dying with only one final request for his wife, namely that their son also serve. Now knowing about the endless, pointless destruction of the Vietnam War, this musical wish is hard to stomach.

“Honey” by Bobby Goldsboro (April 13, 1968)—Telling the story of a man whose wife died, “Honey” falls within the maudlin tragedy song tradition. But what makes this sappy song stand out is that it’s not clear whether the narrator ever really liked his wife. He describes her as “Kind of dumb and kind of smart,” while also recounting how he laughed himself to tears when she almost hurt herself falling in the snow. With lines like, “She wrecked the car and she was sad / And so afraid that I’d be mad, but what the heck,” the only thing you should feel after “Honey” is hope that you’ll never be in a relationship like this.

“In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)” by Zagar and Evans (July 12, 1969)—In Dave Barry’s novel Tricky Business, he describes a band that is forced to work the party circuit after they fail to make it big. When the group is asked to play a song that they don’t like, Barry describes how they then perform a retaliation song to punish the audience. “In the Year 2525” is described as the “hydrogen bomb” of retaliation songs. While I don’t know if I’d go that far, it’s a strange song that predicts the future in thousand-year increments. If Zager and Evans are correct, then in the year 4545 you’ll no longer need your teeth because “You won’t find a thing to chew.” Dentists, please beware!

And, just to supplement this list (actually, “Mrs. Brown” isn’t so bad), here’s my own personal list, compiled over decades, of the worst pop/rock songs ever. The “best” list is pages long, so I won’t include it. But if you can find “An open letter to my teenage son, list to it. Remember, many of these songs were after the sixties, so it’s not comparable.

Coyne’s Worst Songs Ever

Green Berets                                       Sgt. Barry Sadler

An Open Letter to My Teenage Son  Victor Lundberg

Spill the Wine (Dig that Girl)             Eric Burdon

I Got a Brand New Pair of Rollerskates         Melanie

I’ve Never Been to Me                                    Charlene

Octopus’ Garden                                 The Beatles

Macarthur Park                                   Richard Harris

Old Rivers                                           Walter Brennan

Take the Money and Run                   Steve Miller

Muskrat Love                                     The Captain and Tenille

The Name Game                                 Shirley Ellis

Drops of Jupiter                                  Train

Oh hell, I’ll also add my BEST list, but only between 1962 and 1969. Surely some of these made #1, but they’re not in the list above. They also don’t include soul music, of which I’ve kept a separate list. And THAT one is awesome (perhaps I’ll put it up some time). I have added “God only knows” by the Beach Boys, which came out in 1966.

Coyne;’s best non-soul songs, 1962-1969

Light My Fire                         The Doors

Nowhere Man                         Beatles

Eleanor Rigby                         Beatles

In My Life                              Beatles

Got to Get You into My Life  Beatles

Please Please Me                    Beatles

A Day in the Life                    Beatles

Louie Louie                            The Kingsmen

Sweet Judy Blue Eyes            Crosby, Stills & Nash

49 Reasons                              Crosby Stills & Nash

Bluebird                                  Buffalo Springfield

Rock & Roll Woman              Buffalo Springfield

On the Way Home                  Buffalo Springfield

Feel a Whole Lot Better         The Byrds

Eight Miles High                    The Byrds

Mr. Tambourine Man             The Byrds

Turn! Turn! Turn!                   The Byrds

Touch Me                               The Doors

Honky Tonk Woman              The Rolling Stones

Venus in Furs                          Velvet Underground

Heroin                                     Velvet Underground

California Dreaming               Mamas & Papas

I Saw Her Again                     Mamas & Papas

Younger Girl                           Lovin’ Spoonful

Summer in the City                Lovin’ Spoonful

Groovin’                                  Young Rascals

Wouldn’t It Be Nice                The Beach Boys

Don’t Worry Baby                  The Beach Boys

God Only Knows                     The Beach Boys

Little Deuce Coupe                 The Beach Boys

Badge                                      Cream

Positively 4th Street               Bob Dylan

Angel                                      Jimi Hendrix

I Only Wanna Be With You   Dusty Springfield

Take Another Little Piece of My Heart          Big Bro. & Holding Co.

Along Comes Mary                The Association

Israelites                                  Desmond Dekker

You Don’t Have to Say you Love Me            Dusty Springfield

I Only Want to be With You  Dusty Springfield

These choices are subjective, of course, so feel free to weigh in on either my choices or Dalla Rivia’s:

h/t Barry

We have a bunch of kangaroo photos from Scott Ritchie of Cairns, Australia. Scott’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. (His Facebook page is here.)

My last report from my Melbourne to Sydney trip. From Depot Beach New South Wales. It was epic. We stayed in a national park cabin that looked out over the ocean. And at 5 o’clock our front lawn became the bar for Eastern Grey Kangaroos [Macropus giganteus]. And in the morning, you could take pictures of the kangaroos watching the sunrise. What could be better for a boy from Iowa?

We had a ringside seat for roos. Would have been over a dozen here, not including joeys in the pouch:

The boys like a bit of rough and tumble:

They are smart to avoid those claws: ..just barely:

Squaring off:

I missed the kick shot. A sudden loud thump. Then the fight was over. One kick!:

I don’t know how this is going work!:

But somehow it does:

White-faced Heron [Egretta novaehollandiae] loves a roo too:

Cute:

Hanging loose:

Just in time for smoko:

I love pan pipes:

It’s a tight fit:

Come on big fella. I’m already familied up:

 

Sunrise at Depot Beach:

Roo at sunrise:

Great way to start the day:

Isn’t it lovely?

This eclectic ZeFrank video was sent to me via reader Keith, who notes that ZeFrank is also on an “educational channel” containing videos that have been bowdlerized for educational use. But this one isn’t on it, and I think we’re all adults here. (“Jerry”, referred to several times, must be the producer.)

The first bit is about nematodes (“roundworms”), which inhabit a variety of environments and have a variety of lifestyles, including gross but fascinating parasites.  The discussion of how parasitic nematodes infect insects, using electrostatic charge, is amazing, and the same method is used by ticks and mites. (There’s an ad between 4:22 and 5:38 but it’s for Planet Wild, which has a good mission.)

We then learn that electrostatic fields promote the pollination of flowers by bees. We also see again how bees use thoracic vibration to gather pollen, something that Athayde Tonhasca Júnior wrote about the other day. Finally, we get a lesson on the physics of how hatchling spiders disperse by spinning threads that they release into the atmosphere to drag them away from the hatch site: this is a way of finding a new and possibly better habitat.

As usual, the video is terrific and the science accurate.

 

This morning I posted a photo showing animal tracks in the snow. Here it is again, along with a bonus photo:

Well, it’s not a d*g or cat or squirrel. Nope, it’s one of my friends whom I often see walking to work.  Here’s a photo taken in 2012:

Yep, it’s an Eastern cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus). Several of them live near the spot where I took the photos above, and there’s no doubt in my mind.  If you want confirmation, check the photos from a Google search of “rabbit tracks in snow”. ]

Why the big prints followed by small ones?  Backpack explains:

As it hops, an animal’s smaller front feet tend to land first, followed by the larger back feet, which plant ahead of the front feet. Picture a rabbit planting its front paws and swinging its back paws in front as it bounces through the snow. Clumps of four prints indicate that a hopper has passed through.

Well, it looks as though the front feet often land in the same small area, but there’s no doubt it’s a bunny. And, like me, Mr. Bun-Bun is bereft of food, for the grass he eats is covered with snow.

How much genetic difference separates us from our closest relatives? The conventional wisdom about humans and our closest ape relatives (chimps and bonobos) is that we share 98% of our DNA. That’s a big similarity, and implies that if we lined up our genomes side by side, only about 2 out of 100 DNA bases would differ. This figure is often used to show that we have only a tiny genetic difference from our closest relatives. To quote W. S. Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan, “Darwinian man, though well-behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved.”  Well, the differences go farther than mere shaving.

The “98% similarity figure” is wrong. And it’s wrong for several reasons. First, most ape genomes (chimps, gorillas, orangs, etc.) have not been as thoroughly sequenced as was the human genome. A lot of the data that went into the 98% figure was missing.  Second, you can’t just compare genomes by lining them up and looking for differences in base pairs at similar sequences.

Why not? Because the notion of “similar sequences” is ambiguous and, sometimes, meaningless. Since we diverged from our ape ancestors, there have been a lot of changes in every species’ DNA that prohibit us from simply “lining up the genomes”.  Transposable elements have invaded some species but not others, bits of the DNA have been duplicated, so there are species that have sequences that are not homologous. Bits of the genome have been inverted (turned around and reinserted), causing big differences in sequence in previously similar sequences. Further, pieces of the DNA have been moved from one chromosome to another, so DNA sequences previously in the same place are now in another place, leading to a difference in total sequence.

All this leads to a substantially greater DNA divergence between humans and chimps than the 98% figure.  These extra genomic differences were sussed out by Yoo et al. in a Nature paper  from April of last year that you can read by clicking below (or find the pdf here).They did a much improved job in sequencing six of our ape relatives: the chimp (Pan troglodytes), bonobo (Pan paniscus), Western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii), and the siamang (Symphalangus syndactylus), an endangered species of gibbon from SE Asia.

First, the authors give a revised set of divergence times based on DNA differences between living species.  The human vs. chimp/bonobo species, for example, split from their common ancestor about 5.5-6.3 million years ago (mya), roughly in line with previous estimates. The divergence between humans and other African apes (gorillas) occurred between 10.6 and 10.9 mya, and that between humans and orangutans about 18.2-19.6 mya.

There is a ton of genomic information in the paper, including a lessening of the similarity between humans and chimps, but also specific information about what genes and regulatory bits of DNA differ among species. These differences suggest some some intriguing future research. I’ll mention just a couple, but will refer you instead to a long tweet below which shows why the human-chimp differences have increased. It’s an excellent tweet that you can read pretty quickly, though it doesn’t detail all the many differences that the researchers describe in the Nature paper, which is exhausting for those outside the field. There are also genes whose sequences changed very rapidly, suggesting that they were acted on by natural selection.

There are a gazillion sequence and structural differences revealed among the species, including 229 bits of ape DNA (all species) that have evolved rapidly and are thus candidates for natural selection. The paper also reveals parts of the DNA that have evolved especially rapidly in the human lineage since we split from chimps/bonobos. These regions are called HAQERS, and could be candidates for the Holy Grail of such work: seeing “what makes us human”. But that question is a bit misguided.

Nevertheless, the authors found one gene, ADCYAP1, that “is differentially regulated in speech circuits.” The implication is that the changes may have something to do with why humans are the only ape with syntactic spoken language, but that gene does a lot of other stuff, too, so I don’t take that implication seriously. The FOXP2 gene, which evolved rapidly in the modern human genome relative to other species, has mutations that impede people’s ability to speak, and I well remember when it was touted as “the language gene” that enabled humans to speak. But further research showed that the accelerated human evolution of the gene was an artifact, and that the normal function of the gene is manyfold, so nobody these days takes FOXP2 seriously as the “speech gene”. All claims should be regarded as caveat emptor.

There are also several genes that are not only unique to humans, but are “associated with human evolution of the frontal cortex”, suggesting these account for our big brains. The photo below comes from the tweet shown next, and its caption comes from that tweet. (The average chimp brain is about 400 g in mass—less than a third the mass of the human brain, which weighs in at 1300-1400 g in adults.)  Again, caveat emptor with regard to the two specified genes.

Figure 3. Radiograph illustrating cranial expansion in the human lineage, which is associated with increased neocortical growth – Chimpanzee skull (left), Modern Human skull (right).

Other genes that differ strongly among ape species involve those producing immunoglobulin, major histocompatibility products (MCH) and T-cell receptors, but especially immunoglobulin genes—involved in production of antibodies. Why have these evolved so rapidly within apes? Your guess is as good as mine, but suggests that reaction to antigens was an important element of ape evolution.

Here is the authors’ summary, and most of the paper will be of interest only to geneticists familiar with the argot (not necessarily me):

The complete sequencing of the ape genomes analysed in this study significantly refines previous analyses and provides a valuable resource for all future evolutionary comparisons. These include an improved and more nuanced understanding of species divergence, human-specific ancestral alleles, incomplete lineage sorting, gene annotation, repeat content, divergent regulatory DNA and complex genic regions as well as species-specific epigenetic differences involving methylation. These preliminary analyses revealed hundreds of new candidate genes and regions to account for phenotypic differences among the apes. For example, we observed an excess of HAQERS corresponding to bivalent promoters thought to contain gene-regulatory elements that exhibit precise spatiotemporal activity patterns in the context of development and environmental response99. Bivalent chromatin-state enrichments have not yet been observed in fast-evolving regions from other great apes, which may reflect limited cross-species transferability of epigenomic annotations from humans. The finding of a HAQER-enriched gene, ADCYAP1, that is differentially regulated in speech circuits and methylated in the layer 5 projection neurons that make the more specialized direct projections to brainstem motor neurons in humans shows the promise of T2T genomes to identify hard to sequence regions important for complex traits. Perhaps most notably, we provide an evolutionary framework for understanding the about 10–15% of highly divergent, previously inaccessible regions of ape genomes. In this regard, we highlight a few noteworthy findings.

The importance of the paper for now seems to be the presentation of the sequences and their differences rather than explaining the differences or their significance in ape adaptations—especially in humans—for studying adaptive hypotheses involves a lot of work for each single region that differs among species or evolved quickly. Nevertheless, useful questions have been raised—like why genes involved in the immune response changed so rapidly—that will be subject to future work.

I am not sure who runs the Origins Unveiled site dealing with evolutionary anthropology, but based on the clarity of the tweet below from that site (click on screenshot to see the tweet in situ), it deserves more followers. It’s only about a year old, which may explain the follower issue.

This tweet from September of this year explains why the 98% similarity between humans and chimps drops to 84.7% when you take translocations, inversion, duplications, insertions, and other genomic rearrangements into account. And these rearrangements are not necessarily trivial, for duplications can lead to divergent gene families, and insertions can act to regulate genes in a new way.

Again, click below and read; it’s short and lucid:

I’ve shown one figure from the tweet above: the brain differences. Below is another figure showing how the 99% similarity between humans and chimps has traditionally been calculated, requiring alignment of nearly identical but perhaps slightly different bits of DNA. All captions come from the tweet. This figure shows how they line up chimp and human sequences (you see the gross similarity), but also that here there’s been a single nucleotide substitution in one of the two lineages, rendering this sequence 92.3% similar. (This is a made-up sequence for purposes of illustration.)  When you did that with the whole genome comparison based on earlier data, you got about a 2% difference. The problem, as I said, is that we didn’t have great chimp (or any ape) sequences and there are parts that you simply couldn’t line up this way. And those parts, when compared among species, increase the genetic difference between us and our closest relatives.

Figure 1 — Simplified Mock Alignment Illustrating Nucleotide Sequence Similarity Between Chimpanzee and Human Genomes. Out of 13 positions, one substitution (single-nucleotide variant, circled in red) results in ~92.3% DNA similarity. This example demonstrates the methodology behind the misleading 98–99% human-chimpanzee DNA similarity figures.

Below is another figure showing how various rearrangements, insertions, deletions, and translocations reduce similarity, but I’ll show only four of the six parts of the figure, giving the captions for a-d. You can see how these changes make humans and chimps less genetically similar than previously thought (again, captions come from the tweet; click to enlarge).  These are also “mock alignments” meant for purposes of illustration, but they do show the kind of thing seen in the Yoo et al. paper:

Figure 2 — Simplified Mock Alignments Illustrating Structural Variation Between Chimpanzee and Human Genomes. Note: Structural variants are not taken into account when calculating the 98–99% Chimpanzee-Human DNA similarity figures.
( a) Insertions and deletions contributing to sequence divergence. Out of 34 positions, 3 indels (insertions circled in orange; deletions in yellow) result in ~91.2% DNA similarity. Note: These indels are relative, as without a suitable outgroup (i.e. gorilla), an insertion in one genome appears as a deletion in the other.
(b) Duplication contributing to sequence divergence. Out of 34 positions, a duplication of 12 bases (duplicated segment encircled in blue; original in purple) results in ~64.7% DNA similarity.
(c) Inversion contributing to sequence divergence. Out of 34 positions, an inversion of 11 bases (encircled in green) results in ~67.6% DNA similarity. Note: Although bases may match within the inverted region, they do not contribute to sequence similarity due to misalignment. Without a suitable outgroup (i.e. gorilla), it is unknown whether the inversion occurred on the chimpanzee or human genome.
(d) Translocation contributing to sequence divergence. Out of 34 positions, a translocation of 20 bases (encircled in brown) results in ~41.2% DNA similarity. Note: A translocation is a DNA segment that has been “copy and pasted” or “cut and pasted” from another part of the genome.

So, when you hear that we’re nearly genetically identical to our closest relatives, just say, “Wait a tick. Not all that identical.” We have about 15% difference in sequence, which is not trivial.

UPDATE: I’m aware now that creationists and IDers have been using this 85% to cast doubt on human evolution, our place in the ape family tree, and whether evolutionists are honest.  This is bogus: the 85% vs. 98% depends on two different methods of calculating similarity. Which ever method you choose (alignment vs. total genomic similarity), the same family tree of the great apes appears, with chimps/bonobos our closest ancestors, then gorillas a bit more distance, and then orangutans, and then other apes.  The point of this post is not to cast doubt on human or ape evolution, but to show different ways of calculating genetic similarity.

Today we have some marine mammal photos taken by Marcel van Oijen. Marcel’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.  Here’s a screenshot of the site, the island of Inchkeith:

Seal pup counting on the island of Inchkeith

Marcel van Oijen

The island of Inchkeith lies a few km from Scotland’s capital Edinburgh in the Firth of Forth, the sea-arm to the north. The last human to live on the island, the lighthouse-keeper, left in 1986. (The lighthouse is now controlled remotely from Edinburgh as are most lighthouses in Scotland.) Wildlife has since come back, and there is now a thriving colony of grey seals (Halichoerus grypus) producing around 900 pups each year. I took the photos below during the pup count of 29 November organised by the Forth Islands Heritage Group of volunteers.

This is near the harbour where we arrived, and we had to be careful not to get too close. Fortunately the female was busy keeping the male away from her pup. Cannibalism does happen occasionally.

Looking back to the harbour with the second group of volunteers just arriving. Note the many seals on the beach and in the water

Mating couple. The female life cycle is intense: a few weeks after giving birth and after the pup is weaned, they can be impregnated again:

This pup has moulted (i.e., lost its fluffy white baby-coat called the lanugo), so it will be three to four weeks old. At that age pups will be weaned and have to fend for themselves.

Two young pups who have just begun moulting, starting from the head:

Female seals carefully watching us:

This pup is nearly done moulting, some fluff left on top:

A moulted pup with an unusual colour, not the standard dappled grey:

Overview of ‘our’ patch of the island where we counted around 200 pups:

The most affectionate mother we saw on the island. She occasionally rolled on her back with eyes closed but always kept patting her pup with her front flipper:

Looking back to Inchkeith with fond memories!:

Well, winter is still two weeks away, but tell that to the clouds.  Last night it snowed several inches in Chicago—and it’s still coming down. The streets seem impassable, putting the kibosh on my plans to do grocery shopping today, and I’m out of the essentials at work, including peanut butter and tuna.

But it’s still lovely. Here, for example, is Botany Pond. I hope the turtles are hibernating safely despite the pond’s gravel bottom.

My tracks on the way to work. Could you identify these as human tracks? It looks as if I was weaving drunkenly, but I was just avoiding certain spots.

But here are tracks of another creature. The quiz is, WHAT MADE THESE TRACKS?  Answer at 11 a.m. Chicago time.  Please don’t put your answers in the comments, but if you think you know, do say that.

And you’re lucky if you can get to the grocery store!

For the past two weeks I have had bits of a song’s melody in my head, but I couldn’t remember any words, and that made it tough to remember.  Then, last night, I remembered a bit of one line, which, in my brain, went “Didn’t it seem right to walk along the beach last night”, but I still couldn’t find the song from Googling that, either. (It turns out that the word is “sand,” not “beach”.)  Amazingly, though, as soon as I remembered that line I remembered the end of the stanza as well its title “It could be we’re in love”.  Then I was able to find it by Googling.

It amazes me that my brain had been working unconscionsly on this thing for weeks, and finally the neurons came through for me.

The song is “It Could Be We’re in Love”, released in 1967 by The Cryan’ Shames, a Chicago group. It’s a good but not a fantastic song, but it’s catchy and somehow it was lingering in my brain and popped up for unknown reasons.  There are two versions, one with laughing in it and another with some psychedelic vibrato. I’ll put up both.

First, the better 1966 psychedelic version released on LP: (psychedelic vibrato at 1:41).

And here’s the laughing version, from the 1967 single (laughing at 1:49):

The Jesus and Mo artist sent this cartoon with the caption: “A Chrismassy Friday Flashbacck today, from 9 years ago.” Jesus is beefing about the nonexistent “war on Christmas” in the UK:

Please send in your good wildlife photos (with “wildlife” construed broadly) if you have them. So far we can continue on.

Today’s bird photos are by Ephraim Heller, continuing with his pictures from the Pantanal wetlands of Brazil. Ephraim’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

These photos are from my July 2025 trip to Brazil’s Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland area and the world’s largest flooded grasslands. Today I have photos of a toucans, aracaris, woodpeckers, and “cardinals.” It’s a random assemblage of species, but all the adult males have at least some red feathers so I declare it to be a cohesive post.

Toco toucan (Ramphastos toco). The largest and most recognizable toucan species. Despite its size, the bill is lightweight due to internal honeycomb structure. Per Wikipedia:

Research has shown that one function is as a surface area for heat exchange. The bill has the ability to modify blood flow and so regulate heat distribution in the body, allowing for the use of the bill as a thermal radiator. In terms of surface area used for this function, the bill relative to the bird’s size is amongst the largest of any animal and has a network of superficial blood vessels supporting the thin horny sheath on the bill made of keratin called the rhamphotheca. In its capacity to remove body heat, the bill is comparable to that of elephant ears.

This one kindly posed against the full moon before dawn:

The enormous beak helps the toco reach fruit on small branches:

Chestnut-eared Aracari (Pteroglossus castanotis). Just a small, cute toucan:

Green-barred Woodpecker (Colaptes melanochloros). The green-barred woodpecker’s diet is almost entirely ants including their larvae and pupae. Yum!:

Little woodpecker (Veniliornis passerinus). As you can see, it is a hard worker:

Female:

Male:

 

Pale-crested woodpecker (Celeus lugubris):

Yellow tufted woodpecker (Melanerpes cruentatus):

Now for the “cardinals.” Why the quotation marks? Because neither the yellow-billed cardinal nor the red-crested cardinal are true cardinals. Both belong to the tanager (Thraupidae) family, not the cardinal family (Cardinalidae). Now why would you go and call a tanager by the name cardinal? I’m outraged by it. How did the naming bodies allow this? In my opinion it puts all of science in a bad light with the general public, like cold fusion.

Red-crested cardinal (Paroaria coronata):

Yellow-billed cardinal (Paroaria capitata):

Please write to your congressperson and ask them to immediately address this issue. Tell them to “follow the science.”