Lichens at Coyote Hills

Coyote Hills Regional Park is a special place tucked against the east shore of San Francisco Bay in Fremont. It is rich in habitat– from marshland to rolling hills featuring interesting Franciscan complex outcroppings– and has a long human history, indicated by an old Ohlone village site and shellmound. The lichens growing on the reddish radiolarian chert are the most lovely I know of in the Bay Area...

Love, oh love, oh careless love

Source.

Oscars wrap-up

I did see "The Favourite," and though I wasn't all that fond of it, Olivia Colman was awesome. I didn't see "Bohemian Rhapsody," and though in fact you'd have to pay me to see it, I do like Rami Malek in "Mr. Robot," so... good for him! I liked "BlacKkKlansman" and would like to see Spike Lee win more Oscars. That's all!

Conserving the Magnitude of Uselessness

Pied Beauty for the atheist... the poet... or both...

Conserving the Magnitude of Uselessness
A.R. Ammons

Spits of glitter in lowgrade ore,
precious stones too poorly surrounded for harvest,
to all things not worth the work
of having,

brush oak on a sharp slope, for example,
the balk tonnage of woods-lodged boulders,
the irreparable desert,
drowned river mouths, lost shores where

the winged and light-footed go,
take creosote bush that possesses
ground nothing else will have,
to all things and for all things

crusty or billowy with indifference,
for example, incalculable, irremovable water
or fluvio-glacial deposits
larch or dwarf aspen in the least breeze sometimes shiver in---

suddenly the salvation of waste betides,
the peerlessly unsettled seas that shape the continents,
take the gales wasting and in waste over
Antarctica and the sundry high shoals of ice,

for the inexcusable (the worthless abundant) the
merely tiresome, the obviously unimprovable,
to these and for these and for their undiminishment
the poets will yelp and hoot forever

probably,
rank as weeds themselves and just as abandoned:
nothing useful is of lasting value:
dry wind only is still talking among the oldest stones.

S/he cardinal

Who knew it was possible? A cardinal under any circumstances is already some kind of little miracle.

Go West

As AOC and Bernie try to restore socialism's good name, we'll hear plenty of red-baiting. Why not get it all out in the open with some high-concept homoerotic Soviet-style socialist realism? And who better to do it than the Pet Shop Boys?

Grammys

I watched most of it. Happy to see the women being recognized. Great: Brandi Carlile. Good: Janelle Monáe, Cardi B. Bad: Kacey Musgraves (love you Kacey, but ouch...), Lady Gaga. Indifferent: the rest, including Alicia Keys.

I know it's all about pop and commerce and "youth." But really... no jazz? no classical? You want youth, how about Felix M, who wrote this crazy wonderful thing when he was 16. Sweet 16!

Lichen is fungal, mostly

It sops up the rain like a sponge... or a moss. I can't vouch for my phone getting the colors exactly right, but pretty close.

Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 84

Isn't it cool when you cut your hand and the blood is red instead of sellout green?