The underground homes, often a
century old, are topped with gardens exploding with lush dune
grass, diamondleaf willows, and yellow wildflowers—a flash of color in
an otherwise gray landscape.
“They’re bright green and everything around them is just brown,” says Brian Person, a wildlife biologist for the North Slope Borough in Barrow, Alaska. “It pops”…
I can die happy now that I know this fact.
I am now picturing soft little foxes with watering cans and spades planting and tending to their Fox Gardens
gettin ready for the winter
Even though it’s not deliberate, literal gardening, it’s still a really cool example of how plants depend not only on the animals that eat and/or germinate and/or spread their seeds around, but also on the animals that eat other animals. Healthy predator populations are really important for maintaining plant communities within an ecosystem, which is something that often gets overlooked when people talk about protecting specific ecosystems.
A famous recent example of this has been the research into the recovery of plant communities (and, heck, other animal populations) in Yellowstone National Park since the reintroduction of wolves. There is some debate about other factors like drought, but it’s possible that the wolves have been helping to control elk populations in areas that previously lost a lot of their trees due to elk eating them. Those trees also support other species as sources of food and shelter.
“Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
A little doodle for one the most beautiful lines from any poem, The Old Astronomer.
This is not a little doodle. This. THIS. This is fucking MAGIC. You have captured pure wonder and whimsy and romance and bliss and that almost melancholy wholeness when you look up at the sky and just feel the smallness of your being and the grandness of the universe. All this captured with a lover’s eye. We cannot see her face but I feel the tender passionate ardour for this petite but mighty creature in the world. While at the same time I feel the bittersweet swoon of wanting to be gazed upon myself with such whole and overwhemling admiration and love. It is goddamn masterful.
I am fucking following your tumblr charliebowater you are amazing.
yesterday my lyft driver had a gps that read off directions in what was obviously some sort of specific customized voice
so i was like ‘hey, why does this sound familiar?’
and he was like ‘oh i downloaded it special. it’s colonel sanders.’
never in my life had a stranger thrown me such a goddamn conversational curveball.
was this an official branded piece of content marketing by kfc? why? why would you go to the trouble of auditioning and hiring a voice actor to impersonate your now-dead founder guiding people onto the i-95, like the world’s least interesting benevolent spirit? colonel sanders was a real dude who is now dead; that is a flipping weird thing for a company to spend money on. is this some misguided corporate attempt to try to revamp his image, like ‘yeah he was a plantation-y southern gentleman and symbolically there’s no way it’s not at least a little racist to glorify him but look…he did just help you get to ikea’
on the other hand, if it’s not affiliated with the company that raises SO MANY MORE questions, like who did this? does colonel sanders have some sort of underground fan community? was there a forum somewhere on the internet where colonel sanders die-hards were all wistfully expressing their longing to have that fried chicken guy’s voice drawling in their ear during long road trips and then finally one lone man stepped forward to fill that gap with a microphone, a dream, and a sub-par fake southern accent
what i said was, ‘…huh’
‘i had t-pain’s voice for a while but it got old really fast,’ said my driver
‘turn right,’ said colonel sanders
‘mm-hmm,’ i said
‘there’s a traffic camera up ahead,’ said colonel sanders. ‘if anyone asks, i was with you last night.’ then he chuckled, in a warm, folksy manner.
i realize this probably sounds like some sort of twisted postmodern tumblr joke, but no, these were the actual pre-recorded words the actual app said.
‘did your gps just jokingly imply colonel sanders committed a murder yesterday and needs an alibi,’ i asked.
‘what?’ said the driver, changing lanes. ‘yeah i guess.’
never in my life had a gps thrown me such a goddamn conversational curveball
like. was it a gps at all, or some sort of experimental new form of fiction, an avant garde crime story delivered in tiny dribbles in and among every hundred navigational tips? but no, if so we are talking some TRUE UNSOLVED MYSTERIES shit, because why the fuck is your dark antihero colonel fucking sanders?
was it a gps at all, or was the deceased wing-and-drumstick magnate now a vengeful ghost and my driver a bold and resourceful ghost-hunter who somehow managed to trap that malignant specter inside the car and bind the colonel’s will to his own and then use that will to get us to the airport via the most efficient available route?
either way, the driver did not divulge his secrets. the colonel droned on. the ride ended. the car drove away and still the truth eluded me, slippery as greased corn.
somebody call a paranormal investigator because we have a lot of shit to work out
