No real bees, either. I have to believe that some bees are more painful than fire ants!

The LifeGem is surprisingly pretty, but kind of creepy. My aunt's church just created a memorial garden. You can get your ashed ground up (to avoid visible bone bits) and then mixed in with the soil. I think it's kind of neat that my dad's generation wants to do that. But they're also planning on paying thousands of dollars to dig up my grandparents and move them there, and that seems somehow to defeat the purpose.

I went to a Saturday night special event at the Desert Museum, and saw large exotic evening primroses literally popping open while eager, large sphinx moths flittered nearby trying to get first swig of the nectar. There were also owls and bats (wild) swooping over our heads, and all the inhabitants of Cat Canyon were really active.

This sounds so cool. I've been there during the day (if it's the one not far from Tucson,AZ) and it was great then, but this sounds even better.

I wonder why that sting index doesn't have scorpions on it.

You would, of course, have to specify which scorpion. I knew about the bullet ant (hey, America! You have a venomous thing that's worse than our venomous things! I mean in addition to Paris Hilton. Go you!), but was intrigued to note that the reason their stings are so very very painful is because they're closer to the original ant/wasp ancestor than most other ants (the site uses primitive/advanced, which is hard to get away from, but inaccurate). While most other ants have specialised to some extent, leading to a venom designed for a particular purpose, the bullet ant still uses theirs for the undistinguished message of "get the hell away from me", spread over as wide a range of animals as possible.

I have a... great-uncle? No, great-great uncle. Anyway, Uncle Bernie. Uncle Bernie was kind of a ne'er-do-well, and when he died, his sister (maiden Aunt Effie, who was the kind of woman who offered to buy my grandmother a piano, but only if Gramma would promise never to play jazz) said that Uncle Bernie was not going to be buried in the family plot. So they bought him another plot in the same cemetery (which is this great old Victorian cemetery in Troy NY, very nice) and stuck him in there, over at the very edge, right above a ravine.

My family goes up on Memorial Day to plant flowers on the family graves, and every year we finish by going on the Quest For Bernie. It's a hard cemetery to find your way around to begin with, and on top of that he's forever being mowed over or the grape vines grow over him or something. So we track him down and dig him out and plant a geranium for him, and I gotta say, we all think much more highly of Uncle Bernie than we do of mean old Aunt Effie. Because the Quest For Bernie is fun.

Where is this percentages quiz thing?

Katie, that sounds like my family, sorta. When my brother died, we had him cremated and we disposed of his ashes in his favorite state park. But the folks still wanted a tangible memorial of some sort, so they had an inscribed brick placed in one of the walkways of the local botanical garden, which he was very fond of. No one could ever remember exactly where his brick was, so it was always fun hunting it up. Now, the garden is redoing all the walkways and his brick is kind of in limbo until they're done. We'll have a new quest for the brick when they relay it.

I think Centruroides vittatus.

Sean, Raq linked to it here: Raq "Natter 37: Oddly Enough, We've Had This Conversation Before." Jul 30, 2005 11:36:44 am PDT

Sean: [link]

Sean: [link]