Lily

This is Lily, Joe Jr’s 18 month old (I guess) Tabby. As you can see, she is perfectly color-coordinated with my decor (which I like to refer to as the Bachelor-Dork Motif). Generally, cats are really weird creatures and Lily doesn’t disappoint in that department. She has all the typical attributes of her species: pretention, aloofness, arrogance, stubbornness – OK I am just kidding about that (I think).

Is There Anything on TV Tonight?

Bruce Springsteen wrote a song a couple years ago entitled 57 Channels and Nothin' On on his Human Touch album. (Yikes, just realized that ‘a couple of years ago’ was actually almost twenty years ago. Also, damn shame about The Big Man passing away recently.) 57 Channels was constructed around a couple of timeless themes:

• Wealth and material possessions can’t buy or guarantee happiness.
• More is not always better than less.

Today, it is kind of funny and quaint to think back how Bruce was lamenting the explosion of cable television (I think they know refer to it as) content at a point in time when the number of available channels hadn’t even reached triple digits. My cable provider is Time Warner Cable of Chapel Hill. Here is their Channel Guide. Good old progress at work there.

That Is One Big Rock

On my recent mini-trip through Central Virginia, I had four hours to kill on a Friday afternoon and ended up doing the tourist-trap thing at the Natural Bridge and Caverns in (who would have guessed) Natural Bridge, Virginia.

I’ll have to admit that my expectations were pretty low going into this visit. I had visions of a National Lampoon Vacation-type of adventure since the attraction itself is pretty well-scoped. Natural Bridge is basically this, well, natural bridge, that was formed over many years when Cedar Creek (a tributary of the James River) dug a gorge through a mountain of limestone. So I imagined that there wouldn’t be a whole lot to do other than taking a couple of pictures of the bridge. For the most part, I was right but I still had a good time and glad that I took it in.

Magicicada Brood XIX Emerges In Orange County, NC

No, I am not talking about some collection of Mexican Gangbangers. Magicicadas are a genus of flying insects that periodically emerge from underground, mate, and then die. In the Southeast right now, we are inundated with these things. They are commonly mistaken for locusts. The picture above is of a cicada on my driveway. As an aside, I haven’t seen eyes that red since I was in college.

They call a collection of these magicicadas that emerge together in a geographical location a brood. Entomologists attach cool labels and Roman Numerals to each brood which obviously legitimizes the whole deal – I mean it works for Super Bowls right? The batch of cicadas that is occupying my backyard right now is part of Brood XIX – The Great Southern Brood. This brood emerges every 13 years, having not made an appearance around here since 1998.