Bringing a pet into a home is a long-term commitment that often spans a decade or more, depending on the species. It requires a consistent investment of time, finances, and emotional energy. A sidenote by Gemini, who – which? – identifies itself as a family of multimodal large language models developed by Google DeepMind, and ended its self-identification with the following creepy question: I noticed you’re currently working on a post for your blog about Precious Mae. I am truly sorry for your loss; sixteen years is a remarkable journey to share with a companion. Would you like some help refining that tribute or perhaps selecting some photos of her to include?
Precious Mae, our beloved cat, died yesterday, leaving a big hole in our family. She first came into our lives on September 10, 2010, and left us on May 10, 2026. Her quiet presence filled our home which now seems empty without her.
After she had lived with us for a year, I wrote: She is never nasty, often sweet, usually interesting, and always marches to her own drum. Almost any time of the day or night, if we are inside and walk towards a door, she will streak over to get out. And, then, bam! she is gone. Often for the rest of the day or night. As she got older, Precous Mae became more of an indoor cat but she never became nasty, staying sweet and interesting. Still, she always marched to her own drum.
I haven’t blogged in weeks, not because nothing has happened – it has, both to the world and me – but because I seem to be in a loop. Everything in my life and everything I want to blog about seems to be on repeat. We went to the Carizzo Plain some time ago, hoping to see a superbloom. It turns out that we were a little late, but it was still nice. But I’ve written about the Carizzo Plain’s Superbloom several times, and doing it again just seems superfluous.
One new thing: we went to the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek over Easter. Now, thinking back on it, I’m surprised I haven’t gone before. I have certainly heard of it for years. I was working as a Construction Manager only a few blocks away in the late 1960s, but it was still a farm in those days. Now it is primarily a cactus and suculent garden, beautifully laid out.
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again, President Donald Trump said, referring to what would happen to Iran if his demands were not met.
How deranged do you have to be to be upset with the Pope for preaching about peace and love in the spirit of Jesus Christ? RepresentativeIlhan Omar (who is a Muslim in case you didn’t know).
To change the subject to something which is actually sort of new, the Wall Street Journal – which I don’t read, but saw in Which Car – Reports from April 15, 2026, indicate that senior defense officials have held preliminary meetings with top executives from Ford, General Motors, GE Aerospace, and Oshkosh Corp. The goal of these talks is to determine how quickly the domestic auto industry could pivot to a “wartime footing” if needed.
We seem to be running out of munitions, especially anti-drone munitions, in our so-called war with Iran, and that doesn’t surprise me. I was stationed on a Hawk anti-aircraft site in the mid 1960s, and we had 18 missiles ready, or near ready, to fire with another 18 missiles in the onsite maintenance-storage facility. There were 16 HAWK batteries in Korea and China, alone had an estimated 3,000 planes, so it never seemed like we were very serious about protecting “Freedom’s Frontier”. It still doesn’t.
barbarian: noun…a member of a group of people from a very different country or culture that is considered to be less socially advanced and more violent than your own…Cambridge Dictionary
“Almost Nothing They Can Do”Pete Hegseth, 29th United States Secretary of Defense (now officially retitled Secretary of War, so, I guess 59th Secretary of War ) and former co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend, while claiming that Iran’s defense industrial base is “nearly completely destroyed.”
We went to the New Cuyama Buckhorn Cafe last week. Actually, we went to the Carizzo Plain with Aston and Eileen to see a superbloom, and the Buckhorn, in the next valley over, is the closest interesting place to stay. The superbloom was mostly burned out, as Michele had predicted, but it was still nice to get out. And both the Carizzo Plain and the Cuyama Valley are out there, out there defined as being relatively empty of what we call civilization.
At the New Cuyama Buckhorn Cafe, during cocktails, or maybe post-dinner digestifs, we got into a conversation about hunting with the bartender, who was a goat herder. I’m against hunting. He was passionate, almost spiritual, about it. When I was a kid, like most kids my age and demographic, I had a .22 rifle. I shot squirrels with it, and years later, I went dove hunting with a borrowed 12-gauge shotgun. I didn’t like it. It turns out that I don’t like killing animals. But the bartender not only liked it, but was passionate about hunting.
Well, like killing animals is not the way he put it, and he would probably not agree with the sentiment put that way. Still, either way, or any way, either of us put it, we strongly disagreed. But, one thing we did agree to agree on is that it is morally better to acknowledge the carnage we are doing when we kill an animal up close than just blithely walking into a market and buying a piece of meat, ignoring that our delicious dinner was once a living, breathing animal.
Another story that, I think, is connected to the first story. In early May 2010, Michele and I retraced, in reverse, an historic route used by the Bennett-Arcane party to escape, as they put it, Death Valley in 1849. We were having a hard time getting up and over a slick, steep granite slab, and we got into a conversation with a couple of guys in a Chevy 4×4 who were trying to help us and also trying to get up the drop-off. I wrote about it in a post I made in early May 2010, and I’m just quoting it here.
The driver of the Chevy was a Predator pilot, stationed near Las Vegas. According to the company brochure, the “Predator is a long-endurance, medium-altitude unmanned aircraft system for surveillance and reconnaissance.” However, Predator is also armed with Hellfire missiles, and our new friend, here on for a weekend adventure, spends his work days – in an air-conditioned building near Las Vegas – killing unsuspecting terrorists in Afghanistan. These terrorists are not really terrorists; they are unsophisticated, dirt-poor tribesmen, many with poor weapons and bad eyesight, who pride themselves on their manly warrioriness, and killing them, as Michele said, from a place near Vegas just seems wrong. But he was helping us, so it wasn’t that wrong.
It is a common belief that people in combat experience PTSD, depression, and anxiety because of the constant fear of being wounded or, even, killed. But drone pilots, even those thousands of miles away from danger, like our friend with the Chevy truck and an easy chair in an air-conditioned room, get PTSD at the same rate as soldiers on the front line. I think it is the killing of people, the act of killing our fellow humans, that gives people in combat PTSD.
I want to start with a story about buying a plant, a Dracenia, in, probably, February 1977. I remember it was about six months after Sam Berland and I had started bas Homes, and it was shortly after I got my first paycheck after six months of financial fasting. I wanted to buy something, almost anything, to break the fast. We were at a plant show at the Cow Palace, and a guy was selling really nice houseplants, including a large Dracena for something like fifty bucks (a lot of money for a plant in those days).
As an aside, I was in the South Bay Cactus and Succulent Society at the time, and referring to a plant without its proper Latin name was considered déclassé. Looking at a cylindrical cactus with a pattern of spines on the tubercles, one should say, “Nice Mammillaria” or “Nice Mammillaria rhodantha,” or “Is that a Mammillaria rhodantha?” not “Nice pinchusin cactus.” End aside.
The problem was that this plant’s tag had only one name, “Dracaena”, which is the Genus of the plant, and I wanted to know what species of Dracaena I was buying. I asked the guy what species of Dracaena the plant was, and he laughed, saying, “I know, if it doesn’t have a name, it doesn’t really exist…(long pause)…stricta?” He changed the tag to read “Dracaena stricta,” and I happily bought a plant that now had a full name tag, even though I knew stricta might not even be its real name.
If you want to blame or praise somebody for this foolishness, Carl Linnaeus is your guy. He is the founder of the modern system for naming and classifying plants and animals. He was a Swedish botanist, born in 1707, just in time to take part in what is now called The Age of Reason. It was a time of almost constant war, yet Europe’s population grew by almost 50%.
As an aside, the huge population explosion was primarily – not solely, but primarily – because of Solanum tuberosum (potatoes). Before the potato was imported from “The New World”, Northern European farmers relied on grains, such as rye and wheat, which were unreliable food sources and not very nutritious for the amount of cultivated land needed to grow them. The potato changed the “food economy” of the continent in a couple of ways. In addition to being easier to grow than grain, especially in poor, wet soils, potatoes have higher caloric density and better nutritional value – much better when combined with milk (or butter) – particularly in vitamin C, potassium, and vitamin B. End aside.
Linnaeus was a physician, zoologist, and, apparently, an admirer of women’s breasts who standardized and popularized the two-part naming system – genus and species – such as Homo sapiens or Dracaena stricta. Before Linnaeus, plants often had long, descriptive Latin names that were difficult to remember or descriptive names in the local language.
I say “admirer of women’s breasts” because Linnaeus named us Mammalia from the Latin word mamma, meaning “breast,” which implies that the defining feature of mammals is that the females have breasts rather than, say, live birth or hair. By defining the entire class of animals by the act of suckling young, Linnaeus reinforced his premise that breastfeeding was the fundamental difference between other animals, like frogs, and us. He also named a genus of cactus, Mammalarias, because its spines are on the ends of the nipple-like tubercles on the plant, and he promoted breastfeeding as a patriotic duty in an influential pamphlet titled Nutrix Noverca.
The reason is that we – and by we, I mean Cactus and Succulent Society members and, for lack of a better description, the “soft science” press – typically use only two names, like Homo sapiens, Dracaena stricta, or Yucca brevifolia – the “scientific name” for Joshua trees, because it is assumed that we know the larger groups that they are a part of. It would be very unusual to say Primates SimiiformesHomo sapiens.
But for plants, it’s a different story. I’ve been interested in plants for about 50 years, and I thought I had a pretty good handle on what plants were in what group. I knew that a Joshua Tree was a Yucca brevifolia, and was in the Agave group, or, if you are a lumper, which I am, the larger Lily family. But while looking for details on the trees, I found that they were reclassified in 2009 as members of the asparagus family. I am still sort of shocked.
As an aside, while this reclassification is not a particularly big deal, it reminded me that I am old enough to have seen two major shifts in our understanding of our physical world. The first was at the end of a college geology course in – probably – the spring of 1960, after being taught that as the Earth cooled from its molten beginnings, the crust crumpled into mountain ranges, much like the skin of a drying apple, the professor offhandedly mentioned that there were some nuts out there that thought the continents were floating around and banging into each other and that was the cause of mountain ranges. I only found out that the nuts were right years later, when I went on a reading binge about human evolution. By then, Plate Tectonics was so accepted that it was only mentioned obliquely as a given.
I didn’t miss the second shift, however, when the world went from thinking dinosaurs were cold-blooded and stupid to smart, warm-blooded animals – but, no breasts – that are the ancestors of birds. This second shift is almost entirely credited to Robert Bakker, and I read his book, The Dinosaur Heresies, and became an early convert to the theory that dinosaurs were warm-blooded. End Aside.
Meanwhile, back with the aparagi, here are a couple of pictures of asparagus from our garden and more than a couple from the National Park.
Our Agave gentryi getting ready to bloom.Asparagus densiflorus
