The Urban Pantheist

Needham is a small mostly residential town next to the one I live in, in eastern Massachusetts. I don't go there much, except to Cutler Park, a big boardwalked swamp that's fun to visit. To be fair, I haven't been to a big boardwalked swamp that WASN'T insanely fun in my opinion, and I've been to a few. I noticed that in addition to Cutler, there was another parcel of public land in the town, designated Needham Town Forest. When my dad drove up for the day, we went there. It was a very unusual Town Forest in many ways.

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My dad and I went to the Springfield (Massachusetts) Science Museum a couple days ago. They have a temporary exhibit about dogs up now.

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Agawam Massachusetts, 11/21/15

I go to the Cape once a year--a coworker opens his family's house up to the zoo staff for a week. This time my 36 hour visit coincided with the Summer Solstice. Here's the bay side beach showing an awful lot of low tide.

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Zoos have a unique role in society: for most people it is the only place they will ever see an exotic animal. The hope is that zoo guests will be energized by the experience to want to protect the animals that they have come to love. Elephants and rhinos are on the fast track to extinction, mainly because certain humans will pay a high price for some of the hard pointy stuff that grows out of their heads.

Zoo New England is spearheading an effort to make the sale of elephant ivory and rhino horn illegal in Massachusetts. That's right, it's not currently illegal by state law. We will join New York and New Jersey who already have a law on the books, and a host of other states also working on it.

If you live in the Bay State, please contact your local lawmaker this weekend to get them to cosponsor the bill and ensure it's passage go here for convenient links.

Tomorrow is voting day. If you've been reading things I've been writing for any time at all, I'm not about to surprise you: I'm a far left liberal environmentalist/social libertarian. If you are interested to see what I'm voting for, I'm laying it out here; this will save me valuable thinking time in the booth tomorrow:

Senator in Congress: Ed Markey (D) - I have heard literally nothing about the challenger. He must be double digits behind in the polls. Don't know, don't care, this position MUST be held by a Democrat.

Governor: Martha Coakley (D) - this is a vote against the Republican businessman candidate. Coakley is a disastrous campaigner, hopefully that won't translate to being a bad executive, but I'll vote for anyone to keep a capitalist like Baker out of the job. Keep ruining the private sector jackass, stay out of government, your kind has enough power.

Attorney General: The Democrat

All the rest of the State Offices: I'm voting for the Green-Rainbow candidates, in the hopes that a genuinely liberal third party will get some more power in the state.

Question 1: NO. The Massachusetts gas tax is tied to the Consumer Price Index, meaning it goes up automatically as other things get more expensive. A yes vote would turn the gas tax into a political football.

Question 2: YES. This is the expansion of the bottle bill--right now only carbonated beverage containers are required to have a deposit on them. That means all the roadside litter in the state is non-returnable beverage cans and bottles. Put a deposit on water and iced tea and wine bottles (I don't know which of these will actually be covered, since this is a limited expansion) and those containers will disappear from the litter stream. There is literally no reason this shouldn't pass, except that the beverage companies are throwing millions of dollars at an ad campaign to try to convince people that something that has worked for 40 years for beer and coke won't work for Four-Loko, orange juice, and canned coffee.

Question 3: This is the toughest one--it's essentially a prohibition of gambling. I'm in favor of legalized gambling in principle. However the way our state is trying to legalize it is by awarding three contracts to three gigantic corporations to make three big casinos. A yes vote will send them back to the drawing board. I think I'm voting yes.

Question 4: YES. This mandates that companies with more than eleven employees would have to provide paid sick time. This should be a federal law, in my opinion, but I support my state mandating it.

NOT on the ballot: a question to stop changing the clocks every six months like a bunch of idiots.
Also NOT on the ballot: a question to make marijuana legal to use just because you want to get high, and not have to come up with some phony baloney excuse about your anxiety or your back pain.

In April Urban Nature Walk went to Ponkapoag Pond. Some folks stayed for four or five hours, finally making it to the bog. Alas, I had to leave after 2 hours. Friends of mine (locals I call the "nature friends") found out I'd never been to the bog and were horrified. Finally enough things came together and I planned for the July walk to approach Ponkapoag from the opposite side so we would get to the bog quicker. Even before we got to the bog, it was a very different walk than the one we took in April. For one thing: mushrooms!


These little teeny guys were right by the trailhead (which is right off of rt 93). They look very similar to mushrooms we've seen at Cutler Park--we haven't identified them to species, but Alexis named them "Spaghettio mushrooms."

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Last weekend I went to the Cape to visit the seashore and hang out with friends. This is when I first got there and couldn't find anyone but I liked the random green things growing on the beach.
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My dad came up to visit on Saturday and we didn't have a plan of what to do. I drove us to Attleboro, since I'd been there relatively recently for the first time and enjoyed it. I was looking for the Natty Greene Tavern so we could get some lunch, but I found Capron Park first. We walked to a lovely little rose garden.


We both separately decided this orange rose was unusual and beautiful enough to stop and photograph it.


Of course, being who I am, I was much more interested in the fungal wildlife that had colonized the wet mulch around the roots of the roses. All around I found the same species--or perhaps species complex--Coprinellus micaceus, the mica cap mushroom. These were about half again larger than I usually see them, which makes me wonder how diverse the complex is in our part of the world.

Here we are, your 2014 Zoo Crew! This is the largest group we've assembled for a 25 mile ride yet. Ours was also the team that raised the most money for the scholarship (thanks in no small measure to you wonderful people).

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