At the National Conference for Media Reform in January, FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps challenged the thousands of people attending to enact a new “American Media Contract.â€Â I think he did a good job of summing up the problems with big media. He proposed replacing the “bad old bargain that past…
I've always been fascinated by the moon. Perhaps it was my father's work with NASA from the 1960's through the 1990's, or maybe just a fascination with shiny things. I was sitting in my back yard watching the fireflies and bats at dusk, when I was inspired to grab my…
I saw on the local news that the Brain Gym® program is being adopted (purchased) by some local schools. You may want to read what the Bad Science website has to say. Their main complaint is that it claims to be scientific, but has all the hallmarks of pseudoscience in…
I needed to attend a deposition in Washington D.C. today. I brought one of my daughters (she's 6) on the trip. She patiently drew pictures and read books during the deposition, which lasted two hours this morning.  Now that I'm done with work, we're having fun doing tourist things. First, we visited…
The first years of living in a new home are filled with surprises. Our new home in the burbs (I had to go, the family went first!) has a large wooden deck in the backyard. Large wooden decks are fun for outdoor dining, entertaining, repairs, power washing, staining, sealing, AND carpenter bees. The bees are big and sound like low flying helicopters.
Carpenter bees bore into the wood, create tunnels where they make more carpenter bees and then more tunnels and more bees, you get my drift? Carpenter bees are the size of golf balls and very aggressive in posture (although none of us has been stung by one yet). The bees buzz at you about a foot or less away and follow you as you flee until some as yet undetermined distance is traveled away from where they first confronted you.
Needless to say, the kids are afraid of the bees and won’t play in the backyard. I sprayed the bees with water from my high powered nozzle on my hose. Unlike honeybees which die from too much exposure to water, carpenter bees drink the stuff up and zip by the spray to let you know they are still around.
Next, I put out lots more birdseed to draw more birds to my deck area. I hoped birds were natural predators of the bees and would decimate their population. I looked up what might eat a carpenter bee and seeded the deck according to the directions on the back …