Fragments From Floyd

First, be sure and stop by Horseshues, blogger Chris O'Donnell's 8-yr-old daughter's entrepreneurial effort to pay her way to her very first horse. Chris finessed the webpage in WordPress; everything else comes from the ideas and hard work and motivation of his take-charge young'un. Come on. You know you've been thinking about adding maybe one or two more ornate used horseshoes to your decor. (Not recommended for hanging from your rear view mirror, but hundreds of other symbolic and aesthetic uses too numerous to mention!) Help this gal get her horse(s).

You don't have to go to Iceland to learn about weblogs. But if you did, you would.

Doug Thompson is packing boxes and revisiting the memories. And he has lots of both. Soon, what didn't get Good-willed or green-boxed will travel south to a farm in Floyd County. Who knows: never to be boxed again? Given Doug's peripatetic past, I'm hoping he will continue to unpack his stories on his new and spiffy weblog (the man has as many webpages as Tsuga has fleas. No, scratch that. Bad analogy.) And of course, with a 40 year history as a photog, you'll see some incredible shots from some wooly places: today, for instance, from Jerusalem, 1985: wife Amy on a camel. Speaking of fleas. (The camel. Not Amy. I think I'm going to move on...)

And finally, and of course totally unrelated to any of the above (I certainly hope), here's your one-stop-shopping place for any thing you ever wanted to know about the current wave of global extinction that his happening in a forest, desert, jungle, savanna, ocean, estuary or prairie near you.

No, wait. If you've read this far, maybe you'll stick around for one more very important and serious link: Please take a moment (about 12 for all three audio tracks) to hear author/zoologist Peter Mathiesen's assessment of the interplay between environment and politics. We cannot go on in our present state of disregard for the effect our policies have on populations-- and not just the voting population. At root, it is not sound economies that insure continued survival, but sound ecologies. The smartest Greenspan among us will become one of those multiple extinct species if we continue to nurture our ignorance and indifference toward the health of the planet's support systems.