Monday, January 12, 2009 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM

Prickly pear, Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM, January 8, 2009

I want to get this thought down before I lose it

To paraphrase Groucho Marx: Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read except on an iPhone.

Or iPod touch in my case. Love it. Especially while boondocking - no external light source needed, unlike the Kindle or Sony reader.

I'll have to come back and expand on this. Thanks to Nick Russell for the tickle on his blog this morning.

Night camp

Site 7 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM

Verizon cell phone service - good signal
Verizon EVDO service - very good signal and access speed ( I have to qualify this - during my January 2008 visit the signal and access speed was excellent - in January 2009 it was practically non-existent during the day and slow at night with unpredictable short periods of excellent access)
Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park website
Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park on my Nightcamps map
Check the weather here

Five Trillion Spiders

Spiders begin their hunting with a few handicaps. They're often smaller and weaker than their prey, and they have no wings to give chase in the air. Some species extend their legs by hydraulic pressure, using the same liquid that carries oxygen from their lungs, so they have a hard time running and breathing at the same time. Even their poison may be no match for their victim's: a crab spider's bite is to a honeybee's sting as "an air-gun compared with an elephant rifle," John Crompton wrote. Yet spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes about a tenth of a gram of meat a day. Were their victims people instead of insects, they would need only three days to eat all sixteen and a half million Dutchmen.

From Spider Woman by Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker magazine, March 5, 2007, page 69

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