Brian’s Favorite Overstuffed Breakfast Burrito

Most of my breakfasts are fairly involved as I believe that morning is the time to put your best foot forward. It sets the tone for the rest of the day and tells those around you that you are willing to put in the work for a good payoff.

Note: This is best made with the leftover steak (steak from the night before, fajita meat… anything not stewed) or uncooked white mushrooms.

Ingredients:
¼ cup meat, diced or ¼ diced mushroom, diced
¼ diced onion
¼ diced green pepper
½ cup medium tomato, diced
¼ cup Monterey jack cheese with jalapeños, grated
¼ cup sharp cheddar cheese, grated
3 large eggs
1 tbsp heavy cream
2 tbsp sour cream
2 dashes Red Hot or Tabasco
1 12” flour tortilla
3 tbsp butter
2 tsp fresh cilantro, coarsely chopped

Melt 1 tbsp of butter in skillet and cook onions and peppers until soft, add meat (or mushrooms) and tomatoes, cook for 1 minute longer and turn out on a paper towel to dry.

Beat eggs, heavy cream, Red Hot or Tabasco in a bowl and set aside.

Wrap tortilla in a damp paper towel and microwave for 20 seconds, leave in microwave until eggs are cooked.

Reheat pan and melt 1 tbsp more of butter, add eggs and start to scramble by slowly pushing eggs from one side to another with a large rubber spatula. When about halfway cooked, add drained onions, peppers, tomatoes, meat (or mushrooms) and both cheeses. Continue to cook until dry and turn out into the center of tortilla.

Fold in tortilla like a burrito (without an open side). Add 1 tbsp of butter back to the pan and add burrito folded side down to pan. Flip when browned and remove to a plate when both sides are golden and delicious.

Top with sour cream, cilantro and serve immediately.

Assiduous

I've received a number of complaints that I haven't been blogging much lately.

To this, I cannot disagree.

Happy Cinco de Mayo

Cinco de Mayo - the day where the Mexican forces, led by General Ignacio Zaragoza, defeated the French Army by throwing empty Corona bottles at them.

Tea Party Protests

Bitter that your side lost? Angry that the majority of the country thinks that you're wrong? Wanna pretend that your corporate sponsored, news endorsed, political action party scripted values are grassroots and spontaneous? Then I have an event for you!

Today at your local Hooters, they will be serving beer and hot wings. I suggest that you go sit at the bar, have a drink and some wings, and try to get a grip on reality.

Frantically Doing Nothing

There is a presumption that in times of crisis any action is better than no action. It is commonly thought that this failed dichotomy is nothing more than a manifestation of our fear of failure through inactivity. If you have ever seen someone drowning, you know all too well that the natural instinct to thrash around supersedes the basic knowledge that our bodies naturally float. The same is true for many other predicaments as well. The second someone believes that their situation is in peril, fast and frantic movement of any kind is naturally preferable to simple, slow-paced logic.

This phenomenon isn’t new. In Greek Mythology there is a God of drowning named Charybdis, whose actions caused her to be turned into a sea monster and lead to phrase "between Scylla (another monster) and Charybdis.” It was the ancient version of “between a rock and a hard place” and was designed to teach not only how to stay out of harm’s way, but why we do so poorly once engulfed within it. What I contend is that our evolutionary defenses against physical danger has slowly descended deeper into our psyche and now acts to protect us from ourselves.

What we are now afraid of is the quiet moment preceding any test; we fear that beneath us is nothing but failure and that drowning in the lake of one’s being is a fate far worse than death. And if one were able to dive further, past their faults, doubts and death itself, they would encounter the horror of who they truly are.

Our intuition knows what the truth never hides and our subconscious responds in defense. We fear what is most precious; something so valuable that it must be protected at all costs. We fear that our inaction will force us to see ourselves honestly and death holds no fear of the truth. My recommendation is to let yourself drown. Let life consume you. Maybe you will float and maybe you won’t. Either way, you will have faced yourself and won.

Hiking on Vacation

I love hiking and over the last several years I’ve done some hikes that I’m very proud to have completed (I’m even proud of a couple that I couldn’t finish). There is just something about heading out into nature with nothing but a day pack and a well worn pair of shoes that is thoroughly invigorating. What I don’t care for, more than anything else, is some of the other hikers.

Barring serious weather conditions or an actual emergency, when I am in the middle of a hike I do not want to stop and talk to people I pass, I never want to compare gear and I am not looking to add people to my party mid-hike. Just a nod or a “hello” as we pass is just fine. You know what, if you can fit in a sentence, “the bridge is out,” “rock slide ahead,” “lovely weather today,” without breaking stride – that’s just fine. But please, please, please don’t expect me to stop and tell you about my socks or hold me up with prolonged weatherspeak. I just don’t care.

The reason that I now feel compelled to write about this is because this last week Kela and I did some wonderful day hikes while carrying Sebastian. I did not know this beforehand, but there is something about carrying a kid around with you that people interpret as, “Hey, we could use a break. Ask us a stupid question.” While I did my best to ignore most of these people, Kela felt compelled to be polite and talk to them. Doing my best to ignore her and her new friend, I usually just kept moving and forced her to offer a hasty, “Sorry, my husband really doesn’t like to stop” before jogging to catch up. As you can imagine, I’m still making amends for my bad manners. In doing so, I would like to answer all of your questions, in the exact same fashion that I would have on the trail, so to prove to my wife that it was better that I just kept moving:

1. Thank you, we think he’s cute to. Now please get out of my way.
2. He weighs 25 pounds and we trade him off as much as we can.
3. Yes we own one of those baby-backpacks, but didn’t bring it with us to California.
4. You wore flip-flops to do a 5 mile hike that rises 1800 feet and you want to talk gear? Seriously?
5. You are very clever, you are the first person to joke about making him walk.
6. He’s one year old and I’m not wasting his time on someone as uninteresting as you.
7. There are directions every quarter mile and this is the middle of a three mile trail, if you don’t know where you are now, I’m not going to tell you.
8. No, I don’t know where on the trail you can get cell phone reception.

I hope that answers any and all of your questions.

Entry for March 16, 2009

Patience for people’s intellectual abilities should always be directly proportional to the opportunities that they have had to develop those skills.

It's Good to be Well

Everywhere that I have lived has had some colloquial communication conundrums for those who are not from their area. In Jamaica “Seen” meant “Yes” or “Do you understand,” whereas in Michigan, “Seen” could be used in either past or present tense: “I seen him coming this way.” So when I moved to South Carolina I expected some provincial differences, but I instead noticed exaggerations of common grammatical mistakes. The most egregious, by sheer volume, is the inability of the local population to use “Good” and “Well” properly.

People often use good when they should use well, especially in speech. For those of you searching your brain for 6th grade English terminology, “Good” is an adjective (a word that describes nouns) and “Well” is usually an adverb (a word used to describe verbs). Good’s meaning indicates the noun is above average or better than normal. As an adverb, Well describes or qualifies an action or to tell how or to what extent an action is carried out. You also can use "well" to describe someone's health. The trick is to remember that you do not use good to describe verbs.

Before moving around the world I always assumed that certain spoken grammatical mistakes were either sloppy slips of the tongue or a sign or a poor education/upbringing. What I’ve learned is that some words or phrases can be local accepted by all classes and educational levels. While I find this uncomfortable, I am trying to see it as part of a dialectic difference. With any luck, I’ll maintain my good grasp of the English language and still fitting in well.

Seek Medical Attention

You may not know it, but your stink requires a health professional. If there was an emergency room for BO, you would need to go there. If you smelled any worse, it might be fatal. Your pits could kill Dracula. If you were slightly more malodorous, the military would preemptively invade you. You reek so bad that there should be a team of doctors examining your underarms.

But not to worry, Procter & Gamble has just launched prescription strength deodorant, because they know that you are so far above the normal level of reekatude, that your scent could make an onion cry, you odor is so foul that a priest couldn’t exercise stench off of you and if you were a color is could be called funky tuna.

That is why you need prescription strength deodorant – so that the bouquet of rotting corpses that is your natural aroma might become manageable. Humanity awaits your purchase.

You Are Not Alone

This is an article posted from the AP this week:

More Americans say they have no religion

By RACHEL ZOLL, AP – Mon Mar 9, 12:14 am ET

Children walk back to their pews after listening to the reading of a religious AP – Children walk back to their pews after listening to the reading of a religious story at the foot of the …

A wide-ranging study on American religious life found that the Roman Catholic population has been shifting out o of the Northeast to the Southwest, the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all.

Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey.

Northern New England surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious region, with Vermont reporting the highest share of those claiming no religion, at 34 percent. Still, the study found that the numbers of Americans with no religion rose in every state.

"No other religious bloc has kept such a pace in every state," the study's authors said.

In the Northeast, self-identified Catholics made up 36 percent of adults last year, down from 43 percent in 1990. At the same time, however, Catholics grew to about one-third of the adult population in California and Texas, and one-quarter of Floridians, largely due to Latino immigration, according to the research.

Nationally, Catholics remain the largest religious group, with 57 million people saying they belong to the church. The tradition gained 11 million followers since 1990, but its share of the population fell by about a percentage point to 25 percent.

Christians who aren't Catholic also are a declining segment of the country.

In 2008, Christians comprised 76 percent of U.S. adults, compared to about 77 percent in 2001 and about 86 percent in 1990. Researchers said the dwindling ranks of mainline Protestants, including Methodists, Lutherans and Episcopalians, largely explains the shift. Over the last seven years, mainline Protestants dropped from just over 17 percent to 12.9 percent of the population.

The report from The Program on Public Values at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., surveyed 54,461 adults in English or Spanish from February through November of last year. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 0.5 percentage points. The findings are part of a series of studies on American religion by the program that will later look more closely at reasons behind the trends.

The current survey, being released Monday, found traditional organized religion playing less of a role in many lives. Thirty percent of married couples did not have a religious wedding ceremony and 27 percent of respondents said they did not want a religious funeral.

About 12 percent of Americans believe in a higher power but not the personal God at the core of monotheistic faiths. And, since 1990, a slightly greater share of respondents — 1.2 percent — said they were part of new religious movements, including Scientology, Wicca and Santeria.

The study also found signs of a growing influence of churches that either don't belong to a denomination or play down their membership in a religious group.

Respondents who called themselves "non-denominational Christian" grew from 0.1 percent in 1990 to 3.5 percent last year. Congregations that most often use the term are megachurches considered "seeker sensitive." They use rock style music and less structured prayer to attract people who don't usually attend church. Researchers also found a small increase in those who prefer being called evangelical or born-again, rather than claim membership in a denomination.

Evangelical or born-again Americans make up 34 percent of all American adults and 45 percent of all Christians and Catholics, the study found. Researchers found that 18 percent of Catholics consider themselves born-again or evangelical, and nearly 39 percent of mainline Protestants prefer those labels. Many mainline Protestant groups are riven by conflict over how they should interpret what the Bible says about gay relationships, salvation and other issues.

The percentage of Pentecostals remained mostly steady since 1990 at 3.5 percent, a surprising finding considering the dramatic spread of the tradition worldwide. Pentecostals are known for a spirited form of Christianity that includes speaking in tongues and a belief in modern-day miracles.

Mormon numbers also held steady over the period at 1.4 percent of the population, while the number of Jews who described themselves as religiously observant continued to drop, from 1.8 percent in 1990 to 1.2 percent, or 2.7 million people, last year. Researchers plan a broader survey on people who consider themselves culturally Jewish but aren't religious.

The study found that the percentage of Americans who identified themselves as Muslim grew to 0.6 percent of the population, while growth in Eastern religions such as Buddhism slightly slowed.

Entry for March 08, 2009

Science and religion can only coexist if you don't mind letting your religion constantly evolve.

The Anderson, SC Jockey Lot

On the northern county line of Anderson County in South Carolina exists a cultural anomaly of epic proportions. Anything, and I do mean anything, seems to exist for sale in this one location. It draws people from as far away as the swamps of Florida to the back woods of Gatlinburg, TN, and even from the parts of Alabama where the term relative humidity literally means the moisture between two cousins having sex. This 65 acre flea market is the largest in the Southern United States and goes by the simple name: The Jockey Lot.

Each visit to the Jockey Lot is an experience that everyone in my family cherishes - mostly because it makes us feel better about ourselves. Now I’m not saying that these individuals are below the national average of intelligence, hygiene or “correct” breeding, I’m just saying that a large percentage of them prove that there is no minimum or maximum amount of chromosomes required to successfully procreate. This is the crowd that makes Larry the Cable Guy culturally relevant and on job applications probably list smoking as a hobby.

I wouldn’t even mention that their personalities can be fully described in hat form, that they consider teeth something they’re going to have to buy, or that most of them have more invested in their trucks than in their homes, except that I neglected to mention you wouldn’t get a full picture of the people who will be your shopping companions if you should ever decide to visit the Lot de Jockey.

You see, the Jockey Lot is a place that allows people to openly sell live poultry, next to pirated DVDs of last week’s movie release, adjacent to a pile of used and unwashed clothes, down the row from open boxes of medication, across from someone serving food that could give diabetes to a sugar ant, and all from sellers who consider showering optional. It is a enormous garage sale of people who don’t have to look their neighbor in the eye while trying to sell them last year’s must have, and still boxed, As Seen on TV products.

Personally, I find the fact that their high art comes in DVD form, that they classify Sunny D a fruit juice and think of Jesus mostly as an accessory, as kind of endearing. In all honesty, there really isn’t anything more entertaining than waking up early on a Saturday morning, hurriedly driving to this mecca of shopping delights, hopping out of the car to immediately see a mullet-clad female using the term redneck as a complement to try to woo her hubby in the Buy American shirt to purchase a cheap Chinese knockoff of a European bag designer while their toddler is shooed away from the semi-automatic gun table. So if you do go and happen to see something like that, and you will, just know that it’s going to be a good day at the Anderson Jockey Lot.

Big Government

Here is the biggest secret in all of Washington: Both the Republicans and Democrats love big government. It guarantees them jobs, makes them more powerful and creates an almost unbreakable institution in which they can run the show. The only difference is that they like big government in different places.

Lately there has been a pseudo-outcry by Republicans over the stimulus bill heading through Congress. Their latest charge is the true and tried "borrow and spend" assault that has worked well for them. Yet when you look at their own history back through the 1980’s, they have done the exact same for their own pet causes.

During Reagan’s Administration government spending increased by 69%, with a 92% increase in defense spending as he built up the military to confront the Soviet Union (none of these numbers are adjusted for inflation). When he left office the economy was growing and the size of the government as a share of total economic production had shrunk slightly, from 22.2% to 21.2%. In contrast, Clinton’s Administration increased government spending by 32% during his time in office; which was decreased by the rapid slowdown in defense spending after the Cold War ended. When he left office, Clinton’s defense spending had increased by just 4%. So the combination of restrained growth in government and a booming economy meant that government's size as a percentage of the economy dropped from 21.4% to 18.5%.

Next up was George W. Bush, who boosted government spending by 68 % in his eight-year presidency, spearheaded by a 126% increase for defense as he waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush's spending totals don't include the $700 billion bank bailout added last fall to his final fiscal year, or the $787 billion stimulus package added early this year, but by the time he left office, Bush's government had grown as a share of the economy from 18.5% to 22%.

Over the last couple of weeks Republicans have done everything that they could to brand Obama as another Big Government liberal. And even while Obama speaks of hope and optimism about the economy, he will probably increase government spending for the next two years, only to lower if back down to that same 22% by the end of his first term – the same as George W. Bush at the end of his presidency and slightly more than Reagan at the end of his.

The interesting thing to watch is Republicans crying Big Government while approving of any spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or on weapons systems such as the F-22 Raptor fighter jet being developed by Lockheed Martin. Even such Rush sycophants like Georgian Republican Representative Phil Gingrey has recently brought an argument to the floor that buying nearly 200 more of the F-22 Raptor jets (he attempted to claim that they were needed to defend ourselves from China and Russia) at $160 million each, is a good investment. If you’re trying to do the math in your head, that’s 32 billion dollars worth of Big Government on something even the military deemed unnecessary.

What it comes down to is that Obama and other Democrats want a big government that addresses their priorities, not the Republicans' agenda. Being a liberal myself, I see the military complex of Big Government that the Republicans pushed through over the last twenty years as wasteful, but the Big Government of education, energy conservation, health care… that the Democrats are now trying to push as worthwhile investments. So in the future, when you hear someone say that they are against Big Government, ask them what specifically they don’t wish to fund. I have a strange feeling that you’ll be able to pick out their political leanings fairly quickly.

Entry for March 04, 2009

If the voice of your political party is a talk show host, you should probably get ready for your party to reorganize.

Is Paying for Indulgences Wrong?

I am the first to admit that I am not Martin Luther. I can say this with all certainty because I am in no way religious and because I am not sure that paying for some modern-day indulgences is wrong. As we all work to deal with things like global warming and fair trade, certain moral negotiations are going to have to be made and simply paying our share may be the most inclusive solution.

A simple case in point is air travel. As of right now, there is no practical alternative to flight, but flying spews lots of CO2 into the atmosphere. To try and make up for the environmental damage, a growing number of travelers purchase carbon offsets, which goes towards worthwhile things like reforestation and alternative energy projects. It’s the 21st-century way of paying indulgences and it helps people travel with clearer consciences, but I’m not sure that we are dealing with the underlying issue. Instead, we are doing exactly what Martin Luther had a problem with: buying our way out of serious moral obligations or personal sin.

According to the Catholic Church there are two different types of sins: A mortal sin and a venial sin. “Mortal sin destroys charity in the heart of man by a grave violation of God's law; it turns man away from God, who is his ultimate end and his beatitude, by preferring an inferior good to him. Venial sin allows charity to subsist, even though it offends and wounds it” (Vatican.va). Or in simpler terms, a mortal sin is one that was done with the knowledge of why it was wrong and a venial sin is one that was done without.

As you can imagine, the punishment for a premeditated sin is worse than one committed without full knowledge of the offense. Even once the sin has been paid the sinner still must "strive by works of mercy and charity, as well as by prayer and the various practices of penance, to put off completely the 'old man' and to put on the 'new man’” (Catechism of the Catholic Church: 1473).

Which brings us back to purchasing carbon offsets to make up for the environmental damage of flying and other modern-day indulgences. If you have to keep repurchasing the same indulgence, are you really sorry for what you are doing? (Surely there are better paths that have a more immediate and specific impact) So our purchasing of indulgences are doing nothing more than justifying our premeditated behavior and delaying the choices that we will eventually have to make.

Which again brings us back to Martin Luther’s 95 Theses. Luther did not deny the Pope’s right to grant pardons for penance imposed by the Catholic Church; he made it clear that preachers who claimed indulgences absolved buyers from all punishments and granted them salvation was wrong. And while the Council of Trent did away with the sale of the types of indulgences that sparked his door defacing act, the sale of indulgences for certain sins still remains in the Catholic Church to this day.

So is this simply a matter of something is better than nothing? Is it a deliverance from our wrongs because the alternative is individually unrealistic? A collective shrug and a hope that we’re doing a little, even if it is just a very little? The dance of the gray area between the lines of black and white? Does anyone actually feel absolved? Or do we all just wish that someone else would come up with a solution that we can all get behind? You know, someone who doesn’t have a plane to catch…

Over the next few years the number things like offsets and other modern indulgences will substantially increase, with some being voluntary and some being mandatory. Their money will go to important, needed things that will help work towards solutions to fix the underlying problem. My concern, as with Luther’s, is that we may be granting people moral salvation instead of actually asking people to take an active role to fix the problems that they helped caused.

http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/p3s1c1a8.htm

Give it a Rest Already

For the sanity of humanity, I would like to clear up a couple things for those of you out there who think that everything that is happening right now, this very second, while you are wasting time reading this, is important:

These are not the “End Times”

Things are not any worse or better than they have ever been

The newest generation is no worse than yours

Each political party will get an equal chance to harm the country in time

Money and time have always been in short supply

Nothing powerful enough to create everything would ever care what you believe in

And lastly, none of this shit is new. Anyone telling you differently is selling something.

So please, for the love of all that is covered in chocolate, give it a fucking rest and stop taking yourself so damn seriously.

Entry for February 26, 2009

Is it just me, or do you want to run into people wearing camouflage just so you can say, “Oh, sorry, didn’t see you there!”

The Peacock has Landed

In The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, the author Neil Strauss (Styles) gives the word Peacocking the following definition: Peacock – verb: to dress in loud clothing or with flashy accoutrements in order to get attention from women. Peacocking items include bright shiny shirts, light-up jewelry, feather boas, colorful cowboy hats, or anything else that makes one stand out in a crowd. Origin: Mystery.

Mystery is a pick-up artist and part of the seduction community. In one of their adventures Styles describes Mystery as being “dressed in a top hat, flight goggles, six-inch platform boots, black latex pants, and a black T-shirt with a scrolling red digital sign that said "Mystery" on it.” Sure you may laugh, but that same guy ended up with his own VH1 reality television series The Pick-up Artist, now in its second season. His thought behind the theory rests in the belief that, in order to attract the most desirable female of the species, it's necessary to stand out in a flashy and colorful way.

His concept, now over a decade old, seems to have grown into the national dress code. So much so that, over the last year or so, I’ve complained about everything from gaudy clothing, to being an unpaid billboard, and even the ridiculous posturing-fashions that so many teens seem unable to resist. That being said, I have come to this conclusion because the style has reached its apex, crossed into the absurd, and will hopefully be soon laid to rest because of flagrant overuse. Moreover, this shift will affect more than just clothing. It represents a general cultural shift from one norm: peacocking for status, to the new norm: understatement for shown awareness – and I couldn’t be happier.

Bring on people trying to outdo each other for how subtle, subdued, or conscience they are by blending into the background. Sure it’s along the line of making something that is good for us overly trendy, but at least I’ll be able to get a drink at the pub without laughing so hard at someone’s clothing that I shoot Guinness out of my nose.

Darwin Day - February 12

Fossils Reveal Truth About Darwin's Theory
By Robin Lloyd, LiveScience Senior Editor

With the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin this week, people around the world are celebrating his role as the father of evolutionary theory. Events and press releases are geared, in part, to combat false claims made by some who would discredit the theory.

One frequently cited "hole" in the theory: Creationists claim there are no transitional fossils, aka missing links. Biologists and paleontologists, among others, know this claim is false.

As key evidence for evolution and species' gradual change over time, transitional creatures should resemble intermediate species, having skeletal and other body features in common with two distinct groups of animals, such as reptiles and mammals, or fish and amphibians.

These animals sound wild, but the fossil record - which is far from complete - is full of them nonetheless, as documented by Occidental College geologist Donald Prothero in his book "Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters" (Columbia University Press, 2007). Prothero discussed those fossils last month at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, along with transitional fossils that were announced since the book was published, including the "fishibian" and the "frogamander."

At least hundreds, possibly thousands, of transitional fossils have been found so far by researchers. The exact count is unclear because some lineages of organisms are continuously evolving.

Here is a short list of transitional fossils documented by Prothero and that add to the mountain of evidence for Charles Darwin's theory. A lot of us relate most to fossils of life closely related to humans, so the list focuses on mammals and other vertebrates, including dinosaurs.

Mammals, including us

* It is now clear that the evolutionary tree for early and modern humans looks more like a bush than the line represented in cartoons. All the hominid fossils found to date form a complex nexus of specimens, Prothero says, but Sahelanthropus tchadensis, found in 2001 and 2002, threw everyone for a loop because it walked upright 7 million years ago on two feet but is quite chimp-like in its skull size, teeth, brow ridges and face. It could be a common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, but many paleoanthropologists will remain unsure until more fossils are found. Previously, the earliest ancestor of our Homo genus found in the fossil record dated back 6 million years.

* -Most fossil giraffes have short necks and today's have long necks, but anatomist Nikos Solounias of the New York Institute of Technology's New York College of Osteopathic Medicine is preparing a description of a giraffe fossil, Bohlinia, with a neck that is intermediate in length.

* Manatees, also called sea cows, are marine mammals that have flippers and a down-turned snout for grazing in warm shallow waters. In 2001, scientists discovered the fossil of a "walking manatee," Pezosiren portelli, which had feet rather than flippers and walked on land during the Eocene epoch (54.8 million years ago to 33.7 million years ago) in what is now Jamaica. Along with skull features like manatees (such as horizontal tooth replacement, like a conveyor belt), it also had heavy ribs for ballast, showing that it also had an aquatic lifestyle, like hippos.

* Scientists know that mastodons, mammoths and elephants all share a common ancestor, but it gets hard to tell apart some of the earliest members of this group, called proboscideans, going back to fossils from the Oligocene epoch (33.7 million years ago to 23.8 million years ago). The primitive members of this group can be traced back to what Prothero calls "the ultimate transitional fossil," Moeritherium, from the late Eocene of Egypt. It looked more like a small hippo than an elephant and probably lacked a long trunk, but it had short upper and lower tusks, the teeth of a primitive mastodon and ear features found only in other proboscideans.

* The Dimetrodon was a big predatory reptile with a tail and a large sail or fin-back. It is often mistaken for a dinosaur, but it's actually part of our mammalian lineage and more closely related to mammals than reptiles, which is seen in its specialized teeth for stabbing meat and skull features that only mammals and their ancestors had. It probably moved around like a lizard and had a jawbone made of multiple bones, like a reptile.

Dinosaurs and birds

* The classic fossil of Archaeopteryx, sometimes called the first bird, has a wishbone (fully fused clavicle) which is only found in modern birds and some dinosaurs. But it also shows impressions from feathers on its body, as seen on many of the theropod dinosaurs from which it evolved. Its body, capable of flight or gliding, also had many of dinosaur features - teeth (no birds alive today have teeth), a long bony tail (tails on modern birds are entirely feathers, not bony), long hind legs and toes, and a specialized hand with long bony fingers (unlike modern bird wings in which the fingers are fused into a single element), Prothero said.

* Sinornis was a bird that also has long bony fingers and teeth, like those seen in dinosaurs and not seen in modern birds.

* Yinlong is a small bipedal dinosaur which shares features with two groups of dinosaurs known to many kids - ceratopsians, the beaked dinosaurs like Triceratops, and pachycephalosaurs, known for having a thick dome of bone in their skulls protecting their brains. Yinlong has the thick rostral bone that is otherwise unique to ceratopsians dinosaurs, and the thick skull roof found in the pachycephalosaurs.

* Anchisaurus is a primitive sauropod dinosaur that has a lot of lizard-like features. It was only 8 feet long (the classic sauropods later on could be more than 100-feet long), had a short neck (sauropods are known for their long necks, while lizards are not), and delicate limbs and feet, unlike dinosaurs. Its spine was like that of a sauropod. The early sauropods were bipedal, while the latter were stood on all fours. Anchisaurus was probably capable of both stances, Prothero wrote.

Fish, frogs, turtles

* Tiktaalik, aka the fishibian or the fishapod, is a large scaled fish that shows a perfect transition between fins and feet, aquatic and land animals. It had fish-like scales, as well as fish-like fin rays and jaw and mouth elements, but it had a shortened skull roof and mobile neck to catch prey, an ear that could hear in both land and water, and a wrist joint that is like those seen in land animals.

* Last year, scientists announced the discovery of Gerobatrachus hottorni, aka the frogamander. Technically, it's a toothed amphibian, but it shows the common origins of frogs and salamanders, scientists say, with a wide skull and large ear drum (like frogs) and two fused ankle bones as seen in salamanders.

* A creature on the way to becoming a turtle, Odontochelys semistestacea, swam around in China's coastal waters 200 million years ago. It had a belly shell but its back was basically bare of armor. Odontochelys had an elongated, pointed snout. Most modern turtles have short snouts. In addition, the roof of its mouth, along with the upper and lower jaws, was equipped with teeth, which the researchers said is a primitive feature for turtles whose mugs are now tipped with beaks but contain no teeth.

Death

I realized the other day that everything that I know about death I learned from Calvin and Hobbes Cartoons.