Night time is the right time

I just returned from riding a few loops around Greasewood Park, my first mountain bike night ride in a couple of years. The high point was seeing a gray fox run across the trail in front of me. I also flushed a common poorwill from the trail, and I watched a trio of lesser nighthawks foraging under a streetlight on the ride back home. The wildlife sightings more than made up for my dead legs, the likely result of an uninterrupted work week of bike commuting in the heat and wind.

Meanwhile, somewhere downtown, the Tucson Naked Bike Ride was going on. And when I say naked bike, I don't mean a sport-oriented motorcycle without a fairing - I mean it's a Critical Ass ride. Authorities had warned would-be participants...class six felony...think of the children...or so the newspapers reported. We'll find out tomorrow how many smelly hippies, wimpsters, fixsters, BICAS hangers-on, and other assorted scene-making downtown denizens The Man took down in lieu of working to prevent actual crimes.

As an aside, you may have noticed, though not cared, that I'm no longer plugging in scientific names when I mention a plant or animal (or bacterium or sponge, for that matter). Some binomials I know, but most I don't, making it a good exercise to look them up. The name of the author who'd first named the species is less widely published. Finding it takes a bit more effort, and I often end up with a few other tabs open in Firefox and/or a small pile of scientific books next to my monitor. It's too much like work.

That's it for now - it's past my bedtime.