Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

Thanks, Stradee --- if you need anything for the house - like a new house or a truck or car, just go down to the Atlantic beach area and wait a few minutes....... All that stuff is floating over from Japan now and will continue for an estimated 4-5 yrs.

Trees asmiling!!!!!!!!!!!

Hibernators Take It Slow

Sacha Vignieri


CREDIT: GEORGE MCCARTHY/CORBIS
Hibernation is thought to have evolved as a strategy for avoiding extreme environmental conditions in seasonal climates. Hibernators, however, are also found in the tropics and will sometimes continue to hibernate after mild conditions, and plentiful food, return. Other forces, therefore, may act to make hibernation, which is present in nearly half of all mammalian orders, a common strategy. Hibernation lowers metabolism and conserves energy, but as animals enter hidden dens and burrows to hibernate, it also removes them from the external environment, perhaps affecting survival. Turbill et al. reviewed the published literature on 19 species of mammalian hibernators and found that, indeed, annual survival and total life span in hibernating mammals are greater than they are in nonhibernators of the same size. Hibernators also have a "slower pace of life," including a delay in maturity, lower annual reproductive output, and longer generation time. This analysis suggests that small hibernating mammals may trade high annual reproduction for a longer reproductive life, a successful life history strategy that is seen more often in large, long-lived mammals.

I haver company and think I forgot to click yesterday. Will do better today.
Waiting for more rain on Saturday. Veggie garden is looking good.

April 14, 2011
Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born
By NICHOLAS WADE
A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated.

The finding fits well with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA that modern humans originated in Africa. It also implies, though does not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of considerable controversy among linguists.

The detection of such an ancient signal in language is surprising. Because words change so rapidly, many linguists think that languages cannot be traced very far back in time. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, that of the Indo-European family, which includes English, goes back 9,000 years at most.

Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language. Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.

Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has about 45 phonemes.

This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.

Language is at least 50,000 years old, the date that modern humans dispersed from Africa, and some experts say it is at least 100,000 years old. Dr. Atkinson, if his work is correct, is picking up a distant echo from this far back in time.

Linguists tend to dismiss any claims to have found traces of language older than 10,000 years, “but this paper come

Thanks, sumac -- I always thought the oldest and very first word spoken by a human was that sound done down south by rednecks - the one that is unspellable, sounds like, "Aaangh!!" and is normally used to stop a dog from doing something.

Good clicking.

One Year Later

Next week marks the first anniversary of an environmental disaster — the explosion at BP’s Macondo oil well that killed 11 workers, sank the drilling rig, sent 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and threw thousands of people out of work. Yet Congress is behaving as if nothing at all happened, as if there were no lessons to draw from the richly documented chain of errors and regulatory shortcomings that contributed to the blowout.

Even worse, Congress is pushing in exactly the wrong direction. The House Natural Resources Committee passed three bills this week that would force the administration to accelerate the granting of drilling permits in the gulf and open huge new offshore areas to oil and gas exploration. The compromise 2011 budget makes major cuts in clean energy programs designed to lessen this country’s dependence on fossil fuels.

What makes this particularly discouraging is that, Congress aside, there has been a surprising amount of progress, thanks largely to the hard work of thousands of people and the extraordinary resilience of nature. More than 99 percent of the gulf has been reopened to fishing, jobs are returning, and the Interior Department has tightened oversight. Yet without Congress’s help progress will slow and many crucial tasks will remain undone.

•

Here is a one-year report card and a look ahead:

THE GULF After prematurely claiming victory last year, the Obama administration has since done exhaustive sampling across the gulf and concluded — along with many independent scientists — that the oil has now mostly evaporated, been captured or consumed by microbes. One thousand miles of soiled beaches have been reduced to less than 100. Gulf seafood is safe to eat.

Louisiana’s wetlands — vital fish nurseries — are soiled, and the full extent of the damage to the gulf’s ecosystem and its species, especially to fish larvae and the tiny organisms vital to the food chain, may not be known for years. More will be learned when the government issues its preliminary, legally mandated assessment next fall. Until then, and for years after, the watchword is vigilance: the herring population in Prince William Sound did not crash until three years after the Exxon Valdez spill.

RESTORATION The gulf had serious problems before the spill. One-third of Louisiana’s marshes, wetlands and barrier islands disappeared over the last century, victims of industrial development and levee-building along the Mississippi River. The administration correctly saw the spill as a chance to help underwrite a huge restoration effort, drawing on the $5 billion to $20 billion in civil and criminal penalties BP is likely to owe. To jump-start the effort, the White House may ask BP to make an advance payment on these penalties. But none of that can happen without Congress. Under current law, the fines would flow mostly to a fund to clean up future spills.

REGULATION The spill exposed grievous flaws in federal oversight, including a destructively cozy relationship between the oil industry and its regulators in the Interior Department. The department has since been reorganized and tough new standards applied to all aspects of the drilling process.

Industry and local politicians started pushing for new deep-water drilling permits the moment the drilling moratorium was lifted last fall. The Interior Department has been right to move cautiously. It has also insisted that new operators fully prepare for worst-case scenarios and have access to new equipment capable of stopping a runaway well. Such equipment — known as a capping stack — is now available, but has yet to be tested at great depth.

Here again Congress can be helpful. At a minimum, it should codify the Interior Department’s regulatory changes so that future administrations do not rescind them. It could go further by making the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — the agency responsible for the health of America’s coastal waters — an equal partner in decisions about where oil companies can and cannot drill. Environmental concerns must play a primary role.

INDUSTRY A presidential commission concluded that the Macondo blowout reflected not just BP’s carelessness but an industrywide “culture of complacency.” Right after the spill, a half-dozen of the biggest companies banded together to develop new systems to contain a blowout. But so far the industry has turned a deaf ear to the commission’s modest but sensible suggestion that it establish an independent safety institute to audit industry operations, much as the nuclear industry did after the disaster at Three Mile Island.

BP will pay a high price for its negligence. But this is a rich and powerful industry long accustomed to getting its way.

If Congress chooses to keep enabling the oil barons, rather than demanding that they change their ways, the lessons of the gulf disaster will be wasted. And America’s waters will remain at risk.

Isn't that the way all government actions are --- during a crisis they yell fix it --- and after the crisis they forget all about fixing it.

Good clicking.

pril 16, 2011

Chemicals Were Injected Into Wells, Report Says

By IAN URBINA
WASHINGTON — Oil and gas companies injected hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous or carcinogenic chemicals into wells in more than 13 states from 2005 to 2009, according to an investigation by Congressional Democrats.

The chemicals were used by companies during a drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, which involves the high-pressure injection of a mixture of water, sand and chemical additives into rock formations deep underground. The process, which is being used to tap into large reserves of natural gas around the country, opens fissures in the rock to stimulate the release of oil and gas.

Hydrofracking has attracted increased scrutiny from lawmakers and environmentalists in part because of fears that the chemicals used during the process can contaminate underground sources of drinking water.

“Questions about the safety of hydraulic fracturing persist, which are compounded by the secrecy surrounding the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing fluids,” said the report, which was written by Representatives Henry A. Waxman of California, Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Diana DeGette of Colorado.

The report, released late Saturday, also faulted companies for at times “injecting fluids containing chemicals that they themselves cannot identify.”

The inquiry over hydrofracking, which was initiated by the House Energy and Commerce Committee when Mr. Waxman led it last year, also found that 14 of the nation’s most active hydraulic fracturing companies used 866 million gallons of hydraulic fracturing products — not including water. More than 650 of these products contained chemicals that are known or possible human carcinogens, regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act, or are listed as hazardous air pollutants, the report said.

A request for comment from the American Petroleum Institute about the report received no reply.

Matt Armstrong, an energy attorney from Bracewell & Giuliani that represents several companies involved in natural gas drilling, faulted the methodology of the congressional report released Saturday and an earlier report by the same lawmakers.

"This report uses the same sleight of hand deployed in the last report on diesel use -- it compiles overall product volumes, not the volumes of the hazardous chemicals contained within those products," he said. "This generates big numbers but provides no context for the use of these chemicals over the many thousands of frac jobs that were conducted within the timeframe of the report."

Some ingredients mixed into the hydraulic fracturing fluids were common and generally harmless, like salt and citric acid. Others were unexpected, like instant coffee and walnut hulls, the report said. Many ingredients were “extremely toxic,” including benzene, a known human carcinogen, and lead.

Companies injected large amounts of other hazardous chemicals, including 11.4 million gallons of fluids containing at least one of the toxic or carcinogenic B.T.E.X. chemicals — benzene, toluene, xylene and ethylbenzene. The companies used the highest volume of fluids containing one or more carcinogens in Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas.

The report comes two and a half months after an initial report by the same three lawmakers that found that 32.2 millions of gallons of fluids containing diesel, considered an especially hazardous pollutant because it contains benzene, were injected into the ground during hydrofracking by a dozen companies from 2005 to 2009, in possible violation of the drinking water act.

A 2010 report by Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy organization, found that benzene levels in other hydrofracking ingredients were as much as 93 times higher than those found in diesel.

The use of these chemicals has been a source of concern to regulators and environmentalists who worry that some of them could find their way out of a well bore — because of above-ground spills, underground failures of well casing or migration through layers of rock — and into nearby sources of drinking water.

These contaminants also remain in the fluid that returns to the surface after a well is hydrofracked. A recent investigation by The New York Times found high levels of contaminants, including benzene and radioactive materials, in wastewater that is being sent to treatment plants not designed to fully treat the waste before it is discharged into rivers. At one plant in Pennsylvania, documents from the Environmental Protection Agency revealed levels of benzene roughly 28 times the federal drinking water standard in wastewater as it was discharged, after treatment, into the Allegheny River in May 2008.

The E.P.A. is conducting a national study on the drinking water risks associated with hydrofracking, but assessing these risks has been made more difficult by companies’ unwillingness to publicly disclose which chemicals and in what concentrations they are used, according to internal e-mails and draft notes of the study plan.

Some companies are moving toward more disclosure, and the industry will soon start a public database of these chemicals. But the Congressional report said that reporting to this database is strictly voluntary, that disclosure will not include the chemical identity of products labeled as proprietary, and that there is no way to determine if companies are accurately reporting information for all wells. In Pennsylvania, the lack of disclosure of drilling ingredients has also incited a heated debate among E.P.A. lawyers about the threat and legality of treatment plants accepting the wastewater and discharging it into rivers.

How horrific! They may also find people floating in the debri...so sad.

I'll stay in California thank-you-very-much and play the lottery...

Sue, heard about the storm mess in Virginia...lots of dust heading your way...and maybe rain with it. Today, weathers nice, but we may have showers during the afternoon hours...great for the lawns. Staying in and working on the damned walls. yuk

Good day all ~

That's true, Stradee. The Japanese estimate approx 17,000 missing people --- most guessed to be in the Atlantic. I wouldn't think that anything of the bodies would make it to the US though - It's all just seafood now. A few days after the tsunami rescuers found a man about 20 miles off shore - alive.

Sue, great and disturbing article. I'd heard about this before, but your article gave much more detail. I say "Frack em all"!!!!!!!!!!

National Parks Week kicks off Saturday, but the celebration comes at a rough time for National Parks. Harried by federal funding cuts and urban development, the nation's park system is also facing the rising threat of climate change.

Those effects are becoming most visible in Yellowstone, one of the best known of all national parks, according to Paul Solotaroff. He wrote about Yellowstone's climate challenge in April's issue of Men's Journal and tells Weekend All Things Considered guest host Noah Adams that the damage is putting the park's ecosystem out of balance.

"In the last decade, there has been just an endless siege of dry and unusually hot stretches that have thinned out the streams and lakes, that have made it very difficult for trees to regenerate at the highest elevations, among them the lodgepole pine and whitebark pine, which are the signature of the Yellowstone greater ecosystem," Solotaroff explains.

As a consequence of the heat and dryness, pine beetles have invested the trees and left many of them dead, he says. This is a big problem for Yellowstone, as the pines are especially essential to the park's inhabitants. They provide shade, stabilize the soil and, perhaps most importantly, feed the local grizzly bears.

The tree's pine seeds are core to the bears' diet. Without it, the animals become increasingly desperate to find food, Solotaroff explains.

Yellowstone had two grizzly bear attacks last year, something that hadn't happened in the park in 24 years. The first was an accident: A hiker crossed paths with a bear that had been sedated by a team of federal researchers. The second attack was by a mother bear searching for food. She injured several campers before ultimately killing a medic from Michigan who had come to Yellowstone to fish in its streams.

Pine seeds are only part of the bears' problem, Solotaroff says. Trout, another part of the bears' diet, are dying as a result of rising temperatures in the streams. All of this, he believes, can be linked back to climate change.

Despite the attacks and the infestations, Yellowstone told NPR in a statement that the issues are too broad to scientifically connect to climate change. Solotaroff disagrees.

"Every reasonable scientist, every reasonable arborist, agrees that there is a very tightly knit connection between the availability of food supply and the behavior of these bears," he says.

"What is driving these bears into populated places is hunger, and that hunger derives from the ripple effects of the warming of the last 10 years and the significant but more gradual warming of the last 30 years in the American Northwest."

New climate change case headed to Supreme Court

By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press
Mon Apr 18, 4:22 am ET

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration and environmental interests generally agree that global warming is a threat that must be dealt with.
But they're on opposite sides of a Supreme Court case over the ability of states and groups such as the Audubon Society that want to sue large electric utilities and force power plants in 20 states to cut their emissions.
The administration is siding with American Electric Power Co. and three other companies in urging the high court to throw out the lawsuit on grounds the Environmental Protection Agency, not a federal court, is the proper authority to make rules about climate change. The justices will hear arguments in the case Tuesday.
The court is taking up a climate change case for the second time in four years. In 2007, the court declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. By a 5-4 vote, the justices said the EPA has the authority to regulate those emissions from new cars and trucks under that landmark law. The same reasoning applies to power plants.
The administration says one reason to end the current suit is that the EPA is considering rules that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. But the administration also acknowledges that it is not certain that limits will be imposed.
At the same time, Republicans in Congress are leading an effort to strip the EPA of its power to regulate greenhouse gases.
The uncertainty about legislation and regulation is the best reason for allowing the case to proceed, said David Doniger, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which represents Audubon and other private groups dedicated to land conservation.
"This case was always the ultimate backstop," Doniger said, even as he noted that the council would prefer legislation or EPA regulation to court decisions. The suit would end if the EPA does set emission standards for greenhouse gases, he said.
The legal claims advanced by six states, New York City and the land trusts would be pressed only "if all else failed," he said.
When the suit was filed in 2004, it looked like the only way to force action on global warming. The Bush administration and the Republicans in charge of Congress doubted the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases.
Federal courts long have been active in disputes over pollution. But those cases typically have involved a power plant or sewage treatment plant that was causing some identifiable harm to people, and property downwind or downstream of the polluting plant.
Global warming, by its very name, suggests a more complex problem. The power companies argue that any solution must be comprehensive. No court-ordered change alone would have any effect on climate change, the companies say.
"This is an issue that is of worldwide nature and causation. It's the result of hundreds of years of emissions all over the world," said Ed Comer, vice president and general counsel of the Edison Electric Institute, an industry trade group.
The other defendants in the suit are Cinergy Co., now part of Duke Energy Corp. of North Carolina; Southern Co. Inc. of Georgia; Xcel Energy Inc. of Minnesota; and the federal Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA is represented by the government and its views do not precisely align with those of other companies.
Eight states initially banded together to sue. They were California, Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin. But in a sign of the enduring role of partisan politics in this issue, New Jersey and Wisconsin withdrew this year after Republican replaced Democrats in their governor's offices.
Another complication is that the administration and the companies may be on the same side at the Supreme Court, but the power industry is strongly opposing climate change regulation. The Southern Co. is a vocal supporter of GOP legislation to block the EPA from acting.
"It's two-faced for them (the companies) to come into court and say everything is well in hand because EPA is going to act," said Doniger, the NRDC lawyer.
Comer said the key point is that judges should not make environmental policy. "This has important implications for jobs. If you raise energy costs in the U.S., does that lead industry jobs to go elsewhere and if it does, do you get the same emissions, just from another country?" Comer said. "These judgments are properly made by elected officials."
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was on the federal appeals court panel that heard the case, is not taking part in the Supreme Court's consideration of the issue.
The case is American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut, 10-174.
___

Interesting stuff re. the bears and the pollutants --- I say, regardless of what humans do - nature will win.

Great clicking all, keep it up, the trees are asmiling.

The veggie garden continues apace and just harvested a small ton of radishes which undoubtedly will go bad and have to be thrown out before I eat them all. Oh, well.

Durham was in the middle of all that tornadic activity over the weekend but nothing on top of us. It is very rare to have even one touch down in NC, let alone all of them.

For decades the scientists have said global warmings first signs will be an increase in the severity of our weather. Well, it's here!!!

Good clicking and thanks for the articles.

There appears to be another big storm heading your way. So be careful.

Thanks for the heads up Danon. Need the rain but not the wind. Here is a good article about whales.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/science/19profile.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha210&pagewanted=print



April 18, 2011
Whales’ Grandeur and Grace, Up Close
By YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE
On a warm summer afternoon in 2005, Bryant Austin was snorkeling in the blue waters of the South Pacific by the islands of Tonga, looking through his camera at a humpback whale and her calf swimming less than 50 yards away. As he waited for the right moment, the playful calf swam right up to him, so close that he had to lower his camera. That’s when he felt a gentle tap on his shoulder.

Turning around, Mr. Austin found himself looking straight into the eye of the mother whale, her body bigger than a school bus. The tap had come from her pectoral fin, weighing more than a ton. To Mr. Austin, her gesture was an unmistakable warning that he had gotten too close to the calf. And yet, the mother whale had extended her fin with such precision and grace — to touch the photographer without hurting him — that Mr. Austin was in awe of her “delicate restraint.”

Looking into the whale’s eye, lit by sunlight through the water, Austin felt he was getting a glimpse of calmness and intelligence, of the animal’s consciousness. The moment changed Mr. Austin’s life. It struck him that something was missing from four decades of whale photography: the beauty of true scale. Mr. Austin concluded that the only way to capture the magnificence of whales would be to create life-size pictures of them. “I wanted to recreate the feeling I had when I looked into the eye of the mother whale,” he said.

Mr. Austin has since pursued that dream, spending countless hours at sea in the company of whales. Working with five different whales from three species, he has created 25 true-scale pictures, including two full portraits — each composed from dozens of photographs of different sections of the whale’s body. The largest photo is a 6-by-30-foot portrait of a dwarf Minke whale from the Great Barrier Reef in Australia; the panels that make up the image weigh a total of 600 pounds. Some of Mr. Austin’s work went on display this month at the Electric Works gallery in San Francisc

April 18, 2011

The Court and Global Warming

The case about global warming scheduled to be argued on Tuesday before the Supreme Court is a blockbuster. Eight states — from California to New York, plus New York City — sued six corporations responsible for one-fourth of the American electric power industry’s emissions of carbon dioxide.

Rather than seeking money or punishment for the defendants, they seek what everyone should agree is the polluters’ responsibility: abatement of their huge, harmful part in causing climate change. The purpose is not to solve global warming or usurp the government’s role in doing so. It is, rightly, to get major utilities to curb their greenhouse-gas emissions before the government acts.

Because there is no federal regulation of this problem in force, it is fortunate that there is a line of Supreme Court precedents back to 1901 on which the plaintiffs can build their challenge. When this lawsuit began seven years ago, one of the defendants’ main defenses was that, because the Clean Air Act and other laws “address” carbon dioxide emissions, Congress has “legislated on the subject” and pre-empted the suit. The pre-emption claim was spurious when they made it and remains spurious now.

Seven years ago, neither Congress nor the Bush administration showed interest in pushing comprehensive laws or rules to curb these gases. Since then, the Environmental Protection Agency has found that greenhouse gases endanger public health as “the primary driver” of climate change and has regulated vehicle emissions.

But the electric power industry is working to scuttle this regulation, with the help of the Republican-controlled House. In court, the industry pushes for letting the E.P.A. regulate. On Capitol Hill, it tries to torpedo that authority.

For the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, two Bush appointees (one by the father, the other by the son) held that the prospect of regulation by the federal government is not enough to make this lawsuit go away. What the judges noted remains incontestable today: “E.P.A. does not currently regulate carbon dioxide” by requiring “control of such emissions” from existing power plants.

The judges reviewed five other major statutes that directly address the issue of climate change, beginning with the National Climate Progra

pril 18, 2011

What Stories These Lice Can Tell

Were there many bird and mammal species while dinosaurs still lived? Or did they diversify only after dinosaurs were wiped out some 65 million years ago? The fossil record hasn’t been much help answering this fundamental question. But a study published recently in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters may have found an answer based on a different kind of fossil: fossilized lice.

Imagine a louse not as a repulsive human pest (this may take some doing) but as a scientific marker of sorts. Lice reproduce quickly, and they tend to co-evolve with the species they infest, adapting to fit one kind of host. This means that a wide variety of lice presupposes a wide variety of hosts. Using genetic markers, a team of scientists led by Vince Smith of the Natural History Museum in London determined that lice families began to radiate, or diversify, before the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, which killed 75 percent of the species on earth. They may have begun to diversify as long as 145 million years ago.

That suggests that bird and mammal species also began to diversify in the Cretaceous period. It corroborates new genetic evidence, from birds and mammals, though it is still unclear how many of them survived the extinction that marks the end of the Cretaceous period.

We may now have to reimagine the age of dinosaurs, picturing a wider array of birds and mammals moving among them. We may also have to picture feathered dinosaurs pestered by lice just the way modern birds are. Those could well be ancestors of the postextinction lice that specialize in mammals, including the three species that specialize in us.

That reminds me of one of my very favorite poems, sumac --- "To A Louse", by Robert Burns.
_______________

On seeing one on a lady's bonnet, at church.

Ha! whare ye gaun, ye crowlin' ferlie!
Your impudence protects you sairly:
I canna say but ye strunt rarely,
Owre gauze and lace;
Tho faith, I fear ye dine but sparely
On sic a place.

Ye ugly, creepin, blastit wonner,
Detested, shunn'd by saunt an' sinner,
How dare ye set your fit upon her,
Sae fine lady!
Gae somewhere else, and seek your dinner
On some poor body.

Swith, in some beggar's haffet squattle;
There ye may creep, and sprawl, and sprattle
Wi'ither kindred, jumping cattle
In shoals and nations;
Whare horn nor bane ne'er dare unsettle
Your thick plantations.

Now haud ye there, ye're out o' sight
Below the fatt'rels, snug an' tight;
Na, faith ye yet! ye'll no be right
Till ye've got on it,
The vera tapmost, tow'ring height
O' Miss's bonnet.

My sooth! right bauld ye set your nose out
As plump and gray as onie grozet;
O for some rank, mercrrial rozet,
Or fell, red smeddum,
I'd gie you sic a hearty doze o't
Wad dress your droddum!

I wad na been surpris'd to spy
You on an auld wife's flainen toy;
Or aiblins some bit duddie boy,
On's wyliecoat;
But Miss's fine Lunardi! fie,
How daur ye do't?

O, Jenny, dinna toss your head,
An' set your beauties a'abread!
Ye little ken what cursed speed
The blastie's makin!
Thae winks and finger-ends, I dread,
Are notice takin'!

(((((and this is my favorite part !!!!!!!!!)))))

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
And foolish notions:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
And ev'n Devotion!

-----------------

If only we all had a mirror to ourselves as other people see us.
We would all be more understanding of other people as well as ourselves.

I just love the poem -----
Also, equally loved by me is Burn's poem, "To A Mouse"!!!!!!!!

All of the above!!!!

great clicking all you Wildclickers!!!!!!!!!!

We - together - have saved several trees and there is a tree asmiling today!!!