Dear Kitty. Some blog

Today, first along the railroad.

Blackberries, and common blue and meadow brown butterflies still there.

Then, the botanical gardens.

A biologist explains on, mainly small, animals, there.

First, many small snails: common door snail. They eat lichen, so they don’t harm flowers.

There are also sowbugs, isopods, with some new born young. They lay their eggs in fluid similar to sea water: they are crustsaceans, whose ancestors lived in the sea.

Then, a bigger snail species: brown garden snail.

And a centipede: Lithobius forficatus, garden centipede. It eats isopods, worms, etc. Later, another, bigger, centipede species.

Under stones, a small black ant nest. Winged males and many pupas among them.

We see a smooth newt: there are hundreds of them in the botanical gardens. Also many young toads, just one centimetre in size, jumping.

In the chestnut trees live many horse chestnut leaf-miners; small moths.

Then we go to the hothouses.

Ten tropical ant species live there, which came along with tropical plants; as did jumping spiders.

In the Victoria amazonica hothouse waters live many small tropical fish. And also a metre long South American catfish.

African cichlids also usaed to live there. However, they had to be taken away, as they ate the Victoria amazonica plants.

Today, from the city to the villlage.

Eurasian reed-warbler singing. Great cormorant flying overhead.

Later, in the nature reserve: a buzzard. Still later; a sparrowhawk, a regular nesting species here.

Welcome to dearkitty at Blogsome. This is the first post. This is a backup blog to Dear Kitty blog at ModBlog.

An email has been sent giving details how to login to the administration section.

From there you can change the design by clicking on the tab MANAGE and then click on the tab THEMES. If you have any questions ask them in the forum.

UPDATE 16 october 2006: ModBlog seems to be gone forever.

A troubadour for this generation

(Wednesday 10 August 2005)

INTERVIEW: David Rovics

by MIKE CHIVERS

INTERVIEW: DAVID ROVICS talks about the inspirations and ideas behind his progressive folk music.

At a time when grand humanitarian gestures have become indistinguishable from the latest corporate publicity drive, US singer-songwriter David Rovics is a rare and precious find.

Here we have a committed artist who encourages his audience not only to care deeply about the world but to go out and change it themselves - a true anti-capitalist and travelling troubadour for the G8 generation.

I meet Rovics at the Brighton [England] pub the Evening Star.

He enthuses about the performers that he appeared alongside at the previous day’s Glastonwick Beer Festival, including Carter USM’s JimBob, ex-Adverts front man TV Smith and “keep it spiky” trainspotters Eastfield.

Rovics’s own music falls into the acoustic tradition of Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs and Pete Seeger. …

“My most recent song was directly inspired by the Bush administration.

They appointed Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank.

That was so poetic, because, at least in the US, there’s a real division between the global justice movement, around WTO, G8 and that kind of thing, and the anti-war movement.

“It seems outrageous because it is so obvious that these things are connected. How can you separate US economic policy from US military policy?

They’re all part of the same thing.

“Appointing the guy who was in charge of bombing Iraq to the financial institution that’s supposed to help develop the Third World?

If that doesn’t make the connections between capitalism and imperialism obvious, then what will?”

Read more here.

Background of Rovics’ song Saint Patrick’s Battalion: here. The Mexican-US war of 1848: here.