Zoofari at the St. Louis Zoo

Lions have often been spotted only a few miles from my house.

I live in St. Louis, Missouri, where we have a rather excellent zoo that offers free admission to everyone. Today my daughter and I took our cameras to the St. Louis Zoo, which is only about four miles from my home. Here's one of the lions that is often spotted:

We also enjoyed watching apes interacting with sea lions:

Here are some of my chimpanzee pics. Whenever I see the chimps grooming, I think of Robin Dunbar's (persuasive) arguments that human gossip serves the same purpose as chimpanzee grooming.

If you click on the title, you will be taken to the full post, where you can view a gallery of these and other photos from today, Zoofari.

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God, the Cartoon Version

Back in the 1970s, I went to high school with Mike Harty at Mercy High School in St. Louis, a co-ed Catholic school. We hit it off immediately back then and we remain good friends today. One thing I enjoyed and admired about Mike is his ability to draw. After high school, as young adults, we periodically got together to draw cartoons. I threw a lot of bad ideas his way and he tried to make them funny. We tried to get them published by several newspapers and syndicates, but we weren't successful.

We've kept those cartoons and I recently pulled them out of mothballs. As I looked at them yesterday, I found that about half of them still seemed funny to me. Yesterday I called Mike and we agreed to risk yet more public rejection/humiliation by publishing some of these cartoons on my website, Dangerous Intersection as well as featuring some of them on FB. We'll publish these in six small batches, starting this this group on the topic of God. I smile as I look at these because Mike has always been religious and I have never been, yet we both enjoyed batting around these ideas. We hope you enjoy some of these too.

One of our two-panel Christmas Cards focused on the related topic of eschatology:

Here is a gallery of our other cartoons on the topic of God:

[More . . . ]

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R.I.P. Lyle Mays

RIP Lyle Mays. How often have the notes from your keyboards filled my heart and mind? Here is Lyle with Pat Metheny, playing one of the most beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard, "Letter from Home." Please take 2 minutes to listen to this. It will melt away anything that is troubling you.

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Acrylic Poured Art – First Attempts

Last night I made a few acrylic poured paintings. It's mostly fun and takes very little artistic ability. The patterns develop as you cause the paint to slide around the canvas by slanting the canvas after you pour your own customized concoction of paint (and Floetrol, water and a few drops of silicon) out of a cup. And then you get to stand back and watch more patterns and "cells" emerge on their own. If you are interested in trying this, just Google acrylic pour painting and you'll find numerous tutorials/demos.

On FB, a friend commented: "An uncanny resemblance to some rocks I've seen some guy posting lately."

My response: There is a parallel to rock tumbling. Very little need for talent, yet sometimes stunning results. These activities are both fun and relaxing and they work well as a counter-balance to the intense abstract time-driven work I do as an attorney. Or maybe I'm simply regressing to my childhood . .

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