I’m here today to stand up for the rights of bugs everywhere. From an early age, I have been a voice in the dark for insects you mainly see in the light. I’m talking about the good guys: crickets, lady bugs, and my favorite, the praying mantis –– those guys that don’t cause you pain or eat your garden plants. I have been known to lovingly pick up a cricket from our family room carpet in a tissue (to my wife’s horror) and carefully carry it outside to a safe haven. They hurt nobody and to my thinking deserve a break.

But when it comes to the other ones –– mosquitoes, flies and stinkbugs in particular –– I’m not Mr. Nice Guy. Armed with our battery-operated, tennis racquet-shaped zapper, I will dispatch these pests when they dare to encroach upon our backyard deck let alone enter the sanctity of our home. Why, just the other day, in an office building, I quickly disposed of a cockroach that was sitting comfortably on a hall carpet. ...

Fish tacos. Nick Croce. Normally, when someone mentions San Diego to me these rather disparate words come to mind. There’s nothing mysterious about my thinking of fish tacos: Rubio’s in San Diego features them and they’re super. It seems that after first tasting a fish taco in San Felipe, Mexico, Ralph Rubio returned to San Diego to hand-craft his own recipe and introduced America to the fish taco in 1983. I can tell you first-hand that he did a heck of a job crafting.

Why the city reminds me of Nick Croce –– now that’s a little more esoteric. I used to work with a man by that name, and I always think of him when I pass by Croce’s restaurant on Fifth Avenue in San Diego. I’ve never set foot in the place, but I vow to do so in March. Why March?...

My connection with rubber tires dates back to my childhood, those days before I was old enough to drive. On weekends, my parents and I would go to one of several beaches in Connecticut not too far from our home. In the trunk of our car, next to the picnic basket, was something I loved: a large black inner tube. In those days, car and truck tires had inner tubes, flexible circles of rubber into which you pumped the air.

 

When we got to the beach, I would grab the tube and run to the ocean. It was my first boat. Actually, it was my only boat. My family never had one. Probably one reason was that my mother never learned to swim and never ventured farther than a few feet into the water.

 

Jump ahead a number of decades and I am driving my car in New Jersey, and I see what looks like a trillion used tires piled up in a lot beside the highway. As much as I loved those inner tubes, it bothered me to think of the effect that tire disposal might have on the environment.  And then, this week, I read an item in the ACS Weekly PressPac that made me smile again…

This memory has so many cobwebs on it that I can’t remember what the device was called. It was either a washboard or a washing board. Or maybe it even was called something else. (Jumping back to the present, I just checked online and it was a washboard.)

What I do picture clearly is my mother soaping up a shirt and vigorously scrubbing it against this board with metal ridges on it. It made a unique noise. She spent many hours slapping that board until we got our first washing machine.

Years later, even after we got our first clothes dryer, she preferred to hang our laundry on a clothesline in the backyard. I remember bringing frozen shirts into the dryer on more than one occasion.

The invention of the washing machine was a God-send for my mother and women everywhere, but now, eons later, there is a small problem with these ever-evolving devices.

With an apology to the millions of you out there who love to bask in the heat of the beach and work on a tan, I am a confirmed shade-worshipper. I don’t like the heat, nor does my wife. We always head north for our summer vacations. And even then, I always try to pick the shady side of the street when we are in cities. It just feels more comfortable to me.

 

I’m no sun-hater, on the other hand. I realize my garden tomatoes would never see the light of day without Old Sol, nor would any of us, needless to say. So I guess you could say I can take the sun in small doses. But as one of the loudest cheerleaders for green energy, I admit that there are times when more is better when it comes to the sunshine effect. Take solar panels in homes and office buildings, for example.

Anyone who reads the blog knows that I’m a mosquito magnet. As I’ve written, one minute near the woods and I get bitten. A few days ago, in broad daylight, I was showing a carpenter something next to our house and in about 30 seconds I had a first: A mosquito bite on the palm of my hand.

 

Unfortunately, mosquitos aren’t the only insects that have taken a liking to me. When I was about 7, I turned over a detached slide in a neighbor’s backyard and a nest of hornets chased me home. And then there was the time I was picking my daughters up at a babysitter’s and several bees flew into my open car window and stung me on the ear lobe. I was minding my own business. These experiences coupled with several occasions when yellow jackets have stung me as I sat quietly in the grass or simply walked through the woods make me wonder if Mother Nature has it in for me.

I didn’t see this one coming. I pride myself in keeping up with the latest breakthroughs in green chemistry. It’s part of my job, for one thing. For another, I love the environment. I recycle fanatically, never litter, turn off the lights when I’m not in the room at home, and I soon will be in the market for a car that gets 40 mpg.

 

So when I hear about breakthroughs in water filtration, anything that protects forests, or more creation of alternative fuels, it makes me happy. This week I’m a little bit ecstatic.

 

Amid growing concern that using soybeans and other food crops to produce biodiesel fuel will raise the price of food, scientists have identified a new and unlikely raw material for the fuel: Alligator fat. Their report documenting gator fat’s suitability for biofuel production appears in ACS’ journal ...

Every day I get multiple chances to pose the not-so-musical question: So what? It may be on cable news. They show tape of a guy winning the annual hotdog-eating contest in Coney Island, Brooklyn. So what? Do I know this guy? Do I have stock in an antacid-making company? I read in a news magazine that, with 15 months until the next presidential election, a certain candidate has this rating in one poll and that rating in another. So what? A lot can happen in a year. A lot can happen in a day.

 

Sometimes, though, I get fooled. Sometimes a “so what?” is actually a “no kidding?” in disguise. A case in point is a study that is described quite nicely in this week’s ACS PressPac.

It’s official: I’ve finally become my father. Or is it my mother? I honestly don’t remember anymore which one of them was always bugging me to turn out the lights before I left a room, but in any case I, too, am now a light-turner-offer fanatic. And my poor wife has become my victim.

 

Twice in the past week I clicked off the lights to our basement, unwittingly leaving her in the dark down there. In my defense, I did call downstairs to see if she was there, but she was in a back room and didn’t hear me. “Your voice is soft, so you really have to yell for me to hear you down there,” she gently reminded me… twice.