McDonaldLand

The other night my daughter woke up screaming about 4am. I went in and she was sitting straight up in bed, eyes blank. I got her calmed down and she went back to sleep, only to wake up 20 minutes later. Repeat, but this time she stayed asleep.

In the morning I asked her what her bad dream had been about. With a look of doubt on her face she very seriously asked, “Daddy, was there a bear in the house last night?”.

Yes. Yes, there was. Not really. I told her no and took it as a lesson.

I had been channel surfing and stopped on a Discovery channel show about wolves. In it, there was a grizzly bear that stole a meal from a pack of 4-5 male wolves. During this time she had been playing with her dolls on the floor, so I thought nothing of what I was watching. I am slowly but surely learning that kids, even at age 2, see and hear everything. The show that I didn’t even think she was paying attention to ended up causing a bad dream later that night.

Young children really are sponges.

Put down your buckets of red paint – no animals were harmed in the creation of this post.

So I was mowing the lawn yesterday and I spotted this big red thing crawling across the grass. I had never seen anything like this before and wanted to know what it was. It looked like a wasp with no wings to me, so I naturally avoided touching it. So I used my daughter’s bug catching net to scoop it up then took a couple pictures for identification.

Roughly the actual size of it…

I searched Google for “red and black wingless wasp” and quickly found pictures that matched mine. This appears to be a Red Velvet Ant, commonly called a Cow Killer. That’s Dasymutilla occidentalis for you entomologists out there. The name is derived from the painful sting of the female, shown above, which is said to be so painful it could kill a cow. Only the females can sting and only the males can fly and both squeak/squeal when they are trapped. I was standing upright and had it pinned down with a stick and could hear it squealing loud and clear.

This species seeks out the underground nests of other stinging insects, namely bumblebees, and lays eggs that eventually eat the host larvae. What does this mean for me? I am likely to see more of them as we have a ton of bumblebees around. I let it go because I didn’t know what it was but with two little girls, one who refuses to wear shoes, I wish I had gotten rid of it.

I’m eating some peanut M&M’s right now instead of working out because of my injury. When I poured them out they just happened to all segregate by color, which reminded me of a little experiment we did a while back.

A guy I work with stated one day that he didn’t like a certain color M&M (I don’t remember which), which prompted the debate over whether they really tasted different or not. His repeated assertions that they did prompted us to set up a blind taste test. We purchased a single bag of peanut M&M’s and got him a glass of water to rinse his palette between each tasting. He then ate them one by one and told us what he thought the color was.

I was amazed at the results. While he wasn’t perfect, he got around 80% (I don’t remember the exact number) of them right. If you consider that a bag of M&M’s has roughly 20 candies in it and 5-6 different colors, this is a pretty impressive feat.

So can you taste the difference between M&M colors?