Yep. Pigs are smart and good at survival. They’ve wreaked environmental havoc in the Hawaiian islands. There are pigs gone wild all over the place and it’s totally appropriate to hunt them, IMO.

Hmmm, we have gravel paths and grass—I’d much rather fall in grass. What we do see in playgrounds around here is dirt with redwood chips. Not great, but tolerable. Grass is still better for running and stuff requiring some traction.

Did it drown? I’m a little worried about what will happen with El Nino—it’s already rained more this summer than it did in January.

That’s better than nothing, though. There are plenty of HOAs that demand grass and nothing else. Trees are good—cut those carbon emissions—or, if you’re me, get a lemon tree and indulge. Rosemary and lavender are both drought-tolerant perennials that look good. Bulbs (daffodils, tulips, etc.) are pretty much all…

Arizona is a hostile environment to humans during much of the year. I suspect toddlers are too busy having heat stroke to impale themselves on the saguaros.

For the Bay Area, at least, there are some non-native options. Basically, the stuff that grows in Mediterranean climates will work here—so Greece, Italy, Provence, Turkey, South Africa, Chile—all of that works. I’ve seen some beautiful gardens with lavendar, lemon trees and olive trees.

But if dinosaurs survived how would there be a niche for mammals to develop enough to develop homo sapiens? And how is that the dinos survived various ice ages and other climate changes? Okay. I will stop now.

Still, couldn’t they at least have some nice warm feathers? There really aren’t nearly enough feathered…

I can tell that Pixar’s in northern California—if you know the area, you see bits and pieces of local features and plants—it gives Pixar’s films a distinct look from films made by animators based in SoCal.

It’s around. Not a lot of it, but my neighbors across the street did it—poured in a bunch of concrete and then stuck Astroturf over it. Pre-drought. It looks god-awful and was a big negative when they tried to sell it. They would have been better off doing some sort of patio mixed with xeriscaping—people like…

Yeesh. You’re in California? That one’s worth sending to the local water agency.

This. Paving stuff doesn’t help in the long-term. There are drought-tolerant plants and ways of using reducing water usage (drip, recycled). There are drought-tolerant native grasses as well—they don’t make for lawns, but they don’t stab people either.

We don’t actually all live in the desert. Native grasses, drought-tolerant stuff like rosemary and drip-watering are the actual answers here.

Let’s see, if the great dinosaurs hadn’t gone extinct, there wouldn’t be much of a niche for the development of mammals, let alone us . . . .

Disagree. My kid loved those books—more than HP. The film version sucked because they ignored what was in the books—Will was an American, for example, which really, really does not work.

Oh, cool, something else in Nevada—I’m planning a trip to Yosemite from California and am open to anything that breaks up the monotony of driving across in Nevada. Great Basin National Park—am I dying to see it? Not really. Will I see it? Yep, because it breaks up driving across Nevada. New monument, you’re being…

My recollection is that the psychiatrist pushes at George to dream a fix to something that already bothers him—George is bothered by there being so many people, but his dreams come up with a bigger “fix” than either intends.

Thanks. Hillary just seems to have been a genuinely admirable man who tried to give back to the Sherpa community. The current onslaught of Everest tourists could learn a lot from him.

Sorry Esposito, this video is blocked in my country. What was it about?

Pretty much. Seriously, zombies are nothing—they’re dumb, don’t use tools and are not particularly strong or agile. Basic medieval war strategies would work—moats and walls, along with mandatory cremation of the dead.

Yep. I find I’m becoming increasingly less patient with the post-apocalyptic genre simply because there’s so little sense of, historically, how people actually behave in dire circumstances. Few people and tons of resources? There’s no reason to kill one another a la The Walking Dead. There are, however, a lot of…