Mastodawn

Beautiful pest.

Morning glory vines have been swarming all over my garden this year, trying to choke everything else out.

This is year two for my milkweed. I have yet to see a caterpillar or butterfly on it, but it attracts all kinds of bugs. I snapped this photo yesterday afternoon, and I have no idea what these orange-and-black insects are. Does anybody have a clue?

#bugs #insects

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Daniel Johnson Aug 3

“The huge goal is to help people find their own language after having been rolled over by the Apsburgos/Bourbones, the Holy Roman Empire, the Americans, and everyone else, and I'm afraid that the huge numbers of native languages are being lost, but my little speciality is trying to keep Spanish dialects alive.”

3/3

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Daniel Johnson Aug 3

“And I am over the moon that the Tejano dialect has not been overrun by the norteño or colorado dialects. It is so good to hear people speaking their own languages with accents very close to their grandparents.”

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Daniel Johnson Aug 3

My brother, who many years ago majored in Spanish at a Texas university, has been revisiting Tejano music, and has this to say:

“One interesting thing about Tejano music, they've always sung in Spanish, but it's only been in the past 25 years that the artists have been relearning Spanish as a conversational language, because they're usually from San Antonio, Austin, Houston, DFW, and this was exactly what I was working toward with my Chicano/Riquieña work.”

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Daniel Johnson Aug 2

This is my crabapple crop for the year. Fedi, what do you do with crabapples besides make pectin?

#Fruit #BackyardFruit #Apples #Gardening

Daniel Johnson Aug 1

It was only in the last couple days that I came to the realization that the 1971 musical “Godspell” was named for the archaic form of the English word “gospel.” “God spel” literally meant “good saying” (cf. modern German “gut spiel”), and is therefore a direct cognate of the Greek “εὐαγγέλιον” — “evangelion” — which of course literally means “good message.”

#WordNerdery

Daniel Johnson Jul 31

Starting in fifth grade, I was trained on the flute. It just now occurred to me that that probably helped considerably with my then-undiagnosed #AuDHD because it involves cross-lateral coordination. Such cross-body movement stimulates communication between the brain's hemispheres, which can be a weak point with neurodiverse people.

This was one reason why we had my neurospicy kids do Suzuki violin when they were little.

https://thejacobsladdergroup.org/2025/04/the-benefits-of-cross-lateral-movement/

The Benefits of Cross-Lateral Movement - The Jacob's Ladder Group

From birth, movement plays a vital role in cognitive, emotional, and social development. One of the most powerful types of movement for brain development is cross-lateral movement, which involves coordinated motion across the body’s midline, such as crawling, running, or touching the right hand to the left knee. These movements engage both hemispheres of the […]

The Jacob's Ladder Group

Daniel Johnson Jul 31

I was getting persistent errors logging into IRS.gov... and today, after yet another failure in Firefox, I tried Safari, and got logged in on the first try.

People really need to test their sites on non-Webkit browsers.

Daniel Johnson Jul 30

#NowPlaying: the 2013 album “Between Places” by Norwegian popsters Young Dreams. Delightfully full of Brian Wilson-esque light fluffy vocal harmonies and unexpected chord substitutions. Vocal melodies are full of leaps where you would have expected stepwise motion.

Scandinavia: lightweight pop or black metal. There is nothing in between.

Website	danieljohnson.name
Languages	English, Spanish, small smatterings of many others
Animals	Six cats, three ball pythons, about 14 rats