Purple Owl's Clover is a small plant, but upon close inspection it proves to be a rather interesting plant. The flowers form a spikelike cluster and are magenta to red, but yellow splotches form on some of the corollas giving the plant, when in bloom, a rather distinctive appearance! I came across a rather large colony of these plants between Fish and Isham Canyon in the Slate Range last spring. Other members of the Scrophulariaceae (Figwort Family) include Desert Paintbrush, Scarlet Monkeyflower, Lesser Mohavea, Panamint Penstemon, and Desert Figwort.

I've posted several videos on YouTube featuring tarantulas. This one is the first one I've posted that features a song without lyrics! Actually I posted another video with a version of this song that included lyrics, but I thought the song was pretty good without lyrics and so I decided to post an instrumental version.

I've enjoyed using various flavors of Linux since the mid-1990s. The first Linux distribution I tried was Slackware. It was pretty basic, but it had several features that were quite attractive to a computer geek that weren't offered at the time by other major operating systems. For a long time I used Red Hat and then Fedora, but now my favorite distribution is Ubuntu. It combines all the standard features you expect with Linux with the ease of use you expect from commercial operatings systems. Check out the discussion at TronaNews.com for more info!