As we approach the end of the tax year, I thought I’d share a brief list of the charitable organizations I personally support.  Some of you can probably afford to make much larger gifts than I can, and I’d encourage you to give generously to support these causes.

1. Humane Farm Animal Care

While I am a meat eater, I don’t see why eating an animal after it’s dead requires that it be tortured while alive. Food labels like Certified Organic, Pasture-Fed, and Free Range are essentially meaningless these days, but one label can be trusted to say that the animal you’re eating was not made to suffer throughout its life: Certified Humane.  These labels come only from the folks at HFAC, and they are rigorous in enforcing strict criteria before they’ll give out the label.

I will admit that I don’t always buy Certified Humane, but that’s because it’s still difficult to find.  Supporting this organization will help raise awareness, and that will make Certified Humane products much easier to find.  You can learn more and donate through HFAC’s web site.

2. Cell Motion Biobus

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZpFENgX9uI

Founded by an old friend of mine (now apparently known as “Doctor Ben“), the Cell Motion Biobus is a mobile science classroom that travels New York City, bringing sound science education, taught by PhD scientists, to students whose districts can’t afford expenses like microscopes and computers.

You may have seen the Biobus on the Colbert Report in March, when they stole Stephen’s blood.  The organization reaches about 20,000 people a year, and they operate on a shoestring.  You can learn more, volunteer, and make a much-needed donation at their web site.

3. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and ACLU of Pennsylvania

As if I would forget my employer.  As I’ve been known to say, I work for the ACLU because I support the cause, and not vice-versa.  The ACLU was the first charity I ever donated to, back when I was about 17 years old.  It is no exaggeration to say that the ACLU has not only defended, but in fact shaped the U.S. Constitution.  Did you know that no court ever upheld a free speech claim until the ACLU started arguing cases?

I view the ACLU as the world’s most important non-profit organization, and every American, whether they support the ACLU or oppose it, benefits from the ACLU’s 90 years of work.  Your gift to the ACLU is shared equally between the National organization and your state affiliate, no matter where you send it.

Incidentally, if you are one of those people who hates the ACLU, I’d invite you to learn more – particularly the articles on Snopes, and a list of the ACLU’s real work defending Christianity.  Most people who hate the ACLU have entirely the wrong idea about what we do, because unfortunately there are a lot of people out there telling outright lies about the organization.

I had the good fortune to enjoy a vacation in the Caribbean this past week, on which the first stop was Key West.  Though the weather drove me away from the beach, I was able to tour the Ernest Hemingway House and take in the considerable population of semi-domestic cats who have free reign of the property.  The 50 or so cats are descendants of Hemingway’s own pets, many of them polydactyl – meaning they had extra toes, not that they were flying dinosaurs.  The house is pretty famous for the cats.

A diversity of personalities are represented, as any cat lover would expect, but most seem acclimated to the tourists who often try to make friends.  In general they were appreciative, or at least tolerant of being pet – with one notable exception.  My right wrist now bears three parallel scars inflicted by a chubby gray-and-white fellow who offered no other warning that my hand was unwelcome.  I figure as a writer myself I should wear the scar with pride.  My scars will be a lifelong memento of my visit to the Hemingway House.

I didn’t get a photo of the culprit, but I was able to get some great photos of a few other cats.  That first guy is my favorite, but here are a few more:

It’s got to be familiar to anyone on the East Coast:  It’s a beautiful summer day, and you’re out in the park, or maybe just your back yard.  You spot an inviting picnic table, and are about to have yourself a nice sit when terror suddenly sets in.  You’re surrounded by bees.  Bees the size of hummingbirds.  They’ve obviously decided that the table is theirs, because they are hovering menacingly around it.  One of them flies straight for you, stopping to hover a mere foot away and staring you in the face with beady bee-eyes that say, in a universal bee-to-human language, “you wanna make something of it?”

You’ve just had an encounter with the carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica), also known as the Wood-Boring Bee or Woodcutter, one of the more terrifying summertime residents of the Eastern United States.  As much fear as they may inspire, carpenter bees are in fact quite harmless (at least to your physical well-being) and actually inquisitive and even flirtatious.  That hover-and-stare we all interpret as confrontational is in fact the bee asking, “Hey!  Wanna screw?”

No, really.

Carpenter bees make their homes in untreated wood, boring out tunnels with their mandibles (they don’t actually eat the wood, but throw it away or use it as building material) and raising their young inside.  The females are the ones who do the tunneling, along with the egg-laying, pollen-gathering and larvae-defending.  The males spend their time doing one of two things: eating (they only gather nectar for themselves, and don’t share it) and hovering around, looking for sex.  They aren’t subtle.  A male carpenter bee will find a nice location where several females have made nests and, like that creepy guy following you around at the bar, hover.  As the females come and go, he’ll chase them in the hope of a quick midair lay.  If another male comes by, he’ll chase the rival away – presumably with threats of either biting or raping, because male carpenter bees do not have stingers.

Thing is, carpenter bees don’t see so good.  They are quite nearsighted, and so any time they want to get a good look at something they have to hover right in front of it – and they tend to take an interest in anything that happens past, including you.  Once the bee realizes you are neither a rival bee nor a hot chick bee, he’ll lose interest in you and go watch for something else.  They aren’t choosy, either.  Carpenter bee males have been known to “mate” with other insects and small birds – presumably because they mistake them for female bees, but they might just be that desperate.  If you’re the type who is easily entertained (or your friends are) try tossing a bee-sized rock, and watch the bee chase it down and try to have sex with it.

Note that I’m not advising you to go grabbing carpenter bees every chance you get.  Every once in a blue moon, that hovering bee will not be a male at all, but a female who is guarding the baby bees in her nest.  Females do have stingers, and from what I hear they pack a wallop.  However they don’t sting except as a very last resort, so as long as you don’t go grabbing them in your sweaty maws, you won’t need to learn the difference between a boy and a girl bee.

The only real danger carpenter bees pose to humans is property damage, and that’s mainly superficial anyway.  Their tunnels tend to run right beneath the surface of the wood, rarely penetrating more than a half inch deep, and they always start with the entrance on the bottom, facing the ground.  This is why it’s generally safe to sit on that park bench or picnic table, even if the lady bees have made it a home.

Some people with untreated wooden eaves on their houses get upset at the damage caused by carpenter bees – once a bee chooses her nest location, it can be damned hard to dissuade her.  On top of that, her babies (and their babies, and their babies, and so on) will generally return to the same piece of wood to build new nests, which over time can lead to more serious damage – and the presence of a lot of hovering boy bees, which many people (myself included) instinctively find unsettling.  To prevent carpenter bees moving into your wood (insert joke here) experts recommend staining, or even better painting, the underside.

Personally, I find that threatening to press charges works wonders with hovering males.  Failing that, you can always turn the garden hose on them.

Is there any invertebrate creepier than the house centipede (AKA “thousand-legger”)? I grew up in Upstate New York, and had never encountered one of these until I first moved to southeastern PA around 1993. The first time I saw one skitter across the living room while I was watching TV, I thought for sure I’d seen some kind of demon–a lesser demon, granted, but a demon nonetheless.

Turns out it’s just Scutigera coleoptrata, a fast-moving type of centipede that lives mostly within human homes and eats spiders, roaches, bedbugs, silverfish, and other small insect-types that also invade human dwellings. Doesn’t sound like much, I know, and if you’ve been fortunate enough never to have encountered one, you have no idea just how disconcerting the sight of fifteen pairs of legs moving in a coordinated wave can be as this sizeable critter slashes across a floor or wall.

Since we got our dog, a Rhodesian ridgeback mix, we haven’t had much problem with these little guys. We just say “Copper, bug!” and he goes into full-on hunting dog mode, enthusiastically sniffing out the centipede before crushing it to death with his paws, and then typically tossing it around a bit before eating it. Unfortunately, he’s recently taken to retching — and I mean, retching — after eating one, so we’re not letting him do that any more. I looked up information on the house centipede, and it appears that their venom is not dangerous to house pets, though their bite is recorded as painful. After finding a close-up photo of a house centipede face, all I can say is yikes. I’m not surprised their bite is painful, check out those fangs!

(Photo after the jump)

If you do have these around, you might like to know that they are generally considered beneficial (see the list of undesirables that they are doing away with?) and that a concerted effort to kill off house centipedes might reveal a bug problem of another sort that you never knew you almost had… That, and their bites are apparently really painful to people, too. At least as painful as a bee sting.

On a related note, my search for information and photos of Scutigera coleoptrata led me to Dope on the Slope, a pretty cool Brooklyn-based blog of invertebrates and photography. It’s not many blogs that really catch my interest, so I figured I’d give this one a plug.