Mirkwood comes to Midland

The New York Times reports that a state park in Texas has become home to a spider web several acres in size.

Sheets of web have encased several mature oak trees and are thick enough in places to block out the sun along a nature trail at Lake Tawakoni State Park, near this town about 50 miles east of Dallas.
The gossamer strands, slowly overtaking a lakefront peninsula, emit a fetid odor, perhaps from the dead insects entwined in the silk. The web whines with the sound of countless mosquitoes and flies trapped in its folds…
Mr. Dean and several other scientists said they had never seen a web of this size outside of the tropics, where the relatively few species of “social” spiders that build communal webs are most active…

The Times doesn’t mention the possibility, but one predicted consequence of global warming is that tropical species will extend their ranges northward. Maybe the spiders have congregated to reward all those Texas oilmen for providing them with new habitat.

The Grey Lady is also mum on the explanation I find most likely: once both Tom DeLay and Karl Rove headed back to the Lone Star State for good, word went out on the grapevine that the nucleus had formed for a creepy crawler flash mob.

Random thought on the Hammer

You can only do the hokey-pokey so long before you have to do the pokey.

Hammer’s down

Through that notoriously wild-eyed liberal, the Hammer’s dear friend Chris Matthews, Tom DeLay yesterday leaked the announcement that today he would announce his withdrawal from the 22nd district race.

After performing pirouettes like every other actual liberal in the country, a dance even more of pure relief for our corruption-battered nation than of schadenfruede, I confess I started to feel a little ashamed. Was this any way to hold up the banner of my alternate persona, Pickle Lips Now? Surely this glass is nine tenths empty somehow?

Well, no. The glass is three fourths full. Pickle Lips is going to have to content himself with the following worry: will DeLay set a bad example? What if Katherine Harris (R-FL) and Kent Conrad (Grifter-ND) should be moved to stop, consider their real chances, and withdraw in time for the GOP to field replacements? But even PLN has to concede that both possibilities are remote.