There was an article in the Guardian earlier this week on the Anthropic Principle. This says something along the lines that any valid theory of the universe must be consistent with the fact that we, as a carbon-based life form, exist at this particular place and time.

 

Personally, I just take it as a truism that if the fundamental constants of the universe were different, then we wouldn’t be here, so the fact that we are here is simply a result of the particular values of the fundamental constants. But then I read the readers’ letters in the Guardian today, where apparently some people believe that the Anthropic Principle is evidence for the existence of a god doing the tweaking of the values – the so-called Fine-Tuned Universe. I just don’t see the connection between the two. In fact, it seems to me that the Anthropic Principle actually undermines the proposition for Intelligent Design (which basically boils down to GodDidIt). Certainly, I see no evidence for it.

And talking about Moles, our neighbour this morning said that he had another infestation of Mole Crickets in his garden. This could be bad news if the little buggers tunnel through to our garden as well.

 

The last time they did that was back in 2000. I had noticed that the lawn was starting to show bald patches, which I found surprising, because it didn’t get that much wear and tear. Then, one day, I noticed something moving in the grass. Grabbing a jam jar, I trapped it. Holding it up for inspection, it turned out to be a large (8 cm) insect of some kind, which I had never seen before.

 

Looking it up in the section on pests in my gardening encyclopaedia drew a blank, so I took the jar and its contents off to the local garden centre for identification. Oh, said the man, it’s a “veenmol”. Having established that he knew what it was, I asked for something that would exterminate the beasts (having a suspicion that the damage to my lawn was more than could be accomplished by a single specimen). He then did that thing that I have come to dread in any interaction with a tradesman – he sucked his teeth. It’s a sound that usually translates to delay and/or serious expense. Ah, he explained, we used to have poison for it, but the manufacturers have taken it off the market, and anyway they’re difficult to get rid of. Upon seeing the rolling of my eyes, he did offer to check if another garden centre in Gouda had any of the necessary material. Yes, I said, anything to prevent the lawn from becoming Yul Brynner. Luckily, a telephone call established that the garden centre on the other side of town had some remaining stocks, so off I cycled and snapped up the last three packs of poison in the known universe.

 

I sprinkled the pellets on the lawn, and then followed a gruesome week of veenmol hunting with my jam jar. Every day would reveal more of the damn things surfacing on to the lawn in mortal agony (die, damn you, die! – an apposite quote from Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, I kept thinking, as I would find another one and pop it into the swiftly filling jar).

 

Curious to know what veenmol was in English, I consulted the dictionary, and found it meant “mole cricket”. I went onto the Internet to look for “mole cricket” on the Web, and was rewarded by a number of sites explaining that these rare, and delightful, creatures were a protected species in the UK. Ha!, not in my garden, they’re not, I thought grimly, sprinkling my pellets, and humming Tom Lehrer’s “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”.

 

That time I managed to get rid of them, but it sounds now as though They’re Baacckk! I shall be keeping a careful eye on the lawn in the next few weeks…