Here's a spot in Inks Lake State Park on May 26th that caused me to make a U-turn and pull over on Park Road 4. The red flower heads are blanketflowers, perhaps Gaillardia amblyodon, which is all red, rather than the more common G. pulchella, whose ray tips are yellow. The yellow flower heads with brown centers are Coreopsis basalis, known as goldenmane tickseed, golden-wave, or just plain coreopsis. The very low flowers growing adjacent to the road's pavement are yellow stonecrop, Sedum nuttallianum. The second picture shows the densest part of this stonecrop colony a little farther to the right, where the exposed bedrock that makes Inks Lake State Park so scenic adds to the three-species display. And I guess I should mention the seemingly ubiquitous prickly pear cactus, Opuntia engelmannii.
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If you ever think about human sacrifice, you probably assume it's a horrible practice from ancient times based on the superstitious belief that sacrificing people would cause God or the gods to favor the sacrificers. Maybe you think about Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac, as recounted in the Hebrew Bible. Or maybe you think about the human sacrifices that the Aztecs carried out in Mexico until the Spaniards conquered them in the 1500s and put an end to the practice.
You'll probably be dismayed to learn there are groups of people in the world today who still superstitiously carry out human sacrifices. You can read an article about that continuing tradition in the African nation of Uganda. Be aware that the article includes some gruesome details.
© 2023 Steven Schwartzman
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