Nina and I went to Knoxville, TN, yesterday for her early birthday present of tickets to a James Taylor concert. We spent the day doing some sightseeing before the main event. First we took a long walk through the lovely Ijams Nature Center . A log just a few feet from the Tennessee River was studded with hundreds of mushrooms. I decided this photo of some of them worked best in black and white: This is a " geologic fold ." Bee on a sunflower: This magnificent creature is a red-tailed hawk. It has an irreparably damaged wing, and therefore can't be released back into the wild, so the nature center rehabilitated it and uses it for education about raptors. Her name, unofficially, is Tiger. Next we went up into the Sunsphere , a structure built for the 1982 World's Fair. I have no good photos from that part of the day. Then it was on to the Knoxville Museum of Art , just a stone's throw from the Sunsphere. One intriguing piece was this one, by Devorah Sperber . It...