… grabbed the carton of milk, opened it to see if it had gone bad, had the smell of rancid horrible off hit your nose, recoiled, and handed it to the person next to you saying “Oh My God This Is Horrible Smell This”?
Why do we do that? Why is our first impulse, on having a horrible experience which we can spare those we care about from repeating, to insist on sharing that experience? It’s a mystery.
Anyway. This is horrible. Watch this.
We’re not much for the Big Winter Holidays at our place, for a few reasons: the atheism thing, revulsion at enforced mass consumption, Seasonal Affective Disorder. For myself there’s also the fact that my birthday follows close on the heels of the New Year, and though that used to be a jolly opportunity for reflection on the accomplishments of the previous year, the process gets old when you’ve gone through it 50 times or more.
But we are seeing some friends in the coming week, and getting outside to enjoy the gorgeous winter light in the Mojave, and taking advantage of the slight slowdown in our work schedules to enjoy life a little bit. Also there’s the Doctor Who special. One cannot understate the importance of the Doctor Who special.
Regardless of how you experience the next few days, with joy and hilarity or with clenched teeth or by not caring much at all either way, I hope your December 25 is every bit as happy as any of the other 365 days we’re scheduled to have had this year. And in that spirit I offer you the best holiday image ever.
There are days when having a glass desk is a serious health hazard, because I run the risk of serious facial lacerations when I read certain things.
Take this extremely well-intended article at Care2.com:
Human-accelerated climate change is a disaster waiting to happen. We’ve already seen the superstorms and drought it can create. Although we can work to slow climate change, there’s no way to stop it completely. This reality means adaptation will once again become the most important strategy for survival.
One thing’s for sure: the Earth will continue to exist as it has for eons. The question is, what will be left behind to inhabit it? Below are five species known for their resilience and ability to survive in adverse conditions. They are the most likely to survive a climate change disaster.
If you’re going to write one of those web-traffic pandering List Posts — not a criticism: I’m writing one this weekend as it pays the bills — that’s not a bad topic to tackle. True, the fact that the article starts this way might cause an anticipatory eyeroll:
Survival of the fittest. This basic tenant of evolution explains why the dodo bird no longer exists and why humans have opposable thumbs.
I’m trying to imagine what a basic tenant of evolution looks like. Maybe a Sphenodon. She’s paid her rent on time since the Pleistocene, comes from a good family, never made noise or caused trouble. You know the type.
That said, if I start making fun of people for typos there’s about a decade and a half worth of mine online people can choose from.
And it’s a great idea for a post. What species are likely to survive the disastrous climate change we’re almost certainly facing in the next decades? Human-adapted pests, probably, like rock doves a.k.a. pigeons, Rattus norvegicus, German cockroaches, but those stories have been written over and over again. How about wild species? Western sagebrush, maybe: that complex of subspecies in Artemisia tridentata that’s only just gotten settled in the Intermountain West, and is busily evolving new regional strains since the end of the Pleistocene? Or invasive exotics in the wild? That’s be a good if not precisely new topic.
Nope. Here are the five “species” listed:
We can call “species” 2 and 5 near misses: wolves and coyotes comprise two closely related species, and while there are about 4,500 species of cockroaches and five commonly found in human dwellings as pests, the author mentions one in particular, the American cockroach. Though that’s not the one you usually think of as surviving Armageddon.
But those others. “Trees in the Amazon” as a species? really? There’s not a single place on the planet you could have picked where there are more tree species. One estimate of species diversity for trees in the Amazon basin put the likely number of species in the Brazilian section alone as above 11,000.
There are an estimated 22,000 species of ants. The author says this, almost:
There are approximately 20,000 different species of ant, with colonies of millions located all over the world. They were here long before humans, and the odds are good that they’ll be here long after.
One has to wonder what the author thinks the word means, if a species can be made up of more than 20,000 species. “Taxon,” maybe? Hard to say.
And “algae.” The author says:
Once of the few species that has been around since the beginning of evolution (remember the primordial slime?), there are over 200,000 varieties [of algae] known to man.
A chance to use the word “species” correctly, almost, but the author opts for “varieties” instead.
This is an inconsequential article and the author meant well. It’s a good thing to get people to think about. And Care2’s editors, if they have any over there, are really the people to blame here, if I were blaming rather than observing. Which I’m not. Really.
But to quote the celebrated environmental scientist Rush Limbaugh, “words mean things.” Maybe it’s just PTSD from having spent most of my adult life editing prose by environmental activists. I may well have had a big red button pushed. But if you’re writing about saving the natural world, you need to know at least a little bit about the natural world. And when you write about threats to biodiversity, knowing the actual definition of the word that represents the basic unit of biodiversity is a good idea.
Lest you end up calling “algae” a species.
I mentioned in passing a while back that I moved my other blog Coyote Crossing to a brand new home. What I didn’t mention was that said move is part of plans to slowly put together a biodiversity-preservation-oriented blog network, inspired in no small part by the wonderful community at FTB, called Coyot.es Network. In addition to my joint, we’ve also got Madhu Katti moved in with his blog Reconciliation Ecology and Mojave Desert protection blogger Shaun G. (best known for the Mojave Desert Blog) with his new, more general blog The ‘Not Essential’ List, and though hordeling Ron Sullivan’s taking a short break from writing aside from for money, her blog Toad In The Hole is there relaxing comfortably until she feels like writing there. We’ve got a couple other experienced bloggers strongly considering joining up, and coming soon, a new mystery blog by a couple of desert herpetologists which is simply awaiting a first post.
And as we’ve got the biggest of the new site bugs worked out, we’re interested in hearing from biodiversity, wildlife, natural resources, and other related issue bloggers who might be interested in coming aboard. If that sounds like you, check out the about page and FAQ and if you’re interested in exploring the notion more deeply, get in touch.
Probably also faked: the sweater looks completely ‘shopped. Via Ed Lam.
I held forth on the fake eagle video thing at some length over here at KCET yesterday, but there was something I didn’t mention there that irked me about the hoax: in the recap part, where the “amazing footage” of the “eagle” “catching” the “child” gets “replayed” in slow “motion,” the filmmakers dubbed in a bit of sound effect right at the moment where CGI talon hit virtual toddler.
And of course it was a red-tailed hawk call. It always is, It doesn’t matter what bird of prey is in a film: the SFX guys will always dub in a red-tailed hawk call.
Not that the red-tail sound was a dead giveaway: during the 45 minutes or so in which I was somewhat taken by the hoax in I was prepared to grant that perhaps the videographers just did a clumsy, misguided dubbing job, for much the same reason that nature YouTubers always seem to want a horrible music track to cover up their occasionally interesting footage. But it was the same kind of mistake as inflating a CGI osprey to eagle size and calling it a golden and expecting birders to believe it for a second.
In case you’ve never seen a bird of prey represented in video and have no idea what I’m talking about, here is a red-tailed hawk’s call:
By way of comparison, here’s what golden eagle vocalizations sound like:
Bald eagles have calls you might well mistake for a gull’s:
[Update: in comments, otrame offers a more characteristic adult bald eagle call.]
Almost without exception, the red-tailed hawk call is what the sound engineers will use. I do know of one such exception. In the 2010 remake of Clash Of The Titans, which I suspect most people here watched solely for the Kraken and the releasing thereof, there was a scene where Zeus and Perseus were having a difficult father-son moment. Perseus is recalcitrant, whereupon Zeus transforms himself into an eagle and flies away. And that eagle doesn’t “keeeer” — he peeps. Like a golden. Honestly, that one moment of verisimilitude was worth the preceding hour. I was impressed that they got that one detail right. Though the Kraken did disappoint.
Exemplary efforts like Clash Of The Titans aside, it seems like there’s a secret world law governing natural sounds in TV and film that requires all raptors sound like red-tailed hawks. All rats squeak incessantly. Horses whinny while chewing placidly. Tropical rainforests in Africa and South America always have kookaburras in them. And as soon as you start to pay attention to how things actually sound in the real world, that kind of mistake unsuspends your disbelief pretty damned quickly. It’s a bit like having a scene where John Wayne is leading a wagon train westward to Oklahoma City, and they pass the Tetons on the way.
It’s the natural world version of illiteracy, and it makes those of us who know a few things wince.
I wrote here about the accidental 2009 capture and subsequent euthanasia of Macho B, an aging male jaguar who’d wandered across the U.S. border into southern Arizona.
Last week, in a really rather remarkable bit of investigative journalism, Dennis Wagner of the Arizona Republic reported that Macho B’s capture may not have been precisely accidental:
Although Game and Fish officials claimed Macho B’s capture was accidental, [Biologist Emil] McCain actually set the snare along a favored trail and baited it with scat from a female jaguar in heat. Then he flew to Europe to visit his girlfriend, leaving Smith and another Game and Fish employee to check the traps.
Macho B was caught on Feb. 18, 2009. Smith promptly shared the news with Ron Thompson, the Game and Fish administrator overseeing carnivores, who fired an e-mail to McCain in Spain, announcing: “Thorry did it!” [Thornton “Thorry” Smith, McCain’s colleague]
As word spread, congratulatory messages contained a hint of conspiracy. McCain received one e-mail from a co-worker who wrote, “And just think, he was an ‘incidental’ take. The hell with politics.”
The answer: “Yes, it was incidental, and you know that. Right? I had nothing to do with this right? And neither did Ron.”
Thompson then issued a warning about indiscreet messages: “Emil, be aware that we cannot use the government email to communicate with you. Sky Island (Alliance) is calling it a conspiracy, and for the first time they are right!”
For those of you not conversant in Endangered Species Act jargon, “take” is defined in that act as “to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect [a listed species], or to attempt to engage in any such conduct.” An incidental take is a take that’s not deliberate, but rather a side effect of some other activity.For instance, accidentally capturing a jaguar in a snare you’ve set for pumas.
Which means, if Wagner’s report is accurate, that AZ Game and Fish employees and contractors tried to pass off a deliberate take as an incidental take. In other words, fraudulent violation of Federal environmental law.
Why? Wagner has an idea:
The ability to track a jaguar known as Macho B would make the state agency and its contractors clear favorites to win a multimillion-dollar research grant. It would bring prestige to scientists and administrators involved. And it might provide valuable information about the border travels and habitat of an endangered species.
The last three years have been a festival of conflicting stories and fingerpointing. McCain was convited of violating the Endangered Species Act and given five years probation, during which time he’s not allowed to study big cats in the US. So he’s doing so in the Eastern Hemisphere. Biologist Janay Brun, who had acted as McCain’s assistant, agreed to a plea bargain and is writing a book.
Here’s what that “incidental” take did to an aging cat:
[S]ometime on Feb. 18, 2009, an aged feline known as Macho B stepped on the tripping mechanism with his left front paw. No one witnessed what happened next. Based on injuries and evidence at the scene, however, there is little doubt that the creature’s escape efforts were panicked and prolonged.
One of the jaguar’s legs was cut and severely swollen. A canine tooth was broken off at the root. Claw fragments, hair and fluids were recovered from the tree trunk. A javelina tooth was inexplicably stuck in the jaguar’s tail.
Brun has described the cat’s struggles in an online interview, based on her visit to the site afterward. “Macho B fought,” she said. “I don’t know how long he fought, but he was climbing this tree, clawing the tree, biting the tree, banging himself against (a boulder). He fought and used probably every last ounce of strength he had. … It just absolutely killed him.”
Macho B was tranked, collared, and released, and recaptured two weeks later when his transmitter stopped moving. Despite being gravely ill, with a septic hind leg that was hugely swollen, it took some doing to get him back in custody. He was euthanized for kidney failure shortly after recapture.
Wagner details further dissembling, both before and after Macho B’s death, by both Game and Fish and US Fish and Wildlife Service staff. It’s a difficult read, but Macho B deserves no less.
I think we could probably all use a few reminders of good things right about now.
… because I didn’t want to have to use the “Fuckbrained assholes” tag on the last post.
This is how Michelle Malkin started a screed six months ago against public school teachers in Wisconsin:
They really outdid themselves. In Wisconsin and across the nation, public school employee unions spared no kiddie human shields in their battle against GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s budget and pension reforms.
We all use metaphors that turn out in retrospect to have been distasteful.
But this was beyond the pale even before Sandy Hook. Malkin needs to apologize for this, and she needs to do it now.
Victoria Soto, age 27, apparently died yesterday while trying to get her students into a safer spot in their classroom at Sandy Hook. She stood between the murderer and her students, and he killed her.
[Updated to add: Andrew Revkin shares more on Soto’s colleagues Kaitlin Roig and Maryrose Kristopik: “Kaitlin Roig locked her students in the bathroom and kept them safe, while Victoria Soto was trying to do the same when she came face-to-face with the gunman and was shot, execution style. Maryrose Kristopik barricaded her music students in a closet, while the gun man fought to get in.” Roig and Kristopik survived, thankfully.]
I spent a little time thinking about Soto and her colleagues this morning. I’ve known quite a few grade school teachers over the years. Until 2009, I was married to one. And I realized as I was thinking about Soto that there’s not a single one of those grade school teachers I’ve known, my ex- emphatically included, who I could imagine doing anything but jumping between the gunman and his or her students.
I know that’s an argument from incredulity. I know teachers are human beings, and human beings freeze up when they’re frightened. But I’ve also seen the sacrifices grade school teachers make on days the media don’t notice. Over and over, day in and day out, with no hope of any relief outside of leaving the job.
And for this they get to be one of the most denigrated groups of professionals in the United States, targeted every single goddamn year for one “reform” after another, vouchers from the fundies and charter schools from the liberals, forced by law to take every spark of individuality and interest out of their curricula and then blamed when their students lose interest, resented their pensions and their health care by people who then blame them when their kids turn out to be apathetic.
Once the media horror dies down about Soto and her co-workers’ sacrifices, I guarantee you this: public school grade school teachers will go right back to being the despised class. “Union thugs.” “With three-month vacations.” “Teaching kids their ABCs.” All the idiotic, ill-informed, right wing anti-intellectual myths will rev up again as if nothing had happened. And in the meantime the people the Fox pundits despise will go on teaching kids to read and do math and treat each other with respect.
In other words, it’s not really that much of a jump to imagine all the teachers I know instinctively taking a bullet to protect their kids. To a first approximation, every single one of them does the same thing every waking moment, giving up their lives by increment to give their students a chance at a better life.
I don’t at all mean to trivialize the sacrifice Soto and her colleagues made by comparing it to, say, having to buy pencils on your own dime because the Republicans cut your district’s budget even further. What I’m saying is that given the kind of peson who chooses to remain in the profession despite all the sacrifice and opprobrium because they want to help kids, Soto’s tragic sacrifice isn’t in the least surprising. It’s what teachers do.
So I just thought I’d take a moment to thank those of you reading this who are, or who have been, grade school teachers for your routine heroism. We don’t recognize it enough.
AshleyKate just saved me the trouble of writing about the “mental health” gambit. Good thing: she did a better job than I would have.
I’m asking you–begging you, really, to not decide that Lanza had a mental illness. I’m asking you not to make “being a good person” the standard for mentally healthy.
Do not try to rationalize this away with mental illness. Stop talking about how it could have been schizophrenia, stop saying he hadto have mental health issues. You do not know.
You do not know his state of mind. When you decide to armchair quarterback him, to stamp him with an “obvious” diagnosis, do you know what you are saying?
Here is a terrible thing. The only thing that could possibly cause someone to do such a terrible, tragic thing is to have This Disorder. Because only people with This Disorder could be so dangerous/awful/scary.
And you, you people who want to look for signs of schizophrenia, who want to talk about how he ‘went crazy’, how he just needed medication, I want you to consider how much harder you are making it for someone to seek treatment.
Read the rest.
