Category Archives: Critters

December 22, 2013 · 19:26

Targets Of Opportunity For Sunday, December 21st

Another several hours putting up more of the Christmas lights (almost there, I swear) but today I had my camera at the ready. In the past couple of days that I’ve been out in the yard working on the lights there have been pictures that were just begging to be taken — but the camera was in the house and by the time I would have gotten it, the picture would have been long gone. Today I decided to be ready. And a good thing too!

IMG_6581 croppedI spotted this gorgeous creature on the light pole across the street. We often see hawks flying around, often soaring in pairs, but we rarely have them roosting on our street. Too much green grass and manicured lawns. Two blocks away where the big open fields and hillsides are, that’s where you’ll see them often. Meals are often on the loose in those fields.

In addition, the hawks we normally see are red-tail hawks and they’re only about 2/3 the size of this one, which is one of the reasons this one stood out so much.

IMG_6587 croppedShe (or he) was very patient as I took pictures, scanning the area for lunch. I think it was pretty much a case of me not being lunch appropriate, so as long as I wasn’t throwing rocks or something aggressively threatening, I didn’t exist.

IMG_6588 croppedSuddenly, she (or he) was off like a shot. I assume that some squirrel or roof rat had made their one fatal error. I love hawks, can take or leave squirrels (Jessie has a much different opinion), and hate rats, so I was rooting for the hawk.

IMG_6589 croppedAs she (or he) took off I got one decent picture of her (or his) plumage. Based on this picture, I’m thinking that this is a red-shouldered hawk. If anyone out there knows better and/or can identify if it’s a male or female, please let me know.

IMG_6597 smallAs the sun set, far out to the west over the coast there was a regular “wagon train” of large jets with their contrails lit up like pink comets.

IMG_6601 smallI’ve checked before on Flight Aware to see what the jets on this course might be – most of them look like they’re headed to northeastern Asia. Japan, South Korea, Shanghai, that sort of thing.

IMG_6610 smallAs I was putting away ladders and equipment, this guy was about fifteen feet up on the palm tree, just above the top of the lights I had been having fits with all day. He was chittering and bitching at me and I swear he was taunting me. I had been up and down my biggest ladder probably thirty or forty times today, moving it around in between each climb, in order to get two strings of lights to circle the trunk of the tree. I didn’t have my squirrel translation app loaded, but I think the gist of it was, “Puny, stupid human! This is how you do it! Up! Down! Up! Down! Backwards and upside down! See how easy it is? Neener-neener-nee-ner!!”

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Critters, Photography

October 30, 2013 · 19:55

Rush Hour In LA & My Faith In Humanity

To be blunt, the former doesn’t do much for the latter.

Driving down to Irvine this morning in rush hour traffic gives a good example. I’m sure folks see this in every city. I’m sure that there are hot spots in every metropolitan area in the world that are a living nightmare on a daily basis. I’m sure that there are places that are worse. (Shanghai comes to mind…) But this morning was startling in how typical it is, at least here in Los Angeles, to nearly die in traffic every single day.

A mere one hundred yards from my house, at a four-way stop, I came within a foot or two of almost certain death. As I stopped, checked for cross traffic, and then started through the intersection, some pin-headed mental midget doing at least fifty MPH came barreling in from my left. He never even slowed down as he blew through the stop sign. FREAKIN’ IDIOT! If I hadn’t seen him at the last second and stomped on the brakes he would have hit me square in the driver’s door and I wouldn’t be here to write this. The only consolation is that his pulped carcass would have been accompanying mine to Valhalla, like a mini honor guard.

For two seconds it was tempting to hang a hard right turn and chase his ass down, or at least get the license plate on the car, but I didn’t have the time. Next time, maybe.

Two miles later, stopped at a red light behind two other cars, it was someone else’s turn to almost die at the hand of some freakin’ idiot. At least this brain-dead cretin had the manners to be honking his horn like crazy as he ran the red light a good three or four seconds after the light had turned. I guess that’s the new international signal for, “Look out! My shoe size is bigger than my IQ and I’m in a hurry! I don’t give a rat’s ass if we both die so I have the de facto right of way!” Driving a full-sized pick-up truck doing about forty, he could have done a lot of damage to a bunch of other cars, not to mention the three or four pedestrians already in the crosswalk.

Once I get on the freeway, the fun continues. On the 405 southbound at the intersection with the 101, the two far right lanes exit onto the 101 transition. The four left lanes are packed and crawling. (Someone about ten miles ahead, at Sunset, had flipped and was blocking a couple of lanes.) So at the gore point where the lanes split, we see dozens and dozens of cars racing along in the nearly empty transition lanes, only to stop (and block the lane) at the last second and then force there way into traffic. Freakin’ idiots!

The first smiley-faced balloon-head to try this was doing it while blow drying her hair. None of this simple “texting and driving” for her, no sir! She’s obviously a very, very important person who can’t be bothered with all of those petty, stupid little traffic rules that only the peons have to obey. So she’ll pass by a mile or more of gridlocked traffic to block a lane before she forces someone to either let her in or get hit by her. Doing her hair while endangering multiple lives? That’s just the icing on the cake.

The second SFBH was a young kid who I got to know as “The Little Drummer Boy”. He also bypassed all of the gridlock, blocked a lane, and played chicken with someone’s bumper to get into the through lane. He then cut straight over another lane to pull in behind me, earning him an extensive horn sonata and a one-finger salute from the guy behind me who got cut off by him. The Little Drummer Boy then proceeded to stick behind me for another ten miles or so, without ever touching the steering wheel with either hand. How could I tell? I could clearly see in my rear-view mirror that he had a pair of drum sticks and was playing along on the dashboard, windshield, mirror, door, and steering wheel. (I’m guessing that it was the drum solo from “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”.) FREAKIN’ IDIOT! At least he didn’t have the music turned up so loud that it was rattling my windows — he was wearing a full-sized pair of headphones (also illegal while driving, but who’s counting).

While traffic was crawling for us mere mortals, those in the carpool lane were zipping right along. Especially the ones who very obviously did not have two people in the car and weren’t driving a hybrid or alternate fuel vehicle. I don’t have precise data, but I would be surprised if less than 10% of those using the carpool lane were using it illegally. I guess the “$371 minimum fine” signs aren’t much of a deterrent. At least, not any more of a deterrent than those double-double yellow lane markers that would seem to indicate that it’s illegal to get into or out of the carpool lane except where allowed. I couldn’t even guess how many folks I saw crossing back and forth illegally.

Using the phone while driving? (Illegal in California for years if you’re not using a hands-free device.) Texting while driving? (Illegal, period, and incredibly dangerous and stupid to boot.) Probably close to 1 in 20, if not more.

Lest you think that I’ve become my father or some old coot fixated on every little scofflaw (“Rotten kids, get off my lawn!”), I really do understand that it’s a “Not My Float!” moment. Yeah, there’s a tiny little Catholic school voice in my head who wants to punish and get self-righteous, but forty years of LA traffic has pretty much beaten it into submission. I’m much better than I was in my younger days at just watching out for the freakin’ idiots and making sure they don’t hit me than I am wanting to go all vigilante on them. (Except for that little shit who almost killed me at the four-way stop. That’s personal.)

But three hours of driving in those conditions will not do anything to help your belief that people are good, decent, intelligent people.

More accurately, it serves to remind me that probably 98% of the people out there are good, decent, and intelligent — but it only takes that 2% to completely screw it up for everyone. And it sure looks like the 2% are getting away with murder. Watching that right before your eyes for three hours and being so inured to it that you can’t afford to care about it? That’s poison enough to kill your faith in humanity.

P.S. — As I finish writing and editing this, it becomes painfully obvious that a skunk has gotten upset somewhere very close by. As in, “eye-watering, choking, stomach-turning, WTF IS THAT SMELL” close. Perfect.

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Filed under Critters, Distracted Driving, Freakin' Idiots!, Not My Float

October 29, 2013 · 07:00

Odds & Sods For Tuesday, October 29th

Item The First: Heads up! (Literally.) I’ve seen several folks on Twitter talking about how they’re seeing bright ISS passes listed for their cities in the US this week. Check it out, especially for Halloween night. If you’re already out and about with the kiddies, setting your phone to go off a minute or so early will give you the “heads up” you need to see a pass.

Here in Los Angeles, there was a pass  last night that I didn’t think I would see because of the heavy clouds. But I happened to be taking Jessie out at the right time and found some holes in the clouds to see the VERY bright ISS blinking in and out through the gaps. Spectacular!

For the rest of the week, at least for Los Angeles, there are passes this week tonight (Tuesday, the 29th) at 18:22 and 20:01 (the first pass is higher and brigher), Wednesday the 30th at 19:14, and Thursday night (Halloween!) at 18:23. The Thursday night pass is supposed to be especially bright, rising in the WNW with a maximum elevation of 47.2 degrees, a magnitude of -3.2 (which is much brighter than Venus), and setting in the SSE. You can’t miss it!

Item The Second:  Yes, the central scientific idea in my October 24th Flash Fiction story is similar the idea in Larry Niven’s “Inconstant Moon”. Yes, while mulling over the random title I got (“Fire On The Sea”), I did think of Niven’s story as a source of the fire, since I wanted to do something other than just telling a story about a guy in a burning boat or oil rig or something. That’s how my thought processes go. I don’t want to do the “usual”. What else could be on fire on the sea? An oil spill? A large explosion of some sort? Maybe an asteroid impact over the horizon. What about the sun? What was that Niven story? Maybe the guy in my story is dealing with something similar. He’s looking east, waiting for the sunrise, so where does that put him. Jersey? Virginia? Florida? I don’t want to do the “usual”, so let’s make it Africa. OK, that works, so what’s this guy doing and thinking in that situation. (By the way, if you haven’t read “Inconstant Moon”, go do so immediately. It’s a classic and most excellent.)

Item The Third: So far, neither Rocky, Raquel, or “the kids” has managed to pry the screen off of their hidey-hole. Sorry, Pat! But I’ll keep an eye on it. They’re up there on the roof every couple of nights, there are plenty of half-eaten oranges left around, and the dog’s water bowl is occasionally quite muddy from where they’re using it to wash their food – but they haven’t reclaimed their hidey-hole. Yet…

Item The Fourth: Two thoughts on the media’s changing reaction to a certain couple of pieces of music. First, I thought that it was interesting to see Filter’s “Hey Man, Nice Shot” being used as the background music in an episode of NBC’s “The Blacklist” a couple weeks ago. A few years ago, when the song came out, I remember quite a bit of protest about it and folks trying to get it banned. Ditto for “I Don’t Like Mondays” by the Boomtown Rats, which I heard on a middle of the road, “classic rock” FM station the other day. Back in the day, I remember folks hollering for KROQ’s license because they dared to play it.

The second, equally upsetting thought, was the realization that “Hey Man, Nice Shot” came out in 1995 (eighteen years ago) and “I Don’t Like Mondays” came out in 1981 (thirty-two freakin’ years ago!!), so when I casually think to myself that it was “a few years ago”, the only one I’m fooling is myself, I guess. It’s not just a river in Egypt any more…

Item The Fifth: Which NFL team is undefeated at 8-0? Hmmmmm? Face it, coming off of a terrible year in 2012 at 2-14, this year we sincerely hoped that we would be better. Most folks were praying for an 8-8 year, and a few brave souls thought we might get to 9-7 and squeak into a wildcard playoff spot. To say that we need to reassess those goals and expectations is the understatement of the year. I don’t think we need to be reserving hotels and airfares to New York just yet. But it’s much, much better to be 8-0 at this point in the season than it was being 1-7 last year!

Item The Sixth: I swear, someone in the neighborhood has a kookaburra. I hear it almost every night, right around an hour before sunset. It’ll sound off repeatedly, sometimes a dozen times. I have no idea if it’s caged in someone’s house or if it’s on the loose (like Lester), but I would love to track it down and see it, take a few pictures, maybe some video. If nothing else, just to prove that I’m not hearing things and hallucinating.

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Filed under Astronomy, Critters, KC Chiefs, Music, Odds & Sods, Science Fiction, Space, Sports, Writing

October 28, 2013 · 21:39

A Busy, Productive Day (With Critters)

It might have been a day in which I got a lot done, but it was not one in which I left myself a whole lot of time to do 500 to 1,000 thoughtful and insightful words for this blog. (I’m trying to “clear the decks” of as many tasks as I can in preparation for the big November plans!)

So, have some “emergency” critter pictures from the archives!

IMG_0744_smallI’ve got to admit, opossums freak me out just a little.

img_0750_smallThey don’t do much for Jessie, either. I don’t know if it was this one or another one, but there was a night when she went out just before bedtime to do her business and cornered a mama opossum with a handful of young ones. The babies were hanging tight to mama’s back, mama couldn’t make it up into the tree and was trapped on the ground in the corner. Jessie was “poofed” and going bananas, trying to wake up half the neighborhood. Mama opossum might have been out of her weight class, but there was no way she was letting Jessie near her babies without it being over her dead body. I was just trying to get close enough to Jessie to grab her collar and yank her back without even further freaking out the opossum and having her try to bite me. She had a lot of very sharp looking teeth.

IMG_2523_smallThese guys also drive Jessie nuts, deliberately taunting her and playing “chicken” to see if she can catch them. (She can’t.) There have been multiple occasions over the years where we’ll find dead ones, apparently dying of either a fall or some kind of disease. Jessie leaves them alone, either because she instinctively knows they’re diseased or (more likely) she’s scared of them because they’re not acting “right”. Even when she’s found them hurt and unable to get away or get up into the trees, she’ll leave them alone. But if they’re “acting like squirrels”, then she goes nuts, doing her part to “act like a dog” in return.

IMG_5588_smallRed-tailed hawks are all over the region and they’re so great to watch. There are a couple of pairs that we see regularly, often accompanied by a half-dozen crows trying to “mob” them.

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October 25, 2013 · 19:38

Juicy Chunks O’ Wisdom For Friday, October 25th

‘Cause Fridays used to be better, that’s why.

  • What is it about this time of month? (Just realized a possible answer as I used that turn of phrase…) I noticed that the “Juicy Chunks” posts for August and September were on the 27th and 25th respectively.
  • It sounds like they’re having a good time at the football game at the high school two blocks away. I wonder who they’re playing?
  • Last night there was a really loud owl somewhere in the trees either in our back yard or the neighbors’ back yard. It was beautiful listening to it hoot once a minute or so for over an hour.
  • We can always tell when there’s a big rivalry game at the high school because our street fills up with overflow parking.
  • This whole passive-aggressive thing with Joey Chan (the cat) is really getting old. She sits under my chair and whines and begs to be on my lap, refused to jump up on her own, but if I reach down to pick her up and put her there, she takes a swipe at my hand.
  • I’ll bet the noise from the football game scares the owl away tonight.
  • It occurs to me that Joey Chan and I might be playing different games. She might be totally uninterested in sitting on my lap. Instead, she might really wants to claw me up for whatever feline reasons her almond-sized brain has.
  • The passive-aggressive thing is just what she’s figured out to get me to put my hand down there where she can get at it. I mess with her head using the laser pointer, she messes with mine by pretending that she wants on my lap. Ahh, perspective…
  • I wonder how big that owl was and if it was big enough to take out one of our full-sized raccoons. Maybe not. But squirrels or rats, for sure. Probably could take out a cat as well.
  • When I was seventeen I really wanted to take the summer between my junior and senior years of high school and go to Europe.
  • I was going to stay at hostels, get a Eurail Pass, and backpack through a dozen countries.
  • I did not go to Europe when I was seventeen. I did not backpack through a dozen countries.
  • My mother informs me that she has gotten another dog, a Yorkshire terrier of some sort. I’m glad it makes her happy and it’s great that she rescued an abandoned critter. But I still look at it as just a pair of “little rat dogs”.
  • Our high school football team was not very good. From memory, I think we were 1-7 and 0-8 in my junior and senior years.
  • That wasn’t the reason I wanted to go to Europe.
  • Imagine our surprise at the 35th anniversary high school reunion when the current football team rolled by in the parade carrying the state championship trophy.

Remember to keep some “emergency” rockin’, upbeat music at hand for when it’s time to feel better.

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Filed under Cats, Critters, Dogs, Juicy Chunks, Travel

October 14, 2013 · 11:47

Odds & Sods For Monday, October 14th

Item The First: The raccoons have (I hope) been evicted! Last week’s windstorm caused some minor damage on the roof. While making those repairs, I checked out the “hidey-hole” that the raccoons have been using for an occasional home for the last year or so. I hadn’t heard them in a couple of days so maybe they were off causing problems at someone else’s house. On close inspection, the hidey-hole was found to be vacant, so I nailed up some screening over the opening again. (Don’t worry, I checked, double checked, and triple checked. There aren’t any raccoons or raccoon babies in there to be trapped and starving to death.)

photo 2 smallThey can still eat our oranges and dates and run around on the roof and in our trees, but they can’t live under our roof.

Assuming they’re not clever and/or strong enough to simply pry the screen off…

Item The Second: On my mother’s side, I come from a family of practical jokers. Nothing malicious mind you, just enough to keep you on your toes every now and then. (Other stories, other days.) On the other hand, The Long-Suffering Wife doesn’t much cotton to that sort of nonsense.

We recently had need to buy a new washer and dryer set and it got delivered and set up while The Long-Suffering Wife was out of town. It occurred to me that this was an ideal setup for a most wonderful prank! Since we had gotten machines with lots of new bells and whistles, I needed to sneak into the laundry room before she could after every load was finished in the dryer. If I fold everything and then put it stacked neatly back into the machine, maybe I could convince her that this was a new automatic setting on the fancy, schmancy dryer!

photo 1 smallDiscretion (and a desire to not sleep on the proverbial couch) was the better part of valor, so I did not pull this trick on my lovely wife. I did tell her about it, but while I was giggling and enjoying the story, she was not amused, so I guess I had made the correct choice. This weekend, having let her in on the joke, I did go in and do it for one load, but got only a, “Cute, dear!”

Proof that I’m easily amused. But we knew that.

Item The Third: Following up on my posts from Saturday and Sunday, Biology-Online.org has responded to Dr. Lee with an apology. It appears to be earnest and sincere. Good for them!

In addition, as a subscriber to Scientific American I receive a slew of their email newsletters, such as “Scientific American Daily Digest”, “Scientific American Basic Science”, “Scientific American Space & Physics”, and “Scientific American Weekly Review”. I find these extremely useful and valuable for keeping me up to date on what’s going on in the sciences, as wells as providing easy links to the full length stories. Since many of the Scientific American blogs are included in the stories featured in these newsletters, I was wondering if anything regarding this weekend’s events would be mentioned there.

I wa pleased to see that his morning’s newsletter includes a link to yesterday’s blog post from Mariette DiChristina. Transparency, openness, and communication are all really good things.

Item The Fourth: With yesterday’s win over the Hated Raiders of Oakland, my beloved KC Chiefs are now one of just two undefeated NFL teams at 6-0. This is a source of considerable joy and happiness in our household, so for that I would like to thank the entire KC Chiefs organization. In these trying times, it may be simple escapism, but it’s not meaningless. As for the future, our next three games are against teams that are at or below .500, then we have our bye week. Dare we hope that we can go into that ninth game against Denver (the other team currently 6-0) at 9-0, quite possibly facing another 9-0 team?

One game at a time. But it’s great being a Chiefs fan this year.

Item The Fifth: Since the last couple of weeks seem to have had a lot of stress, let’s start the new week with some role models for breathing, relaxing, prioritizing, and keeping things in the proper perspective.

photo 4 smallJesse, asleep under my desk.

photo 3 smallJoey, asleep in her sunny bay window next to my desk.

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Filed under Cats, Critters, Dogs, KC Chiefs, Moral Outrage, Odds & Sods, Photography, Sports

August 13, 2013 · 18:51

Spiders

Heads up – if spiders freak out out, stop reading now. The “worst” of the pictures should still be out of sight at the bottom of the post and you can’t see them yet. I’ll see y’all tomorrow.

Among the many critters that we have here in the urban jungle, so far I’ve mentioned only the mammals, the birds, and Fred the Lizard. But as with most anyplace else, we have spiders.

We don’t get a ton of them inside and the ones we do get seem pretty benign. We do have to do a sweep for webs periodically and occasionally squish a spider who’s particularly bold about being out where we can’t ignore him. For the most part however, it’s live and let live since they’re scarce and well hidden. Out of sight, out of mind.

Outside is a different story. With lots of trees and bugs and a semi-arid environment, spiders are the norm. It’s that whole “ecosystem” thing.

photo 2

On a regular basis we have to sweep and hose down the outside glass on the windows as they pick up an assortment of cobwebs, which in turn pick up dirt and debris.

photo 1

A lot of the plants will also pick up these sheet webs of some sort or the other. No worries. If it doesn’t bother Jessie when she goes crashing through the bushes, it doesn’t bother me.

But today I’ve noticed something new. In the back yard, clearly visible from my home office window and the living room windows, are a couple of incredibly long and industrial strength threads going across a ten-foot gap between two trees. Especially late in the day, they caught the sunlight and really were noticeable.

The existence of such a thread isn’t news, but this one seems almost unbreakable as the branches of the two trees have been banging around pretty good all day and this thread has hung in there. (Yeah, yeah, stronger than steel gram for gram, better tensile strength, blah, blah, blah. Even so…) In addition, it appears to be much thicker than a “normal” spider web thread, almost looking like forty-pound test mono filament fishing line.

photo 3

Is this from one of Charlotte’s relatives? Only if Charlotte got into Alex Rodriguez’s leftover PED stash! Or if she’s trying to catch a bat instead of butterflies.

I guess that’s not 100% a joke. We do have bats that fly around every night. I’m a big fan of bats and I like seeing them in the neighborhood. They’re interesting and they keep the bug population down. I know that there are spiders big enough to catch bats (Google it yourself if you wish, the images I pulled up just freaked me out big time) and spiders big enough to catch bats are supposed to be found on every continent except Antarctica. I still wouldn’t expect any of them here in LA — maybe Texas, part of that whole thing about everything being bigger there. If they are here, it’s time for a search and destroy mission and I don’t care how rare or endangered they might be!

One way or the other, I don’t want to think of Charlotte trying to kill Stellaluna, especially in my yard! (Although when that children’s book gets written, I expect the audiobook to be read by Samuel L. Jackson.)

Finally, speaking of eight-legged critters that are also on my kill-on-sight list, we get a few of these nasty little buggers from time to time:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Long ago and far away, when the first two kids were toddlers and Michi was still to come, we moved into a house with a completely overgrown back yard and a narrow walkway between the house and a cinder block wall. It didn’t take long before I figured out that that narrow passage was Black Widow Heaven, hundreds of them out there, particularly at night. In order to protect the kids, I got rather aggressive in wiping out the “widder spidders”.

Now days, we’ll occasionally see that tangled, random web that’s their signature off in some corner, indicating that we’ve got a new one. They don’t last long – it’s easier to kill one or two now than a few dozen later. At this house they also tend to hang out in places where I walk in the dark occasionally (like around the trash cans) and I don’t need that kind of surprise. I’ve used up enough adrenalin this year.

But I do wonder what’s moving into those pine trees now.

photo 4

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July 31, 2013 · 17:44

Other Critter Photos

Ye olde brain is a bit fried. It’s been a long day and there may be some bad juju brewing (although there has been some good news in the last day or two). It may be a good night to curl up with a good book or watch some cartoons. (Looney Tunes, not Cartoon Network or anime.) Or take Brother Bluto’s advice and start drinking heavily.

In the meantime, have a picture of a lizard, taken in our yard last week – we call him Fred:

20130731-174351.jpg

And a bunny – they all look alike to us so we haven’t named any of them:

20130731-175523.jpg

A big grasshopper:

20130731-181535.jpg

We have a fair number of crickets around. We used to find them in the house all the time and I would take them outside instead of squishing them. I heard they were supposed to be good luck. But we haven’t seen any inside for a while. I wonder if Rocky & Raquel are munching on them:

20130731-180205.jpg

And, as always, more squirrels than you can shake the proverbial stick at:

20130731-180702.jpg

One of my favorite birds around is this beautiful woodpecker that we see every now and then:

20130731-181924.jpg

Best of all, I managed to write this post, insert photos, and edit it all using the iPad app and I (to the best of my knowledge) did not hit the wrong buttons or post it or send out emails to everyone with it looking half baked. Woo-hoo!!

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July 23, 2013 · 20:35

Random Blatherationings for July 23rd

Feel lucky, punk? (If you’ve forgotten the rules, they’re here.) Tonight’s three random seed words are “disgest” (to digest), “panton” (a horseshoe to correct a narrow hoofbound heel), and “crustaceology” (that branch of zooumllogy which treats of the Crustacea malacostracology carcinology)

Disgest – Google comes up a complete blank on this one, simply assumes that I’m spelling “digest” incorrectly. (I double checked, I’m not.) The unabridged dictionary has it as an obsolete version of digest and cites something by Sir Francis Bacon.

Sir Francis Bacon was a prominent English orator, statesman, author, and scientist in the late 1500’s and early 1600’s. While looking up some facts on him my brain’s still quietly digesting art thoughts from The Getty visit, so what immediately caught my eye in the Google search was an image of a sculpture at the Oxford University Museum.

11465080_1a5dcbbc5a_z Photo by Kevin Walsh (CC BY-NC 2.0)

The “dead eye” thing on sculptures has always freaked me out a bit. I’m guessing that there’s some reason to do it that I haven’t heard of. (Having said that, there was a sculpture at The Getty that had the eyes done in silver inlay on a marble bust – that was even creepier.)

The detail in the stonework on this entire piece is just unbelievable, but the detail on the ruff goes even beyond that. Someone either was a huge fan of Bacon or was getting paid a lot of money for an incredible piece of art.

And I thought that the ruffs made of lace or cloth looked stiff & uncomfortable!

Panton – Google doesn’t find anything relating to horseshoes that I can see and wants to assume that I can’t spell “Pantone”. (Google is very big on thinking that I can’t spell tonight – don’t be so judgemental, Google!) But there are results returned for “panton chair” and “panton valentine leukocidin”. Let’s pick Door #2!

As the old Knight Templar in “Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade” said, “He did not choose wisely.” A CDC article pops up with a whole bunches of $35 words. “Panton-Valentine Leukocidin Genes in Staphylococcus aureus”.

Do you know what “tl;dr” means? I’ll summarize as best I can (i.e., badly). Panton and Valentine were researchers who in 1932 looked at a strain of staph cells that were particularly toxic and a source of all kinds of problems in cuts, injuries, and infections. This 2006 paper is from a group of researchers in Rotterdam that were looking at how infections caused by that strain of staph are currently distributed both by time and location.

What this reminds me most of is the recurring nightmares many college students have where you show up for a final exam in a critical class that you had totally forgotten about and never attended at all. Some time for extra credit your subconscious will have you show up naked and/or late for that forgotten class and final.

Remind me to tell you some time how I finally got rid of that particular nightmare.

Crustaceology – “That branch of zooumllogy which treats of the Crustacea malacostracology carcinology”? Are you freakin’ kidding me? “Zooumllogy” isn’t even in the first two unabridged dictionaries I look in – I finally find it in a scientific dictionary. It’s the subcategory of biology that refers to animals. (Why couldn’t they have just said that?) “Carcinology” and “malacostracology” both refer to zoological classifications of crustaceans, particularly lobsters and crabs. So from context it means… Ooh, look, a butterfly!

Who was the first guy who looked at king crabs and thought that they were edible? Who was the first guy who even saw king crabs? The reality TV shows on Discovery Channel always show these guys out in the middle of the Bering Sea in fifty-foot waves dropping traps down into hundreds of feet of water, so it’s not like someone just stumbled across one of these things.

So, ignoring that, let’s say that somehow you’ve managed to grab onto a king crab and it looks like a huge freakin’ armor-covered spider from the bottom of the ocean. My first response would be to run screaming and worry about getting clean underwear later. What inspired someone to instead say, “Man, if that thing doesn’t kill me, I’ll bet it’ll taste great with some drawn butter!”

It’s things like this that make The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy a much, MUCH better foundation for theology than the Bible. There’s too much just plain freakish and bizarre stuff out there every day that goes totally unnoticed and unthought about for there to be any intelligent design behind it all.

Are we done? Close enough, although we never did find anything relating to orthotic horseshoes, did we? Google that and see what comes up!

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Filed under Art, Critters, Random Blatherationings

July 10, 2013 · 22:04

When The Ceiling Dripped Blood

We had moved into the house less than a week before. It was December. There were boxes everywhere, some neat, most not, almost none of them labeled. The gods had played Fifty-Two Pick-Up with our lives and we were trying to get it back into some semblance of order.

The house was much larger than the one we had moved from, which was a significant chunk of the reasons for moving. The small, three-bedroom, two-bath house in a so-so neighborhood with so-so schools near the intersection of two major freeways was getting to be problematic with three kids, aged one, three, and six. The large, five-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath house was in a really good neighborhood with really good schools, had a separate family room, and a much bigger yard.

Between work, moving, getting the oldest into his new school, and trying to unpack and get re-organized, it was a real three-ring circus. One daughter’s birthday practically got forgotten in all of the chaos, and it was not clear if there would be a time for a tree, or lights, or any other decorations for Christmas. Hell, between the expenses of moving and then paying for a bigger house that we really couldn’t afford, it was anyone’s guess if there were going to be presents for Christmas, let alone a lot of decorations.

It is safe to assume that I was stressed. Just a tad.

The weather had turned bad for a couple of days as it sometimes does in Los Angeles just before the holidays. It was late that night, near midnight, and there was a pretty good rain storm going on outside with some occasional thunder and lightning. Everyone else was in bed, but I was up late in the family room at the far end of the house, unpacking boxes and taking a few minutes to breathe.

I had finally found and gotten a television hooked up to the cable outlet in the family room. I was working on getting the computer put back together with some idiot late night show on the television for background noise.

I became aware of a dripping noise. Not a huge gushing surge or even a steady stream of fluid, but a drop-plopping-onto-something sound every twenty or thirty seconds. It was coming from the other side of the room, over by the door to the garage.

Given that it was pouring rain outside and we had only been in the house for a couple of days, my first thought was that there was a roof leak that we hadn’t been told about. I grabbed a small garbage can and went looking for the leak so that I could minimize the water damage.

Near the door to the garage, where there are a set of book shelves and cabinets built in, I found the wet spot. I got a paper towel to mop up before I put the trash can down and was startled to see the towel soaking up a dark red fluid that was thicker and more viscous than water.

I looked up at the ceiling where the drip was coming from and I could clearly see that there was a dark stain there. The ceiling in the family room is made of open 4×8 beams painted dark brown, with white-painted lathe hardwood laid down perpendicular to it as the bottom layer of the roof. There was a knot in the wood with a crack that I could see up into, and once I got a flashlight I could see the drops slowly forming there before they fell.

OK, so, to review. Dark. Middle of the night. Heavy rain. Lightning. Thunder. We just moved in. Chaos inside. And a thick, dark, red fluid (i.e., blood!!!) dripping from the ceiling.

I would like to say that I went to check the bathroom mirrors for swarms of flies spelling out “GET OUT!” or any places in the house where “REDRUM” had been scrawled in lipstick on a door. I didn’t. Instead I figured that there must be a rusty nail or something up in there, some tar or roofing material that was staining the leaking rain water, and that’s what was making the water look dark. There was no way that it was actually blood. C’mon!

I cleaned up the mess and put the garbage can there catch any further leaks.

Two or three nights later I was in the same room, again late at night. This time it was quiet and not raining. I had checked the previous couple of nights to make sure that nothing else was dripping or leaking and hadn’t seen anything further.

But late on this night, again, I heard something dripping near the door to the garage. And on this night another sound as well, a scraping noise coming from the ceiling.

I went to where I had found the drip the first night and could again see a thick, dark red fluid dripping from the ceiling onto the counter. It looked like blood. And every few minutes I could hear a soft scraping noise, a shuffling sound.

I thought it might be coming from the garage on the other side of the wall, so I got a flashlight and went out to check, figuring it might be rats (or a raccoon!). We have lots of fruit trees and I thought that there might be one in the garage. But there was no sign of any critters there, and from the garage I could still hear the shuffling sound, coming from high up on the wall, which would put it on the roof of the family room. The sounds and the dripping stopped after about ten minutes.

The next night I was ready and waiting for any odd occurrences or noises in the family room. An hour or so after sunset, I started hearing something again. Tonight it was more shuffling noises in the same spot as before, slowly moving along the wall between the family room and the garage, out toward the outside edge of the room. Then I heard a rush of wind, a literal “WHOOSH” sound, then nothing.

About two hours later I heard a loud thud, then more scraping, shuffling noises. This time the sounds moved from the outside wall back in toward the main house, followed by some noises like something settling and moving around. Five or ten minutes later, again I found blood dripping from the ceiling.

At this point I had yet to get up on the roof. We had only lived there about two weeks and, as I said, it was pretty chaotic. But the next day I dug out the ladder and took a look around up there.

IMG_8316_smallThe flat gravel roof is the family room. The pitched roof running left to right in the center background is the garage. The higher, pitched roof on the right is the living room and main house. Where the pitched roof from the garage doesn’t quite meet the flat roof of the family room, there’s a bit of an open space, running the width of the family room.

IMG_0104_smallDid we have uninvited guests? I got a flashlight and took a closer look.

IMG_0103_smallRunning the length of the family room (with the garage wall on the left in this view) is this triangular hidey-hole. In this particular picture from last year you can see Rocky & Raquel lurking down at the far end, but on that first day that I peeked in here over twenty years ago, I saw nothing.

It was dark at the far end and I didn’t have the best flashlight, so I went and got a better one. I crawled up right next to the opening and put my head and arm in with the flashlight — in retrospect, possibly not the best move if there was a pissed off wild critter in there and I was wedging my head into the only exit. Still, I saw nothing at first, waving my flashlight around to figure out what I might be seeing…

…and then the owl opened its eyes, looking right at me from ten feet away. Huge, gigantic, golden, glowing eyes. And it blinked and I was outta there!!

Yep, it really was blood dripping from the ceiling. This magnificent, huge owl was crawling along the gravel at night (scraping and shuffling), flying off after dark (with a very audible WHOOSH), catching dinner and coming back to take it back into its nest to eat, and as the rat/rabbit/mouse/squirrel/critter got eaten, the blood was soaking down through that knothole and into the house.

As much as I love birds and owls, it couldn’t last. The critter-friendly hiding spot under the garage roof had to be closed off.

Then, as now, my main concern was to make sure that I wasn’t dooming any critters by sealing them in, particularly if there are little critters there waiting for mom and/or dad to bring home dinner. So I cut a large piece of heavy-duty wire mesh sheeting to cover the hole to the triangular hidey-hole and waited for a good night. When I heard the owl leave, I went up and checked the “nest” to make sure that it was empty and there weren’t any other owls, adult or babies, left behind. Then I sealed it up quickly and figured that the owl would have to find some other nesting spot.

Now, with Rocky and Raquel in there (the wire mesh got taken off when we had the roof re-shingled a few years ago), it’s time to seal off the “critter nest” again. We know that there are at least two kits in there now, but they’ll be grown soon and then it will be time to again wait to hear the critters leave for their nocturnal adventures and do a quick eviction on them.

We learned that lesson the first time over twenty years ago — WHEN THE CEILING DRIPPED BLOOD!!

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Filed under Castle Willett, Critters, Weather