24 July 2008
What I'm Reading Lately: Death, Dog Poisoning, Novelty, Flawed Heroes, Psych Experiments, Limiting Generalisations
A mish-mash of my recent online reading, pondering, etc.
>> Alpine murder mystery: Are sheepdogs being poisoned to save the grey wolf? (Independent, 18 July 2008):
So far this year, 17 sheepdogs (including Great Pyrenees) have been poisoned -- with slug poison placed inside pork meatballs -- in the high Maurienne mountains, just inside the French border with Italy. The killings seem to stem from an ongoing dispute between sheep-lovers (and shepherds) and wolf-lovers. "'The pork meat balls were left, some time during the night, most likely just before dawn, in a place where the dogs would be sure to find them. This is the work of a maniac – a madman. What if the meat had been found by a small child? There are tourists everywhere at this time of year, including many British tourists.'"
"The dogs have often died in great agony.... [The poison] causes instant and catastrophic diarrhoea and lung failure in small mammals like dogs. 'They finish up dying completely dehydrated but, before that, they drown in their own bronchial fluids.'"
There are about 100 wolves in France. There is a sheep-protection plan in place in the area, and there have been no wolf attacks on sheep in the Maurienne area for more than two years.
>> If you haven't read it yet, I recommend "Cancer & Creativity: One Chef’s True Story" (Food & Wine, July 2008):
"While undergoing treatment for tongue cancer, Grant Achatz temporarily lost his ability to taste. Paradoxically, it taught him brilliant new ways to create flavor."
>> Impossible Experiments (Psychology Today, 1 July 2008) is a small collection of research psychologists would like to do "if neither ethics nor practical reality stood in your way." What interests me is that almost all the comments (so far) are about one hypothesis, that how parents raise their kids doesn't influence them significantly. The experiment I would jump on is Tamler Sommers' "Another Man's Shoes." (The YouTube video at the end makes clear that the whole thing is a joke ... or is it?) Other never-done experiments.
>> "Our Infantile Search for Heroic Leaders" by Johann Hari (26 June 2008, Independent). Hari's thesis is two-fold: That there are no perfectly good leaders and that we can't expect leaders to solve our problems because "every civilising advance in history ... was won because ordinary people banded together and agitated for it." Not much new there, but what interested me about this article was Hari's critique of Mandela, Gandhi, and Churchill as flawed leaders. I never knew that Churchill, for instance, was "strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes." His portrayal of Gandhi as a murderer (of his wife) seems overdone, not because I don't believe it's possible but because even as Hari presents it, it sounds more like a matter of adhering to principles in one case (his wife's illness) and not in another (his own illness), a rather ordinary though insidious trait.
>> Reframing Questions by Dave Pollard at How To Save the World (16 July 2008) seeks to promote critical thinking, to help us think beyond our own "false myths and limiting generalizations." He gives some examples of some limiting myths and generalisations he encounters everyday in business, then reframes the questions, and then asks his readers: "What are the false myths and limiting generalizations that you are struggling with, and how might you use appropriate questions to reframe them, disempower them, put them to rest?" Some day I may give some energy to it and respond to that challenge here.
>> "Why We Like New Stuff" (Mental Floss, 16 July 2008). Basically, "our brains are actually hard-wired to prefer novelty and adventure. ... In fact, research on the ventral striatum (the part of the brain associated with rewarding behavior) seems to indicate that sating our sense of adventure provides us the same sort of satisfaction we get from sex and food." Dopamine figures, too. Full study (7 pages, PDF).
>> "Italian Outrage Over Roma Drowning Photos" (21 July 2008, CNN) is confusing to me. "Italian newspapers, an archbishop and civil liberties campaigners expressed shock and revulsion on Monday after photographs were published of sunbathers apparently enjoying a day at the beach just meters from where the bodies of two drowned Roma girls were laid out on the sand."
I think I might be creeped out if dead people were lying on the beach -- I'm creeped out when a dead seal or horseshoe crab is lying on the beach -- but the sunbathers' critics aren't shocked that they're not repulsed enough, presumably; they're shocked that the sunbathers are indifferent to the bodies. Shocked that they can act as if they aren't there, that they can do what they would ordinarily do without creating a sacred space for the bodies, without making their deaths the focus. That doesn't seem so bad to me. In any important way, the girls are not there, so why regard the dead bodies as something sacred, something whose presence means we should act differently than we do ordinarily? I guess it's because death is seen as such a powerful force.
The Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Crecenzio Seppe, said in his blog that "'To turn the other way or to mind your own business can sometimes be more devastating than the events that occur.'" I'd agree if the girls were injured or needed lifesaving efforts; then it would be cruel to be indifferent. But I don't see how the sunbathers' can really mind the dead girls' business now, or why they should.
I've been in the presence of someone in the moments of her death, and in the presence of her body, as it lay in her house, for a couple of hours after that. The moment of dying, yes, that felt like something happened, something a little unusual and yet not, like breathing in and out. But for the hours afterwards? My experience was that life went on in its ordinary way. If I hadn't felt that all along that morning, I would have when the mortuary folks came with their plastic garbage-like bag and heaved her body into it. It was about as sacred-seeming as bodies under beach towels on a sunny day.
(In a twisted way, it kinda reminds me of this ...)
06:15 Posted in animals , death , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture , science and tech , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
20 July 2008
Websites with Narrow Focus, X
I've been saving them up for this post.
It's Lovely! I'll Take It!, "a collection of poorly chosen photos from real estate listings. With love." And comments. Don't miss it.
potentially nervous: "The world's going to hell. Here are some bunny photos."
How I Spent My Stimulus. Tell your story.
Kim's Page o' Chopsticks. Chopstick wrappers, actually. (Thanks, Mike.)
06:45 Posted in animals , art and photography , finance and business , food and drink , householding , pop culture , silliness and humour , websites with narrow focus | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
18 July 2008
Goose + Man Story
In the Boston Globe, a 5-page piece by Vicki Constantine Croke about making tough veterinary care decisions features a lovely story about Mark Podlaseck and his goose with cancer, Boswell, who seems to like The Iliad.
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17 July 2008
Sheep is "great company"
22-stone (300 lb.) white sheep, outcast among other animals, comes to live in home of British family. Affection all 'round. CNN video.
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10 July 2008
Who are the Victims?
Another idea I have for an occasional series: News stories in which some group is labelled 'the victim' of a group, abstraction, or individual. I think it's educational and interesting to explore who or what are identified as victims and perpetrators in the media.
Recently,
American people are the victims: "The whiners are the leaders. Hell, the American people are victims. ..." [Said by political advisor and former Congressman Phil Gramm, reported today]
Palestinians are the victims of Jewish persecutors: "Touring the somber [Holocaust] museum, it occurred to [Israeli-Arab lawyer] Mahameed that 'we Palestinians are the victims of the terrible things that were inflicted on the Jews by the Holocaust.' [8 July; the article is actually eye-opening, moving, IMO]
Bass and salmon are the victims of mismanagement: "Striped bass are the victims of gross state and federal mismanagement of Central Valley rivers and the Delta, as are collapsing Sacramento River chinook salmon populations." [8 July]
Tuna are the victims of their own success: "Chronically overfished, Mediterranean tuna are the victims of their success with fish lovers, especially with the passion for sushi." [3 July]
Sociopathic politicians, celebrities and sports figures are the victims: "For all the public examples of bad behavior set by politicians, celebrities and sports figures, many young people see these individuals for exactly what they are: spoiled, overrated sociopaths who are the victims of an overly indulgent, disengaged society in search of civilization." [7 July]
Pakistani college women are the victims of cell phone use: "Mostly intermediate students are the victims of mobile mania" [8 July]
San Diego stores are the victims of shopping cart theft and displacement: "The stores are the victims, Councilman Jack Feller said, and they aren't the ones who should be punished." [12 June]
and finally, the word "victim" isn't used but it's sure implied in this odd story [7 July]:
"A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon.
"County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.
"Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections 'has become a black hole' because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.
"Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud 'Excuse me!' He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a 'white hole.'"That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy."
wtf?
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09 July 2008
June and July Garden Photos
Twelve new garden photos at Flickr.
Also, photos from Tower Hill Gardens and Garden in the Woods, both in Massachusetts.
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27 June 2008
Current Events Quote of the Day
"It's so disappointing," Linda Wilmesherr, a local resident, tells the Associated Press. "With all the guns in this county, couldn't we kill a muskrat?"
from Muskrats blamed for levee breach in Missouri, in USA Today
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25 June 2008
Inside Animals' Heads
DALMATIANS
'Hey, look, the truck's stopping.'
'Did they take us to the park this time?'
'No -- it's a fire. Another horrible fire.'
'What the hell is wrong with these people?'
From 'Animal Tales' by Simon Rich in the 30 June 2008 New Yorker.
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16 June 2008
Garden in June
The latest photos ... Click to enlarge; go here for best viewing:
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14 June 2008
Skunked
Our dog was skunked last night when she went out for her last pee of the night, around 9:15 p.m. She got it in the face and neck. At first she couldn't open her eyes and was foaming from the mouth. Though my spouse saw the varmint trying to escape our fence, he wasn't sure in the dark, seeing it at a distance from the rear with its tail held aloft, whether it was a skunk or a porcupine (it looked large), so we checked the dog's face for quills, and bites or bleeding, while she was still out on the deck. Finding none, and smelling a strong eau-de-Pepe-Le-Pew, we assumed a skunk spray.
We called the emergency vets, who told us to rinse her face over and over with warm water, which we did in the tub upstairs. We didn't really want to bring her in the house but it was dark outside, we don't have a portable tub or wading pool or anything large enough to use as one, and we weren't sure where the perpetrator was. After the warm water rinse -- by now her eyes were open and she'd stopped foaming -- we scrubbed her with a tomato sauce-water mixture. We are apparently quite ill-prepared for this sort of event: no tomato juice, no hydrogen peroxide and about a half-cup of white vinegar to our names.
Fortunately, it was warm and not rainy last night, so we opened most of the windows upstairs and some downstairs, using window and exhaust fans in some, but the house still stinks to high heaven today. Last night, it smelled like a chemical, a burning rubber kind of smell, not really the smell I associate with skunks. Much more concentrated and acrid. The forecast is not looking good for us, with rain and cooler temps expected from tonight through next Friday.
The dog slept in our room last night, on her foam bed covered double with washable material, but even the foam (three layers down) stinks today, so it's time for a new bed for her. The human furniture is of course off-limits to her for a while.
We humans also stink. I went to the Farmer's Market and grocery store today and heard people wondering if there was a skunk around. There was a fluffy black-and-white long-haired chihuahua running around at the Farmer's Market that caused some double-takes. :-)
My car stinks, though I sat in it only for about 8 minutes total. I'm running the 4th load of laundry now (so far, all dog-related) and have two more, at least, to go.
The dog went to the vet's this morning for a booster rabies shot; she was current on her rabies vaccine but they recommend a booster any time a pet has a run-in with a wild animal. She's now getting her second and third baths, with a mixture of white vinegar, baking soda and a little Dawn liquid detergent -- to neutralise the skunk's potent oil. The vet recommended this, or rather instead of vinegar, hydrogen peroxide, but though I bought some hydrogen peroxide earlier today -- along with white vinegar, gloves, sponges, and more baking soda -- we still don't have enough of it to do the trick, and the vinegar seems to be working well. We're keeping it away from her face. (The vinegar is also working well added to the laundry.)
Our dog is a short-haired shedding variety that doesn't get groomed. Her fur can't be shaved without her looking like a Gloucester Old Spots pig and leaving her prone to sunburn and other skin injury. Judging from other spots she's had shaved for medical procedures, the hair may not grow back, either.
The skunks are around, we think, because our neighbours on both sides have grubs, which skunks love. We have a lot of nightcrawlers in our lawn -- not sure whether that's a skunk food source, too. We don't have any garbage outside and thankfully, the skunks don't seem to be nesting under the deck.
Sunday Update: We gave her another bath yesterday using the hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, Dawn recipe linked below. She still stinks. Part of the problem is that most of the spray was on her face -- eyes, nose, mouth -- and that's where we can't wash much using the solution.
(Photo: The dog with a treat resting on her nose. One of her other tricks, besides disturbing skunks.)
Helpful de-skunking websites
What to do when your dog has been skunked (PetPlace.com) - our vet printed this out for us
The best way to deskunk your dog (Brian Retzler)
Solving problems with skunks (The Humane Society)
12:35 Posted in animals , gardening and weather , health and medicine , householding | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
02 June 2008
Incredibly Close(Up)
Sit in front of this weblog -- In a Dark Time ... the Eye Begins to See -- and see / don't see.
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05 May 2008
Do We Miss the Moment When We Take Photos?
(Short answer, no, not any more than we ever miss the moment.)
Thank god, an answer to this age-old question with an explanation I can accept, from Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.
Someone asks him "Is taking a photo or video of an event for later viewing worth it, even if it means more or less missing the event in realtime? What's better, a lifetime of mediated viewing of my son's first steps or a one-time in-person viewing?"
Cowen's main response is two-fold:
"If you take photos you will remember the event more vividly, if only because you have to stop and notice it. The fact that your memories will in part be 'false' or constructed is besides the point; they'll probably be false anyway. In other words, there's no such thing as the 'one-time in-person viewing,' it is all mediated viewing, one way or the other. Daniel Gilbert's book on memory is the key source here.
One of the comments, though, brings up the common theory that taking pictures can be a way of hiding behind the camera, making us merely observers of participants, creating distance between us and what we are photographing. This seems true at times for me, particularly at parties or group events -- I like to have a role that supercedes the social requirement of chit-chatting -- but not in the garden, while travelling, taking photos of close friends or family, etc. Even at parties, I feel that I am participating by being an observer, and sometimes the role of photographer seems like the role of therapist: people will reveal things they might not otherwise, because I am hidden, because I seem neutral, because I am part machine.
(Photo taken today. The robin pair, whose nest this is, was not happy to find me in the garden. I wasn't happy to find their nest so close to the ground -- in a rhododendron shrub -- knowing that neighbours' cats stalk our yard.)
12:51 Posted in animals , art and photography , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
28 March 2008
More Winter
More snow today!
The same galanthus (snowdrops), now covered with a few inches of new wet snow.
This false bunny (left by previous owners) wanted her photo shot, too.
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12 March 2008
I'm obviously the intended viewer
(Go to the site within the next 30 days to actually see the strip.)
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RIP Delhi, 1946-2008
An elephant died yesterday.
Delhi, an elephant at the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, TN, died early yesterday morning in her sleep after a time of decline (you can read about her last days here).
She came to the sanctuary in 2004, having been confiscated by the USDA after she was neglected and harmed by the Hawthorne Corp., which lends elephants to circuses.
An email from the Elephant Sanctuary today said that "while her sisters and caregivers slept, Delhi made her transition. Her passing was silent and peaceful, she passed without waking. We are all spending the day honoring our last precious hours with her; caregivers are still fussing around her, whispering quiet goodbyes. Misty carefully touched all over Delhi's body and then gently stepped over her, sheltering her dearly departed friend."
There will be a memorial page for Delhi at the ES website soon.
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04 February 2008
What I Killed Today
That's the name and content of the website of a female, vegan veterinary technician: "I work with a lot of injured wildlife. Also not wild animals that are just in a lot of pain. Sometimes I have to euthanize them. I decided to record each animal I euthanize here."
via TMN
18:55 Posted in animals , death , health and medicine , lists , websites with narrow focus | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this
26 December 2007
Being Double Bagged
Most of us with dogs have probably been here. (We carry two bags now.)
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30 October 2007
Disapproving Rabbits
Maybe that sounds like a metaphorical title, but it's not. (via, and explained by, Neatorama)
And definitely check out the 30-Second Bunnies Theatre Library. Casablanca, Napoleon Dynamite, James Bond medley, Christmas Vacation, It's A Wonderful Life, Caddyshack, Reservoir Dogs (bleeped and unbleeped), Jaws, Fight Club, and lots more, all re-enacted in 30 seconds by bunnies!
20:15 Posted in animals , art and photography , media, film, tv, radio , websites with narrow focus | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
18 October 2007
Dogs, Blog, and Elephants
I'll be back to posting soon. For now, I'm spending most of my computer time updating booklists -- recently finished adult crime fiction, children's historical fiction, children's bibliotherapy, and now only about 30 more lists to go!
Don't forget to feed an animal today, and if you want more reason to care for critters, read this elephant rescue story.
And watch out for barking spiders! :-)
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13 October 2007
So Many Dead and Dying
On Thursday, to my knowledge, a bird and a woman died. The bird, a pet parakeet belonging to a friend, died at 11:03 a.m., after a long life; the woman, a friend of a friend, and an acquaintance of mine, died at 8:04 p.m., after a relatively short life (48 years), one that seems cut terribly short. Both deaths were witnessed by people who love the dying creatures, who were sad they were leaving, who found it hard to watch them die, who cried, who mourn and grieve, who will remember. In the case of the woman's death, other lives will also change, and perhaps major decisions will be made because she is gone, because she was here.
On Thursday, if it was an 'average' day, about 155,000 people died around the world (and about 363,000 people are born). It's hard to comprehend that one or two people die every second. Since I started typing this 10 minutes ago, if this day is average, about 1,000 people who were alive when I started are now dead. Their lives and deaths change other lives.
I can't find any statistics online about global animals deaths per day, but it must be in the billions, counting insects and microbes. Even considering only mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and birds -- pets, animals in the wild, farm animals, circus and zoo animals, animals killed by hunting and human transportation and slaughterhouses -- millions must die every split second.
I'm not railing against death. True, it seems an odd system, but then so is birth. As long as we have birth and a finite planet, death makes some 'sense', I guess, or we'd run out of room even faster than we are.
What I'm thinking about here is just how incessant, constant, and ordinary death is, and how the death of someone we love feels so surprising and extraordinary to us.
16:37 Posted in animals , community , death , math and numbers | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this
11 September 2007
Photo Journal of Woodsy Urban Walk (Boston)
Nice: 9 Miles of Frederick Law Olmsted's Emerald Necklace, thanks to Evan at Life Is Sweet in the Fenway
12:26 Posted in animals , art and photography , community , earthcare and environment , gardening and weather , simple living , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
10 September 2007
The dogs sat in front of the humans and stared at them
Dogs seem to have an innate connection with humans. Even before they are weaned from their mothers and socialised with people, they understand how to communicate with us.
In an experiment in Budapest, wolves were raised from puppies, fed with bottles, taught to walk on a leash and respond to commands: "After a few months the researchers had the young wolves and a group of young dogs attempt the same task. First both groups were taught to remove a piece of meat from a container. After a while, the investigators closed the containers. While the young wolves kept trying to get to the food, the dogs stopped immediately, sat down in front of their human trainers and stared at them."
Yup. (See photo.)
More intelligent dog tricks here.
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17 July 2007
Gored By Bull?
If so, these are the possible types of injuries you might expect. Hint: the abdomen is the worst; advice is to turn your back -- or more precisely, buttocks -- to the bull if horns are coming your way. Perhaps this list (with diagrams) will come in handy for someone. via Official Ground Rounds
Image from Picasso's Guernica
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12 July 2007
Book Thoughts: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
I haven't done many (any?) book reviews here but am jotting down my thoughts on Water for Elephants, a novel about circus life by Sara Gruen, because I have found online only extravagant praise for the book -- including numerous comments along the lines of "I don't know anyone who's read the book who hasn't loved it" -- and I wanted to at least weigh in with another view. I finished the book only because it was a book group read (although that didn't stop one person in my group from returning it to the library in disgust), and the ending(s) did not justify my perseverance.
First, what's good about the book: It's a very fast and easy read (I read it in a 24-hour period). The writing, for the most part, flows well, although there are notable exceptions, and some passages felt cliched and old. The main character, Jacob, is likable and engaging both as a 23-year-old and as a 93-year-old. I don't know much about circuses or the Depression but from reviews I've read, Gruen seems to have researched her work thoroughly and captured the atmosphere and spirit of both the place and time. The nursing home scenes, though they are too few imo, rang true. The themes of the book are interesting: good vs. evil, responsibility and culpability for actions, charming illusion and harsh reality, inhumane humans and human-acting animals and human 'freaks,' the twists of memory, and, of course, rivalry.
Now to the rest.
The writing at times feels clunky and cliched (especially the sex and post-sex scenes); there wasn't one line of prose or any paragraph in this book that made me swoon with delight or want to mark it to remember it. The plotting, while fluid, is predictable. Even the 'surprise' ending didn't feel like one to me; the structure of the book led me to believe that the 'prologue' version of events would be re-imagined at some point, and the second ('real') version of events is even less satisfying than the first.
But these are minor quibbles in a fast-paced, plot-centered book. The larger problem for me is that the book takes on grand themes and then treats them so simplistically. I didn't recognise this at first; I just knew something didn't sit well with me when I finished the book. Then a friend described a family situation in terms of 'good guys' and 'bad guys' and I saw what was troubling me about this book.
This is a book in which the major characters are either good guys or bad guys: Jacob and Marlena are good, Uncle Al and August are bad. Walter and Camel, supporting characters, are more complex but are basically foils for the good guys and the bad guys; the brutal, cruel treatment by Al and August of Walter and Camel reinforces in the reader the notion that these men are Bad with a capital B., and the kind treatment of these men by Jacob shows us how Good with a capital G he is. Rosie, not as major a character as I would have liked, gets to be seen as 'good' (even as a 'heroine' according to the blurb on the paperback edition of the book) even though she commits a 'bad' act. Is this because she is 'just' an animal (though it's hinted that she knows what she is doing) or because she is justified in retaliating against a bad guy who has so harmed her and others?
What troubles me about this book, and about the nearly universal praise for it, is that it's a book that celebrates as good and right 'justifiable' violence. It seeks to uphold the illusory line between profane violence -- that of the bad guys, violence inspired by greed, selfishness, and even a mental illness like schizophrenia -- and sacred violence -- violence done to scapegoat the bad guys, violence done in the name of good, kindness, and love. Rosie's act essentially frees Jacob and Marlena to a lovely life together. The message here is that if we can just kill all the bad people, or expel them in some way, then we can finally live in peace and harmony. But as Solzhenitsyn said in the Gulag Archipelago: "If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."
Gruen's novel may have accurately contrasted the brutal and nitty-gritty reality of circus life during the Depression with the 'step right up' illusion of the entertaining family-friendly circus, but her novel only solidifies the illusion that we can live in peace once we identify and do away with the evil-doers.
10:40 Posted in animals , books and reading , girardian anthropology , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
03 July 2007
RIP Laurence Mancuso, 1934-2007
Father Laurence Mancuso, founding abbot of the Eastern Orthodox order of the Monks of New Skete (NY), well-known for breeding and training German shepherds, died on 10 June of injuries received in a fall. The monks have published two books on dog raising, How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend (1978) and The Art of Raising a Puppy (1991). Among suggested training 'techniques' are to cuddle, massage, and sleep with the dog.
Obituaries in the Boston Globe, the NYT, the New York Sun, and the Albany Times Union.
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26 June 2007
Sad News
My beautiful, spirited, gentle dog was diagnosed with cancer today. She will have surgery ASAP, probably followed by chemotherapy. Please give her a good thought.
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04 June 2007
RIP Georgia
Georgia, the first patient of the Georgia Sea Turtle Center (arriving Mother's Day), has been euthanised. She arrived with severe injuries cased by a small boat outboard engine, including five deep propeller lacerations and many broken bones. Her health was declining though she was being treated, so a CT scan was performed on 31 May, revealing that the wound to her head had "caused several fractures to her skull and penetrated her brain resulting in untreatable damage and infection. Additionally, the wounds to her carapace and shoulder continued into her body cavity causing internal complications that were also untreatable." The team decided to humanely euthanize her "right away in the midst of the tropical storm on Saturday, June 2."
From her necropsy, the team hopes to learn how to help engineers design more 'animal friendly' boat engines.
20:34 Posted in animals , death , earthcare and environment , health and medicine , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
14 April 2007
Self-Restraint and Instinct
Dave Pollard's post on The M Word (as he calls it) is insightful and illuminating, especially his analysis of why masturbation is so frowned upon. (I have to think more about the prescriptions that follows his analysis, though.)
After comparing and contrasting the activity of masturbation with the activity of playing video games, he asks why the stigma against masturbation exists. His answer is that there are two reasons, which we have confused.
The first is instinctual, Darwinian: "Social activities are best done with other people, not alone." Eating, sleeping, working (hunting), talking and having sex with others helps the species succeed more than doing these things alone. (He explains each of those.)
The second is cultural and derives from 7 billion of us living together on a crowded planet in which power is maintained by hierarchy and a manufactured sense of scarcity: "Self-restraint is a virtue."
Pollard says, "When it comes to things we 'must' do -- eat, sleep, have sex -- self-restraint dictates that these things be done with decorum or (as with sleeping and sex) when this is impossible, in private. Self-restraint also dictates that these things be done as rarely as absolutely necessary, and hence overeating and obesity, sleeping in, and masturbation, are stigmatized as unrestrained excesses suggesting weakness of character."
Yes, this is exactly my experience, especially of sleeping in. I find that people expect reasons and a defense for sleeping late more than once in a blue moon. There is a hierarchy of best defenses, too: not feeling well (sleeping late is understandable), going to bed extremely late the night before (again, understandable, though less so as lots of people manage to exist on 5-6 hours of sleep), hangover (acceptable in some circles and not in others), and so on. Someone who is a whirling dervish of busyness 364 days a year can get away with proclaiming that they've spent the morning in bed lounging, as it's somehow believed that they've earned the rest by their busyness.
This cultural concept of the virtue of self-restraint seems to mesh nicely in American ideology with Puritan values of hard work, progress, and efficiency -- getting a lot done by working hard, resisting idleness as antithetical to communal progress and an individual's strong moral character, etc. Even with these guiding virtues as the rule, though, masturbation and sleeping late should not be stigmatized, because they actually accomplish something -- one relieves stress, the other allows the body to rest and repair itself. It seems to me that the stigma is less about the result of these activities and more about what these activities seem to imply about the person performing them: she's not busy enough, prone to addiction and/or inertia, indolent, needy, self-focused, not following the rules. As Pollard summarizes, they signal, God forbid, a "weak character."
His suggestions for "declar[ing cultural war on self-restraint" include some that appeal to me -- destigmatizing restaurant tables for one and making widespread use of resealable food containers -- and some that don't -- making nudity legal and socially acceptable (aesthetically, I'm so not there yet!). As far as encouraging and teaching kids to masturbate, OK by me as long as it's not in public -- again, aesthetically, I'm not at the place where I want to witness it among children, strangers, or 99.99+ percent of the population.
11:05 Posted in animals , community , food and drink , pop culture , sex | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
08 April 2007
Easter 2007
Happy Easter to All!
+ Yummy-sounding Recipe for Deviled Eggs
+ Yummy-sound Creamy Asparagus Soup recipe.
+ Easter sermon on death and illness:
"Easter, if we're honest, trains us in how to live when we get sick. Easter is what teaches us how to die. And if we're ready to do these two things, we're really ready to live.
"The fact is, illness and death exert enormous power over our lives, in a very real way, they rule us; they possess an authority that makes them nearly god-like. Consider the obedience they inspire. Consider the ways you and I organize our lives around them. Consider the massive amounts of energy, resources, attention they command -- the way they inspire a fear once reserved for God alone, a terror that can make us forget God, curse God, despise God. Are not illness and death gods then who demand our allegiance, our devotion, our worship? Illness and death -- our fear of them, our avoidance of them, our management of them -- organize all of human life. ...
"You -- who live all your life under the shadow of illness and death -- can there be anything more relevant to your life than the truth that death is conquered (despite all its swagger) and that illness is being swept away, regardless of its lingering power over us all?
"No, there's nothing more relevant to the living of this life than Easter. Nothing except learning how to live it."
11:10 Posted in animals , death , food and drink , health and medicine , holidays and seasons , theology, spirituality, philosophy , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
16 March 2007
Half Human, Half Not
Scott Adams, again, commenting on news of the viability of interspecies breeding:
"The thing that worries me the most is that now I have a new wrong thing to say when someone shows me their baby. It's already hard enough to resist saying, 'It looks like Yoda.' Now I have to worry about not saying, 'It looks half human and half pug.' I don't have that kind of self-control, and it's probably because I'm at least one-fourth Chihuahua. [Note to my Mom: I mean on Dad's side.]"
Yeah.
09:32 Posted in animals , science and tech , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
12 March 2007
Bulldog Saved with CPR
Mouth-to-snout does the trick:
Disabled Air Force war veteran Randy Gurchin saved his 10-month-old English bulldog, Lucy, when she wandered over an icy pond, fell in, and couldn't get herself out:
"'When I went out there, I just laid down on the ice and tried to spread my weight out, and she was dog-paddling.' ... Lucy went under, but the current moved her within Gurchin's reach and he pulled the 50-pound dog from the water. 'As I did … the ice started to crack under me. I just picked her up -- thought she was dead.'"
Paralyzed by the frigid water, the dog
"was unresponsive and had a blue face and paws by the time Gurchin pulled her out. Gurchin closed Lucy's mouth, put his mouth over her nose and started breathing into her and pushing on her chest. After about a minute, he said, Lucy began breathing shallowly."
12:25 Posted in animals , health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
05 March 2007
Emergency Vet
We had a late night visit to the emergency vet last night/this morning. The E-Vet is conveniently located about an hour away from us. It's a very poor and inhumane system, IMO.
The dog showed signs of pain and unhappiness around 9:30 p.m. Sunday night, when she didn't take a bedtime treat, then winced and cried a couple of times while hanging out with us on the bed, as is her custom (the hanging out on our bed before she goes to hers, which is the sofa in the family room -- not the wincing and crying). We thought maybe something was awry with her tummy, as she seemed to gag a couple of times earlier in the day, which is unusual for her. When she went from looking a little hangdog to actually being in pain, over the course of 45 mins or so, we knew we needed to get help for her. We called the e-vet, hurriedly dressed again, and loaded her into the Jeep around 10:30. I sat in the back with her, and we drove as fast as possible, through a few red lights (after stopping first and checking for traffic), on icy, bumpy, dark -- and thankfully, mostly deserted -- streets. I felt like we drove a long, long way, as the dog winced or cried every few minutes.
Once at the vet, she was checked immediately for bloat, or gastric dilatation-volvulus -- a sort of stomach-flipping that can occur in large-chested dogs, especially those who bolt their food and drink a lot of water afterwards. (We had another dog who survived this life-threatening condition thanks to emergency surgery.) Our dog was back with us in the small, overheated waiting room in two minutes when they found no signs of bloat, and we sat, along with three other couples, all dog owners (though no other canines in evidence), and a woman with a cat in a crate, as some hideous TV show blared. Apparently there had been quite a run on the e-vet that evening. One couple had come in at 8:30 and their dog wasn't seen for two hours. They were there until after midnight; their dog, a 9-yr-old female English setter, ended up staying overnight.
We waited almost an hour to be seen, at around 12:20, the last people left in the room. (We had long since turned off the TV.) From what we could gather, there had been two deaths there that night, with a few more very sick dogs sedated in the back room, waiting to be transfered to their regular vet offices at 8 a.m., when the emergency vet closes every non-holiday weekday. This necessity for transfer is another inhumane aspect of this particular system, as we have found when we transported our sick, frail, and recovering-from-surgery dogs from the e-vet to the regular vet over the same roads, roughly the same distance. Animals least capable of enduring being loaded into and out of crates and vehicles, repositioned, and bounced along the road must nonetheless endure it.
The vet who saw us was tired, and very gentle with the dog. While we'd been waiting to see him, we had started to wonder if perhaps something in the dog's neck was hurting her, as her movements and our touching there seemed to elicit the most pain, though not reliably. The vet started with that premise, having found no distention in her belly earlier. He touched her head, face, shoulders, limbs, and neck, and occasionally she would cry or twinge. He put his face into hers, asked her to stay still and not react to his touching by moving another part of her body, so he could isolate the place that hurt. When he did, she screamed, opening her mouth and uttering a guttural cry that seemed to go on for days. Then she did it again, and again, leaning into him, her mouth level with his face, while he wasn't touching her at all. She never tried to bite and in fact wagged her little stump of a tail at him and leaned in close to him immediately after he'd elicited her cries. When the screaming had subsided, he moved her shoulder and limbs and found no problems there.
The two choices for diagnosis seem to be a compacted disc in the neck (C1, C2, C3, or C4, I'm guessing, after studying the canine anatomical model in the exam room) or a very pulled muscle (he didn't say so, but maybe something like a pinched nerve in people?). Based on her lack of neurological symptoms and her ease with his movement of her front limbs, he diagnosed a muscle strain. He weighed her (55 lbs.), then gave her an intramuscular injection of either the NSAID painkiller (Metacam) or the narcotic (Buprenex) and a sub-cutaneous shot of the other. We have some liquid Metacam to give her each night.
We left the e-vet after 1 a.m., but almost turned back when she started panting hard and quick. We called the vet, who told us that he wasn't concerned about it, as the panting could be a result of the Buprenex hitting her system and/or of the pain she felt. The panting was much worse, though, than the panting she had done in the vet office. We stopped for gas not far from the vet to buy us some time to decide what to do, go home or turn back. The panting didn't subside, but I bought some water in case she needed it, and we kept on going towards home, wondering if we were doing the right thing. We were both so tired that it felt difficult to make good decisions. At about 1:45, the panting lessened and she lay down on the seat. We got home a little before 2, carried her in and upstairs, arranged a soft makeshift bed area for her, which we gated in so she wouldn't try to get on our bed or go down stairs, and hoped for the best.
She slept. We slept. From 2 until 7, we all slept.
Now we've been up for almost three hours and she's been softly moaning, groaning, and sort of creaking like a rusty gate for most of it. She has no interest in her food. She's lying on her side on her soft bed in front of the propane stove, which is on and throwing off heat. It's her favourite place on a cold day anyway, and the next couple of days promise to be very cold for March (highs in the teens, lows below 0).
I've got the car ready to take her to our regular vet (only 15 mins away) if she seems to be in distress. She's such a vocal dog -- much more so than our others have been -- that even in the best of times she makes (happy) moaning sounds, a loud noise when she yawns, lots of attention-getting noises. I'm sorry she's feeling so miserable, but glad she is not interested in playing or moving about. Hope she can get some healing sleep today. If she is not markedly better in 40-72 hours (tomorrow evening at the earliest, the wee hours of the morn on Wed. at the latest), we are to bring her into the vet for a re-check, if we don't feel we need to visit them before that.
Update (10:05 a.m.) - She got up on her own and ate her breakfast. Gingerly, as if it might hurt to chew, but she ate it all. Then she went out (I carried her up and down steps) to pee in the snow. Now she's sitting on the bed by the stove, crying and whining.
Update (8:20 p.m.) - She has been laying around all day, pretty listless and sleepy (which is much better than restless and panting in my book), but she eagerly ate dinner, which had the liquid Metacam (painkiller) mixed in it. I noticed that there is blood in and around her right ear canal this evening. When I wiped it with cotton squares, I got a lot of blood out of it. I don't know if her ear is bleeding spontaneously and if that was/is the true cause of her pain, or if she scratched her ear because her ear hurt and that made it bleed, or if she was scratching her ear because her neck muscles/nerves hurt and that was as close as she could get to the source of the pain .... I may take her to the vet tomorrow, or make an appt. for Wednesday. Temps with windchill are predicted to be very cold tomorrow and I hate to subject her to that, plus the transporting, plus the waiting room experience ... Meanwhile, my sister has to have her pacemaker surgery redone tomorrow because of a faulty lead line connection. Grrr.
Update (Thursday, 8 March) - I did take her to the vet, on Tuesday, and she now is on ear medication (Baytril Otic) and antibiotics (Cephalexin) twice a day, plus the Metacam for pain. She has been perky since Tuesday, although there is still quite a bit of blood and gunk coming from her ear. She seems much happier and tolerates the ear drops and our swabbing her ears several times/day, without even whining. We think now that all the pain on Sunday was because of an eardrum about to rupture, and then rupturing, and not due to a neck strain, as she shows no signs of pain in that area at all.
Here's a photo of the girl taken on Saturday:
09:50 Posted in animals , health and medicine | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
02 March 2007
Florida Photos
Florida photos are here.
09:09 Posted in animals , art and photography , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
27 February 2007
What I'm Reading
Back from away. Thanks for the well wishes. I may do a family update later, or not.
Meanwhile, lots of feeds to read when I got home. Some of the best so far:
1. Funny. Sarah Vowell Q&A at Daily Intelligencer. Includes this:
Q: How much is too much to spend on a haircut?
A: I cut my own hair. Not to save money but because I never know what to talk about with the hairdresser. The last time I tried it again it was like an hour of hearing about rollerblading routes.
2. Spiritual. John at Priestcraft on ordinary people living a more eucharistic life. Has a Catholic bent but applicable for people of all faiths. Includes suggestions for making mealtime more eucharistic and following "'the Mass of St John' ... in which you go through some of the prayers of the mass, joining yourself in spirit to the eucharist as it is celebrated around the world."
3. Animal. Sad elephant news. Despite ivory ban, African elephants reportedly being decimated:
"An international effort to halt the illegal killing of elephants for their ivory tusks has all but collapsed in most of Africa, leaving officials and advocates alarmed about the survival of the species. A study released yesterday estimates that as many as 23,000 of the animals were slaughtered last year alone. ...
That's 1 in 12 elephants on the African continent, not counting the elephants in Botswana, which are well-protected and overbred.
"'Almost half of Africa's elephants had been slaughtered in the eight years before the [1989] ban, but now the situation is even more extreme because the number of animals is so much lower to begin with.' ... And unlike in the late '80s, the public has forgotten about this issue.' ... 'Overwhelmingly, what we have across Africa is a widespread slaughter of elephants that is getting worse by the day.'"
What may help: DNA From Ivory May Lead to Poachers: A DNA comparison has shown "that the tusks seized from the black market came from elephants on Africa's broad savannas, primarily from a small area of southern Africa, most likely centered on Zambia."
Some good news: Superfluous hedgehogs in Scotland's Outer Hebrides will be transplanted, not killed.
4. Religious. Simon Barrow's What's Radical About Christianity ... Much here to ponder:
"The social and political challenge of the Gospel flows, it seems to me, from its radical core. ... By radical (radix, from the Latin) I mean something like 'rooted-to-be-routed' -- a personal, communal and intellectual re-exploration and re-expression of a deep tradition of reading, reasoning and responding to the world which propels us to its most risky frontiers. That is what is at the heart of Christianity. ...
"[T]he Christian faith has as its core the conviction that God comes through to us not as a text, a formula or a theory -- but in a person who remains on what I would call 'the disturbing margins' of our attempts at world-construction through empire, religion and rational control.
"This is so because God is not a hypothesis in or about the world, but, for those of us who find ourselves believing in(to) God, is discovered in the sheer giftedness of life. ...
"God, rather, donates beyond the limits of reciprocity (grace) and offers possibility outwith our capacity to get things right (forgiveness). In this sense God is continual creativity and makes all the difference in the world. ...
"As the playwright Dennis Potter said, on the threshold of his own death from cancer, 'I have come to see that religion is the wound not the bandage.' This is not the Gospel we thought we knew, but one given to us in confrontation with our projections. ...
"Prayer is not about manipulating a tribal deity to be on our side, it is the language of donation through which we come to understand that the life we share is given to us, not possessed by us. Similarly, worship is the means to identify whose we are and what is really worth-it.
"The fruit of the Gospel community, then, is not exclusion but embrace, not detachment but engagement, not credulity but critical thought."
5. Maineish. All about Maine's Robert Skoglund, aka The Humble Farmer. Some things I didn't know about him:
- He makes only $30 for his half-hour jazz/talk show on Maine Public Radio every week -- and that's after about 30 years of making $0 per show.
- He has a master's degree in linguistics.
- He's doing stand-up for mobile-home park audiences in Florida.
- He "has saved little for retirement, and has large credit-card debt. His wife was recently diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, forcing her to cut back her work hours."
- And most despair-making, he's been "ordered" by Maine Public Radio's VP Charles Beck to "never again opine on politics, companies, commercial products, or organizations, and to say nothing in public of his affiliation with MPBN without prior approval."
6. Political. What Iraq Tells Us About Ourselves, by Col. W. Patrick Lang, Jr. (Ret.) in Foreign Policy. Nothing new here but succinctly put:
"To be blunt, our foreign policy tends to be predicated on the notion that everyone wants to be an American. In the months leading up to the start of the Iraq War, it was common to hear seemingly educated people say that the Arabs, particularly Iraqis, had no way of life worth saving and would be better off if all 'that old stuff' -- their traditions, social institutions, and values -- were done away with, and soon. ... How did Americans come to believe that the entire world is embarked on the same voyage, and that we are the navigators showing the way to a bright future?" ...
&n