Spam

Not the food, because as everyone who knows me knows, I am a big fan of Spam the food.  This is the first year I can remember that I haven’t stocked up on it in preparation for hurricane season.  And before you start laughing, understand that if a hurricane is threatening, and you are a little late, you will go to the grocery store and they will be OUT of Spam.  They will still have Dinty Moore stew, and canned corned beef, and other very disgusting examples of canned meat products (like Vienna sausage), but they will be out of Spam.  So I am not the only fan of Spam.  Just sayin’.

As for the other kind of Spam, the Internet kind, WordPress sends it to a Spam folder all on its own.  You can still open it if you choose, but at your peril.  In the last couple of days, I received the most interesting Spam post I’ve ever encountered.  I will hereby share it with you, with spelling, punctuation, etc. intact.  It was on my post “2011 In Review”, which really is nothing more than an automatic summary by WordPress.  Not exactly a representation of my personal viewpoints.  It’s by some entity which refers to itself as “Sunshine Ruelar”.

“The subsequent time I learn a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as a lot as this one.  I mean, I do know it was my choice to learn, however I truly thought youd have something fascinating to say.  All I hear is a bunch of whining about something you would repair in the event you werent too busy on the lookout for attention.”

Look–It used commas!  And periods!  Apostrophes are apparently outside It’s skill set.  But what I thought was funniest was…I thought that the whole point of Spam was to get you to click on some link.  Some link you absolutely could not resist.  You know…Free IPad…just click here!  All you have to do is give us your social security number and your credit card number and pay a small shipping charge of $50 and your free IPad ( a $500 value!) will be in the mail ten minutes from now!

But this Spam turns everything on its head.  Perhaps there is a new strategy out there.   Insult them and they will not be able to resist you.  We are Borg.

Personally, I think this comment was from Peggy.

Are You Cold?

Because I am.  I’m almost always cold.  It takes until the last days of July or August for me to actually get “too hot”.  Usually I realize it’s “too hot” when I’m walking across the parking lot at the grocery store and the soles of my shoes are melting.

People think it’s because I’m short and thin, in other words, I have no “padding”.  That is utterly ridiculous.  Like heavier people don’t get cold?

But the older I get, the worse it gets.  I’ve recently decided to become more sensitive to the temperature needs of others.  In my office, which is more a less a cubicle farm–or would be if we hadn’t taken down the partitions–the temperature is up to me.  But I notice that I can wear a coat all day, while everyone else in the office is in short sleeves.  So when it’s warm enough for me to take the coat off, everyone else is suffering already.  Which seems just a tad unfair.  So I’ve been making a real effort to go with the majority (and wear the coat all day, if necessary).  Sometimes, like with most resolutions, I fail.  I will get so miserable I will crank the heat all the way up to…75 degrees.   Oh, the horror.

Really, there are, I think, two things going on here, both of which are physiological things.  Being tiny has nothing to do with it, and I can barely type the word “tiny”.  In my mind, I’m The Hulk.

Thing #1.  I don’t sweat.  Sweating must be a thing that lets you know you are too hot.  It also cools you down, from what I understand.  I have been so hot before, without knowing it, that I’ve fainted.  I recover well with Gatorade.

Thing #2. I have a pituitary deficiency, which I thought was confined to a very specific issue, but maybe not.  Many years ago when an endocrinologist was trying to pinpoint the problem, he asked me a series of questions.  One of them was “Do you get colder or hotter than other people?”  I said, I don’t know how to answer that question.  I don’t know how cold or hot other people get.  He thought I was just trying to be cute.  He said, okay, let me put it this way.  When other people are perfectly comfortable, do you want to open a window?  Or close it?

Today I would have an answer to that question.  When other people are perfectly comfortable, I want to close the damn window and turn on the heat.

All things considered, it seems like a pretty minor “affliction”, if you want to call it that.  But an affliction which affects your social relationships becomes more important to me.  By the way, could we turn up the heat in here?

Dogs…Don’t Live Long Enough

I’ve lately been so reminded of that.  But almost no better example than when I took my Doberman and my Basenji mix to St. George Island for the New Year’s holiday weekend.  Troughton the Doberman had a lot of trouble with it.  He was scared in the car, whereas it used to be that riding in a car was one of the chief delights of his existence.  Most of the houses there are on stilts, including our rental house, and the stairs up to the living area were steeper than any of us could remember from rental houses past.

Troughton had a lot of difficulty with this too.  Going up was scary, because you could see between the steps, and he was stiff from riding in the car.  In the morning, he was stiff going down.  After walking, he was brisk about going back up again.  Yeah, Troughton.  Me too.

But Troughton is not in pain in his normal life, and he is content.  But Troughton is now 12.  The biggest change in him is his appearance.  He’s lost most of his muscle mass, which is most evident on his head and face.  Once this great majestic dog, his face now looks skeletal. And there is no help for that.  All I can do is watch.

But people are still scared of him anyway.  Which just amazes me.  So I started thinking about unintended consequences.  They aren’t always for the worst.

Pre-Troughton, I had a Rottweiler named Hansel, and there was a short overlap when I had them both.  I didn’t get Hansel for “protection” but it worked that way anyway.  I didn’t get Troughton for that reason either.  But it dawns on me that…it’s worked out that way anyway.

I don’t want an alarm system (it can’t bite anybody, can it?), I don’t want a gun.  I want a big dog.  I am about to lose this one.  Now what?

I myself am at the stage where handling a big dog is just about beyond my capability.  I’d prefer to adopt an adult dog, but not only can I not handle the physical aspects of owning a big dog, you don’t know what you’re getting.  I don’t mind that either, if you have the time and patience to work with the dog.  And you must have that.  Or, I could get a puppy.  Ditto what I said about time and patience.  Doubled.

So, the bottom line is that I have crossed one hurdle.  I’ve decided that I will have a big dog again. What kind and when is up in the air.  I’m kind of fond of Catahoulas.  But hounds are really pretty nice dogs.  I might need a breed with a more evil reputation.  If I wanted to adopt a pitbull, there would be no shortage of oppotunities around here.  Every one of them that I ever met, was sweet, but not everybody understands that.  That’s what I mean by bad reputations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww5GXbk58R0

Infested!

This is the new program on Animal Planet that replaces my previous Friday night viewing of Fatal Attractions.  Last night’s program dealt with infestations by brown recluse spiders, and…squirrels.  Squirrels?  What?  This family had squirrels living in their attic, and the exterminator said he could not help them because the squirrels were breeding, and it was against the law in whatever state they lived in to disturb breeding squirrels.  The squirrels were eating the wiring.  Droppngs would fall on their table from vents in the ceiling during meals.  Then their son developed some sort of allergy or something and had to have surgery to remove a gland in his neck (a lymph node?)  I was never quite clear on the details.  At that point, the husband sent a letter to authorities asking for special permission to kill the squirrels.  It was denied.  I was also never clear on why the squirrels could not be trapped and removed humanely.    In any case, the husband took it upon himelf to start poisioning the squirrels, whether he was allowed to or not.  I was like, it’s about time.  It’s amazing how dangerous squirrels can be, how many diseases they carry, and how hard they are to get rid of.  I’m not a big fan of squirrels.  I admire their cleverness, but any squirrel in my house will shortly be a dead squirrel.

Of course, this program reminded me of a real-life infestation I once experienced.

I was living in Royal Palm Beach, about 11 miles west of West Palm Beach, in a rented house.  It was lovely.  There was a little lake (actually, a borrow pit), tons of fruit trees, gardenias and crotons, space for a little garden.  The owner was a guy who was in the Coast Guard; he was being transferred to Maryland and had decided to keep his house and rent it out.  One day before he left for Maryland, he came over and was nailing a board over the um, soffitts?  Eaves?  In any case, he said, we’ve had a little trouble with squirrels getting into the attic, and I think I’ve found the hole they were getting in and I’ve closed it off.

Then I started hearing scratching noises in the walls at night.  At the time, I had two dogs and two cats.  One of the dogs was a Rottweiler, and I am here to tell you that they have no sense of smell.  The other dog was a Chow mix.  It started waking me up.  If it wasn’t the scratching inside the walls, it was the Chow scratching at the wall on our side and barking.

I first mentioned it to a guy who worked with me and lived in my same subdivision.  He said, not to put too fine a point on it, that I was nuts.  He said he lived in the same type of house, built the same way, and that the walls were concrete with a thin layer of drywall over them.  There was no room for a critter to get in between.

Then I mentioned it to one of my employees, a part-timer who was an exterminator in his day job.  He laughed heartily.  He said, You don’t have squirrels, you have rats.  I said,that’s not possible.  I’m paying $1,500 a month in rent for this house–I can’t possibly have rats.  He thought that was even funnier.  Welcome to South Florida, he said.    I have squirrels, I insisted.  Then one sleepless night, it dawned on me that squirrels aren’t active at night.

Exterminator Guy said, you have the two things rats like best:  water and fruit  He offered to come over and set out poison for free.  I said NO WAY.  I did not want my cats or dogs to get into poison, or eat a dying or dead poisoned rat.  I wanted traps.  Exterminator Guy said, that won’t work.  Rats are neophobic.  They have very specific paths they follow (such as through the attic), but you can put a trap in the middle of one of those paths and they will go around it.  They will form a new path–because they’re smarter than you are.

I called the management company several times and asked for traps.  (The owner had moved and turned it over to a management company.)  They said, it’s your imagination.  You can’t possibly have rats   Finally I went to their offices and demanded help.  I was harder to refuse in person, I guess.

They sent out a maintenance guy with traps, and I just can’t tell you how unhappy he was to go into my attic.  Yeah, me too, but I went with him.  We made it without being bitten or scared to death, then he told me I needed to check the traps once a week.   I said, oh no, YOU need to check them.  Needless to say, that never happened.  The noises continued. Rats and Exterminator Guy–1.  Fakename and Management company–0.

Then one night, I got up in the middle of the night and almost tripped over a darker gray spot on the light gray carpet.  In the morning, when it was lighter, I discovered it was a dead rat.  It was gigantic.  It had…like…fangs. I threw it into the lake.  I hope a fish ate it.  My male cat, Erin, whom I had not been able to get inside before going to bed, had been busy.

On successive nights, he brought in three more rats, all babies.  After that, the problem was solved.  No more sleepless nights for me or the Chow.  The moral to this story is, get a cat.  I didn’t have the Rottweiler for protection, and I didn’t have the cat for pest control, but it worked out that way.

Fakename’s Animal Planet: The Coyote

First, the light-hearted part.  How do you pronounce the word “coyote”?  KyOATee or KYoat?  My whole life I have pronounced it KyOATee, but on the program I watched about them this week on the National Geographic Wild channel, there were an equal number of speakers who pronounced it both ways.  I couldn’t figure out if there was some sort of regional difference, if it was the Canadians who pronounced it one way and the Americans who pronounced it the other way.

The answer is:  there is no difference.  Both Canadians and Americans pronounce it both ways.  But here is the curious thing:  the word comes from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs.  Their word was “coyotl”, which Spaniards could not pronounce.  So they replaced the “l” with an “e” and pronounced it KyOATee.  That’s the way Americans pronounced the word in the western U.S. and Canada, where coyotes first appeared.

Coyotes gradually spread east until today when they are in every state, and in every province in Canada, although I have never seen one.  I’m not surprised by that.  They are very shy and wary creatures.  In the Southeast U.S., they are more or less known for raiding chicken houses in the middle of the night.

But a couple of strange twists have occurred. In the language and in the life of coyotes.  Today, people in the West are most likely to use the pronunciation KYoat.  In the East, KyOATee.  That is a mystery.  And something happened to the coyotes themselves.  When they got up to the most northeasterm parts of the U.S. (Maine) and northeastern Canada, they began interbreeding with wolves.

So today there are two recognized populations of coyotes, the Western and Eastern varieties.  I get the impression that they have not yet been designated as different species.  But they are different in appearance and most importantly, in behavior.  The Western coyotes are the shy, wary creatures I thought them to be, who hunt singly.  Eastern coyotes hunt in packs, like wolves.  You have to wonder….since pack hunting is so much more successful than lone hunting, will the process reverse itself?  Will Eastern coyotes begin to populate a wider area and move back west?

The NatGeoWild program (I’m not trying to be cute here, that’s their designation for their TV channel) was about a young woman who was killed, and partially eaten, by coyotes in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park.  Cape Breton is an island off the far northern coast of Nova Scotia, and is part of Nova Scotia.  The attack took place on a hugely popular hiking trail called the Skyline Trail.  This young woman was hiking alone, but in broad daylight, and in a place that was so well-traveled she was likely to run into other hikers, or to call for help and have someone hear her.

I can’t tell you how shocked I was to hear that a person had been killed by coyotes.  Not to mention, I cannot think of another way to die that is more horrifying than being attacked and killed by a wild animal.  Apparently it is not unheard of, but the young woman, whose name was Taylor Mitchell, is quite chillingly described as the first adult ever known to be killed by coyotes.

Like in most such incidents, park rangers went out and hunted down the coyotes in the nearby area.  I don’t know how many were killed, but three of those killed were determined to have participated in the attack.  An Alpha Female (who actually had human material in her stomach), an Alpha Male, and another male who was determined by DNA testing to be related to them–likely a son.

The process of them figuring out what happened was fascinating (and allowed your brain to stop focusing for a minute on the horror).  Between the lab and the park rangers and biologists who investigated, they put together a very credible account of what happened.  Still, all of them were as shocked as I was.  First of all, they decided that due to the popularity of this particular trail, the coyotes had lost their natural fear of humans.   Second, when Ms.Taylor realized at some point that she was being stalked, she ran.  They could tell this by the trail of items strewn on the trail behind her, like her camera and various other things she apparently threw at them.  I realize that popular advice says to stand your ground, but I don’t think that would have worked in this case.  Granted, you cannot outrun a coyote.  But what was she supposed to do?  Just stand there?

The investigators determined that this was not an “accidental” killing, so to speak.  In other words, Ms. Taylor did not inadvertently come across a den, where the coyotes were obliged to protect a litter of pups or something.  These coyotes simply hunted her for food.  She was doomed from the minute she was targeted.  They “knew” she was alone and far from help–separated from the herd–which is why they picked her in the first place.

When I looked up Eastern coyotes, I found another interesting thing.  Due to DNA testing, biologists now believe that Red wolves are not wolves at all, but are wolf/coyote hybrids, just like Eastern coyotes.

The moral to this story, if there is one, is Don’t ever hike alone, no matter how safe the trail may seem.  And take a gun.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 23,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 9 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Dead Animals

There is something very bizarre about keeping the ashes of dead animals (or people, for that matter) in your house.  But I do it anyway–at least for a while.

In the last 10 years, I’ve lost five pets, and three of them, I kept their ashes.  When you have a pet euthanized, you basically have three choices.  You can take the body home and bury it; you can have it cremated en masse with whatever other dead animals happen to be around; or you can have it individually cremated and get its ashes back in some sort of decorative container. Obviously, the last choice is the most expensive.  Not just because you’re paying for the container, but possibly because they have to fire up the crematorium just for you.  I’m not sure about that, because I haven’t looked into it that deeply.  I suspect they could put your animal in some sort of container which would protect its ashes from being mixed with those of Fido or Fluffy.  Like it really matters.

In any case, you pay a premium for it.  The two animals that I did not have individually cremated (I did the en masse cremation thing), was not because I loved them less.  It’s more about my emotional state at the time, and how much money I had at the time.

So all this is a lead-in to my New Year’s Eve plans.  (See, this is how my brain works.  It takes twists and turns that even I have a hard time following.)

The first pet I had individually cremated was my dog Troy Russell (long story how he got that name), who died in 2005.  In the summer of 2007, my friends Lebron and Brenda, and my sister, buried TR’s ashes on the beach at St. George Island.  Which according to Lebron is illegal, so we were very furtive about it.  I don’t really get that, but I take Lebron’s word for it.  I mean, it isn’t like TR died of Black Plague, and even if he had, I can’t see how you could get it from ashes that were subjected to thousands of degrees of fire.

So the very next year, in 2006, my dog Hansel died.  And I still have his ashes, in a very nicely carved wooden box.  TR’s ashes came in a very beautiful blue ceramic urn (which I still have), and it was sealed with wax. After cutting the wax seal, I was surprised to find that TR’s ashes were in your basic Ziploc bag.

So I assumed Hansel’s box would be sealed as well, and I never tried to open it until yesterday.  That’s almost 6 years.  The box was not sealed after all. But inside, his ashes (in your basic Ziploc bag) are enclosed by a black velvet draw-string bag.  Quite elegant.

The point is…I decided it’s time to let Hansel go.  He isn’t doing me or the Universe any good by “living” (so to speak) on my fireplace hearth.  I’ll bury his ashes as close as I can get to TR’s, if I can remember where that is. Not that it matters. Like TR, Hansel’s ashes will nourish a sea oat, or blow out to sea, or scatter in the wind to the skies.  And it will be on New Year’s Eve.  A new beginning.  For both of us.

That will leave me with only one dead animal in the house, my cat Erin, who died in 2007.  (’05, ’06, and ’07 were very bad years for the Fakename family, one loss per year.)  Eventually I will either bury Erin’s ashes in my yard, or scatter his ashes there.  The beach is a fitting place for TR and Hansel–they loved the beach.  Erin would likely have had a nervous breakdown at the very idea of that much water all in one place. My yard was his home turf.  His base of operations.  He needs to stay here, even if I end up elsewhere.

This is the terrible dilemma of pet ownership.  You may choose not to have them, to spare yourself the pain of losing them, but in making that choice, you also deny yourself the joy of them.  I pick joy.

Fakename’s Animal Planet

Friday night is a great TV night for Fakename.  First it’s the night Fatal Attractions comes on the Discovery Channel.  Then Nat Geo Wild usually has something of interest, and third, Fakename is too tired  after a week of mentally exhausting work to do anything more challenging.  Although last night she did go to a holiday party first. 

Last night’s Fatal Attractions was about snakes again, as many of them seem to be.  There is a sort of theme here–snakes, big cats, and crocodiles.  There are quite a few other dangerous species you could choose to keep as pets, but maybe nobody keeps fire ants. 

So in last night’s episode (there are always two separate but related stories per episode), there was a guy named Brian who had more than 50 venomous snakes he kept in his basement.  The other guy was an American living in Mexico who practiced injecting himself with venom in order to make himself immune to particular snakes.  In this case, they actually film him injecting himself with the venom from the deadliest snake in the Americas, the Fer-de-lance. 

According to the show’s expert herpetologist, this can theoretically work, as long as you don’t inject yourself with too much of the venom at one time.  There is apparently not much in the way of study in this field (how many subjects could you find?), so there’s no scientific way to determine how much is too much.  But it could work–you could build up an immunity–unless you were Brian. 

One night, Brian has a problem with his female King Cobra.  She’s trying to lay eggs but they have somehow become “stuck”.  He’s up until 2:00 A.M. massaging her to try to get the eggs to come out (he’d been advised to sacrifice her and take the eggs, because if he did nothing, he would lose both her and the eggs), and he has a friend with him. 

He’s more or less holding the snake by her tail and her head is draped down to the floor.  He fails to notice that the head is getting closer and closer to his foot.  And he’s wearing flip-flops, because it’s hot in the basement–prime snake temperature, and he deliberately keeps it that way.  Suddenly, she sinks her fangs into his foot and delivers the entire contents of her venom sacs.    You can kind of understand this.  She was probably terrified, and in pain, and this was her way of saying “Let me go”.

Brian goes over like a felled tree, in seconds.  His friend starts screaming, which wakes up his wife and I think it was she who called 911, and they’re there in minutes.  Brian dies in the ambulance.  What? I said.  So soon?  Brian had antivenom in his refrigerator, which he assured his friends and family would keep him alive for 8-10 hours, ample time for him to get to a hospital. 

So what happened?  It turns out that any time Brian was in the basement, he started to have trouble breathing.  He was using an inhaler.  Because as it also turns out, when you clean the snakes’ cages you are inhaling tiny particles of dried venom.  Which could build up your immunity–or could make you more sensitive, as was the case with Brian.  He didn’t die from the snakebite, he died from anaphylactic shock. 

That goes far to explain my conversation with the allergist after I was stung by fire ants and had an anaphylactic reaction.  I said, What if I get stung again?  Will it be worse?  Or will it be better?  He said, I don’t know.  The difference between me and Brian is that I avoid fire ants.  I don’t love them, and I don’t keep them as pets. 

Then the program I watched on Nat Geo Wild was called Caught In The Act, which is not about catching animals robbing convenience stores.  It’s photographers more or less accidentally capturing animals doing amazing and usually unheard-of things.  One scene was a hippo (herbivorous, normally placid) killing an antelope, who was on the run from wild dogs.  Another was of a mother elephant kicking her baby calf.  (It was the drought season and they were only yards from water.  She was just trying to get it to get up and take a few more steps, but it was too young, weak, and dehydrated to go on).  But my favorite was the one that follows.  It has a happy ending, and is the perfect story of the underdog who wins. 

Republican Follies

I haven’t really ramped up my political brain yet, but meanwhile, it’s fun watching the Republicans dance.  Today, Herman Cain dropped out of the race, and my question is, What took him so long?  A friend of mine on Facebook said, what is it?  Do they think we won’t find out?  Or that we won’t think it’s important?  Or that we’re just too dumb to understand it?  I vote for a combination of Option A and Option C.

I don’t have a high opinion of the voting public.  So Option A comes first.  They won’t even know.  Because they don’t read newspapers, or listen to NPR, or watch debates.  It’s a complete bother.  And anyway, football might be on.  Then Option C sets in.  Even if they know, they won’t understand it. 

I present to you as my Exhibit A, an email I recently received from a friend in Canada.  It was about bar codes.  It said that if you want to buy only products made in Canada or the U.S., and avoid products from China, you should pay attention to the first three numbers of the bar code, which tell the country of origin.  Well, sort of.  So I went to snopes.com and checked it out.  Then I replied to my friend with a link to snopes and said, you should check this out.  It’s only partly true.  And she said, no, I’m pretty lame about checking things.  I doubt I will ever go there.  What?  But this is how people in the U.S. choose to vote.  They saw the truth in an email…no need to look further. 

So there are probably plenty of Cainiatics (I just made that up) who will think Cain was driven from the race by the ruthless MainstreamMedia–all one word now–or by his ruthless opponents with more money who were scared of him. 

So let’s look at the remaining field.  Bachmann?  Okay, moving right along.  Perry?  Ditto.  That leaves Romney and Gingrich.  Romney is a total has-been who has been running for office his entire life, but never won anything.  It so amuses me when he calls someone a career politician.  We can’t say you qualify, Mitt, because you’re just a wannabe.  And Gingrich.  I could talk about him all day.  I do have two words for the family values people:  Newt Gingrich.  I think the Republicans are in a bad spot.  They have bad choices. 

I have some early predictions.  First, I think Romney will in fact be the nominee.  Second, I think Republicans will be about as excited about voting for him as they were about John McCain.  Third, I hesitantly think Obama is going to win. 

But in the broader picture, I get the feeling that conservatives are increasingly drawing away from the Republican Party.  It’s happened before.  Political parties have spawned and then died.  (Can you say, Whigs?)  But regardless, the Republican Party has become the Party most likely to shoot itself in the foot.  It’s almost (almost) painful to watch them carefully parse their language. 

But I really think we are witnessing a movement here.  Time will tell.

Bad News From Tallahassee

Of course, I guess when your governor is Rick Scott, you shouldn’t be expecting much good news out of Tallahassee.  I’m still trying to figure out who the idiots are who elected him. 

If there is any good news, it usually has to do with the FSU Seminoles.  They finished this season ranked 25 in the polls, so I guess they’ll be playing in the Vlasic Pickle Bowl or something.  Apparently that’s not high enough to be invited to the Chick-fil-a Bowl.  I mean seriously, people, how can you take a championship game seriously when it has a name like that?  I’m aware that there is a huge debate raging over the whole Bowl system (yawn).  I tend to fall on the side of those who say there should be a true playoff system, like basketball has. 

All that aside, Tallahassee has made national news this week for unpleasant reasons.  The fun parts of living in Tallahassee are not news.  Like the part where they finished putting up all the holiday lights in the trees in the Chain of Parks.  This is a six-block area on a divided street, Park Avenue, where the medians are all tiny little parks.  Full of live oaks covered in Spanish moss and Resurrection ferns.  It takes forever to put up the lights throughout the live oaks, but starting today, they will all be illuminated through New Year’s.  It’s inexpressibly cheering to be greeted by this sight every day when you work downtown as I do. 

But Tallahassee made the news for two reasons that are quite depressing, one not so public as the other.  That one concerned the disappearance of a Tallahassee real estate appraiser named Mike Williams on December 16, 2000.  I’d say that it’s only in the last few years that I’ve been aware of this story, because there’s a writer for the Tallahassee Democrat who keeps it alive.

I was in Tallahassee at the time of Williams’ disappearance, but I had only been here for about two weeks.  I was still trying to figure out the best way to drive from my house to my office, and fighting my way through the satellite trucks to get there.  Because what was going on then?  The infamous recount. 

But this week, Williams’ disappearance was profiled on the Discovery ID channel, in a program called “Disappeared”.  Williams went duck hunting (allegedly) alone on Lake Seminole on the morning of his disappearance and was never seen again.  Apparently it isn’t a very big lake, and it isn’t very deep.  No trace of his body was ever found.  His best friend, who helped in the two-week long search, floated the idea that Williams had been eaten by alligators.  Not so, said a biologist that by some strange coincidence, I happen to know personally.  It was too cold.  Alligators do not, and physically cannot, feed in those temperatures.  There are many more twists and turns to the story. 

But the main thing Tallahassee became nationally known for has to do with the “other” school here–Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, aka, FAMU, or locally as we call it, just FAM.  About two weeks ago, a 26 year old drum major for the band–known as the Marching 100–was found dead on the band bus in Orlando, after a trip to the Florida Classic, and it has something to do with hazing.  It turns out the autopsy was inconclusive, so I guess when they find out who did it, they won’t be charged with outright murder.  Which is a pity. 

The Marching 1oo is actually about 400 people strong, and it’s a legendary band.  They played at President Obama’s inauguration.  They played at half-time during a Super Bowl.  And they deserved to–they are spectacular, and a great source of pride for everyone in Tallahassee.  But.  The entire band is now suspended, and they’ve fired the band director who is also Chairman of the music department.  Which as more begins to come out appears to be a classic case of scapegoating. 

At least three very thoughtful editorials have come out about this in the newspaper.  The first one said, you will never ever stop this by targeting the professors or the administration of the university, no matter how good it might make you feel. If you want it to stop, you have to change the hearts and minds of the people who are doing it, and those who are submitting to it.  These events largely take place off-campus and no member of the teaching staff or university administration is likely to even ever hear about it until it’s too late. 

The second editorial said, you can’t call what happened to Robert Champion (the name of the drum major) “hazing”.  It was brutality.  We need a new definition.  The writer talked about his own “initiation” into the Marine Corps.  When I was in high school, I was “initiated” into the Sub-Deb Club, and I remember it as dressing up in silly clothes and being paraded through the popular teen hot spots.  When I was promoted to my current position, we had to get up before our fellow managers and sing a song.  These experiences were humiliating, but at least we knew we would not end up dead. 

The third editorial quotes a retired Tallahassee clinical psychologist, and past president of the National Association of Black Psychologists, Na’im Akbar, who says, this is an abuse of power, and people with a legacy of oppression don’t really grasp what power means.  “Normal power is based on competency or mastery, but this distorted power is based on domination.”  Yes. 

On Thursday, the story made the CBS Evening News.  It resonates far beyond the confines of little Tallahassee.  Meanwhile, the day before, Robert Champion was buried in his hometown of Decatur, Georgia–in his FAMU drum major’s uniform.