Time For Another Episode of….

…Fakename’s Animal Planet.  Meet Styloctenium mendorensis: 

The reason Stylo attracted my attention is that his face bears an uncanny resemblance to my dog Pippin, aka, The Beast.  The main difference is that Pippin’s nose isn’t split into two parts.  Besides that, Pippin doesn’t have wings.  I’m sure he wishes he did.  Then he could just fly over the fence and bite all those annoying children riding bikes down his street. 

Stylo is one of the top 10 new species of 2007, according to Arizona State University.  He’s a little fruit bat found only on the Phillipine island of Mindoro.  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25215673?pg=6#TOPspecies_science

This article was one of a couple linked to the main article entitled “Lobsters and crabs feel pain, study shows”.  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29915025/?GT1=43001  As Andy Borowitz might say, this must have been the cover story on this month’s issue of Duh Magazine.  Here’s the first sentence of that article: 

“Ripping the legs off live crabs and crowding lobsters into seafood market tanks are just two of the many practices that may warrant reassessment, given two new studies that indicate crustaceans feel pain and stress. “

Wait a minute.  Ripping the legs off live crabs?  Somehow I missed the part where we were doing that.  Included in the article was a poll which asked, if you were sure that lobsters and crabs feel pain, would you stop eating them?  The majority–44.7%–said No, pain is a fact of life for food.  Oh, I don’t think so.  Death is a fact, but who said it had to be painful?  What a strange and cruel species we are. 

Finally, a second linked article was called “Hook-ups in the wild:  Do animals enjoy sex?”  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29878301/  This must have been on Page 2 of Duh Magazine.  Apparently scientists previously thought that humans were the only animals who have sex just because it’s, well, fun.  Until the next episode of Fakename’s Animal Planet, I leave you with a romantic image from the article. 

Fakename Does Basketball

So now we are down to the Elite Eight, and I’m trying to decide who I want to win to get to the Final Four.  More importantly, the issue is predicting who will win it all.  That’s a tough decision, because…I really don’t give a damn.  But I’ll pick anyway, and I’ll use a strategy similar to the one I use when picking the winners of horse races. 

In the case of horse racing, I choose the horse by the name.  For example, one of Fakesister’s former horses was named Non-Stop Cash.  If he had been racing, I would have picked him.  Fakesister and I once attended a real live horse race in New Orleans, and we both used that strategy with great success.  During that event, we were introduced to the concept of the “racing sheet”.  A racing sheet gives you all the stats of each horse:  how many times it’s run, against whom, how many wins and in how much time.

As you can see, there are many parallels here to basketball.   Those in the know make predictions based on a team’s schedule, what conference it’s in, who it played, how many wins and by how much.  And my observation is:  you would do just as well picking a team by its name.  Therefore, if I were picking by name alone, I would pick UConn, because they have the coolest name by far.   However, in the case of basketball, I throw in other criteria:  geography and personal preference. 

For instance, I graduated from the University of Memphis, so they were my favorites.  I grew up in North Carolina, so I guess I could kind of root for UNC.  I lived in Iowa for a couple of years and really liked it;  unfortunately no Iowa teams seem to have been involved since I started paying attention.  Why don’t they allow write-in candidates in sports? 

Little known fact:  Fakename played basketball in junior high.  Thank God there is no video of that.  I really only did it because my mother was a huge basketball fan, and played on the girl’s team in her high school.  She had only three wishes for me:  play basketball, speak French, and play the piano.  I am so fortunate to have been saved from the basketball thing, and it happened through no fault of my own and had nothing to do with my skill or lack of it.  It had to do with the fact that my teammates shot up to 5′10″ or so, while I hung around at 5′3″.  Love ya, Fakename, but so long…it’s been good to know ya. 

Now let me spend just a moment talking about men and sports.  Somehow, every man I’ve ever been remotely attracted to is a big sports fan.  Why is that?  I mean, why is it that I’ve never had a relationship with…a poet, for example?  We would probably have a lot more to talk about.  This is one of life’s great mysteries…along with why men are so wigged out about sports in the first place. 

In conclusion, I think you really can’t pick winners in either basketball or horse racing using numbers.  The fastest horse in history may stumble on a clod of dirt in a particular race, and lose.  Go UConn.

Photography…Part 2

The reason I took a photography course in 1997 is that earlier that year, I went on a whale-watching cruise in Canada–armed, as usual, with a disposable camera.  The whales we saw were pretty far away, but we came reasonably near a rock that was covered in seals.  It’s the one and only time I’ve ever seen seals in the wild, and it was just spectacular.   As we drew closer, we could see there were also seals in the water.  It appeared that the ones in the water were juveniles;  every now and then one of them would flop onto the rock and they were smaller.  It was like the parents were indulgently watching the toddlers play in the pool.  Click, click, click went the disposable camera. 

Now then.  A disposable camera thinks its job is to make everything in its viewfinder perfectly focused.  In other words, it focuses to infinity.  So the further away the object is you’re trying to take a picture of, the smaller everything in the picture gets.  It’s like you said ,”Camera, go out and take a picture of Space, the Final Frontier.  Go where no man has ever ventured before.”  In the case of the seals, I’m pretty sure that if I had tilted the camera a little further up toward the sky, I’d have a picture of Alpha Centauri.  Of course, you wouldn’t have been able to recognize it.  I would have had to say, see that white dot in that black stuff?

As it was, I had to say, see that brown blob with those black specks on it?  Well that blob is a rock, and those specks are seals!  Isn’t that cool?  I was beyond disappointed.  When you have to explain a picture, it totally misses the point, doesn’t it?  So I vowed I would never again take a picture like that.  When my teacher said, if you can’t take a good picture of it, don’t take the picture, I was way ahead of him. 

One of his other favorite sayings–which you hoped he would never say to you–was “This was a good idea for a picture”.  Translation:  This is a bad picture.  He really didn’t care about your subject matter and never suggested anything.  You could have taken a picture of a slug with its slime trail, as long as it was a good picture of a slug.  Which reminded me of another story from the class. 

A woman in class arrived the very first evening with an old Canon SLR she’d inherited from her father, but she didn’t know how to use it.  The teacher was very impressed…he said it was the best Canon ever made.  Of course the problem was, there was no user manual that came with the camera.  The further problem was that the teacher was not about telling you how to use your camera.  That was your problem.  He explained many, many technical points (like F-Stop!) but it was up to you to figure out how to do it on your particular camera, and this poor woman could never get it.  Which was a shame…because she had a good eye and picked great subject matter.  I remember she took pictures of an Amish family in a wagon, and of horses in an indoor rodeo.  At least I think so, because everything she ever took was overexposed and washed out.  She never got the part about how the lower the F-stop number, the more light you were letting into the camera.  It just seemed counterintuitive to her.  So there she is in a blazingly bright arena at a rodeo, setting the camera to its lowest F-stop.  The teacher was actually more patient with her than most, because he could see she had potential, but eventually he said, Look.  Before you take your next picture, put the camera settings where you think they’re right.  Then before you actually take the picture, change all the settings to the exact opposite.  I mean, what can you do? 

When I went to my first class, I didn’t even have a camera.  Everyone else did.  The next day, I went to the camera store and said, sell me your cheapest SLR.  Then I read the manual. 

Since then, I’ve taken some very bad pictures.  But I’ve taken a lot of good ones too.  And I’ll never again have to explain that the black specks on the brown blob are seals, or that the gray stuff in the background is the Atlantic Ocean.

Photography To Die For

Fakesister once gave me a book on photography from National Geographic.  In it there was a quote by some photographer who said that the secret to taking a good picture was “F-8 and be there”.  And truer words were never spoken.  Especially the be there part. 

For the camera-challenged among you, the F-stop is a ratio of the focal length divided by the diameter of the aperture.  Got that?  Yeah, me neither.  In practical terms, however, the diameter of the aperture is possibly the most important factor in taking a decent picture.  Not counting lens speed and focus, but we won’t go into that.  Let’s just say that F-8 is right in the middle of the scale, and if you set your camera there, you’ll be lucky more often than not if you’re at the right place at the right time. 

One of the most fun things I ever did was take a photography class, and I absolutely poured myself into the subject.  It has forever changed the way I see things.  At the time, I became so obsessed that I started seeing things in terms of whether or not it would make a good picture. 

My photography teacher was not an especially nice guy, to put it mildly, but he gave everyone fair warning about that.  His philosophy was, I’m going to teach you some things, and your job is to use them.  If you ignore me, I will smush you like a bug.  To be fair to him, he didn’t expect you to become an expert.  He just expected you to try, and to get better.  Needless to say, by the end of the class, which started with maybe 30 people, there were two left, including me. 

I was still there because he loved me, or more accurately, my pictures.  He could see that I was working at it, and he actually told me that I had a talent for taking pictures of, of all things, buildings, even though my main interest was taking pictures of wildlife.  Hint:  it’s a lot easier to take pictures of dead things.  But seriously, I discovered that I have a knack for composition, as long as the things I’m taking pictures of stand still long enough. 

So many things he said are etched in my brain now.  One of them is, if it won’t be a good picture, don’t take the picture.  You may come upon the most amazing sight you’ve ever witnessed, say you’re seeing the Leaning Tower of Pisa for the first time.  That’s all well and good, but if the light is wrong or your camera has the wrong film in it, just don’t bother.  The other thing he preached religiously was, Guard against taking a picture where something other than your intended target becomes the subject of the picture.  To that end, he said, never take a picture of anything where the background is a chain link fence!  The eye works in such a way that it will be drawn to the fence. 

I will never forget the class where one of the students turned in a photo of a train winding around a mountain, but she took it through the window of a car.  You could see the window frame and the rear-view mirror.  I was inwardly groaning just looking at it.  The teacher was brutal.  He said, “What is the subject of this picture?”  (The rear-view mirror.)  “Why”, he said, “didn’t you get out of the car?”  She said, “It was raining.”  And he replied…as you can guess…”Then you should not have taken the picture”.  She proceeded to melt into a puddle. 

The occasion for this post is the amazing photograph in today’s NY Times of a Syracuse player dunking the ball.  I didn’t so much admire the player, I admired the photographer.  The wonderful thing about photography is that it always captures a single moment in time.  You could take a picture of the same object over and over, but it would never be the same picture.  And this photographer captured a moment that will never be repeated.  The player looks like he is flying.  There is F-8 and be there.

Let’s All Get Mad

Only yesterday I was saying that I can’t bear to hear the letters “AIG” one more time.  I’m now boycotting network newscasts until they stop talking about it, which shouldn’t take long.  Soon there will be another Octomom or killer chimpanzee or Bernard Madoff to take our minds off AIG.  But really, my mind has been off AIG for at least a week. 

Everyone who knows me well knows that this is my morning routine:  1)  Do the NY Times crossword puzzle online.  2)  Read the NY Times op-ed columnists of the day.  So today, Gail Collins, whom I suspect is a long-lost twin , said everything I was thinking except better.  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/opinion/21collins.html?_r=1&ref=opinion  The best part of her column was talking about “outrage creds”.  Which is my point exactly.  There are people in Congress who must be getting daily injections of mad-sustaining drugs in order to maintain this level of silly, phony anger. 

Charles Blow of the Times had a different take on the issue, which was equally pointed and registered with me just as much.  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/opinion/21blow.html?ref=opinion   So really, am I mad?  Sure.  Except I quit about a week ago. 

And why?  Because it doesn’t make a hoot’s worth of difference to my life.  I raged about the unfairness of it all for about a day.  But to KEEP being mad about it for weeks would require me to get some of those injections Congress is apparently getting.  I’m done.  It’s a blip.  Get over it.

Reading With Fakename

This week I was sitting in the bank drive-through commercial lane (as I do every day), and the ultra-sweet teller whom I’ve grown very fond of, said, “Ms. Fakename, how many books do you read in a week?”  

“Hmmm”, I replied.  “Two, maybe three?”  The reason she asked, of course, is that while they complete my transaction, I’m reading. 

This week, however, I outdid myself and read four books.  You may be wondering how I have time for that, and the answer is simple…I read all the time.  I have no spare moments.  I read when I’m in line, anywhere.  I read while I’m watching TV–during the commercials. 

Many people, if not most people, prefer or maybe even require uninterrupted time to read and focus.  I can sort of remember that I used to be that way too.  I trained myself, in a sense, to be able to read in short bursts and remember the thread of the story when I return to it.  I might have to re-read the paragraph I stopped at, but then I’m off and running again.  So why do I do this?  Good question. 

I think it’s because I can’t bear to have an empty moment, where my brain isn’t working on two or three things at once.  Meditation, where the idea is to empty your brain in order to relax, would be sheer hell for me.  Needless to say, I’ve never even tried it.  I’m like that all the time.  One of the reasons I love my job is that I get to flit between one thing and another all the time.  I get to get up and move around.  Put me at a desk for eight hours a day, doing anything whatsoever (unless, maybe it was reading!) and I would go insane. 

So if I’m not reading, it’s because I’m engaged in something else that makes it impossible.  Sleeping.  Taking a shower.  Writing.  Okay…I can think of at least one activity that would engage my full attention so that I wouldn’t even want to be reading. 

Now for the books:  This week I read Aristotle and an Aardvark Walk Into a Bar (thanks to Fakesister for the tip), Michael Shaara’s The Broken Place (thanks to online friend Ptfan1 for that tip).  The latter book I found to be too gloomy and brooding for the most part, but it was well-written and had a sort of redemptive ending.  Then I read the last two books in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series:  Little Scarlet and Blonde Faith.  I’m quite undone by the fact that in the latter book it’s possible that Mosley has killed off Easy, but maybe not.  It’s a cliffhanger. 

Friday I went to the library and got six more books.  (If I can read four in a week, why not six?)  I was thrilled to find that one of my very favorite writers has a new book out.  That would be William Tapply.  Tapply writes crime fiction, and has also written for magazines such as Field and Stream.  His recurring main character, a Boston lawyer named Brady Coyne, alternates crime-solving with fly-fishing.  The only thing equally exciting would be a new book by Robert B. Parker. 

I got two more Walter Mosley books:  Black Betty and Gone Fishin’.  I’m really looking forward to the latter, because it’s a sort of prequel.  We get to learn how the sometimes-dangerous Easy and the always-dangerous, truly scary Mouse become friends. 

I got two more Michael Shaara books:  For The Love of the Game (thanks again Ptfan1) and The Herald, which is, of all things, science fiction.  The library did not have a copy, or perhaps it was checked out, of The Killer Angels, for which Shaara won the Pulitzer Prize.  I’ll keep looking for it, as I will Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, which is checked out. 

Finally, the latest Jonathan Kellerman novel Bones.

One reason I can read so much is in fact that I read very fast, but also, it’s because I don’t have to take a test afterwards.  There are no pop quizzes in novel-reading.  I’m looking forward to all these books with great pleasure, but I can sense guilt coming on.  Soon I’ll have to read another non-fiction book to keep up my pretense of being an intellectual.  Unless my attention becomes otherwise engaged.

No Thanks, I’ll Just Starve

In a recent conversation, a friend and I were discussing things we won’t eat…or we would have been, if I could have thought of anything I won’t eat.  Now granted, we were talking about normal everyday foods.  We weren’t talking about the kinds of  things they feed you on Survivor, like live Madagascar hissing roaches.  I will say that I have eaten chocolate-covered ants (they taste like chocolate).  Normally I’ll try anything once, but as I recall, I once passed on fried grasshoppers.  

Now, thanks to today’s New York Times, I’ve just discovered something else I’ll never try.  Now, all these years I’ve thought they were kidding about this particular food item.  Silly me.  Behold the following picture from the NYT:

What you’re seeing here is a judge, in the yellow jacket, gazing at a tray of the signature item at the International Comstock Mountain Oyster Fry in Virginia City, Nevada.  Mountain oysters are the testicles of castrated calves and lambs.  All I can say is, I read this article at about 6:30 this morning, and it’s a good thing I don’t eat breakfast.  For more than you ever wanted to know, here’s the full article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/us/18oyster.html?_r=2&hp

It must have been weird food day for the Times, because another article talked about the growing popularity of Whoopie Pies.  Now, I don’t know about you, but when I think “whoopie”, the next word that comes to mind is “cushion”.  It certainly isn’t “pie”.  I don’t think I’m in any danger of trying them either, because from now on, they will always be linked in my mind to Mountain oysters. 

I think I’ll go have something normal for dinner, like an eel.

Fakename’s Political Comments for Today

It seems to me that  the Obama adminstration has mostly been quietly doing a lot of “undoing”.  Undoing the rules that say we can torture prisoners as long as we call it by some other name (thereby making us all less safe, according to Dick Cheney.  Please, Dick.  Go away, already.  We stopped listening to you sometime in 2001.)  Undoing the ban on stem cell research (proof, I’m sure, that Satan is taking over the government.  Soon, no doubt, we will be slaughering live babies).  Undoing the environmental deregulation that would have allowed expanded mining near national parks in the West. 

If there has been more than a peep from the Republicans about what are basically small steps, I haven’t seen it.  Then of course, I don’t watch or listen to the crazies.  For a blistering opinion about the Republican bankruptcy of thought, see Frank Rich’s op-ed in todays NYT.  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/opinion/15rich.html?ref=opinion  Really, we all know that Rush as the “face of the Republican party” is a joke.  The real potential leaders of the Republican party, such as Eric Cantor, who is bright and articulate, simply have the wrong ideas.   

But the news that grabbed me today was that President Obama has instated a ban on the slaughter of all “downer” cattle.  To refresh your memory, all cattle must be able to walk to slaughter.  That in itself sounds like the premise for a science fiction movie–”Soylent Green”, maybe.  Cattle who are too weak, sick, or injured to walk to slaughter are supposed to be euthanized and disposed of in such a way that they don’t enter the human food chain.  But there were loopholes in the regulation.  And this led to workers making every effort to get cattle to stand, in some cases resorting to unimaginable torture.  If you can stomach it, here is the video from the Humane Society showing the torture of such animals at the now closed Chino, California plant (click under the second photo, for the first-person investigator’s video).  http://www.hsus.org/farm/news/ournews/undercover_investigation.html

If you can’t stomach it–and I could certainly understand why–let me just say that cows are shocked repeatedly, stabbed in the eyes with sticks, dragged by the leg with chains, poked with forklift tines and run over by forklifts.  It had to be clear that these cows were never going to be able to stand.  They weren’t lazy.  They were already dying.  The process of trying to get them to stand became more like punishment; a manifestation of the frustration of the workers. 

So the announcement that all downer cattle will now be banned from slaughter is good news on two fronts that are near and dear to my heart:  food safety and the humane treatment of animals.  Now once a cow goes down, that’s it.  I’m sure it won’t entirely eliminate cruelty, but it should go a long way toward stopping the insane attempts to get cattle to stand, because now there will be no point in it.  The failure to adequately fund the FDA is a national disgrace.  For an article about the new ban, see this article from the AP:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29691788

I can hardly wait for some Republican to explain to me how this is a step on the road to socialism.

Fake Book Review: Plato and a Platypus

This is a first for me.  I’m reviewing a book I haven’t read yet.  Thanks to Fakesister for the tip.  The book is Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar:  Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes.  Each joke illustrates a particular philosophical idea.  Fakesister could not remember what the following joke illustrated, but no matter.

A snail is mugged by two turtles.  Afterwards, the police ask the snail to describe what happened.  “I don’t know”, said the snail, “It all happened so fast!”

Through the miracle of the Internet, I caught the authors telling another joke on YouTube.  This joke illustrates a particular type of logical fallacy, that is, assuming that because one event precedes another  it was the cause.  Example:  85% of heroin users used marijuana first.  Yes, says one of the authors, but 100% of heroin users first used mother’s milk.  And now for the joke.

An older man with a very young wife goes to his rabbi and says, “No matter what I do, I can’t seem to satisfy my wife”. 

“I see that problem often”, said the rabbi.  “What you do is, you get a young man to come in and wave a towel over you while you make love to your wife.”

So the old guy does it, but it doesn’t work.  He goes back to the rabbi.  “Yes,” said the rabbi, “I see that often as well.  Here’s what you do.  You go back and put the young guy in bed with your wife, and you wave the towel.”

It works.  As the wife is moaning in ecstasy, the old guy says, “Schmuck!  Now that’s how you wave a towel!”

The writers have a second book as well, Aristotle and an Aardvark Go To Washington:  Understanding Political Doublespeak Through Philosophy and Jokes.  A review I read gives the following example:  Donald Rumsfeld said there were no good bombing targets in Afghanistan, therefore we should consider bombing in Iraq instead.  Equivalent to this:  a guy comes upon his friend Joe, down on his hands and knees under a streetlight.  He says, “What are you looking for, Joe?”  Joe says, “My car keys.”  The friend says, “Is this where you dropped them?”  “No”, says Joe, “I dropped them in the bushes over there, but the light is better here.”

This illustrates what the authors call ignoratio elenchi, “ignorance of the issue”.  I wonder if they made that up?  Even if they did, it’s still funny. 

Speaking of fake book reviews, the blogger on my blogroll DavisW (you can click the link) frequently does episodes of Fake News.  (Wait!  This could be copyright infringement!  I should have sole domain over Fake stuff!)  His latest post is about news that sounds fake but isn’t.  Don’t miss the story about the tanning bed catching on fire.

Let’s Kill Florida

As it stands now, Florida has a dangerous glut of useless natural features:  beaches, swamps, rivers, lakes, forests, woodlands and plains.  And all of them are inconveniently located, standing right in the way of where a house or an office building or a road could be.  Even worse, all these places have critters living in them that are either useless or downright dangerous.  No civilized person should have to be confronted with an alligator or a bear. 

That’s why I propose a New Florida, in which only three animals will be allowed:  ducks, fish and deer.  I haven’t quite worked out where the ducks, fish, and deer will live since in the New Florida, there won’t be woods or water to speak of.  I’m thinking along the lines of a condominium project.  The fish can live in the basement, which I’ll fill with water.  The ducks and the deer will live on the upper floors.  That way, when you have an urge to go deer hunting, you can just push the button on the elevator that says “6 point buck, 11A”.

In these trying economic times, there are still people, believe it or not, who are trying to hold on to these outdated natural features.  We need growth!  We need to put people back to work!  Public Enemy #1, my friends, is the state’s Department of Community Affairs, which oversees something it calls “growth management”.  Growth obstruction is more like it!  It has a bunch of rules and regulations and fees and fines and such, and pokes its nose into affairs that are none of its business, overruling the due authority of local officials that we bought and paid for fair and square. 

But don’t worry, we have that covered.  Right now we have a bill in the Legislature that will pretty much dismantle DCA (S.B. 360) and send those tree huggers back to the landfill where they belong.  If you care about Florida’s future, as I know you do, join with me in supporting State Senator Mike Bennett.  Let him know that if necessary, you’ll use your own personal shovel to help fill in a swamp, because feeding your family comes first. 

Footnote:  This post is not in English.  It is in Newspeak.  Freedom is slavery.  Growth management is ungood.