Category Archives: Uncategorized

On the Ownership of Large Dangerous Wild Animals

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Years ago, I read an old newspaper account of chaos in 19th century New York City; A storm damaged many of the cages at the Central Zoo, and most of the wild animals got out. The next day or two was spent rounding up the animals, and even the mayor and the governor, who were experienced big game hunters, got involved in tracking down the rhino and the hippo and the lions and the rest of them.

A few months ago, for some reason, that story re-emerged in my memory for the first time in decades, so I went and looked it up and found out that it was a hoax. I don’t remember if I knew it was a hoax when I first read it … I think not. I think I read it in a magazine at the dentist office and never followed up on it. As stories go, it’s a great story. As hoaxes go, not so much. A bad hoax of a great story adds up to … uninteresting.

But last weeks events were neither uninteresting nor a hoax.

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What is scarier than Halloween?

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What is scarier than Halloween?

1804

Lewis and Clark struck out on their famous expedition. Alexander Hamilton was shot to death in a duel. Morphine is invented. Short distance transport is done on foot or horses, long distance on clipper ships or packets. The world population reaches 1 billion.

1927, over a century later

Horses are still widely used but some people are driving around in cars and trains have been in use for almost a century. The War of 1812, the American Civil War, the Spanish American War, and World War 1 have all come and gone. The first transatlantic phone call is made. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is probably formulated. A total of about six hominid fossils are known. Carving of Mount Rushmore commences. The world population reaches 2 billion.

1960

Cars, trains, and increasingly planes are the main Western form of transit. World War II and the Korea War have passed. Independence in the Belgian Congo. France tests an atomic bomb. Kennedy is nominated. A total of about a dozen hominid fossils are known. I exist. The world population reaches 3 billion.

1974

The Vietnam War is just ending. We’ve been to the moon. Skylab 4 crew returns to earth after breaking a record for stay in orbit. I get my first job. There are now dozens of hominid fossils known and most major genera are known. The 60s happened. India detonates a nuclear bomb. The world population reaches 4 billion.

1987

Disco has come and gone and U2 is famous. Mathias Rust is placed on trial and the Soviet Union teeters on collapse. The first National Coming Out day happens. I’m in graduate school and working in Zaire. The world population reaches five billion.

1999

The music scene has not changed much. Transportation technology has not changed. World politics are about the same. I switched from Zaire to South Africa for field work and am about to move to Minnesota. Hugo Chavez elected President of Venezuela. Spongebob Squarepants airs for the first time. The World Population reaches six billion.

2011

Michael Jackson has died. Cell phones have changed a lot but other technology remains similar. The war in Iraq is winding down. I’m working on some of the same stuff I was working on in 1999. The world population reaches seven billion on or about Halloween.

Let me rephrase this slightly

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Should Punishment For ‘Negligent Shooting’ Be Harsher?

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When two teens were shot in an apparent hunting accident, the family wanted to know why not more was done to the teen responsible.

TORNADO — On August 8, Keith Holsopple was hunting squirrels with two teenage friends. It would end with he and another friend being peppered with shotgun pellets in their arms.
“It was like claws digging into my arm and being pulled out slowly,” said Holsopple. “Blood was squirting everywhere.”

10 pellets are still under Holsopple’s skin and full mobility could take as long as a year to return.

The teen who fired the shotgun has not been charged with any crime. According to Dwight Holsopple, Keith’s father, he was banned from getting a hunting permit for a number of years.

source

Van Gogh’s Cowboy Boys Shakespeare’s Pot

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ResearchBlogging.orgAlthough one can not be certain, all the evidence points to the fact that William Shakespeare smoked pot. This is not a new story. My good friend and colleague, Dr. Francis Thackeray, who has never smoked pot in his life but who has acted in Shakespeare’s plays numerous times, led a research team that put 2 and 2 together and came up with narcotic literary munchies. In Shakespeare’s time, land owners were required to grow pot in order to provide fibers for making the rope needed hoist the sails and flags over the increasingly powerful British Navy and merchant vessels. One of the better depictions of Shakespeare’s face shows the well known smoker’s mark, a feature that forms when one habitually smokes with a kaolin tobacco pipe. Thackeray masterfully identifies numerous passages in Shakespeare’s work that strongly indicate that he partook of the weed but not of stronger narcotics such as cocaine. But, that was all mentioned in code; Elizabethan England did not exactly have “drug laws” as we know of them today (though substances were controlled, legal, or not legal, depending). The main problem was that drug use was considered Witchcraft, and even though smoking various things was either legal or not depending on which Monarch was in charge, Witchcraft was always going to get you … well, stoned. As in crushed by them. (Or hung or burned at the stake, though rarely the latter … why waste good fuel.)
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Do Urban Heat Islands Explain the Global Warming Hockey Stick Curve?

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Urban areas can be warmer than surrounding non-urban areas because there is a lot of combustion, pavement and other structure can collect solar heat and retain it for a while, and other factors. It is not uncommon to look at a weather map where conditions for precipitation are marginal, and everywhere but the urban zone, or only the urban zone and nothing else, is showing a weather phenomenon. Because people and airports (where weather is very important) are located in or very near urban areas, it stands to reason that a lot of the data used to estimate global temperatures would be affected by any urban effects, and if urban areas are a) warmer than surrounding areas and b) increasingly warm over time then “global warming” may well be an artifact of the urban heat island effect. That wouldn’t necessarily make it a hoax, but it would make it wrong. We would then have to revise our understanding of certain aspects of physics because we expect global warming to occur in CO2 levels go up, but physics has been revised before. Kepler was wrong, Newton was wrong, maybe the climate change scientists are wrong too….

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Our Conversations Are Like a Cold Fruit Salad on a Dusty, Hot, Summer Day

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I am having a conversation with my friend, Pat. We are talking about the way we talk when we have a chance to spend some time, or the way our emails seem to go.

“I tire of being asked what I think about something only to have the conversation derailed at the first ‘bump’ in my logic, at the first self-contradiction,” Pat says, of life in general.

My response: “I savor your contradictions. It is my desire to explore them with you and to experience the change that happens when you wrestle with them.”

“Yes, I think you get it. How refreshing.”

As you can see, Pat and I have a deeply meaningful relationship. Enviable, in fact. It is based on not knowing things that we want to know, and how to fix that. There is also an element of bringing unformed or poorly formed thoughts to the table, cutting them up like a fruit salad, and enjoying them. Our conversations are like a cold fruit salad on a dusty hot summer day. Yes, very, very refreshing.

But not everybody has the opportunity to interact that way. This is because all utterances are questionable, if you want them to be. All communications are subject to measurement against a standard that one can easily justify as “Teh Standard,” even though one has merely pulled it out of one orifice or another. In fact, there is a place where that kind of communication is favored, revered, honed and practiced, and imposed by force of will and repetition on those who do not come to the table oppositional in affect and armed with snark.

That place is known…as the blogosphere.

But, dear reader, that is a feature of the blogosphere that I generally don’t like, even though it can be amusing, it can be productive, and it can bring lots of page views to my hit-counter. I don’t like it even though I am as capable as the next person of doing damage with printed word, baiting the most wary of trolls, and turning and churning the most innocent of conversation until it becomes vile like ogre piss. I don’t like it because I find it inhumane. I find it not the way I want to interact, not the way I want to understand. It is bitter roots and rotten offal. It is not a refreshing fruit salad on a dusty, hot, summer day.

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