Redhead with roses

An explanation

2009-01-17T13:09:01Z

Dear all,

I was thinking about my journaling habits this morning, and I think I owe everyone an apology for being such a lousy journaler, as well as an explanation.

It's not that I don't love you! The problem is that my chosen career is teaching, and in particular, teaching primarily 18-22 year olds. Can you imagine an age group more shallow with less good sense? (Well, leaving aside some middle-life-crisis men.) So I have to think critically about anything I put out for public consumption - it's sort of like being in politics, but with a constantly renewing crop of teenagers, which I think is actually slightly worse.

Teh interwebs is terribly cool, and useful, and all this other stuff, but it's also incredibly public. Once I put anything "out there" in cyberspace, I can never get it back. (See also: a computational chemistry project that I did at age 16 is still on the web. OK, it was kind of cool, but, c'mon!)

Unfortunately, I don't trust any simple security scheme to keep my information private. (I have people from Russia adding me as 'friends' all the time. I don't really think that "restrict to friends" will stop a determined and bored compsci major in ten years from hacking my old LJ posts and instantly publishing them to my entire student population.) I suppose I could distribute everything under PGP or something, but that's terribly James Bond, and really, I couldn't take myself seriously doing that. Besides, if my students got quantum computers, I'd be screwed. Similarly, I will not trust my privacy to a thinly-veiled online persona; if that persona was representative of me, it would be relatively easily identified, and if it weren't, I'd just be making a sock puppet. (If I want to play with sock puppets, I'll do it in the privacy of my own home for the amusement of my cats.)

Please note: I do NOT want to criticize anyone else's posting or not posting habits. I simply have reflected on the position in which I find myself, and have come to these conclusions. This is one case where those of you who feel like wage-slaves may be slightly more advantaged than I am. "Ivory tower" my foot!

So, there's a long list of things that I just don't think I can post about. These include almost everything I think is interesting or unique about me, like: my religion/spirituality (way too controversial), my personal relationships (way too much teenager fodder), details of my health (I don't want students or potential employers reading that), and pretty much everything down to what I did last Saturday and whom I did it with.

The small set of things left outside of this is terribly boring, I think. Things that don't have to do with my uniqueness or personality tend to boil down, in my mind, to what Limbaugh fans call "dittos." My efforts to live greener, the latest cute lolcat, my progress in yoga or aikido (besides being terribly technical to most people), and my opinions about news and popular culture are all relatively repetitive of information that already exists. Something in me protests at lowering the signal/noise ratio of the world. (You can argue about whether this contributes to the eventual heat death of the universe through increasing entropy, but it might be all hot air.)

I suppose I may post some things about news/pop, particularly when I think I have something vaguely interesting to add (see Posse Comitatus and the black helicopters of the 3rd ID), but that's fairly rare. Besides, my analyses of why the LOTR movies suck fuzzy bunnies through wormholes and so on tend to be very long-winded. Historians tend to take a long time to say anything, I suppose. Maybe it's because the past is such a very big place. ("I will splain. No, will take too long. I will sum up. Buttercup is marry Humperdink in lettle less than half an hour...")

So, I will use this space to comment occasionally, and I would love to hear about what's going on in your lives, so I'll still read my friends page to keep up with the people I care about.

Much love!
FA

Idiomatic idiocy, or, English is saved by hippies

2008-11-15T12:39:40Z

Okay, so, it was bad enough when my students routinely spelled the phrase as "free reign." I resigned myself to the fact that not only do people not ride horses anymore, little girls don't even play with My Little Pony toys enough to know that reins are something used by a rider to communicate with a horse. I was slightly more irritated when people didn't realize the inherent contradiction between free and reign - but at least they didn't confuse the idea of control with watery precipitation, I consoled myself.

I got more frustrated with the instantly standardized uses of "financial meltdown" and "toxic assets" in the current economic situation. The metaphors aren't bad, it's just that they went from expressive usage to fixed phrases overnight, thus relieving people of any burden of thought regarding either their words or the economy.

The last straw is a columnist in my beloved NYTimes writing that unemployment could move "like a toxic virus" through the economy. Toxic virus? A poisonous disease? Those wires are more than crossed - that's some ugly mental macrame made from what used to be two perfectly good scientific concepts that didn't really want to be used for decoration, thank you very much.

Yes, I know that virus comes from the Latin for poisonous and was adapted to its current usage because of issues with the germ theory of disease and the concept of filtering out bacteria, etc. That doesn't excuse this usage; applying an archaic usage to a confused phrase to produce something merely redundant is hardly an improvement.

There is, however, some good news. I actually saw a sign yesterday that said "Ten items or fewer." That's right, somebody in a grocery store finally made the correct word choice when describing the express lane. (I don't even care that it's a sentence fragment!) Where might this legendary feat have taken place, you ask? It was at Whole Foods. That's right - the English language is going to be saved by hippies.

Gah.

2008-11-15T11:53:01Z

We saw the first ten minutes of "Quantum of Solace" last night.

Why only the first ten minutes, you ask? Because the Arena Grand theater lost power at about 8pm. Apparently there was a 'series of explosions' in power transformers in that area. No one was hurt, but it took out the grid. Very odd.

So, my first impressions: Daniel Craig is still hot enough to start a fire in the middle of a snowstorm. Judy Dench is still perfect as M. The new theme music is cool. You should, however, take your favorite motion-sickness treatment to the theater with you. Or at least resign yourself to the fact that you're not going to be able to follow logically what's going on in all the fight/driving scenes. Note to filmmakers: just because you _can_ do that with a camera doesn't mean you _should_. Oh, and at some point, more cuts between different perspectives (and more perspectives) doesn't make something cooler. It just makes it obnoxious. There's diminishing returns somewhere around a cut every second or so. And we know that they're not doing it to make it look like Daniel Craig can fight when he can't; there was some lovely camera work in Casino Royale that showed that he can fight like crazy. Bring back the long all-in-one shot!

Hoist on your own petard

2008-10-26T14:01:38Z

In an amusing turnabout, anyone who argues for the inherent efficiency of a free market now has economic proof that campaigning is more about image than about ideas: Sarah Palin's makeup artist got paid more than any other campaign staff in the last pay period, including all the policy analysts and advisors. So either the market doesn't work very well or the Republican campaign has totally abandoned its intellectual roots, as alleged by Christopher Buckley. Or maybe both.

Today's silliness

2008-10-21T23:33:10Z

In very exaggerated Italian accent: "A pizza is like a woman. It always taste good, but to look good, everythin' must-a be in the right place."

Reasons to watch the series "Bones"

2008-10-05T11:15:42Z

When one lead says to the other: "Jesus was not a zombie!"

Teh Prius, I luves it

2008-10-03T11:31:17Z

I hate sore throats, just in case anyone didn't know that.

Anyway, about the Prius: there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that the fuel gauge lies like a rug. It started blinking at me in the "feed me now" way when the tank should have still had more than a third of its capacity. Actually, I just found out that the fuel tank changes size depending on temperature, and the gauge is designed to deal with that and give you adequate warning of running out. Hmm. Well, it did that at least.

The good news is that we got over 60 mpg on this last tank. *happy dance*

Two things on the economic crisis

2008-09-29T21:50:33Z

One, I want to find the idiots who repealed Glass-Steagal and do anatomically unpleasant things to them.

Two, this is why the market is not a replacement for pensions, Social Security, or anything else. The market is not the solution to everything. Sorry, it's just not. Especially not an unregulated market. Grr.

Tom Clancy isn't exciting anymore

2008-09-29T13:54:40Z

My recent quasi-political diatribe has put me in mind of a recent observation on Tom Clancy books and conservative thought that I've been meaning to write up for a while.

In Executive Orders, at one point during the biological WMD attack epidemic, fictional president John Ryan says "The Constitution is not a suicide pact." The relevant context is that he's just ordered the Cabinet and military to shut down inter-state travel in order to control the spread of the cancer-enhanced aerosol-spread Ebola that makes people eat each other's brains. (Okay, I made up the part about eating brains, but it fits, doesn't it?) Travel is a constitutionally protected right. Ryan gives a stirring speech about how he swore his oath to defend and uphold the Constitution, but the people are more important, and damnit, he just knows he's right (and we do too, since it's fiction). Spoiler: everybody breaks the Constitution, the disease is controlled, the bad guy is assassinated by the military on primetime TV, and everybody's happy.

I have some thoughts about this. Number one, was it really necessary to break the Constitution? I know, it's urgent. But couldn't he have called all the governors and gotten them to activate the National Guard and accomplished the same thing in, oh, say, another twenty minutes?

Number two, and more importantly, why does this reasoning apply in conservative thought when it's urgent because lives are on the line, but only when it's all cool and about eating people's brains and stuff? Where's the lobby that says "The Constitution is not a suicide pact...so maybe we should revise the Second Amendment to exclude handguns."? If allowing handguns in our cities is causing deaths, and we have to allow handguns because of the Constitution, isn't that making it into a suicide pact of sorts?

N.B.: I'm not taking a position on the Second Amendment or on handguns, just pointing out an apparent inconsistency in conservative thought.

I could possibly expand on this. Anybody care? Anybody want to have this discussion?

Posse Comitatus - the rumors of its death are wildly exaggerated

2008-09-29T13:21:07Z

Subtitled: Put down the tinfoil and pick up the ballot - and encourage others to vote, too, and tell them why.

Somewhat alarmist article from Salon

Matt says not to worry about it because "the Third Infantry has an insufficient complement of black helicopters." :)

This is definitely interesting. As someone who exists in multiple worlds, if you will, let me try to address this from multiple points of view.

The Salon article is definitely a bit alarmist. They're putting together two separate pieces of information and concluding that 2 + 2 makes 8. One piece of information is that the 1st BCT of the 3rd ID is under the operational control of a command based here in the US that coordinates with the Department of Homeland Security. This strikes me as pretty normal - basically, they're "on call" for issues inside the US while they're on their stateside rotation. Actually, it seems like kind of a good idea to have a designated "oh shit" group of Army guys stateside, so that when Katrina, or 9/11, or God forbid whatever else happens, you don't have to pull them together after the fact and try to find, equip, and train them in the middle of a mess. These guys are there to backstop the National Guard. The training that they're doing is pretty normal - enhanced disaster response techniques, and yes, crowd control and stuff. Hey, on the plus side, maybe they'll have better skills for their next rotation in Iraq.

The other piece of information is that there's ambiguous language in the law. This is mildly to moderately concerning. It has not completely negated Posse Comitatus, no matter what Salon says. It has made it easier to activate federal forces inside the "homeland" (I hate that term, see below). I think that activation of forces for something other than a nationally recognized emergency (natural disaster or manmade widespread disaster) would be met with a major uprising of Congress and the people, so I don't think this language has made it any easier for the executive branch to stage a coup. The army itself would resist such a move, no matter how many of them are Republicans.

The reason that no one raised more of an alarm about this is because they would look like idiots and jerks, because raising an alarm about this would force them to commit to one of a short list of statements, none of which are palatable: This is a bad idea because.... "the army is only good for killing people and breaking things" or "we shouldn't create resources to help our citizens in the event of a disaster" or "Cheney is trying to take over the world!" Remember, this was passed in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, when people were screaming about how the federal government didn't do enough. As Matt correctly observed, the federal government was not allowed to help because the governor had not asked them to, and we don't really want the federal government deploying troops without anyone's permission. This language was put in there to make it easier to get that permission in case the governor's an idiot (we don't know anyone like that, do we, Ms. Palin?) Yes, it's more ambiguous than it should be, and that's bad, but it's not going to bring out the black helicopters.

Okay, that's the end of the real response. Personal observations follow.

Yes, I'm highly skeptical of anything termed a "nonlethal" capability.

One brigade isn't enough to stage a coup. (I'm reminded of the bit from Ocean's Eleven about "enough armed guards to occupy Paris....okay, bad example." For a more classical reference, see Bogie's bit in Casablanca where he tells the Nazis not to go to some parts of New York at night.)

Ironic point: the conservatives whose worldview makes that ambiguous language possibly dangerous and definitely concerning to the rest of us are the same people who support "Second Amendment rights" on the assumption that it's possible the government will use force inappropriately and we will need to use lethal force to defend ourselves and/or overthrow them in response. This doesn't mean that they're going to stage a military coup, it means that these people are focused on force as the way to get things done, whether that's getting the country through a flu pandemic or resisting aggression.

I hate the term "homeland" in "Homeland Security" and the whole concept of "homeland defense." To me, the term "homeland" has connotations of blood-and-soil that are related to fascist concepts. Maybe it's because I study the Nazis, but there you go. I also know, no matter how much I dislike the term, that one word isn't going to put neofascists in power here. It does, however, mean that we need to be cautious and alert about tendencies like that. So, bravo for the caution; let's elect people who don't share the mindset of this administration, and that will make this whole concern essentially go away.

Sorry that I haven't written in a while - I got sick, but I'm better now.

UPDATE: These changes have been repealed (Wikipedia "Insurrection Act"). Although there was a signing statement issued (also known as the Presidential "nyah nyah, you can't make me"), I'm much less concerned about this than I was. I apologize for not doing my fact-checking first - apparently Salon didn't either.

Reasons I love my fiance, #312

2008-08-10T02:10:11Z

By the way, in case I didn't mention, #215 was:
The wind almost blew my hat off. I commented, "Okay, I need my hat to act less like an airfoil."
My fiance said, "I knew I loved you for a reason. Anyone else would have said kite."

(anyone want me to add wikipedia entries to airfoil and kite?)

#312:

I said: "You know what the tragedy of men is, right? God gave men brains _and_ penises, but not enough blood to operate both at the same time."
He said: "Actually, there's a club....I think our next meeting is in the highlands of Tibet in 2012."

I love him.
FA

Irish Festival

2008-08-04T02:40:19Z

Irish Festival was fantastic! Gaelic Storm in particular was a lot of fun. The dancers are always great. Shopping was lots of fun, of course. :) Tannahill Weavers were fun, and I got Matt interested in Bad Haggis. Aisling was great, although the balance in their area was not great - I'm not sure how much of that was the sound guy's fault and how much was just poor acoustics. Especially interesting was the workshop that the lead from Aisling did on the O'Carolan repetoire.

Flogging Molly on Friday night was absolutely awesome, also. It was a long concert, but worth it. The lead singer for Flogging Molly is pretty amusing sometimes, except when he said that people with long red hair are the devil. He's fascinated with the devil for some reason.

Irish Festival was a perfect celebration of the end of Young Scholars, getting out of my old apartment, and the coming of August in general. Wheeeee!

Updates

2008-07-31T14:17:52Z

Ring! I have a ring! It's gorgeous. Pics later possibly, or run into me at the Irish Festival or something. :) The band is a celtic knot pattern, and the diamond is well beyond usual levels of "ooh shiny".

On the downside, minor health issues have cropped up again the last couple weeks. I've got them down below the "drugs are my friend" level. We're more at the "Okay, let's make a long-term plan" level...now if I can just get ten minutes with my cardiologist, I'll be in good shape.

The Young Scholars Program is...interesting. Teaching is always a bit of a roller-coaster, but it's been moreso this summer. I feel like I've done good work, but I'm also very, very ready for the term to be over, because it's been much harder on me than I imagined.

I'm going to take up an alternate career in animal rescue. The latest save is a cat who was suffering from heat exhaustion in a local parking lot. After some shenanigans, cat is returned to owners.

On the obnoxious front, someone tried to steal the rear wheels off of my bike and Matt's. Given more time, he might have tried to take the front wheels, too. After a quick trip to the Trek store to have the rear wheels properly reinstalled, we've moved them and enhanced their security. Broad daylight in Clintonville, though - demand for bikes is really going up.

On the YAY! front, Matt and I are getting a Prius soon. Apparently, Toyota is selling out of reasonably-sized used cars in good condition that get decent gas mileage. (Same reason bike demand is going up, probably.) So, they made us a decent deal for trading in our two cars, and it's definitely a net win for us. We'll be one-car family, but we can handle that - in fact, I'd been thinking about moving in that direction anyway. We'll end up financing about what Matt has financed on his car right now, and the savings in gas will pay for the car over its lifetime. Pretty cool. In fact, our Prius should be on the water right now - yay!!!

I have to finish up moving out of and cleaning my old apartment today. As of now, I'm officially cohabiting with Matt full-time. (It's been unofficial for a while.) Anybody who needs an updated address, email me. Phone number is unchanged.

Kiki is cuddling me, and it makes me happy.

Wall-E rocks!

2008-07-13T13:21:23Z

Everybody and their Chihuahua should go see Wall-E. Possibly twice.

Ok, not the Chihuahuas.

There are about a half-dozen really really excellent grown-up references in the movie that will make it great fun, especially for anyone with a slightly geeky background. (See also the music that I'm "listening" to. And look out for anything with a single red eye.)

For those of you who may not recognize it immediately, the noise that Wall-E makes on rebooting is the Mac startup noise. The one character who starts out innately friendly and essentially "human" is running on a Mac framework. (That means it's Linux underneath with Mac UI on top.)

Thanks to Spot for pointing out to me that there were mixed-media shots combining live action (the one "real person," ie, from our time, seen in the film) with rendered. The rendering was good enough that I had already completely accepted the rendered people as "real", if a bit cartoonish, and completely didn't notice the changes as disconnects between different media.

Cleaning house

2008-07-04T12:41:30Z

So, I have some stuff that I'm not going to need anymore as I complete the process of moving in with Matt. I have a partial list below. Please help me figure out what to do with all this stuff!

Come get it and I'll thank you for taking it off my hands - or make a suggestion about where I can take/donate it to do the most good:

A bunch of Bath & Body Works products

Stuffed animals in need of a new loving home

Old sheets

An old but very sturdy couch

Make me an offer:

Duplicate copies of movies (list uncertain, and I think I'm too lazy to ebay them all individually) and possibly some duplicate books

Stereo: tape player, CD player, radio, built-in pretty good speakers, great condition

Television with built-in DVD player (medium-sized screen)

Possibly my full size mattress, box spring, mattress cover, and frame - about three years old, in excellent shape

Probably a microwave

Grafton update

2008-06-29T14:36:44Z

For everyone who knows Grafton (gmkieran)....

Graf is in the hospital with diabetes. This is a new development. He was in the ICU for a day while they got the worst of it under control. He is now in room 323 of Mt. Carmel East. He can be reached on his cell phone.

He's doing well; he's much better than just a few days ago, and he will probably get to go home on Monday or Tuesday. He'll have to manage his diabetes from now on, so some changes in eating, medications, and exercise will be involved, but he should be fine.

I'm sure he'd appreciate phone calls to stave off the boredom. :)

EDIT: Graf is home as of 9:30pm tonight, 30 June.

Motivational posters

2008-06-29T14:32:04Z

I has a lolcat!

2008-06-29T13:59:22Z

moar funny pictures

They had to do a study?

2008-06-25T14:35:35Z

Girls are as competitive as boys, just more subtle

Duh. I mean, I'm glad somebody wrote this up in a citable article, but really, I've been saying this forever.

Eaten any good books lately?

2008-06-25T14:33:24Z

I've been working like crazy on my syllabus for the calculus course I'm teaching this summer. I've got the first two weeks done, the third week sketched in, and won't be able to set up the fourth week until I know more about the students and how far we get. Yay me!

I read two good books recently that I want to recommend to everybody (not just history geeks like me). A.D. 500: A Journey through the Dark Isles of Britain and Ireland by Simon Young is quite good. It's told in an interesting format that should keep the reader engaged, especially if you enjoyed Crichton's Beowulf, I mean, Eaters of the Dead. For SCA types who are interested in anything before 1200, this is valuable information about anything other than Italy and Byzantium.

Throwing Fire by Crosby is also very enjoyable, especially for amateur military historians. Crosby makes an engaging argument that what distinguishes the human species is its ability to throw (developed after the switch to bipedalism) and its control of fire. It's intriguing and well supported. This is also one of the few history books I've seen that talks about human development on a comprehensive scale that makes sense. Crosby concentrates on the differentiation of humans from other primates, discusses prehistorical developments, and continues up to the modern period. You get a sense of how little time spent being human has been since we invented writing, among other things, let alone ICBMs with MIRVs. Good catch for science geeks as well, if you want to look at science and tech in a change-across-time kind of context.

Engaged!

2008-06-17T12:04:43Z

Matt and I are engaged!

I didn't put this on my LJ sooner because we hadn't told Matt's parents yet, and I didn't want them to find out accidentally. (I don't think they read my LJ, but I didn't want to mess up Matt's surprise.)

Wheeeeeee!

We're getting married next spring. For various reasons, we're going to keep the wedding pretty small, but it should be lots of fun.

Other news:
*We're going to be fostering some blackbird fledglings again, probably in about a week. We put out the laundry basket with newspaper and bubble-wrap in it to catch them. Hopefully that will be the last clutch of eggs this season....hopefully. :)
*My herbs are growing like crazy on the patio. Matt's parents needed basil for a recipe while they were here, so they got a basil plant and just took what they needed. I need more rosemary, though - we use that one a lot, and it doesn't grow as fast as mint does.
*We got a kitty hammock from a rescue group at a festival this weekend, and the cats love it. It's supposed to be for Kiki, but of course her brother tends to take over.

Photos coming soon.

Wildlife doesn't work weekends.

2008-06-08T12:47:04Z

Apparently I've nominated myself to be the local Green/wildlife protectress and advocatrix. In the process, I'm becoming increasingly upset about how poorly our government handles issues like this.

Yesterday morning, while walking outside, I saw a raccoon. I thought to myself, oh, I don't want to startle it too much, and isn't it neat to see one in the daytime in the parking lot. I walked quietly, and observed the raccoon patting the ground with its paws, looking for all the world like it had lost its keys. Then I got within about five feet of it, and realized that it was confused, wasn't very aware of my presence, and wasn't afraid. Alarm bells went off, and I backed up slowly and ran inside to get my phone. When a car went by within a few feet of it, and it didn't move, that tore it. Being the naive little citizen that I am, I assumed that there was a SOP for handling something like this. I called 911 and reported a possibly rabid raccoon in a populated area; they transferred me to the non-emergency number. The police said "ok, we'll take care of it." I told them that I was going to stay on the scene until they arrived, because I was worried about people (and especially children) not noticing the animal and being exposed. They said "OK" and hung up.

In the next ten minutes, I did in fact warn away two children (who almost ran, literally, right into the poor thing) and a handful of adults. The apartment community's maintenance manager turned up with a shovel and said that he was going to "shoo it back into the woods." I said that I didn't think that was a good idea, and he agreed that the animal was acting sicker than he had seen before; when I said that I had called emergency services, he decided that his job was done and left. (See previous posts for information about this guy's attitude towards wildlife.) I called the police back, asking when they would arrive, and they politely explained to me that they didn't do that, and that they didn't know who did, and that "if you can scoop up the animal, there's somewhere you can take it," but they didn't know where, or how, or who to call.

I became increasingly distressed about the situation because the raccoon was wandering more freely into an adjacent parking lot that was even busier. At this point, I was much less concerned about the raccoon posing an active threat - it seemed too tired, too confused, and too blind to go after anyone - and more concerned about stupid human tricks. (Some passerby had already taken pictures of the poor sick raccoon as if it was a tourist attraction!) I made several more calls and got an increasing runaround; my vet, meaning well, referred me to the pound, who insisted that they didn't do wild animals and no one else did either. I knew, already, that the Ohio Department of Wildlife is closed on the weekends, apparently on the assumption that one can simply ask wild animals to return when normal office hours resume. Finally, another woman and I shooed the raccoon into a small stand of trees, where it seemed content to lay down in the shade, and I went inside and finally got the public health vet on the phone.

Turns out there hasn't been a case of raccoon rabies in central Ohio for over 20 years. When I described the animal's symptoms, the vet was almost positive it was distemper, which is in epidemic status here, but is not communicable to humans. The vet also confirmed for me that there is no agency that handles wildlife, even wildlife posing a threat. It's the property owner's responsibility. (We already know how well the maintenance supervisor handles that responsibility.) In addition, we're not allowed to discharge a gun inside city limits and we're discouraged from approaching the animal. So, let me get this right: It's my job, but I'm not allowed to do it? (Mom, I know you're going to stop here and tell me to call a critter-removal service. Don't even get me started on the impossibility of finding one on Saturday morning. In the meantime, I had already shooed away two more kids and some adults who either didn't see the animal or didn't realize it was sick.)

Thankfully, the vet did refer me to the Ohio Wildlife Center, a volunteer organization that handles cases like this. They also confirmed the probable diagnosis of distemper, and stated that if we could contain the animal, we could bring it to them, and they would either treat and rehome it or euthanize it, as appropriate. I was deeply relieved, and considered the trouble of catching the critter much less of a problem than the danger of someone walking up to pet it and provoking it, even if it wasn't rabid! After some quick thinking, I called the Giant Eagle next to us, because the raccoon had wandered into its parking lot and then been shooed into a small copse between the two lots. I informed them that they had a sick raccoon, and it was their responsibility, but I was willing to help remove the critter if they would donate materials to do so: a shovel and a plastic crate or container to catch it.

Giant Eagle thought this was a great deal, and they did even better: one of their employees was a licensed wildlife rehabilitator who knew the facility to which we were taking the animal. So the three of us - Matt, the rehab lady, and me, went out to catch a sick raccoon. We had thick gloves, and I had taken the precaution of putting on a leather jacket and heavy jeans. I took the shovel, Matt took the crate, and the rehab lady went after the poor kid with her gloved hands. With some coordination, we flushed the critter; thank goodness it was blinded and tired. The rehab lady got it by the scruff, and at that point it fought like crazy. Ever hear a raccoon growl? It's amazing - rather like a small-to-medium size dog, a tenor growl, RRRrrrrrr-RRRRrrrrr-rrrrrrr. The leather gloves saved her; we got the kid into the crate with only some damage to the gloves, and once in the crate, the kid settled down. Thankfully, the rehab lady hadn't had her skin broken, although it was a near-run thing. She advised us to keep a tight hold on the crate lid; we thanked her quite a bit and took her advice to heart.

I had called gmkieran earlier, before I had the good sense to call Giant Eagle and enlist their help, and he arrived shortly thereafter. We spread a trash bag on the back seat, put the crate on it, and I rode in the back holding down the lid (still wearing gloves, of course). The trip went smoothly, with only a disgruntled sneeze or two from our unwilling passenger. The Ohio Wildlife Center is amazing; they took the poor kid in right away. We filled out a form with some basic information (in addition to what the rehab lady at Giant Eagle had phoned in while we were on the road), and left with quite a sense of accomplishment.

Apparently the Ohio Wildlife Center handles thousands of cases like this every year, on a volunteer and donation basis. On the back wall of the office, they had a board listing their releases scheduled for the immediate future, and there were at least a half-dozen species listed there. A couple brought in two ducklings (awwww!) while we were there.

(Yes, Mom, we washed our hands, and stripped and scrubbed when we got home, and threw away the gloves that had been used to catch the critter, and checked each other for ticks and fleas and everything else.)

I'm disgusted at local and state government for this gaping hole in services. I'm also amazed at and grateful for the work done by the Ohio Wildlife Center. I might start volunteering there myself, time permitting. Anybody else want to join me, either in that or in lobbying the government to plug this hole?

Three words you simply have to learn how to spell....quiz at 11

2008-06-06T16:22:56Z

Faith Anne's top three list of words to learn how to spell.

NB: Students of mine, if you can't spell it, don't use it.

~~Rennassance~~, ~~Renascence~~, ~~Reinaissance~~, I mean Renaissance
~~Mideval~~, ~~Medeval~~, (and my personal favorite) ~~Midevil~~, I mean Medieval
Cunnilingus Otherwise, you end up like a fellow graduate student who spelled it "cunninglingus" (in a paper!) without a trace of irony. That's one of those T|N>K moments (also known as a paper-bag mistake).

Why are humans unique?

2008-05-23T12:40:15Z

Six uniquely human traits found in animals

The bit about animals having personality is particularly relevant as Matt and I watch Wilbur and Orville develop - they have much more distinct personalities than I thought possible. It's almost as if they have different 'voices'.

I was interested to see that they didn't include language. I'm beginning to think that some kind of abstracting ability, as represented in language, particularly written language, is the only uniqueness humans have.

This is really the one interesting thing presented in the book The Math Gene, and it's not really about math at all, once the reader accepts that math is a type of abstract language. (If I remember correctly, the author is a little too...structuralist? Chomskyian? for me, but the concept of abstraction was what I took out of the book most of all.)

What do you guys think?

(Edit: Duh. The main article is about language. It's just that I can't read it online. *sigh* Off to the local library, I guess...)

Update on Wilbur and Orville

2008-05-22T13:05:20Z

Matt and I are now only foster parents, thankfully! After making the patio safe for small birds, we put the cage outside with the door open. As long as we keep the cats away from the door on the inside, the mother will come and feed the babies in the cage; she's sort of treating it like a substitute nest, as far as we can tell.

This is really great, because it means that we don't have to worry so much about them learning wild behaviors, and we don't have to feed them so often. We're still bringing them inside at night and feeding them when we bring them in. We know the mom is feeding them worms, and we introduced them to crickets last night. The crickets weren't a big hit, but they ate them, especially when we fed them a cricket and then a bit of baby birdie mush on top of that.

The saga continues...