Readers’ wildlife videos

June 11, 2018 • 8:15 am

I am having trouble braining today, so posting may be light. But there are two videos filling the wildlife slot. The first comes from Tara Tanaka in Florida (vimeo site here, flickr site here), who took some video of Bob the Bobcat, whose picture I posted yesterday. It’s not clear to either of us, though, whether “Bob” may be “Bobbie”, as the sex of this cat hasn’t been definitively determined.  Here are Tara’s notes, and I recommend you enlarge the video to its fullest:

I looked out the window and saw Bob in a trail that goes from our yard to the swamp. I tried to slip quietly out the back door onto the deck, but the sound of the door opening alerted him. He watched me as I walked slowly across the deck, gently put the tripod down, and squatted behind it. I started videoing him, and at first he just watched me, but soon he got up, stretched (check out his racing stripes!), and began walking toward me with his head lowered and mouth open. The closer he got and the more clearly I could see his teeth, the more I wondered if being so low in the sights of such a large bobcat was the best idea. It was quite a relief when he made his turn into the yard. He kept walking at the same speed, marking the bushes every 25′ or so until he was out of sight.

Note the spraying at 36 seconds in. You’ll recognize the title of the video from the song by The Clash:

As I said, the video feature of my point and shoot camera seems to be on the fritz, but I found this video of the ducklings foraging among the lily pads taken on May 20: three weeks ago. How they’ve grown. Honey makes a token appearance toward the end.

Monday: Hili dialogue

June 11, 2018 • 7:20 am

Another damn week has begun, but it’s a quiet one here at the University of Chicago, where the students will be gone until mid-September and classes won’t start until early October. It’s Monday, June 11, 2018, International Picnic Day. If you can pitch your blanket atop a border, do so. In Hawaii it’s Kamehameha Day, honoring the king who united the islands. Oh, and there are still eight ducklings and they’re getting big!

On this day in 1184 B.C., according to (dubious) calculations by Eratosthenes, Troy was sacked and burned. (But remember, Erastosthenes was the first to calculate the circumference of the Earth, and got it quite accurately.) On June 11, 1509, Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon, who was Queen for nearly 24 years, but left when Henry had the marriage annulled so he could wed Anne Boleyn. On this day in 1748, according to Wikipedia, “Denmark adopts the characteristic Nordic Cross flag later taken up by all other Scandinavian countries.” I didn’t realize that all Scandinavian countries had crosses on their flags. Even Iceland!  On this day in 1776, the Continental Congress appointed a committee to draft the Declaration of Independence. A committee seems a bad choice, but considering that it consisted of Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston, it turned out to be a good choice.  On this day in 1919, the horse Sir Barton won the Belmont Stakes, becoming the first horse to win America’s “Triple Crown.” As you may know, the horse Justify won the Triple Crown this weekend—the first Pferd to do so since American Pharoah in 2015 and, before that, Affirmed in 1978. If you missed the race, here it is, with Justify leading all the way.

On this day in 1955, the deadliest racing-car accident that ever happened occurred at the 24 hour Le Mans race: 83 spectators were killed and at least 100 injured after two cars collided. Here’s some raw footage, but if you’re squeamish don’t watch. One of the cars flies right into the crowd:

It is an infamous day in the history of civil rights in America, for it was on June 11, 1963, that Alabama Governor George Wallace, an unrepentant racist, stood in the door of the Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to prevent two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood (both now deceased), from registering. Later in the day, accompanied by National Guard troops federalized by John F. Kennedy, they were able to enter the building. And on that very same day, JFK addressed America from the Oval Office proposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ensuring all Americans equal access to public facilities, ending segregating in schools, and protecting voting rights. Although Kennedy was killed before the bill was passed, his successor Lyndon Johnson pushed the bill through in a feat of legislation and psychology detailed in Robert Caro’s masterpiece (one of four in the LBJ series so far) The Passage of Power.  Finally, on June 11, 2011, Timothy McVeigh was executed by lethal injection for helping carry out the Oklahoma City bombing.

Notables born on June 11 include Ben Jonson (1572), John Constable (1776), Richard Strauss (1864), Gene Wilder (1933), Joe Montana (1956), Hugh Laurie (1959), and the unctuous quack Dr. Mehmet Oz (1960). Those who departed this life on June 11 include Alexander the Great (323: didn’t I say this happened yesterday?), Timothy McVeigh (see above), David Brinkley (2003) and Ornette Coleman (2015).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili thinks herself a sage:

A: What can a cat tell humanity?
Hili: Everything.
In Polish:
Ja: Co może kot powiedzieć ludzkości?
Hili: Wszystko.
From reader Su: a gif of a grateful squirrel getting a drink from a kind man:

From Matthew, baby crocs hitchhiking a ride on mom:

https://twitter.com/mbystoma/status/1005517998378115073

Look at the gnashers on this marine iguana, the only such reptile in the world. It is, of course, endemic to the Galápagos.

A sheep shearer comes out of retirement. These guys know their business!

Well, a mandarin duck gives this wasp a run for the title of “most colorful creature in existence,” but this metallic hymenopteran is still magical:

“My cat ate my homework!” TRUEFACT.

But why did they put a slice on his head? That detracts from his dignity!

https://twitter.com/moodloop/status/1005804813513379840

The last leg of this relay race is amazing:

From reader Blue, a kid who has a great future in baseball (and by that I don’t mean the catcher!):

Sunday: Duck report

June 10, 2018 • 1:00 pm

I’ve fed the Anas platyrhynchos (there are still eight wee ones) twice today and now will go feed myself with goat and handmade tortillas at a Mexican birrieria.

This morning I fed them in the dark and rain, and couldn’t take any pictures. It’s still raining, and the duck island has become muddy. Rather than besmirch their lovely and downy breasts, the ducklings are resting on the bank, well guarded by my beloved hen Honey. And, as it’s a bit chilly, they’re huddled together for warmth. Here are two photos. What a good mom Honey is!

“Drunk on virtue”: Penguin Random House’s new diversity rules

June 10, 2018 • 11:45 am

Author Lionel Shriver, subject of several posts on this site, has become a vociferous opponent of the claim that authors cannot “culturally appropriate” the lives of those who don’t share their gender or ethnicity.  She’s also spoken out against literary censorship of the kind that would ban Huckleberry Finn from American public schools.  Now a letter from Penguin Random House (PRH, my publisher in the U.S.) has fallen into her hands. Apparently intended for authors and employees, it promotes the goal that “both our new hires and the authors we acquire. . reflect UK society by 2025.” That’s a clue that the letter is for the UK branch of PRH; were it my own US publisher, I’d be as irate as she about the questionnaire that, as she describes, was sent to PRH authors and potential employees.

Click on the screenshot below to see her short piece at the Spectator:

She’s brutally critical of the questionnaire:

The accompanying questionnaire for PRH authors is by turns fascinating, comical and depressing. Gender and ethnicity questions provide the coy ‘prefer not to say’ option, ensuring that being female or Japanese can remain your deep dark secret. As the old chocolate-or-vanilla sexes have multiplied into Baskin Robbins, responders to ‘How would you define your gender?’ may tick, ‘Prefer to use my own term’. In the pull-down menu under ‘How would you define your sexual orientation?’, ‘Bi’ and ‘Bisexual’ are listed as two completely different answers (what do these publishing worthies imagine ‘bi’ means?). Not subsumed by that mere ‘gender’ enquiry, out of only ten questions, ‘Do you identify as trans?’ merits a whole separate query — for 0.1 per cent of the population. (Thus with a staff of about 2,000, PRH will need to hire exactly two). You can self-classify as disabled, and three sequential questions obviously hope to elicit that you’ve been as badly educated as humanly possible.

And check out the ethnicity pull-down. ‘Asian or Asian British’ may specify ‘Indian,’ ‘Bangladeshi, ‘Chinese’, or ‘Pakistan’; the correct adjectival form of the latter nationality seems to be mysteriously unprintable. ‘Black or Black British’ may identify as ‘Caribbean’ or ‘African’. ‘Mixed’ allows for the options ‘White and Black African’, ‘White and Black Caribbean’, and ‘White and Asian’, but any other combo is merely ‘Mixed: Other’. As for us crackers, there’s ‘White: British’, ‘White: Irish’, and ‘White: Gypsy or Irish Traveller’, but the rest can only tick ‘White: Other’.

Let’s unpack that pull-down. If your office is chocka with Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Germans, Danes, Finns, Bosnians, Hungarians, Czechs, Russians, Americans, Canadians, Australians, Kiwis, Argentines, Guatemalans, Mexicans, Romanians who aren’t travellers and South African Jews — I could go on — together speaking dozens of languages and bringing to their workplace a richly various historical and cultural legacy, the entire workforce could be categorised as ‘White: Other’. Your office is not diverse.

Sadly, I have no access to the questionnaire. I didn’t get one, as I write for PRH US.

Shriver has a point here, although the rest of her article is a bit overly heated. Perhaps PRH is going about this in a ludicrous way, but it’s not out of line to see if there is indeed a bias—not among authors, but among employees. As I’ve seen from my own dealings with publishers, I don’t think they care much about the ethnicity or gender of their authors so long as they produce books that are good and books that will sell. When your agent submits a prospectus to a publisher like PRH, nobody specifies your ethnicity, though I suppose your gender may be revealed by your name. But perhaps it’s worth examining if the publisher itself employs a paucity  of minorities, and then to figure out why. If it’s bias, fix it. If it’s for other reasons, like differential interests of different groups or a small hiring pool of minorities, ponder whether any action is necessary.

Shriver sees two problems with this kind of diversity vetting. The first is that it neglects other kinds of diversity, including that of “life experience”.  As we all know, promoting diversity has largely become a euphemism for “acquire more oppressed minorities,” and by “oppressed” it means “brown, black, or female.” Readers may ponder if this kind of diversity is the only kind worth striving for. I, for one, think it must go beyond this.

Second, and more convincingly, the search for “more diverse authors” may dilute the quality of a publisher’s output. As she says,

. . . dazzled by this very highest of social goods, many of our institutions have ceased to understand what they are for. Drunk on virtue, Penguin Random House no longer regards the company’s raison d’être as the acquisition and dissemination of good books. Rather, the organisation aims to mirror the percentages of minorities in the UK population with statistical precision. Thus from now until 2025, literary excellence will be secondary to ticking all those ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual preference and crap-education boxes. We can safely infer from that email that if an agent submits a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published, whether or not said manuscript is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling. Good luck with that business model. Publishers may eschew standards, but readers will still have some.

The last sentence sounds a bit bitter and, frankly, a bit bigoted. Nobody wants to read bad books just because they’re written by “diverse voices,” but there is a point in looking more widely for those voices. After all, minority readers do want to read about people like themselves. Not always, to be sure; and the best literature, even if written by a minority member or portraying a minority culture, should appeal to people from many backgrounds, regardless of gender, nationality, or pigmentation.  The question is whether Penguin really will reduce their literary standards to “mirror the UK population”. I doubt it. But they might have a look at their employees.

h/t: Michael

Suicide is not a “selfish” act

June 10, 2018 • 9:00 am

A fair number of people are criticizing Anthony Bourdain post mortem by claiming his act was “selfish”: the implication being that he should have thought about the people he’d leave behind (including the critics) before doing the deed.

This is not only selfish on the part of the critics, who make their own feelings the center of attention, but also ignorant about what many who contemplate suicide are really thinking.  From my own experience and talking to others, I gather that they’re not thinking, “Wait a minute: maybe I should think about the the people I’ll leave behind. They’ll be devastated.” In reality, most, I suspect, are thinking, “I”m in pain and I want it to end.”

The same goes for those, like Rose McGowan, who claim that the suicidal person is thinking “The world will be better off without me.” I suspect that’s not common, either.

I have no patience for those who have only anger for those who kill themselves, or who tut-tut about the selfishness of the suicide. Sadness, bafflement, empathy—those are more rational emotions. Anger is corrosive, as are accusations of selfishness. And remember, even with drugs and counseling, and the help of good friends and loved ones, not everybody can be helped. (I am not, of course, advocating that you don’t try to help someone in trouble.)

To see how one can make a suicide about oneself and one’s feelings of anger instead of about the deceased, have a gander at actor Val Kilmer’s incoherent rant on Facebook.  A few excerpts:

#anthonybourdainisdead
Oh the darkness.

Oh the dark thick pain of loss. The selfishness.

How many moments away were you from feeling the love that was universal. From every corner of the world you were loved. So selfish. You’ve given us cause to be so angry. A spiritual guide once told me suicide is the most selfish act a human can execute and I was confused but she explained there’s just no mental place further away from humanity and purpose than the hypnotized numbness that creates the false picture of despair, that forces the victim, unaware, to believe, life’s legacy is over. That there is no more service. No more task. No more love left to give to another to to be given. Nothing to heal.

. . . . o what? I hear you took your life in paris. What hotel? Did you relapse? Did you just get home from the best meal of your life? Did you cheat on your girl. Those of us that knew you are shocked and angry and angry and angry selfishly angry, for what you just did to us. Millions I should think. At least a million people like me who imagine they know you. Some imagine they know you even well. But you heard that phone ringing, you felt it buzzing in your coat or pants pocket, vibrating a million times, but you didn’t answer it. You let it ring out. Did you bleed out? Did you suffocate? Did you jump. No you didn’t jump. Is it important we know how you did it? No. But that you did it. One of the tentative titles of my new studio is Bourdains.

You could have and should have given it one more shot. Sometimes we must live in service to another’s life and live with no hope of equality. Life isn’t fair that way. Who says you had a right to take away all this love from us so soon? Oh the darkness. The darkness on the edge of town.

Theres a lot more, but it doesn’t show much sympathy for Bourdain, a man worthy of great respect who must have been in great pain. All Kilmer’s rantings do is show what a jerk Kilmer is.

Here are some nice tributes:

https://twitter.com/evanrachelwood/status/1005160318073430016

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 10, 2018 • 7:45 am

Reader Joe Dickinson has sent in a last installment of photos of the Galápagos (photos of Australia to come). His notes are indented:

The Galapagos penguin (Spheniscus mendiculus) is, implausibly, found on the equator.

Superficially similar, the Galapagos flightless cormorant (Phalacrocorax harrisi) has vestigial wings.  Flightless forms are, of course, common on islands.

OK, cuteness alert: a Galápagos sea lion pup (Zalophus wollebaeki):

And a juxtaposition of two tetrapods that have made the transition back to a partially aquatic habit; some sea lion pups as above and a marine iguana (Amblyrhynchus cristatus).

A mockingbird (Mimus parvulus), Espanola Island variety.

We saw a small number of flamingos (Phoenicopterus ruber).

A green sea turtle (Chelonia agassizii) viewed while snorkeling:

A couple of marine iguanas (Amblyrhynchus cristatus).  They are quite variable in color.

A brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis) with a pile of marine iguanas behind and some Sally lightfoot crabs (Grapsus grapsus) off to the side.

Clusters of marine iguanas can be quite impressive.

Sunday: Hili dialogue

June 10, 2018 • 6:45 am

Well, the academic year here is at an end and the campus will be empty all summer. Graduation was yesterday, and now it’s a quiet Sunday, June 10, 2018: National Iced Tea Day.  This morning it was raining hard (lucky it wasn’t this bad during yesterday’s Convocation) and I was worried that the pond level would rise, inundating the tree islands and eliminating resting space for the ducks. Fortunately, that hasn’t yet happened, but the level is still rising. While checking the pond at 6 a.m., I saw a big shadow and eight smaller shadows emerged from the darkness, waddling toward me on the grass. It was, of course, Honey and her hungry brood, and I immediately went upstairs to get corn and duckling chow to feed them. I’m now soaked, but the ducks are well fed and, for the nonce, have energy to swim.  I am pathetic, for the purpose of my life has become to help a mallard hen fledge 8 ducklings.

Today’s Google Doodle is a game celebrating garden gnomes (you can get to it by clicking on the screenshot below). As C|Net notes:

To celebrate our obsession with the figurines, Google on Sunday dedicated an interactive game doodle to teaching us how they’re made — and how far they’ll fly by applying the optimum trajectory. Using the keyboard’s space bar to start the doodle’s catapult swing, players tap a second time to launch their clay figure as far into their garden as they can. The further your gnome goes, the more flowers (and points) you get.

You can experiment with different shapes, weights and bounciness to make your gnome travel further. (Pro tip: Tap the down-arrow button in the lower right corner of the game before your gnome hits the ground to get extra bounce and distance.)

There’s a bit of Angry Birds in this, but without the destruction on the other side. Have a little fun with yet another of Google’s addicting game doodles.

I’m not much of a gamer, and haven’t played it, but go try your skill:

On this day in 1793, the Jardin des Plantes museum opened in Paris, and a year later became the first public zoo. I spent many pleasant hours in the gardens and Museum when I worked for a month at Paris VI nearby.  On June 10, 1829, the first boat race between Oxford and Cambridge took place on the Thames in London. I can’t be arsed to look up who won. In New Zealand in 1885, Mount Tarawera erupted, killing 153 and burying two of the great attractions of that country, the Pink and White Terraces.  In 1916, Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, declared the Arab revolt against the Ottoman empire. Famous to us because of T. E. Lawrence’s participation, it was a display of skill and bravery by everyone fighting the Turks. Here’s a photo of the Arab delegation at the Versailles Conference that declared an end to WWI.  The caption from Wikipedia:  “Left to right: Rustum Haidar, Nuri as-Said, Prince Faisal (front), Captain Pisani (rear), T. E. Lawrence, Faisal’s slave (name unknown), Captain Hassan Khadri.”

Prince Faisal looks pretty much as he did in the movie, where he was played by Alec Guinness:

On June 10, 1935, after Dr. Robert Smith took his last drink, he and Bill Wilson started Alcoholics Anonymous in Akron, Ohio.  Exactly 7 years later, the Nazis razed the Czech village of Lidice, killed all its men over age 16, and sending the women to concentration camps in reprisal for the assassination of Nazi Reinhard Heydrich.  On this day in 1944, Joe Nuxhall pitched 2/3 of an inning for the Cincinnati Reds, becoming the youngest player ever to participate in a major-league baseball game. He was just 15 (there was a player shortage during the war). Exactly two decades later, the U.S. Senate ended a 75-day filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and this landmark bill was quickly passed (LBJ was instrumental in its passage).

Notables born on this day include Hattie McDaniel (1895), Prince Philip (1921), Judy Garland (1922), Maurice Sendak (1928), biologist E. O. Wilson (1929), Elizabeth Hurley (1965), Kate Snow (1969; I’ll watch her on the NBC News tonight), Tara Lipinski (1982), and Kate Upton (1992). Those who croaked on this day include Alexander the Great (323 B.C.; are they sure?), Antoni Gaudi (1926), Jack Johnson (1946), Spencer Tracy (1967), Ray Charles (2004), and Gordie Howe (2016).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili seems to be afflicted again with a bad case of narcissism:

Hili: I hope that you understand how important it is?
A: What?
Hili: To look good.
In Polish:
Hili: Chyba rozumiesz jakie to ważne?
Ja: Co takiego?
Hili: Żebym dobrze wyglądała.

And in Winnipeg, we have “Gus in the garden”:

 

Some tweets from Grania. About the first one she asserts, “This is what I’ve been saying all along.”

Trump is behaving badly at the G-7 summit, as usual. And soon he’ll meet Kim Jong-un, which should be good for a few laughs.

Stephen Fry introduced an odious NRA tweet about gun silencers like this:

The tweet at issue; be sure to watch the video:

As I’ve long maintained, the British don’t know how to make a proper sandwich, though many readers object, claiming that the sandwiches are getting better. Yes they are, but they’re still pretty dire, consisting of a thin filling between two pieces of forgettable bread. And they sometimes have “SWEETCORN” (as opposed to SOURCORN) in them!  Here’s a tweet showing some British sandwiches from 1972, sent by Dr. Matthew Cobb. I’ll add a quote from Douglas Adams contributed by Grania:

“There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do. “Make ’em dry,” is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, “make ’em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing ’em once a week.” It is by eating sandwiches in pubs on Saturday lunchtimes that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They’re not altogether clear what those sins are, and don’t want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever their sins are they are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat.”

More from Matthew: a beetle mimicking a bee, a cool example of Batesian mimicry:

Definitive refutation of a flat earth:

https://twitter.com/_youhadonejob1/status/1005255833008123905

A video of a beetle feeding on a tree:

Who doesn’t love puffins?

Matthew was insistent that I show his tweet, and he’s right in his claim. See here for the proof.