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Furry little guests
4 July 2016 06:39 pmSo this is who came to visit us this afternoon. I want to hug them, but I suspect they might object, in their small bitey way.
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Cutest. Thing. EVER.
15 December 2014 09:57 pmI am dying of adorable overload:
(click through for story)
(click through for story)
...you're right.
This very cool infographic shows pay for men and women by state. Nice going, Louisiana and Wyoming.
Also, Happy World Octopus Day!!
This very cool infographic shows pay for men and women by state. Nice going, Louisiana and Wyoming.
Also, Happy World Octopus Day!!
I hear the rains down in Africa
7 October 2014 11:03 pmAn evocative and beautiful blog post today from photographer Mark Deeble: Raindrops in the dust, about the first storm in months coming to Tsavo in Kenya. His description of how things come to life in the aftermath (the baby leopard tortoises!) is amazing -- right up there with the best of the nature writers.
I started following Mark's blog after I saw some of his photographs and read his piece on Satao, last of the big tuskers. My grandparents loved Africa; they went on safari to Kenya several times, and one of my treasured possessions is a photocopied set of my grandmother's letters home to her daughters (my mom and two younger sisters) during a trip in the 1950s.
So I have a soft spot in my heart for the wildlife there, not just because they're beautiful and so, so precariously balanced on the edge of extinction, but also because they make me think of my grandparents. Mark's blog is a wonderful way to feel like I'm really there.
I started following Mark's blog after I saw some of his photographs and read his piece on Satao, last of the big tuskers. My grandparents loved Africa; they went on safari to Kenya several times, and one of my treasured possessions is a photocopied set of my grandmother's letters home to her daughters (my mom and two younger sisters) during a trip in the 1950s.
So I have a soft spot in my heart for the wildlife there, not just because they're beautiful and so, so precariously balanced on the edge of extinction, but also because they make me think of my grandparents. Mark's blog is a wonderful way to feel like I'm really there.
Wireless mouse
1 March 2014 11:06 pmSo it's still snowing here (ugh) but Mr Psmith and I were amused the other morning to wake up and see that the nasty weather hasn't stopped the mice in the neighborhood from venturing out on their daily rounds. I can only imagine what their sub-surface tunnels must look like, and how annoying it must be when the walls start to melt!
View from our front porch:
Close-up of the plunge into the snowbank:
Close-up of the plunge into the snowbank:
Our little girl out for a walk
25 February 2014 09:14 pm"Little" being a relative term. Eeeeeeeeek!
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Heffalumps
20 October 2013 01:04 pm"So did I," said Pooh, wondering what a Heffalump was like.
"You don't often see them," said Christopher Robin carelessly.
"Not now," said Piglet.
"Not at this time of the year," said Pooh.
Lots of elephant-y things have crossed my path lately. A recent issue of The Economist focused on biodiversity and conservation included a fascinating piece on the success of a demand-side approach to reducing elephant poaching. Back in the 1980s Japan was the largest importer of ivory, at something like 500 tons a year. A group called Traffic launched a campaign to basically make ivory uncool:
[Traffic] worked on the newspapers and helped persuade them to write anti-ivory editorials. But the big breakthrough...came when Britain’s Prince Philip gave a rousing speech at an event organised by the World Wildlife Fund, which encouraged Japan’s crown prince to speak out. “It was the first time that Japanese royalty had taken a stance on a wildlife issue. It was an amazing moment,” says Mr Milliken. Ivory became uncool.
Japanese ivory imports today are down by 90%, to roughly 5 tons a year. Isn't that incredible?? ::does happy dance::
So after that the elephant population rebounded pretty well, but in recent years two things have caused elephant killings to go up again. One is demand in China. To combat this, a group called WildAid is trying the same approach as was done in Japan, only using celebrities, sort of the Chinese version of royalty, I guess. (The picture of the giant basketball player next to the baby elephant is just adorable!) WildAid was really successful in a recent campaign to reduce demand for shark fins in China, so there's a good chance this could help. ::does hopeful dance::
The other problem, though, is terrorists -- Al Shabab, for example, who killed all those people at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi. They're using poached ivory to fund their activities. And these aren't some local yokel with a 20-year-old rifle. These guys are organized and they have higher-tech equipment, like night vision goggles and laser scopes, and their effect on the elephants is devastating. The LA Times and Huffington Post both recently ran stories about the ivory/terrorism connection. If there were no market for ivory, these guys couldn't make money on it and they'd leave the elephants alone. Sadly, this also has an indirect death toll because it leaves orphan baby elephants who aren't old enough to survive on their own. ::does sad dance::
This is the sort of thing that makes me wish that homo was more sapiens, or at least that our position at the top of the food chain was automatically accompanied by compassion and rationality...
Well, then yesterday I got a newsletter from the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, an elephant rescue operation I've contributed to for years in honor of my grandparents. The DSWT is an organization in Kenya that rescues/raises orphan baby elephants and then returns them to the wild. They're a fantastic organization, founded by a British woman (Dame Daphne Sheldrick) but staffed and run largely by native Kenyans, and the work they do is incredibly important. The newsletter mentioned that they're currently doing a fund-raising campaign -- sponsored by Kristen Davis of Sex and the City, of all people! -- on crowdrise, including a video with some beautiful footage of elephants in the wild. This gave me mixed emotions because yay! publicity and they're doing well with their campaign, but sad :( that they are busier than ever with so many orphaned elephants to care for.
Christmas is coming -- maybe you know somebody who's hard to buy for? You could contribute to the campaign in their name, or foster a baby elephant in their honor!
Post-vacation catch-up (I)
22 July 2013 11:27 pmTomorrow there will be pictures of lobsters and sailboats and osprey and swing bridges. Today, the first step in post-vacation catch-up: reviews of the books I read while away.
You wouldn't think that anyone could make four-hundred-plus pages of trudging through dust and heat intriguing. And yet somehow Lessing does it. The very end was a bit of an anti-climax, and I didn't really find it credible that Certain People (who shall remain nameless to prevent spoilage) could successfully track Mara and Dann across an entire continent that's decaying into anarchy and chaos. But if you can look past those two points, it's an interesting take on a distant-future slow-motion environmental collapse.
This is a funny, occasionally warm, sometimes biting, and in places rather horrifying satire on gender. In the world of Egalia's Daughters absolutely everything gender-related (except the actual act of giving birth) is reversed: females are in charge of the government, hold most of the important jobs, and make all the decisions for the family, while males stay home, curl their beards, gossip and raise the children. The reversal extends even to language itself: females are wom (sing.) and wim (pl.) while males are manwom (sing.) and menwim (pl.) -- since it was translated from the Norwegian, major kudos go to the translator for successfully retaining such nuances. Written in the late 1970s during the height of the feminist movement, its historical context is reflected in the story in the form of agitation for equal rights for menwim(!). While I expected story elements like menwim being "homemakers" and wim running the country, the story incorporates the entire spectrum of gender-related experiences, including rape and domestic abuse; in some cases it was downright startling to realize how, even today, society is less appalled by certain behaviors from men than they would be from women. The preceding 200+ pages do such a good job that the last chapter, which consists of the opening paragraphs of a novel the main character is writing about a fantasy world where men are in charge, actually seems weird. Definitely worth a read.
An energetic blending of the sword and sorcery of Michael Moorcock, the mysterious jungle cities of H. Rider Haggard, and the lonely -- possibly mad -- knight-errantry of Don Quixote, with a smattering of H.P. Lovecraft. Solomon Kane is an incarnation of the Eternal Hero; he doesn't remember where he came from, but he has occasional fleeting memories of a far-distant past in which he -- or some earlier incarnation of himself -- battled the Old Gods of fear and darkness as proto-humanity tried to free itself from their bloody grip. And like The Gunslinger (Stephen King's high opinion of Howard is quoted on the front cover), Solomon Kane doesn't know where he's going, only that he is bound to protect the innocent, battle evil, and go forward towards an unknown destiny. (There is, alas, a discomforting racist element to the stories set in Africa; one paragraph in particular is a paean to the Aryan race's strength, intelligence, military abilities, etc. Like Haggard, he was a product of his times, I guess.) That aside, these are tremendously fun adventure tales in the classic Indiana Jones or Allan Quatermaine style, with a dusting of morals/metaphysics. Evil is always defeated, the damsel is always rescued, and the good guy always wins. (Admittedly, sometimes the good guy is the only one who survives, but hey, he is the hero, right?)
I re-read this on vacation last week. I'd forgotten what fun it is :) Milady the thoroughly evil, a sort of 17th-century Black Widow; d'Artagnan so chivalrously romantic, falling in love at first sight; Porthos the lovably pompous goofball, gambling away his horse and inveigling a replacement from his wealthy little old lady; Athos, very obviously A Man With A Secret; Aramis so endearingly bipolar ("I'm going to be a priest...no, she loves me!...no, I'm going to be a priest..."). And oh, the melodrama, the desperate races against time to foil yet another plot, the swordfights and duels and feathered hats! What more could one ask?
Best rat-and-mouse story ever, bar none. I so much wish there was a sequel -- I want to know how they're doing in that valley. (And I don't care what anyone says, Justin isn't dead!)
You wouldn't think that anyone could make four-hundred-plus pages of trudging through dust and heat intriguing. And yet somehow Lessing does it. The very end was a bit of an anti-climax, and I didn't really find it credible that Certain People (who shall remain nameless to prevent spoilage) could successfully track Mara and Dann across an entire continent that's decaying into anarchy and chaos. But if you can look past those two points, it's an interesting take on a distant-future slow-motion environmental collapse.This is a funny, occasionally warm, sometimes biting, and in places rather horrifying satire on gender. In the world of Egalia's Daughters absolutely everything gender-related (except the actual act of giving birth) is reversed: females are in charge of the government, hold most of the important jobs, and make all the decisions for the family, while males stay home, curl their beards, gossip and raise the children. The reversal extends even to language itself: females are wom (sing.) and wim (pl.) while males are manwom (sing.) and menwim (pl.) -- since it was translated from the Norwegian, major kudos go to the translator for successfully retaining such nuances. Written in the late 1970s during the height of the feminist movement, its historical context is reflected in the story in the form of agitation for equal rights for menwim(!). While I expected story elements like menwim being "homemakers" and wim running the country, the story incorporates the entire spectrum of gender-related experiences, including rape and domestic abuse; in some cases it was downright startling to realize how, even today, society is less appalled by certain behaviors from men than they would be from women. The preceding 200+ pages do such a good job that the last chapter, which consists of the opening paragraphs of a novel the main character is writing about a fantasy world where men are in charge, actually seems weird. Definitely worth a read. An energetic blending of the sword and sorcery of Michael Moorcock, the mysterious jungle cities of H. Rider Haggard, and the lonely -- possibly mad -- knight-errantry of Don Quixote, with a smattering of H.P. Lovecraft. Solomon Kane is an incarnation of the Eternal Hero; he doesn't remember where he came from, but he has occasional fleeting memories of a far-distant past in which he -- or some earlier incarnation of himself -- battled the Old Gods of fear and darkness as proto-humanity tried to free itself from their bloody grip. And like The Gunslinger (Stephen King's high opinion of Howard is quoted on the front cover), Solomon Kane doesn't know where he's going, only that he is bound to protect the innocent, battle evil, and go forward towards an unknown destiny. (There is, alas, a discomforting racist element to the stories set in Africa; one paragraph in particular is a paean to the Aryan race's strength, intelligence, military abilities, etc. Like Haggard, he was a product of his times, I guess.) That aside, these are tremendously fun adventure tales in the classic Indiana Jones or Allan Quatermaine style, with a dusting of morals/metaphysics. Evil is always defeated, the damsel is always rescued, and the good guy always wins. (Admittedly, sometimes the good guy is the only one who survives, but hey, he is the hero, right?)I re-read this on vacation last week. I'd forgotten what fun it is :) Milady the thoroughly evil, a sort of 17th-century Black Widow; d'Artagnan so chivalrously romantic, falling in love at first sight; Porthos the lovably pompous goofball, gambling away his horse and inveigling a replacement from his wealthy little old lady; Athos, very obviously A Man With A Secret; Aramis so endearingly bipolar ("I'm going to be a priest...no, she loves me!...no, I'm going to be a priest..."). And oh, the melodrama, the desperate races against time to foil yet another plot, the swordfights and duels and feathered hats! What more could one ask?Best rat-and-mouse story ever, bar none. I so much wish there was a sequel -- I want to know how they're doing in that valley. (And I don't care what anyone says, Justin isn't dead!)
I so much wanted to love Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, with its odd photographs and mysterious grandfather and menacing hollow creatures and, well, peculiar children, but I couldn't, not quite. I enjoyed it, but I didn't love it. The use of photographs was clever, the idea of living inside a time loop intriguing if a bit fuzzy in its logic, but I had two biggish problems with the book as a whole.The first is a lack of good pacing/tightness. Ideally a book hooks you immediately, the tension gradually ratchets up as you go on, until you have a nice big finale. In this case, most of the gripping stuff came at the beginning; although the rest has some good bits it struck me as somewhat meandering and unfocused. The second was that the main character, rather than maturing through the course of the book, seems instead to become more childish (perhaps it's a side effect of hanging out with beings that have been children for 80+ years?). I can't recall when/if his age is given, but based on how he's presented at the beginning I would have guessed him to be 17 or 18; by the end he comes across more like a 13 or 14-year-old.
Then there's the fact that it's obviously a setup for a sequel, which I didn't know ahead of time and which was therefore irritating. (Does no one write good standalone novels any more??) So all in all, I give it a resounding "Meh."
Lives up to the title, "Year's Best." The best collection of short-form SF I've read in quite a while. All the stories are top-notch, with a wide mix of voices, settings, topics, length, styles and approaches. There are tales of post-apocalypse, space adventure and genetic modification; there are children and old men and guitar-playing dinosaurs and even a sort of steam-punk female Napoleon.The only disappointment was the last one, a modern riff on the Benandanti -- I'm a fan of updated/retold folklore and fairy tales and I don't mind unreliable narrators or meta-fiction so I was intrigued at first, but in the end this comes across as too self-conscious an exercise in cleverness by both the narrator and the author.
Now, what to read next?? I can't decide if I want to re-read The Stand (about which Mr Psmith and I had a rousing debate last night, regarding the absence of a religious element among the bad guys) or tackle 11/22/63. I also have to finish Swansea Girl. Lots to do!
(N.B. The fact that I am STILL getting ZERO notifications from LJ, and my ISP apparently can't be bothered to look into it or even respond, is SERIOUSLY vexing me...)
Our local zoo does occasional special fund-raising events focused on a particular animal. You pays your money and you get to come to the zoo in the evening, have drinks and hors d'oeuvres, the keepers give a little talk about the species (both in general and specifically about the ones at our zoo), and then you get to do some kind of special behind-the-scenes activity. We've done several of them: for the lions, we got to get up close near their cage (you could feel them eying you, thinking "Hm, they look tasty..."), for the primates we got to watch a training session, etc. So Mr Psmith and I went to one on Thursday about penguins and the special thing was...we got to actually pet a baby penguin!!! It was so amazing, so soft and warm since it still had all its downy grey baby feathers. Very sweet.
The zoo is also doing major construction work, and as we were leaving we saw they had posted this on the chain-link fence surrounding the construction area, which we giggled over and thought rawther clever esp. the bit about "loud vocalizations lol :)
The zoo is also doing major construction work, and as we were leaving we saw they had posted this on the chain-link fence surrounding the construction area, which we giggled over and thought rawther clever esp. the bit about "loud vocalizations lol :)
People that make me happy
12 March 2013 10:04 pmI thought today I'd share two news stories that made me really happy in the past couple of weeks.
First, an eleven-year-old Masai boy from Kenya named Richard Turere. He's invented a cheap low-tech lion repellent -- a way to keep lions from chowing down on his family's herd of cattle. Lion predation on livestock is the number one reason locals kill them (Kenya's lion population has dropped from 15,000 ten years ago to about 2,000 today), so anything that keep them away is good for the cattle, good for the humans, and really good for the lions, though they may not know it. He wired up a bunch of LEDs to an old car battery powered by a solar panel, and the moving lights make it look like somebody is out roaming around and the lions stay away. Is that brilliant or what?? Many other villages are now installing these things, and it's working like gangbusters. He's now 13, and the Kenya Land Conservation Trust has gotten him a scholarship to go to school and study engineering. Yay!!
Second, the men of Phi Alpha Tau at Emerson College in Boston. They fund-raised on IndieGogo to help one of their brothers pay for his gender change from female to male, when his insurance company declined to cover the surgery. A fraternity, can you believe it?? They raised $16K; the extra is being donated to the Jim Collins Foundation, which helps fund sex change surgery (they call it "gender-confirming surgery" -- new phrase? never heard it before) for those who can't afford it. You guys rock, man. Best fraternity ever.
It's things like this that give me hope :)
First, an eleven-year-old Masai boy from Kenya named Richard Turere. He's invented a cheap low-tech lion repellent -- a way to keep lions from chowing down on his family's herd of cattle. Lion predation on livestock is the number one reason locals kill them (Kenya's lion population has dropped from 15,000 ten years ago to about 2,000 today), so anything that keep them away is good for the cattle, good for the humans, and really good for the lions, though they may not know it. He wired up a bunch of LEDs to an old car battery powered by a solar panel, and the moving lights make it look like somebody is out roaming around and the lions stay away. Is that brilliant or what?? Many other villages are now installing these things, and it's working like gangbusters. He's now 13, and the Kenya Land Conservation Trust has gotten him a scholarship to go to school and study engineering. Yay!!
Second, the men of Phi Alpha Tau at Emerson College in Boston. They fund-raised on IndieGogo to help one of their brothers pay for his gender change from female to male, when his insurance company declined to cover the surgery. A fraternity, can you believe it?? They raised $16K; the extra is being donated to the Jim Collins Foundation, which helps fund sex change surgery (they call it "gender-confirming surgery" -- new phrase? never heard it before) for those who can't afford it. You guys rock, man. Best fraternity ever.
It's things like this that give me hope :)
:: Ecotopia
6 August 2011 12:56 pmThe Pacific Northwest secedes and forms a new country, Ecotopia, based on a steady-state (i.e., sustainable) model rather than the perpetual-growth model that is capitalism. A journalist from the U.S. on an official visit writes columns on various aspects of Ecotopian society: education, health care, working habits, sex, etc. The book's 1970s roots show through in places, particularly in race and gender attitudes, but taken all in all it's an interesting piece of work.
The book alternates between the narrator's personal journal kept during the trip and the columns he files with his newspaper back in the U.S., so you get both facts and personal experiences/interpretation. The Ecotopian solutions to problems like pollution, unemployment, welfare etc. are presented somewhat simplistically, but the author's intent was simply to suggest plausible alternative modes of thinking about success, progress, happiness, love, work, and so on, not to lay out a detailed blueprint of how to execute it. By and large I think he succeeds, if not with the elegance of his predecessor Sir Thomas More. (Speaking of which, did you know that the full title of More's Utopia is "A Truly Golden Little Book, No Less Beneficial Than Entertaining, of the Best State of a Republic, and of the New Island Utopia" ? Quite a mouthful.)
I'm not sure how workable some of the ideas are (people quit work at the drop of a hat to have a beer-and-pot party, for example, yet somehow they're productive enough they only need to work 20 hours a a week) but they're all thought-provoking. Whether the hippy-dippy laid-back attitudes that he describes would be capable of producing the new technology that Ecotopia relies on is debatable, but it's refreshing to be shown another worldview to contrast with our mass-produced, mass-marketed, over-commercialized worship of more/bigger/faster, particularly after the last decade of Double Plus Ungood events (9/11, two wars, economic collapse, etc.). Bottom line: definitely a book with an agenda, not great literature, but an interesting read that should stimulate your little gray cells.
In other news, I've started on Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind, and holy #@&*^ is it good. So well-written that you almost immediately forget you're reading and feel rather that you're living it, seeing events with your own eyes. It's rare writing that goes straight into you like that without, apparently, passing through the eyes or requiring translation by the brain. I'm in awe of his skill.
The book alternates between the narrator's personal journal kept during the trip and the columns he files with his newspaper back in the U.S., so you get both facts and personal experiences/interpretation. The Ecotopian solutions to problems like pollution, unemployment, welfare etc. are presented somewhat simplistically, but the author's intent was simply to suggest plausible alternative modes of thinking about success, progress, happiness, love, work, and so on, not to lay out a detailed blueprint of how to execute it. By and large I think he succeeds, if not with the elegance of his predecessor Sir Thomas More. (Speaking of which, did you know that the full title of More's Utopia is "A Truly Golden Little Book, No Less Beneficial Than Entertaining, of the Best State of a Republic, and of the New Island Utopia" ? Quite a mouthful.)
I'm not sure how workable some of the ideas are (people quit work at the drop of a hat to have a beer-and-pot party, for example, yet somehow they're productive enough they only need to work 20 hours a a week) but they're all thought-provoking. Whether the hippy-dippy laid-back attitudes that he describes would be capable of producing the new technology that Ecotopia relies on is debatable, but it's refreshing to be shown another worldview to contrast with our mass-produced, mass-marketed, over-commercialized worship of more/bigger/faster, particularly after the last decade of Double Plus Ungood events (9/11, two wars, economic collapse, etc.). Bottom line: definitely a book with an agenda, not great literature, but an interesting read that should stimulate your little gray cells.
In other news, I've started on Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind, and holy #@&*^ is it good. So well-written that you almost immediately forget you're reading and feel rather that you're living it, seeing events with your own eyes. It's rare writing that goes straight into you like that without, apparently, passing through the eyes or requiring translation by the brain. I'm in awe of his skill.
