Having spent a day contemplating the creepiness that is Sarah Palin’s hypertrophied self-esteem, I needed something to cleanse my mental palate, so to speak. Fortunately, the newly discovered Bug Girl’s Blog had just the thing: I have pubic lice in my mailbox.
As much as that sounds like a euphemism, it isn’t.
It’s a weird paradox of my life: I’ve lived under some of the darkest skies in the country (at 9,000 feet in the Eastern Sierra), as well as under some of the brightest (in Los Angeles). And while I’ve been an amateur astronomer for most of my adult life, spanning both those times, my interest in stargazing has waxed and waned in inverse (and perverse) relationship with the darkness of the sky under which I’ve lived. That is, I’ve been more interested in looking at the sky at precisely those times when it was least visible, and vice versa.
I think this says something about human nature. Or at least about my nature.
Anyway, the above YouTube clip from Ant 220 of Pinky’s Ant Farm expresses quite succinctly and profoundly how I feel about the sky. Highly recommended.
Courtesy of Paul at work, and then Beck (curse you), here are a bunch of funny cat pictures as helpfully stolen and reposted collated by the folks at Meme Cats.
Never shy about stealing and reposting collating myself, I herewith enclose a few of my favorites:
Capsule review of my holiday cinema-going:
Happy Feet: Unexpectedly awesome, and proof that you don’t have to be a kid to enjoy a CGI animal movie. Casino Royale: Expectedly just a Bond movie, and confirmation that yes, I really did outgrow that genre sometime in late adolescence.
A fun little link, with photos reposted from Swiss design student Geoffrey Cottenceau’s thesis project, in which he dresses himself up as various animals using common items from the closet. Um, it’s more impressive than it sounds.
More of Cottenceau’s cool projects at gneborg.org.
Thanks to Hiro for the link.
I actually recorded this a week ago Friday, but didn’t get around to posting until now. Apologies for the delay. Anyway: Lies.com podcast 18.
In this installment:
Enjoy!
Jack Hitt has an interesting piece in the New York Times Magazine: 13 Ways of Looking at an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. It does a good job of explaining the way that rare-bird sightings are treated in the world of high-stakes birding.
Soon after the original declaration of the discovery was made last April, controversy broke out, and it quickly got nasty. The ugliness derives from something deep in the heart of birding. Most people think of birding as either a science worthy of a word like “ornithology” or a harmless hobby pursued by rubber-faced old men in porkpie hats. But the act of birding, ultimately, is an act of storytelling. For instance, if someone said to you, “I saw this cardinal fly out of nowhere with yellow tips on its wings and land on the side of a tree,” even the least experienced amateur would counter that cardinals don’t have yellow wingtips and don’t cling to trees but rather perch on branches. Each bird is a tiny protagonist in a tale of natural history, the story of a niche told in a vivid language of color, wing shape, body design, habitat, bill size, movement, flying style and perching habits. The more you know about each individual bird, the better you are at telling this tale.
Claiming to have seen rare birds requires a more delicate form of storytelling and implies a connoisseur’s depth of knowledge. Saying “I saw an ivory-bill’s long black neck and white trailing feathers” requires roughly the same panache as tasting an ancient Bordeaux and discoursing on its notes of nougat and hints of barnyard hay.
If you don’t pull it off, then people presume that you are lying or stupid. And this is where birding gets personal. Telling a rare-bird-sighting story is to ask people to honor your ability as a birder — to trust you, to believe you.
Hitt tells a subtle tale himself about the people who have claimed to see an Ivory-billed recently, offering damning details about their long-held desire to see the bird and their association with the fringe elements of the cryptozoology set. As I’ve described in comments at Tom Nelson’s Ivory-bill Skeptic blog, I don’t think the case against the Ivory-billed’s rediscovery is anywhere near as strong as skeptics have been making out. But this article by Hitt does a good job of explaining why that skepticism exists.
More technologically-amplified meat flapping: Lies.com podcast 17. Includes:
Enjoy!
I was feeling pretty low-energy when I started recording this, and I think it shows. For what it’s worth, though, here’s you go: Lies.com Podcast 16.
That’s it.
Some interesting followup links to my earlier story on bird-identification expert David Sibley’s problems with the claims for rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker:
The New York Times has a brief article on the latest news regarding the rediscovery of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker: Is Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Alive? A Debate Emerges.
Basically, David Sibley, author of the best field guide to North American birds, has a brief item in the current issue of Science questioning the validity of claims for recent sightings of the bird in Arkansas (Comment on “Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) Persists in Continental North America”).
The authors of the original Science article on the rediscovery have a response in the same issue (Response to Comment on “Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) Persists in Continental North America”).
Basically, Sibley’s all wet. If you read his (and his co-authors’) criticisms, and the original authors’ response, he really just flat-out loses the argument.
Since Sibley is in some ways the leading expert in the country on bird identification, his criticism is getting a lot of attention. But speaking as someone who’s been involved, at least peripherally, in the world of obsessive birders for more than 30 years, I’ve got my own take on what’s going on here.
Basically, Sibley represents the extreme example of something that turned me off from competitive birding (and yeah, for a certain type of person it actually is a competition) a long time ago. Really obsessive birders tend to be skeptical of claims made by anyone less expert than themselves. Being better at finding and identifying “good” birds (by which they mean, rarities, either birds that are locally rare because they are occurring outside their normal range, or absolute rarities, because there just aren’t very many of them) is how they measure their status, and in that scheme of things, the Ivory-Bill really is the holy grail. For someone like Sibley, the fact that he hasn’t personally seen and identified an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, while someone else claims to have done so, represents a significant challenge to his sense of self-worth.
This is the same thing that annoys me about certain way-committed skeptics of the paranormal. You can be wrong by being too skeptical, just as you can be wrong by being too credulous. Being skeptical to the point of error isn’t a virtue; you’re still wrong. That’s the trap Sibley has fallen into here.
I really hope this isn’t some kind of sexual obsession for the people involved. Anyway, courtesy of Jason and Janus/Onan: Stuff on my cat and Wesley Buckaroo.
More Bush-bashing (now with perspective!), some discussion of movies (including the Hollywood Saloon podcast, Man on Fire, and the Golden Globes), and extended rambling about The Grail Bird, Tim Gallagher’s book on the recent ivory-billed woodpecker rediscovery: Lies.com Podcast 10.
From the fine people of Crypomundo.com come The top cryptozoology stories of 2005. By all means go there for the details, but here’s the summary:
It was a slow news day in the Siberian town of Lazo. That is, until a pack of ravenous squirrels descended from the trees and then attacked, killed, and ate a stray dog.
From Lies.com Ivory-billed Woodpecker Bureau Chief Ethan P comes this latest New York Times update on the big question at the AOU meeting held last week in my neck of the woods: Ivory Bill or not? The proof flits tantalizingly out of sight.
Some fishermen in the Mekong Delta pulled something really big out of their nets back in May: Truly, it was a whopper, but are there bigger fish? The view of the researcher quoted in the story is that no, as of now, he doesn’t have evidence of any bigger (freshwater) fish.
The monster fish was one of just three giant catfish caught in Thailand this year.
Before he headed out on May 1, one of the men who caught it, Thirayuth Panthayom, 29, made sure luck would be on his side. He said he prayed at the shrine of the God of Catfish and begged his boat to help him, “Please, Miss Boat, let me catch something today and I’ll sacrifice a chicken for you.”
He said he had only been out for 15 minutes when he saw the fish smack the water four times with its tail – “Pung! Pung! Pung! Pung!” It took his crew an hour to pull it in.
His father, as owner of the boat, earned nearly $2,000 for the fish from the village fishing association, a fortune in rural Thailand. Mr. Thirayuth, like the other four members of the crew, got $175 of this, which he said he gave right back to his father.
As required by its permit to fish for these endangered catfish, the village association then sold it to the Department of Fisheries, which harvests their eggs and sperm as part of a captive breeding program.
After that, the fish are to be returned to the river, but few have survived the harvesting process, in which hormone injections are administered and the belly is vigorously massaged and manipulated.
The monster fish was returned dead to the fishermen, who cut it into giant steaks and sold it.
When he tried a bit, Mr. Thirayuth said, it tasted soft and sweet and mild.
“It’s hard to describe,” he said. “You have to try it yourself.”
Unforutnately, I seem unlikely to get the chance. Even more unfortunately, the rest of the world’s fish-eaters seem unlikely to have the chance for much longer.
I really liked this op-ed piece from Bernd Heinrich, in which he praises the documentary March of the Penguins, while addressing the broader issue of what it means to anthropomorphize animals in movies, and where one might usefully draw the line between things like Bambi and things like Winged Migration: Talk to the animals.
Paradoxically, the cartoonish anthropomorphism of “Bambi,” although it entertained the youngsters, blocked rather than promoted an understanding of animals. In “Bambi” we do not see other creatures. Instead, we are presented humans with antlers, and with our thought and speech. This is what the traditional idea of anthropomorphizing is – expecting animals to feel and behave like humans, which they never will. One look at that penguin with the egg on its toes shows the inadequacy, the outright folly, of wishing they “were more like us.”
Nature is the greatest show on earth, and reverence for life requires acknowledging the differences between ourselves and the animals as well as seeing our relatedness.
Birds are so cool.
First, a quick update on the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, the long-believed-extinct Liberace of the bird world recently rediscovered (or so we hope) in Arkansas. Tom Nelson has his doubts: my thoughts: Was “Elvis” just a partially leucistic Pileated Woodpecker? But meanwhile, the NYT has an article about how some early skeptics are coming around to the “yup, probably an Ivory-Billed” position based on some interesting sound recordings: Sound files ease doubts on elusive woodpecker.
Meanwhile, if you want a well-written and entertaining insight into what it means to be a birder, check out this piece from Jonathan Franzen in The New Yorker: My bird problem: Love, grief, and a change in the weather.
If you listened to the latest podcast, you know I’ve been obsessing about the credibility of online images lately. Here are a few examples of why, from Worth1000.com:
The last one actually took me a few minutes.