The Mutt-Flap

There's so much going wrong in the world and so little being done about it that I just have to stand up and cheer when someone finally comes up with a solution to something. I am referring, of course, to the makers of Rear Gear Butt Covers. Sometimes it just seems like life is a parade of assholes, even in the blue states, but now, thanks to the folks at Rear Gear, we don't have to look at them. Designed for pets with tails in permanent Sphincter Display Mode, the butt covers dangle neatly from the base of the tail and over the offending orifice, and come in Small, Medium, and Kardashian. The information online is sparse. It is still unclear whether the butt covers are washable, which is fervently to be hoped. Also, in what must be a case of false advertising, the proprietors claim that the butt covers give the pet more confidence.

Which is a crock. One of the points of exposing your asshole is to more efficiently release scent from the anal glands and waft it into the air. No one thus occupied is lacking any confidence. They are nothing if not proud of the poop chute. The only thing that would make a poodle more confident would be a dangling butt frame. The butt covers--can't we just call them mutt-flaps?--just lead to coyness. What have I got under here? the dogs project. Do you want to see? Just sweep it aside with your nose, big fella. It might as well be a geisha fan. Coquettishness among canines is like makeup on five-year-olds. It's not attractive.

The butt cover entrepreneurs also declare that their product is appropriate for cats, but it's not hard to notice that they have no cat photographs on the site. I'm not surprised; good war-zone photographers are hard to come by. Our first cat, (Saint) Larry, was strictly a tail-down cat. We would have to give her  a good tailbone-skritching if we ever wanted to pop it up for anus inspection, but, as it happened, over seventeen years, we were never that curious. But we didn't fully appreciate her courtesy in this department until we got Tater.

Tater is a whole different cat. Tater holds her tail up like an opinion. If she taped a tiny parasol to the end, she could keep the sun out of her eyes. "Put that thing down," we told her, dismayed, for the first few weeks, but she never did. After seven years, I can state that there is not one thing Tater has ever been ashamed of. Even the Christmas Tree Incident struck her as random. Her butthole, meanwhile, appears to be a particular point of pride.

And if Tater's tail is an opinion, it's a strong one. Usually, when you grab a cat's tail to keep it from going somewhere you don't want her to go, she objects. Tater not only keeps going, but she's perfectly willing to tow you through the house on your belly if you don't let go. Guests find it entertaining, but the rug burn is the worst.

Like Hugh Hefner, Tater wears nothing but pajamas, and my suspicion was that she would not particularly cotton to butt jewelry, but there was only one way to make sure. Aaaaaaaaand now we're sure.

Well, that's advertising for you. If the Butt Cover people want to re-cast a feline psychotic break as Confidence, I suppose they have that license. I suggest they hang it from the front.

Thanks to our friends at Cowango for this breaking story.

The Stupendamoon!

The moon was huge the other night. It was so big I almost got my period.  Supermoon, they called it, but that doesn't mean much. That's just more word inflation, which seems to be required in a world where, omigod, we're all brilliant and everything we do is uh-mazing. The moon is always worth looking at and doesn't really need a public relations department. I had the same thought I usually do when I see a nice full moon: wouldn't it be cool if we had a bunch of them?

I mean, wouldn't it be swell to be on Jupiter? Except for the chilly part. Sixty-seven moons winging around that thing, all taking different amounts of time to make the trip, some going this way and some going the other way. There would probably be people around who could rig up tables of exactly how they were going to be arrayed on any given night, but your average person is unlikely to be able to keep track of it without the cheat sheet. Which shouldn't detract from the sheer joy of it all.

Just my luck I'd be stuck on the bus next to someone who goes on and on about the relative positions of Ganymede and Io and the consequences for my fortunes. She'd reel off a dozen moons in retrograde that will soon collaborate on an auspicious moment for changing jobs or starting a relationship, and explain my own personality to me based on the confluence of Europa and Callisto at the moment my egg split off from the motherpod. And on Jupiter it could be a long, long bus trip. I swear, Jupiter is wasted on the Jupitroids.

Anyway, what we just saw here was the Harvest Moon. It's called that because it's a full moon that occurs during "harvest time," which is an old-timey expression from back in the days we didn't have mangoes and kiwi fruit available in the store all year, thanks to all that oil. Same exact moon in February would be called the Shoot Me, It's Still Raining Moon. If we could see it.

Harvest Time

Mangoes be damned, it does signal a change of seasons. We still have changes of seasons--most of us--because our planet is tilted in relation to the sun, and depending on where we are in our revolution, the sunlight is scoring either a direct hit or angling in. The difference between lolling on a raft in your underwear and having to wear everything you own just to cross the parking lot comes down to how much atmosphere that sun needs to slice through. And the atmosphere isn't very thick. It's just a wafer of batting wrapped around the planet. But that thin batting is why we have wind and weather and, for that matter, liquid water at the surface at all. We owe our very existence to that batting, but we've gotten mighty slapdash with it. We just keep dumping crap in it.

That's what happens when people keep their perspectives narrow. Heck, we think the sky is blue, when really it's black almost everywhere, as soon as you get a few miles from here. We even fancy God on a nice fluffy cloud in the blue sky and imagine it's heaven, although that would mean God is practically parking His Fanny on the earth itself. Hope he likes it toasty.

The Clothespins Of Mommy

I'm not much of a hoarder. Still, there's stuff.

Dave knocked the hoarder out of me early. I'd begun to accumulate treasures. Tchotchkes. Dave, rather than grumbling outright, mentioned that if he had his way, he'd live in a house that could be cleaned with a fire hose. I'd already bought him a pressure washer, sensing somehow that he would really like it, and he really, really did. It frightened me how much he liked it. The man would blow the hide off a dusty buffalo if it wandered into our yard. I visualized my little treasures pulverized and began to divest. It wasn't that hard: I discovered that the clean, spare spot left behind was like another little treasure.

But some things are harder to get rid of.

What never seems to go away is the stuff that came down through the family. Photograph albums from nearly the dawn of photography. Newspaper clippings about dead relatives that have been allowed to yellow in peace. (The clippings. The relatives tended toward sallow, too.)

And then there's the serious family crap. The pewter urns. The silver. The furniture of known provenance handed down through the generations from the Revolutionary War era and landing with a thud on my barren self. It ends with me. I can't give it away. Now I know why the Pharaohs were buried with all their all their crap.

But it's other stuff too. The clothespins. Mommy's bag of clothespins! The Clothespins Of Mommy! I took them home from the funeral along with a bunch of other stuff and stashed them in the basement near the clothes dryer that had made them obsolete. But a few years back, I fired the dryer and brought out the clothespins. Mommy's clothespins! They were at least as old as me and could have been much older. Could have been her mom's. Some had hinges and they weren't rusted or anything--worked fine. Most were the peg kind. The kind people use in crafts; the kind kids make stick people out of. I left them out in the rain a little too often and they got funky. They began to leave marks on my laundry. They had to go. But where? I couldn't just toss them out.

Because they were Mommy's! She'd had them in her apron. In her fingers. In her mouth. With the right laboratory and a little skill, we could clone the sweetest woman in the whole wide world from one of these. We could clone a bunch of them! I have a lot of clothespins.

Then it occurred to me. SCRAP is a cool local store that sells recycled everything--anything a child could use in crafts. They'd love my clothespins! They'd appreciate my clothespins! I put them in a bag and we hiked over to the store. There was a sign: Do Not Leave Anything. Ring Bell For Clerk. Of course they didn't want people dumping all their crap. They only wanted good crap. The clerk bustled by with boxes from someone's tailgate. She looked harried. "I'll be with you in a second," she said, not meaning, actually, the very next second. Many, many seconds later she came back, pushing a lock of hair from her sweaty forehead.

"If she doesn't want my clothespins, I'm taking them back," I'd told Dave. "You hear me? They're going in my tomb." Dave looked wary. There's going to be a tomb, now?

"What've you got?" the clerk said, weary.

"Heirloom clothespins," I said, holding out the bag. She opened the bag. She looked inside. Mommy was in there. Mommy wafted right up out of the bag and unfurrowed the clerk's face. She knew how to do that.

"Heirloom clothespins! I love them!" She clutched the bag to her bosom and walked away with a big dopey smile. That made three of us.

Mommy always could do that.

Eeep Eeep Grunt Grunt

Scientists are not supposed to anthropomorphize. Assigning human qualities to non-human things leads to bad science, but it also leads to more opportunities for conversation. I am the sort of person who talks to plants ("grow, you green fuck"); also, I live with a small, lint-filled dog and things just run smoother around here if his wishes are taken into consideration. And a scientist with a cat who doesn't pay attention to its motivations is likely to be subjected to random nocturnal puncturing and messages in her slippers.

Where I really lose control, anthropomorphism-wise, is with all these space buddies we've been sending out there. Like the rovers who (yes, who) land on Mars and go eeep and are never heard from again. All of those seem female to me. Little girls. They're on putzing speed and they can't go a couple centimeters without picking up a rock and putting it in their pockets. I can't stand to worry about them when we don't hear from them. I like to think they're plopped in the sand running their pebbles through a plot line and are so absorbed in the story they can't even hear the mothership trying to entice them with ice cream.

But it's possible they're all grown up and just relieved to finally find themselves in a place quiet enough where a rover has a chance to hear herself think. Or they're peeved and refuse to answer until Earth gets  their names right. They're sending Venera-D to Venus? Really? Who'd answer to that? There are a few spacecraft in the works with the mission to retrieve soil from the moon. They're named Luna-Glob and Luna-Grunt. They sound more like space emissions. Phobos-Grunt was sent to Mars's moon Phobos to do some scooping, but it never made it out of Earth orbit and ultimately crashed in the Pacific Ocean. Phobos-Grunt was totally a dog, probably a Labrador Retriever. It was sent to fetch but all it did was run around the yard like a crazy thing, and refuse to come when called, and then it saw a squirrel scampering over the troposphere and that was that.

Phobos-Grunt: Artist's Depiction

I tend to relate more to the Mars rovers, but it's hard not to get drawn in by the comet-chasers. Deep Impact was sent out in 2005 with the job of harassing a comet to find out more about its composition. He (yes, he) found one to blow up and analyzed the debris cloud, discovering that it was made of dust and crap and ice, which everyone already knew; but now they know what kind of dust and crap and ice. Comets are believed to be how we got water on Earth in the first place. There is a lot of water on this planet and it had to take a major bombardment of comets to accumulate an ocean. Fortunately there were no living things here during that phase; not only would it have been a violent experience for them, but they might not have been able to swim. Just like the men currently dumping chemicals into our streams and fracking up the aquifers, the Deep Impact spacecraft was clever, but stupidly shortsighted. It couldn't recognize any date after August 11, 2013, and kept rebooting itself into a coma.

But Rosetta is doing great. Rosetta has just rendezvoused with another comet.  Once he (never mind

"Rosetta:" it's a he) got past Jupiter, he took a three-year nap to conserve energy. The mission control crew worried, of course, that they may have heard the last from him, and then he woke up and tweeted "hello, world," without, I'm happy to report, including any emoticons, which live in the Oort Cloud with all the other crap. He and his sidekick, armed with a harpoon, are planning to land on that comet. It's full of ice and he's pretty sure there's going to be beer in there. And just before he takes the leap, he's going to say "watch this," and those, as is so often the case, really will be his last words. Totally a dude.

Speaking of crap, holy crap! This is my 600th Murrmurrs post. This calls for a beer.

The Little-Buddy Project

Dave has little buddies all over the place. Almost anything has little-buddy potential, and being technically alive isn't even a requirement. So at some point he's likely to address anything from Pootie to an interesting bug to a massive bricklayer as "my little buddy," and responses vary. Not everyone is as responsive as Pootie. There are days Dave doesn't even get an antenna-wave out of it.

But we both thought we might be able to develop more of a relationship with a crow. We had three or four that lived in the big Doug fir next door, and we set about making little buddies out of them. Crows are smart. If a crow can count on you for a cracked walnut, a crow is going to remember you favorably. "Hi there," we sang out, while placing a walnut in plain sight. The general goal was to have one or more of our crows approach us and say "hi there" to us--they're good mimics--and we'd give them walnuts. It seems like good luck to have a crow or two in your corner, in case there's trouble.

They grew to know us, all right, but they were cagey about it. A crow would perch on the wire, I'd come out with a walnut and say "hi there," place the nut on the wall, and the crow would studiously look the other direction until I backed off. Then he'd pop down for the walnut as soon as it could be reasonably construed as his idea. "I have some important business to conduct," the crow would think, "and I'll just grab this nut here while I'm on the way, because I'm an efficient person." Crows are proud. Still, we had a notion they would come around eventually.

After a bit I thought we could improve on "hi there" as a signal, especially if we wanted to hear it back from the crow. "How about if we say HEY! WALNUT BOY! That would be cool," I suggested, but then I thought about it some more. "Unless they can't pronounce W's. Can crows pronounce W's?"

"They can say 'caw,'" Dave pointed out.

Or we could start offering them filberts.

Some assembly required.

At any rate, although our crows were willing to accept our walnuts promptly as long as we didn't stand too close, we hadn't made much progress on the little-buddy project. And then they went away. They were just gone. Ours, anyway; there were plenty of other crows flying over.

Last week we went on a walk and I found a large dark feather. Two blocks later I found another one, and then more and more. They were all over the place. We appeared to be tracking a naked crow, and nudity is the kind of thing that would knock a lot of the swagger out of a crow. We began to examine the crows more carefully. They all looked like shit. Their tails had gaps. Their breasts were motley and ratty.  They seemed even less willing than usual to launch from the lawn, but they still had the swagger working. They were like the dude at the party who plucks at the sprung threads in his tweed jacket and explains that he'd been in line for Department Head but didn't want to sell his soul to the tenure track.

Crows gotta molt sometime; everyone does. Birds have to change their suits once a year at a minimum. A lot of the birds at the feeder looked like shit too. It happens. The crow gave me the once-over and studiously turned his head to the side. Whatever, dude. "You look like shit," I told him, in all sympathy.

At least I know where our crows are. They do know us after all, and they're proud. They'll be back once they spruce up. Dave will walk out into the back yard one day soon and a crow will land on the wall and say "you look like shit." And Dave will give him a walnut.

The Bonanza

So this is how it works. At the end of summer, you go up to the mountain to get your huckleberries. You pray for one pieful and hope your humility will be rewarded with enough for two or three. The berries are tiny and sparse, sapphire-rare, and you drift languidly through the bushes like a T'ai Chi dude, as attentive to a blue speck as any miner looking for a flash in the pan. An hour later you can still see the bottom of the bucket. If you drop a berry, you get down on your hands and knees to track it down, trying to keep your tears out of the bucket.

Some years they seem plentiful and you scavenge a gallon over the course of six or eighteen hours. Some years your huckleberries are (botanically speaking) in the Theoretical family. No one has a clue why fortunes change from year to year, but people speculate. There was a late snowstorm. El Nino was in a snit. The Berry Goddess was having her nails done or seducing a televangelist when the fruit was supposed to set. No one knows.

And then there was this year. Mary Ann (purveyor of the World's Finest Salamander Hardware) and I pilgrimated to our usual spot and found ourselves hip deep in a sea of blue. I thumbed berries into my bucket; it sounded like a drum solo. After a while I quit picking the ones I'd have to bend over for. Later I narrowed it down to the ones in the strike zone. Then I passed up the bushes on uneven terrain and sought out the ones with a nice flat spot in front of them. Then I quit picking the large berries and concentrated on the huge ones.

By noon I was patronizing only the bushes that waved their little limbs in the air and said yowza, yowza, yowza. A short time later I was ignoring those in favor of the shrubs that offered free checking and a toaster. Towards mid-afternoon I limited myself to the berries that did a swan dive into my bucket when I passed by. An hour later I began ejecting them if they didn't execute either a tuck or a half-twist on the way in. I held up an explanatory card as I punted them out: 3.2, too much splash.

I began to hold out the largest ones so they would not make my pies lumpy. They'll be cut up for steaks and chops and put in the freezer. I ran out of containers for the rest and decanted them into the side pockets of my car.

I have room in my freezer for four pies, or one more pie than I have the serenity to make. I have enough berries for about twelve. There is no reason to keep picking, but I do. Somewhere in this glade I will find a bush with pie crusts on it.

Already rolled out.

How're They Hanging?

Consider the flatworm. There are many kinds of flatworms, and they like to live in dark, wet locations such as the ocean, or your colon. There's not that much going on inside a flatworm. Flatworms are really too flat to even have insides. There's no space for lungs or proper organs or anything. Stuff like oxygen has to be able to drift through them so they can nab it as it comes by; if they were any thicker, they'd be short of breath all the time. They do have a gut of sorts, but it's not the greatest. They are able to shovel food in one end for a ways, but then they have to stop eating long enough to poop out the same hole. Persnicketyness is not common in flatworms. Also, they don't kiss.

It's a sad state of digestive affairs, but there are compensations. Flatworms have two penises, right below their heads. All of them do. And they all have egg-producing capacity as well. It strikes us as odd, but there is an evolutionary advantage to everybody having the same equipment. The ocean is a big place, and if you only meet the occasional flatworm, you have a much better chance of getting lucky if everyone's set up along the same lines.

Virtually any penis-owning organism polled on the subject would say that the only thing better than having a penis would be having another penis. Flatworms went for two, because their imaginations are limited by not being able to count very high, on account of not having fingers. Given the choice, human males would have opted for at least ten, and there they'd be with their crotches waving like a sea anemone; and things would start bumping into each other accidentally-on-purpose, and before you knew it, all the hopes and dreams for the future generation will have been squandered into the nearest hand-towel. It would never work.

Works for flatworms, though. You might think the flatworm would spend all its time trying to get in touch with its feminine side, but it doesn't. It tries to get in touch with the feminine side of the next flatworm over. They seem peaceable enough, rippling blithely along the ocean bottom, until they decide to have sex. And then it's total war.

Because there's a lot at stake. Since everyone in the neighborhood has man bits and lady bits both, it's going to be a stabfest to see who gets to impregnate whom. It's all en garde and penises at zero paces, and whoever manages to puncture the other first gets to ripple away and shoot the breeze with the other successful flatworms, while the other has to be the mommy, and the best she can hope for in life is that the kids won't disgrace her in some way, and maybe she'll get some macaroni art to put on the fridge. It's bleak.

It's not the only way to get new flatworms, though. If you dice up a flatworm, all the pieces grow new heads, eventually. It takes longer for the pieces that were furthest away from the original head, but there's at least some forethought remaining in the entire worm. It's a pretty slick trick, or at least it seems so to a species like ours that considers itself lucky to get any head at all.

But if you slice off the flatworm's penises, they just grow anxious.

What's Not To Lek

Dave isn't ordinarily much of a joiner, but he joined a lek last spring, and now we're just waiting to get the membership card in the mail. We were headed up Flag Mountain (named for the way you feel on the uphill side) and we both heard drumming. Very, very low drumming. "You can hear that?" I said. "And yet you can't seem to hear me half the time I ask you something?"

"What?" Dave said.

He's a polite guy, and so he drummed back. In proper pitch, and to perfection. After a moment, they were going back and forth like new-age warrior men on a spiritual quest. Dave's idea, to the degree he was not being driven by instinct, was to get the drummer close enough to see. In those parts it was likely to be a male Sooty Grouse. The grouse, on the other hand, was, according to the literature, more interested in seeing a female grouse than in seeing Dave.

All sorts of odd noises are likely to come out of Dave at any time and some of them he engineers on purpose. He is percussive to a fault--to a fault, I say. The fingers are going, the feet are going, random objects are pressed into service. He'll drum on the counter. Drum on the crockery. Drum on the open door of the refrigerator,  where he will not begin looking for whatever is in there until all the cold air is out and the solo is complete. 

It's been a few years since I objected to any of this. His response was crisp. "It's either this," he said, "or I start smoking again." So our kitchen has a back beat. It's just one of those things. I excel at torpidity. Dave must have everything going at once or there will be a dangerous buildup of something. We don't want to find out what.

The lek is a loose association of males--birds, antelope--who are all in the flirtation business. They are mighty impressive. Some species that form leks need to be in visual contact so they can check each other out. Others just need to be in hearing distance. The deal is they all put on a show and the females pop by and cruise the possibilities until they make a selection. It's less wear and tear on the females that way; it's hitting the bar on Ladies' Night instead of going through the whole internet dating scene. Hard to say if this was all their idea. Lots of male birds court their mates by feeding them. The grouse just show off. The females hang out and eat as many bugs as they can find for themselves, because nobody's buying at this bar, and then it's just "oh, okay, you then," and off they go.

It's a damn good show, though. The grouse makes the drumming sound by inflating fancy air sacs on his neck, precisely the way Dave does it, only he does it taller. Dave was unable to draw out the other grouse, and we did not get to see the show. It was a good hike anyway. Miles later, we found our way back to the cabin and there, in the periphery, what did we see?--the suggestion of slatey feathers sifting through the woods--giggling, shifting, sly glances sliding our way, a coy tail feather swept to one side--well, we should have seen it coming. Dave's the complete package. He even attracts bugs.

Murrmurrs Bonus: here's eighteen seconds of your life you'll never get back again: