Rest In Pieces

A fin whale beached itself near Florence, Oregon the other day. That hardly ever works out for the whale, and it didn't this time. There's always a lot of speculation over the health, physical and mental, of a stranded whale; what could cause it to heave up on shore? Was it itchy, or morose? Fin whales, being equipped with baleen, eat nothing but small fry and crustaceans, but I've been around long enough to know that sometimes it's the appetizers that will do you in. You get into enough krill, and you just want to go lie down for a while. I'm that way with bean dip.

There was the customary quandary of how you get rid of such a massive dead thing. People are always drawn to these scenes, although I would venture that none of those attracted have ever picked meat out of a mess of crab and discarded the shells into the kitchen wastebasket on a hot July day, thinking it will be okay just overnight. There was talk of towing the whale out to sea, burying it in place, or just leaving it. What there was no talk of was the solution that a very bright person came up with in 1970 when the same thing happened in the same area.

That very bright person, a demolitions expert from the highway division--let's call him Sparky--reasoned that if a beached whale was set with enough charges to blast it into smithereens, the gulls would carry it away before it hit the ground. If you've ever gutted a fish while on the ocean and tossed the bits you didn't want into the air, you have found that this is exactly what happens. So it was a very elegant solution from nearly every angle except reality. You can be an expert in a lot of things, but no one is an expert in everything. In this case, the engineer in question was sadly underinformed about the bodily integrity of the whale. What you think should happen is not necessarily what happens.

Sparky spiked the whale with explosives. The gulls were in attendance in force. So, unfortunately for Sparky, were the news media. The whale was duly detonated, and instead of vaporized whale shrapnel raining down upon the land, pieces of blubber the size of Volkswagens went airborne and came down upon the citizens and infrastructure of Florence. One chunk came down and cratered a car. Nobody, today, is willing to say it was a fluke.

The entire event was so implausible that, for a time, it entered into the realm of urban mythology, until it was clawed back into its rightful slot in history by those who had been, after all, witnesses. Sort of like the Holocaust.

So our current whale was dug into the sands with minor ceremony. It's a shame. I fear that people will be less inclined to come up with creative solutions to our problems when faced with the possibility of personal humiliation. And we'll just have to come up with some other way of dealing with Rush Limbaugh.

Flapping Away

The best guests don't want you to go to any trouble on their account. Our local birds are terrific in that regard. They don't want any fuss made over them, gosh no. The moment I see the first hummingbird of the season, I roar inside and excavate my hummingbird feeder from the back of the closet, scrub it good, boil up the sugar water, cool it, pour it, and hang the feeder up, and the hummers eye it suspiciously from the next yard over and watch it fill up with ants. After a couple weeks I pour out the ant syrup and put the feeder away until next year. It's sort of a routine.

We have about four kinds of birds. We have scrub jays, who like to take mice up to the roof and bash their heads against the gutter. It's unnerving. We have crows, every one of them, I think, deaf. We have starlings. And we have little brown jobs.

Dave went to some trouble to build in a chickadee house in the decorative top to the raspberry posts. He looked it up in the internets and drilled the right hole size and measured the right drop to the floor and put in a clean-out door in the back and everything. The crows across the street yowled "Whaat? Whaat? Whaat?" The chickadees lined up on a branch in the neighbor's yard and had themselves a bitchfest. "As if," the first one said. "Warbler hole," sneered the second. "Totally," sniped the third, and the fourth one was all, "Whatever." The house has been available for six years now. It's still pristine.

We bought a small coral-bark maple, twigs aflame, that came with a hummingbird nest already in it. I put up a tiny sign, facing the sky, "AVAILABLE. Alberta Arts District Cutie. Move-in Ready." No takers. I planted a host of flowers said to be irresistible to birds of various sorts. They perched in the neighbors' yards and admired the hell out of them from there. I got a really good pair of binoculars. Most people are better birders than I am. It's hard to get a good look at them when they're flapping away that fast. When I finally draw a bead, I commit it to memory: four inches. White eye stripe. Gray breast. Pointy beak. Got it! This is what my friends in Maine call a "wobbla!" I run inside for the field guide, and although there are five hundred wobblas therein, my carefully observed bird is not among them. Now, did it have buffy yellow feet? Whitish undertail coverts? I have absolutely no recollection. There are only about four things you can even notice on a four-inch bird, and I've missed three of them. I will the next time, too.

I've set up a little room upstairs just for writing. The main attraction is Dave has agreed not to go in it. But also there is a tree right outside the windows, its branches nearly scraping the house. It's full of birds. We went to the bird store and bought a nice thistle sock and some nice thistle seeds and a nice block of suet and we hung them up nice and close so I could get a good look. It wasn't that much trouble. Word got out instantly. I haven't seen bird one in that tree since.

Next, A Moose Head

Electronic devices have topped the list of preferred gifts for normal American males for years now, and for years Dave has asked for an elephant's-foot wastebasket for Christmas. You can draw any conclusion from that that you wish, including that Dave is an antique or possibly deceased British gentleman from the Raj era given to monocles, pipe-smoking and imperialism. Or, he is not normal. As you prefer. It's all the same to me.

But a while back I decided the only way to get him to quit asking for such a revolting item would be to make him one. First step is to look it up online, and sure enough, there is such a thing as a wastebasket made of a sawed-off elephant's foot, and there is no effort made to pretty it up. Anyone who has one of these objects in his possession is seriously depraved, and no mistake. I know there is a tendency towards hyperbole these days, days in which failing to strap a bike helmet on your child constitutes abuse, and meat is murder; but I will state here unequivocally that elephant's-foot wastebaskets are way worse than eating a hamburger.

One night I concocted a plan involving ceramic elephant toenails and batting and fabric and flour paste and a lot of criss-crossing with dental floss to simulate wrinkles, with the intention of removing the floss once the fabric was dry. It beats staying awake worrying about your finances, although it's just as effective from an insomnia point of view. Once I got the toenails back from the kiln, it was going to have to be a quick operation so as to achieve full wrinkle while the foot was still wet. You never know how these things are going to work out until you try: as the old saying goes, nothing ventured, nothing fancy to toss your toilet-paper tube in. Well, it didn't work so well. I couldn't keep the fabric straight, and it tended to wrinkle up on its own, so I changed gears and went with that, only it took more and more fabric, until finally I had about forty bucks invested in cotton elephant skin. If I'd had to take down a real elephant, though, I'm sure it would have cost a lot more, even if I sold off the other three wastebaskets.

Dave ain't right, but he ain't bad, either, and he probably envisioned the wastebasket as the perfect accessory for his beloved bathroom, which he designed himself with wainscoting and dentil molding and nickel-plated faucets and a marble floor and an art collection. He spends an awful lot of time in there and it pleases him to have fancy surroundings, even if all he's doing is the same thing England did to India.

Packet Droppings

My computer started to sludge up a few days ago. I did the same thing I do with my other relationships: I pretended it was all in my imagination and everything would be fine the next day. It was sludgier the next day. I had a poke at downloading updates and subjecting my anti-virus program to disciplinary action, but the sludge remained. It took me a day and a half to get my rat photo sucked up into the blog, and it wasn't that great a photo. I don't like my own blog judging me. I shut the whole machine down and sent it to its room. Wait till your father gets home, I said. I was peeved.

One of the worst months of my life was spent dealing with an internet service provider when I couldn't get any mail to go to or fro, which is really about all I was asking it to do. Every day off for a month I was on the phone to my new friends in India (Victoria and Alexander, I believe they said), who spent hours emptying my computer until it was cleaner than a colonoscopy patient. Then they filled it back up with jellybeans and joy and pronounced it healed, and hung up, and I tried to send an email, and I got the same error window (accompanied by an orchestral chord of doom that, to this day, will send me to my knees), and then I burst into tears. How I could be made so miserable with technology I had managed to live without for forty years? That's when friend told me about a local ISP, Spiretech.com. They are so local I can see them without a passport--I mean, they're right over there--and when I call them up, I get two ringy-dingies and then, bam, a human being comes on the line. And it's usually a human being with a mass of monitors and such in front of him and a calm voice and the ability to see what's inside my computer and possibly my very soul. Then we all get in the balloon and fly back to Kansas. No, they really exist.

So when my computer pouted and refrained from even sending email this morning, I called up my friends at SpireTech. Got Jaysen on the second ring. He never laughs at me except in the right places. He got to work right away and determined that I had 25,408 errors. That's a lot even for me. Furthermore--he informed me with a gratifying tone of awe--I was dropping packets like crazy. Why, I was at a layer two packet loss. It was like I was picking up a packet and then dropping it right away, picking up another packet and dropping it, he explained. I thought I felt something. I used to have an old guy on my mail route who dropped packets in every way you can think of. His brain had thinned out alarmingly, for one thing; but also, when I gave him his mail, before I learned to put a rubber band on it, he would drop one letter, drop another in the act of picking it up, bend over and pick that one up, drop another, and so on and so forth, until he'd done a complete circle and was back at the mailboxes. Then he'd look for more mail. If he could have done this starting at his apartment door, he'd have had an easier time finding his way home, which had gotten to be an issue.

"So this is bad, these 25,000 errors and the severe packet droppings?" I asked Jaysen. He said it wasn't good. This actually made me feel better, that someone in a remote location was able to document that I was truly sludgy and not just whiny. He got my DSL provider, Qwest, on the line, and we had ourselves a jolly little three-way for a while, during which Jason advocated for me and even tried to spank the Qwest fellow right through the phone on my behalf, but the Qwest fellow was a friend of Victoria's and Alexander's and just as unflappable. I tried crawling under the table and messing with the wires with the cat on my back, and then I tried with the cat on my modem. I believe we left off with the solution that someone from the phone company was going to come out and knock squirrels off my lines, and then we'd see. The main point, as I see it, is it isn't my fault.

Iguano

A big thank you to Linder, who alerted me to the terrible news about Daniel Bennett and his missing lizard feces. Mr. Bennett had saved over five years' worth of the feces of Philippine Butaan lizards and then Leeds university went and lost it. I know just how he feels. I lose shit all the time. Things are constantly going missing. Dave takes a much darker and more accusatory view of this phenomenon than I do; I tend to start sentences with "have you seen the..." while Dave says "what did you do with the..." but neither one of us ever figures out who did the losing, because we never find anything.

Poor Daniel Bennett was nearly through with his doctoral dissertation on the lizard, variously described (in the article) as "shy" and "extinct," which is just an extreme form of shy. He was studying the shit in lieu of disturbing the actual lizards, theoretical or otherwise, which is delicate of him. This leads me to conclude that he is not only a considerate man but a very serious scientist, probably avant-garde as zoologists go, because what he's doing is a lot like research into particle physics. Particle physics is the study of things that might not even exist, so if particle physicists are wrong about anything, no one will ever know. That's part of what gives particle physicists their reputation for smarts. What they like to do is send their particles whizzing through colliders at insane speeds, and sometimes something goes "poink" and that, there, is your--well, no, not your quark per se, but evidence that your quark has been in the area. In other words, the most brilliant scientists in the world spend their time poking through quark shit. It's a living.

The university was profoundly sorry it had lost Mr. Bennett's sack of academic material, all seventy-seven pounds of it, but in its defense it noted that the sack was not labeled. It had been there for upwards of five years, and someone finally took the initiative to dispose of it, greatly upsetting Mr. Bennett. It's sort of like the time I put Dave's old golf clubs in a yard sale after he hadn't touched them in ten years and then all of a sudden they turned out to have been the key to happiness. I'm sure if the 77-pound sack had been properly labeled ("shit"), no one would have dreamed of throwing it away.

Drug Trials

Says here in the newspaper they've discovered that a drug for stroke victims seems to be helpful for increasing the brain power of rats. I always thought rats were plenty smart to begin with. It could be I just assumed that they were smart, because they are so unattractive, and on both ends. A lot of times it was the homeliest kids in class that turned out to be the brains, and even the kids who beat them up were careful not to mash them on the head. Rats are homely, so it stands to reason they're writing code in their nests.

They injected middle-aged rats with this stroke drug and were amazed at how smart they became. Rats without the stroke drug became senile at a more rapid pace. I don't know what constitutes a senile rat. I would consider it a mark of senility if the rats repeatedly went into one quadrant of their cages and then turned around and went back where they started, in an effort to remember what they went into the other quadrant for to begin with. Then they'd go back to the quadrant and forget what they'd remembered and start nosing around in some new scratch. So that's: forth, back, forth, back, nose around. I've had more opportunity than most to observe lab rats and that's pretty much what they do. My colleagues in the laboratory did not mark this as a sign of rat senility, however, and they were unanimous in their opinion that rats are way smarter than mice. I haven't ruled out the possibility that this is academic myth-making based on bias against mice, who are kind of cute; cuter, in fact, than my colleagues ever were in grade school, back when they were getting beat up.

I wasn't able to glean from the article why it is we need smarter rats, but in an article on the same page, I learned that another particularly valuable pharmaceutical is being manufactured from the milk of genetically altered goats. They look okay, but no one really knows what will happen if they were to get out and mix with the general unaltered goat population. So there's been a call to cease production of the drug. I'm sympathetic to this idea, although it would be a right bummer to have to tell people who want to know how you're doing that you'll be fine just as long as the goat fencing holds. On the other hand, it's not much more tenuous a hold on life than we all have.

You wonder about some of these drug trials. In the same newspaper, it is reported that a whaling ship and an anti-whaling ship got in a standoff down in Antarctica, and the whalers pelted the greenies with chunks of blubber. The whaling ship was only collecting its legal limit of 985 whales for scientific purposes, basically minding its own business. Their scientific inquiry appears to be limited to selling whale at the highest price possible to Japanese consumers, so I guess it's a study in economics, which is considered sort of a science. And if they sell all their whale, they'll have to do it again the next year, and the next, because the study results are more reliable over time. Anyway, my point is the whaler-scientists chunked blubber at the interlopers because that's what they had to chunk with. I suspect sometimes the pharmaceutical scientists just use what they've got, too. They already had a stroke drug, all made up; so they lobbed it at the rats to see what would happen. They happened to smarten up the rats, but think what a bonanza it would have been if the rats had grown thicker, more lustrous fur.

Round Feet

I don't know what it means to have flat feet. I'm probably missing something. It seems to me that flat is just exactly what your fee should be, especially on the bottom. If that keeps you out of the army, it's just a bonus.

I don't have problems with my feet, except first thing in the morning. Evidently they round up overnight. They're like little spheres, and walking on them flattens them out again, but that first morning trip to the bathroom is a bear. It's a rocking, rolling, reeling event, and I carom off the walls until they finally funnel me towards the toilet. After that, things flatten out nicely and I'm able to navigate just fine for the rest of the day.

I've spent a lot of time working on exercises designed to straighten out my foot-strike and they've been largely successful. I can tell because I hardly ever keel over anymore when I'm putting on my socks. I never sit down to put them on, for some reason, and it was always about a fifty-fifty proposition that I'd remain upright, especially when I was putting on the left one. I'd just tip right over. People said it was like watching a dinosaur die. Now that I've worked on my foot-strike, I realize that I used to procrastinate or spelunk or whatever it's called when your ankle rolls in. Dave always asked me, as he was giving me a hand back up again, why I didn't just let go of my sock, and I really don't have a good answer for that, except that it simply never crossed my mind. My mission was to get my sock on, and I stayed focused on that mission all the way to the floor. Then I'd finish putting my sock on, get back up and get on with my day. It's just like figuring out how to do something on the computer. There may be a quicker, easier way, but you tend to stick with what works for you.

My friend Linder has many extraordinary qualities, but her feet are particularly dramatic. They are far from flat, but they're not round, either. The arches are so pronounced she could tuck a gerbil under each one and not hear a peep of complaint out of them all day. Also, her big toes are normal size, and instead of the rest of them tapering down like proper little piggies, they're all the same length, about half the length of the big ones. I'm sure it made bedtime rituals a lot easier on her parents when she was a baby. After the big one went to market, it was nothing but "wee wee wee" all the way home. They're unusual enough that at one point, when she was completely undressed in the doctor's office, he suddenly yelled "Oh, my God, look at that! I've never seen anything like that before! Hey, Harry! Tom! Get in here, you've got to see this!" The fact that this doctor may still be alive to tell the tale, and in his original baritone, is evidence of several of Linder's extraordinary qualities.

I miss Linder. I wish she lived here so she could have joined us for a sumptuous champagne brunch we had here recently. There was no particular occasion for it, except that we had several large bottles of cheap champagne left over from a party a few weeks ago, so six of us got together and put a nice dent in the stash. A real nice dent. Found out that champagne makes my feet round, too.