Archive for June, 2006
Is it still cryptozoology if the animal is familiar but unexpected?
Here we are, Barbara and I, minding our own business doing our morning proofing on our respective laptops at 7:30a, drinking our respective caffeine formats. She looks up, cries (shrieks?) “Oh my GOD!” and vaults from the chair. “Whatwhatwhat?” cries me, and leaps up after, thinking (I swear) that we have an eagle or a crane or something sitting in our yard, or maybe she sees a meteorite or something bad coming From the Skies.
Aha. Trotting around in the lawn: a red fox.
I grab the camera. See? Here are the poorly-focused, unsteadied cryptozoological proof I produced:
Now, as context: we live in a little suburban neighborhood in Ann Arbor, with 1960s-era streets and nearby creeks and streams that have been buried in tunnels beneath roads for 80 years (no, really). But when the fox has gone on its chase, and I look it up in the best place I can to verify the possibility, I find that yes indeedy, others here in town are reporting they’re here.
Now, it’s almost July today. And this was a mature adult, maybe 15-18 inches at the shoulder. Puttering around in our overgrown flower beds like it was quite familiar with the places the little tasty critters hang out, so I suspect it’s been here before. And there are plenty of places nearby where a family could hide a quiet den: railroad tracks, overgrown yards (not least our postage stamp, but doubtful that we host them), a park or two, even the little mysterious Nature Center a few blocks from the house. And we have plenty of chipmunks (last year, an amazing and noteworthy surplus, I am reminded) and cats and young fledgling birds to munch. So well-fed foxes, methinks.
Thus we have what I read as our first real carnivores, moved back in after many years away. Can’t count the damned cats; they’re just domesticated pests that occasionally eat the birds, as far as I’m concerned. [Insert an image of me seeing a cat in the back yard, lurking around the birdfeeder farm we've planted, and me diligently trudging out to the hose reel, turning the water on full-blast, and hosing said interloper cat down. "Get off my lawn, you goddamned cats! Bah." Cue Scooby-Doo music.]
So now we have a fox. And where one has one fox, I expect one has several. As far as I’m concerned, a wonder. I’ve watched the crows die, helpless. And seen the innumerable woodpeckers on the gasping carcass of the ash trees, gorging on emerging Emerald Ash Borers. We have a local Sharp-shinned Hawk, and a family of bats. And a bountiful crop of Asian Tiger mosquitoes that bite fiercely during the daylight. And a burly-looking woodchuck that trundles along in the underbrush now and then. And skunks! More than you can count.
A surprisingly bountiful urban ecosystem, frankly. I will now watch for the fox.
Though I’m still holding out for cougars.
Link dump 001/010
Far too many bookmarkletted items in MarsEdit; thus, a purge.
- Metaheuristics conference CFP in honor of Fred Glover.
- Planning for Eurabia and the next melting pot. Don’t forget, ours still has race riots….
- Roulette wheels to help doctors understand probability I may have mentioned this one before, but it’s a damned good idea!
- Zerzura Fever: Orientalism, the dream of the desert, and lost antiquity.
- Advanced Google searching for datamining Find lots more, or a useful less.
- Don’t think Wikipedia is scholarly. It may be right, it may have authority, but it ain’t scholarly (and yes, I agree)
First irony of the day
The Yahoo News article “Adobe Releases Flash Player 9″ was marred by the most annoying Flash advertising animation I have seen since that damned shaky flamingo one.
Too early for this.
Conversations with the living and the dead
It strikes me that the nature of scholarly discourse in the sciences, and engineering, is primarily focused on discussion among living participants. There is a broad consensus in these fields that old is obsolete, and that inevitable progress has left bare bones and ashes in the stacks of libraries: stuff suitable for mere historians only. One publishes to talk, to announce, to replace. One reads to be challenged, to be inspired, to reply.
In some of the liberal arts, on the other hand, the nature of scholarly discourse seems backwards-looking: much more concerned with what the dead or unreachably distant have said, and inferring what they meant from what they wrote. These disciplines are concerned, at their root, with contexts and frameworks, theories and social norms. One publishes to append one’s work, not amend; to join the scholarly host, not disperse it.
Broad generalizations, of course. No room in such a strict dichotomy for the study of media, or policy, or computers, or mathematics.
But insofar as it might be something like the world, what does it say about books, magazines, and publishing? What is preserved, and what added to a collection?
“Wollerkertoot” and meta-miscellany
Google returned no hits for wollerkertoot, a situation I hope this post will remedy.
One wonders about the stability of [ir]relevance. We strive to preserve old writing; how long until we’re a threat to Google? An interesting feeling: impending dangerousness.
Dean Dad on meritocracy
Some ambivalence is noted: “Meritocracy and Losers”.
A sociologist named Michael Young coined the term ‘meritocracy’ when he used it as the title of his dystopian novel, written in the late 1950’s. (It was set a few generations into the future.) The conceit of the novel was that all industries were organized by rigorous merit, with the result that the lower classes were horrifically exploited, since anyone in the lower classes with any ability was quickly reslotted somewhere else. The ones left over were the ones incapable of defending themselves. And nobody else defended them, since they lost fair and square. Over time, it came to resemble a caste system.
On the Endless Forest
Something that makes me wonder about getting a PC: Interview of Michael Samyn & Ariea Harvey, creators of The Endless Forest. Oh so very Miyazaki.
…and why did he leave his letters in my basement?
Philobiblon (by way of Miss Wynn) addresses a perennial question around here, every time we shift the books waiting to be scanned for Distributed Proofreaders: Who was Junius? Gotta get those things scanned, including the facsimile letters therein….
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