The Urban Pantheist

This snapshot-from-my-phone idea was going so great until I left my phone in my pants pocket and then put the pants through the wash. My Beloved Wife went and got herself a Windows Phone the dimensions of a 1975 Texas instruments calculator and gave me her phone. (I'm fantasizing about the waterproof Sony phone with the really high megapixel camera. That thing costs a lot of bucks but I'll tuck it away on my list of material possessions that will fix all my shortcomings and make my life better if I could only afford them.)

So here's a nice snapshot of Sigmund the yellow-billed stork taken with my regular camera on Thursday. Sigmund is the largest free-flight bird in the tropical forest exhibit, flying wherever he likes but spending much of his time with the saddle-billed storks, similar but much bigger birds who seem to tolerate him.

I forgot my camera on Friday and took a snapshot with my interim phone which was Alexis' last pre-smartphone phone. I couldn't figure out how to send the picture anywhere, and it sucked anyway, so let's just let that one disappear between the cracks of technology.

Thanks for checking in on me, Alexis and I are fine. I'm feeling weird inappropriate emotions, mostly rage--not at anyone or any thing in particular, just rage. So irrational, so out of control, you can take a deep breath and relax but then the tension comes into your chest and you can't stand it any more and take it out on a car door or a stick or something. You find yourself thin-skinned with buttons almost pre-pushed, so any little thing will make you fucking scream.

I've contacted my brother and father, and checked in with the facebook and the twitter. I don't have anything smart or good to say, but Patton Oswalt does: https://www.facebook.com/pattonoswalt/posts/10151440800582655

Patton says that the good people far outnumber the bad and he's right.

Another comedian philosopher I've been paying attention to is Paul Gilmartin and he reminds us every week: You're not alone.

In case you don't spend as much on the internet as Roger Ebert does (NO ONE does--the guy is turning into a character from Snowcrash) or don't subscribe to the National Geographic twitter feed (you should--much less annoying than getting the magazine sent to you in a plastic bag) here's some stuff I found interesting lately:

Not to be outdone, the Atlantic Ocean has it's own giant plastic trash gyre. It's mostly invisible, composed of tiny flecks that look delicious to animals that eat tiny flecks of translucent floating debris. I assume they are mostly fragments of plastic bags, like the kind National Geographic sends their magazines in.

Anyone who has kept mice or rats in a tiny cage knows that they get overweight in no time. Unfortunately for the body of knowledge we've been building up based on them, it screws up the results.

By now you know that the Chile earthquake shortened the length of the day and knocked the planet off its axis, but have you seen the tsunami pictures?

Using the worst headline I've ever seen on a zoo website, San Diego Zoo tells us that kangaroo rats will nest in sand that smells of mountain lion urine, because smaller predators treat it like plutonium.

One Facebook friend keeps pressuring me to like Neko Case, but I don't see it happening. I heard the Carolina Chocolate Drops on Fresh Air, however, and I like them.

And finally, I often hear from people wondering why they have to endure ticks and mosquitoes and other parasitic organisms. This abstract from a paper on the subject says it beautifully:

"Taking into account that most of the known living organisms are parasites and that they exert a strong influence on the functioning of ecosystems, we can consider parasitism as a successful strategy for life. Because of the harm that parasites can inflict on man and domesticated animals, which can be expressed as economic loss, many parasites become pests. In natural ecosystems, parasites contribute to the prevention of continuous exponential growth of populations and, therefore, they also need to be conserved."

A commercial passenger jet in New York has apparently struck a flock of geese and crashed into the Hudson River. I can't believe the rotten luck that this has happened on such a brutally cold day. It sounds like there are a lot of injuries but the radio and tv (both of which are chattering in my ears) haven't said anything about deaths. It will be interesting to hear how this pans out. My local CBS station is running the feed from a New York station. They just now said everyone was safely removed from the aircraft. Phew! Get these people some cocoa, stat!

The days are actually getting noticeably longer. I came home with the beginnings of a gorgeous sunset as a backdrop. The tall buildings of the hospital area were bathed in pink light. Anyone planning any big holiday parties for Feb 2?

Usually when you walk on snow, the friction of your step melts it a little and crushes it flat making a bootprint. Today I was following a keeper, watching his boots, and they made holes in the snow, but the crushed snow didn't melt flat. Instead the empty tracks would fill from the sides with fine dry powder. I've never observed that before.

Anyway, be safe out there everyone, especially you lunatics in the midwest.

The scope of human misery in the news can be overwhelming sometimes. Apparently, as we fret over what looks like 500 or so deaths due to the recent hurricane, about 1000 Iraqis (people who are now quite intimate associates of human misery) were trampled to death in a panic at a religious gathering.

I have nothing useful to say on the matter, it just makes having any kind of real perspective difficult, if not absurd. In that spirit, I will go on musing about urban nature, as I do.

The city of New Orleans, with its levees, destruction of wetlands, and petroleum industry seems to be at least somewhat complicit in its destruction. Not that the people who suffer most are to blame—the most powerless are the ones who suffer. Of course, being an animal lover, I wonder about the suffering of the animals. Call it trivial, we all have our interests. The zoos of the area are not suffering any more than anyone else—no major animal losses are reported from anywhere except the Gulfport, Mississippi Marine Life Oceanarium, which no longer structurally exists. Those fish and birds are now part of the gulf coast food web, but the dolphins are safely swimming in hotel swimming pools.

I wonder about the wildlife. Are there alligators swimming in the flooded streets of New Orleans? And what of the nutria, the huge introduced aquatic rodents that plague the region? Did they drown (as our muskrats do when the Muddy River floods) or did they find the high ground, making muddy dens of the Bourbon street balconies?

All of this makes it hard to comment on the loose ostriches on the Golden Gate Bridge, or the giant centipede found in an alarmed Briton’s home.