Last fall in Merrimack, N.H., a former town councilor infuriated by one bird spent months pressing for an ordinance with fines that climbed to $500, prompting one 40-year resident to ask: “We’re an agricultural town. If people moved here and now, all of a sudden, don’t want to listen to the noises of the deer, and the roosters, and the raccoons and the loons, why did they move here?”...
Because of the covid lockdown and because of the rising price of eggs, a lot of people were buying chicks, and some of those chicks grew up to be roosters.
The London Times reports: "Charl Schwartzel of South Africa had to take a one-stroke penalty after his attempt on the 134-yard par-three 7th at Trump Bedminster ended up in the water, and was swiftly swooped upon by a resident fish."
"... they have idiosyncratic habits. Male ring-tailed lemurs have scent glands on their wrists, and engage in 'stink-fighting,' battles in which they stand two feet apart and wipe their hands on their tails, then shake the tail at their opponent, all the while maintaining an aggressive stare until one or the other retreats. It feels no madder than current forms of diplomacy. It’s not unusual for female ring-tailed lemurs to slap males across the face when they become aggressive."
"... moving, for example, to replace the phrase 'a woman’s right to choose' with 'a person’s right to choose.' That well-intended inclusion of transgender and nonbinary people unfortunately blurs the essential message that the coming abortion ban is a frontal assault on women’s rights.
Instead of playing into the talons of the opposition, let’s make sure every voter knows what these toxic turkeys are up to as they shrug off sexual assault and push for a nationwide abortion ban: They are vitiating a half-century of progress for women."
1. The reference to turkeys has to do with an actual turkey that has been biting and scratching people on Anacostia Riverwalk Trail in Washington D.C. There's an analogy there. It's intended to be funny. An aggressive bird. Like the bird is a jerk. But surely the Republicans are jerks.
2. Milbank wrote "the coming abortion ban" just before the draft opinion leaked. I don't think he had any idea how soon it was coming.
3. There's a price to be paid for all the speech control that been undertaken to display superficial deference to transgender and nonbinary people. We've been suppressing awareness of the difference between male and female bodies, as if the vulnerability to pregnancy does not dramatically affect life for a woman. Life isn't just about how you feel inside about things you think of as gender. There's an outward reality that has to do with a very particular right that we fought so long to get acknowledged, struggled for 5 decades to keep, and lost just yesterday. And we're supposed to modify how we speak and not say "woman"!
From "The Stylist Embracing Messy Hair/Meet Dylan Chavles." Just a New York Magazine set of questions for a person, this one happening to be a hair stylist who stole the idea that I had when I was 10. I became famous in my own fantasy as the designer of The Mess-Up, the brilliant new approach to hairstyling done by messing it up.
And I'm also pretty sure that deep sea fish have nothing interesting to say. You know, they're under a lot of pressure, but they don't even notice.
ADDED: There's always Wittgenstein:
That's just the last 2 panels. Go here for the full story.
"Unless we believe there is such a profound moral gap between the status of human and nonhuman animals, whatever reasonable answer we come up with will be well surpassed by the harm and suffering we inflict upon animals. There is just too much torment wreaked upon too many animals and too certain a prospect that this is going to continue and probably increase; it would overwhelm anything we might place on the other side of the ledger.... One might ask here whether, given this view, it would also be a good thing for those of us who are currently here to end our lives in order to prevent further animal suffering. Although I do not have a final answer to this question, we should recognize that the case of future humans is very different from the case of currently existing humans. To demand of currently existing humans that they should end their lives would introduce significant suffering among those who have much to lose by dying...."
I know he's just playing with ideas and going to one of those "Modest Proposal" extremes, so I just want to call him out on one thing: Animals are cruel to each other. I'm willing to concede that humans are the worst and that our kind of cruelty is different because we can understand what we are doing and because we use our powers to amplify and extend cruelty. But without us, what would the other animals do to each other? There would be no humans around to perceive and bemoan it as cruelty, but it's already the case that the animals don't know we're feeling compassion for them.
The problem with this tweet is that you are a foul, disgusting liar and a stain on American public life. The stench of your deceit and your views pollutes your district, your state, your party, and the United States. https://t.co/6Aate5nHSb
I had to look up whether John Podhoretz has expressed pieties about civility. I found this quote: "I think making a pretense of civility toward Eric Alterman is like making a pretense of civility to a scorpion" (from a NYT interview). So, I'm only putting the "civility bullshit" tag on this post because I'm discussing it, not because Podhoretz is doing it. I associate The Weekly Standard with the notion of elevating political discourse, but I haven't read it enough to know if they affected a tone of civility and chastised others for not keeping it. I read Podhoretz's quote about King as consistent with his "scorpion" assertion.
A scorpion asks a frog to carry it across a river. The frog hesitates, afraid of being stung, but the scorpion argues that if it did so, they would both drown. Considering this, the frog agrees, but midway across the river the scorpion does indeed sting the frog, dooming them both. When the frog asks the scorpion why, the scorpion replies that it was in its nature to do so....
The origin of "The Scorpion and the Frog" is unknown, but it might have been inspired by an ancient Persian story with a scorpion and a turtle, and there is this nice 1847 illustration for that:
ADDED: Here's an older video of jack rabbits fighting.
It's interesting, I think — if you want to understand the art of film — that the first video feels immediately and continuously hilarious and the second video — much longer and with insistent music — may not even make you laugh at all.
My first stab at analysis is that the darkness and absence of context in the first video makes it feel abstract and allegorical, causing you to instantly visualize the rabbits as stand-ins for human beings: I know people like that. Silly people are like that. Hey, we're all kind of like that.
You go hurtling through important thoughts quickly. It's not a nature film of curious animal behavior. It's a horror flick shocking us with a harsh look at how stupid we are.
When I was vacationing in Thailand about 20 years ago, I was in a busy restaurant that had a small monkey chained to a perch in the corner. I felt sorry for it and went over to give it some attention. I fed it a treat of some sort from my table and allowed it to perch on my shoulder. Then it shoved its fingers into my eye sockets, driving my lids deep into the space between my eyeballs and eyebrows. It wrapped it's legs around my neck and started humping the back of my head, coming before I was able to tear it off.
I came to realize that having a monkey for a pet would be as much fun as taking care of an incontinent, criminally insane person.
People, can you just leave the dolphins alone? They don't want to swim with you, despite the "expression" you see on their faces. The love you think you are experiencing is nothing more than self-love. Stay home, save your money, and stare in a mirror until you get a deep, accurate assessment of how true your self-love is. Is there a fixed smile on your face? I hope not, but if there is, it's not because you share the spirit of the dolphin. The dolphin is "smiling" because nature played a dirty trick on him, drawing idiot humans into his domain. Get out. Leave the dolphin alone.
ADDED: I just read the last paragraph of the linked article:
After the man pulled me out of the water, Dusty swam away, but then she came back and was bobbing vertically next to me, looking at me. We locked eyes and I felt there was complete remorse in her. She was a totally different dolphin; the anger had gone. The people on the pier were in awe.
The people on the pier were fools. You felt there was complete remorse. Sheer nonsense. She was a totally different dolphin. But you were the same fool you have always been.
Tell me again about how people travel to broaden their minds and gain insight and understanding. And this is a travel story. That dolphin Dusty "starred in an Irish tourist board ad campaign." Oh, here is is:
Yeah, go to Ireland for the dolphins. And toss your tiny daughter in the water with a powerful, unpredictable beast. Because Ireland really wants a huge pile of your money, and what says Ireland more than dolphins? Good lord! Take your kids to a beach closer to home if you must inject excitement into their lives. I continue to believe that a soothing, calm environment is best for children. Give them a place to discover their own ways of having fun. That pleasant room where the girl in the ad sits in a chair and imagines where she could be is exactly where she belongs so she can imagine her own things, not some damned list dreamed up by the Irish tourist board.
Actually, the text of the NYT editorial doesn't use the "circus" metaphor, but it does begin "The hottest competition in Washington this week is among House Republicans vying for a seat on the Benghazi kangaroo court...." and "kangaroo court" does sound sort of circus-like — some spectacle involving animals.
There is some debate over the origin of the term kangaroo court, but some sources suggest that it may have been popularized during the California Gold Rush of 1848, as a description of the hastily carried-out proceedings used to deal with the issue of claim jumping miners. Other sources claim that the term comes from the notion of justice proceeding "by leaps," like a kangaroo. Some[who?] have suggested that the phrase could refer to the pouch of a kangaroo, meaning the court is in someone's pocket.
The question hich animal would make the worst judge is an interesting one. It's easy to quip that the human animal makes the worst judge. Only the human animal ever gets the idea of conducting anything even resembling a judicial procedure.
That said, I would not like to be tried by a bird.
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