"When I was younger, I definitely felt smug about how much money I was saving. I felt like I was doing something secretly smart..."

"... living this ultrafrugal lifestyle in preparation for a day when I wouldn’t have to answer to anyone but myself. But I don’t feel that way anymore. If I drop dead of a heart attack tomorrow, most of my friends will have had more fun in their lives than I had in mine. Right now, I’m playing catch-up on fun. But I’m still pretty far behind...."

From "She Retired at 35. The Only Problem? It’s Lonely" (NY Magazine).

"And only since I retired have I started looking hard at what achieving all this shit was actually going to do for me. What emotional need was I trying to meet? My ambition level, the way I used to think of it, is now gone. But what did it serve?... I have a lifetime goal to foster and adopt out 100 animals, and I’m three-quarters there already.... I am not bored or underchallenged at all. I feel like I am busier than I’ve ever been, just with different things. I have the flexibility to help my friends with their kids, which — as I don’t plan to have kids — is pure joy...."

"[RFK Jr.] was going to look into all of the vaccines and the food. He didn't do any of that. It's fake."

"So he's on some summer vacation with Cheryl and some yak.... On his Instagram... he's like, We did a 10 mile hike up the mountain and I saw a yak... The Secretary of Health and Human Services now doing content on social media with wild animals...."

"Look, I'm 30 years old. Not one of my friends has children. Zero. No one. No one's having kids."

"Do you know how hard you need to abuse a mammal to make them not have children? Like, for real? Let's step back a moment, right?... Look, GDP goes up. People have enough food and whatever. No one's having kids. And this is across the world. This is across both the West, the East, everywhere it's happening. So why do I not have kids?... Do you know what dating app algorithms do?... They don't optimize for you to meet the love of your life. They optimize for you to keep coming back to the app.... We have treated technology as a wild west. Absolutely. Just everyone can do whatever they want. Oh, just sell all of our younger generations' dating lives to corporations for profit. And who pays the cost for this? Who has liability for every person who doesn't find the love of their life because the whole dating market is fucked up? Who pays for this? No one. There is no responsibility. It's completely worthless. And these dating companies, they're not even profitable...."

That's Connor Leahy, and I've got a problem with his abuse-a-mammal theory. Of course, he meant to say "Do you know how hard you need to abuse a non-human mammal to make them not have children?" But non-human mammals don't have access to birth control (and abortion).

"By 1963 we had accumulated ten horses, eleven dogs, a donkey, two goats, pigs, my 4-H cow, chickens, pheasants, ducks, geese, forty closely related rabbits (I started with two)..."

"... and a coop of Hungarian homing pigeons, along with the hawks, owls, raccoons, snakes, lizards, salamanders, and fish in my personal menagerie. A pair of bush babies lived under the porte-cochère, a nocturnal honey bear slept away his days in the playroom crawlspace, while my coatimundi and my giant leopard tortoise roamed free in the house. A jill ferret fed her pups under the kitchen stove. The mailman, retreating to his car, might be chased by goats, geese, or an imposing pack of barking dogs, where he might find a sea lion lolling on the vehicle’s warm hood, playfully slathering the windshield with a fount of fishy saliva. Aunt Jackie captured this bedlam in one of her watercolors, depicting frolicking children pursuing a football among a herd of galloping horses, a worn-out cook leaving the driveway with her overnight bags as her replacement arrives similarly encumbered, while canines pursue an accountant, tearing at his clothes...."

Writes RFK Jr., in "American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family – An Intimate Memoir of Father and Son, the Kennedy Legacy, and Hope" (commission earned).

That's the only mention of raccoons in that book, which I've read and enjoyed and which I was searching this morning a propos of the new story "Kennedy Jr/RFK Jr once cut penis off ‘road-killed raccoon’ in New York, new book reveals/Health secretary in a diary entry said his kids were in the car as he cut off animal’s genitals in 2001 to 'study them later'" (Guardian).

Here's Kennedy when he was asked about the raccoon penis yesterday. I love the reaction, a subtle chuckle as he walks away. I read his mind to say: If only you knew the life I've lived. Your windshield was never slathered with fishy saliva.

"I worked in a warehouse. It's where I felt so free. Then HR saw that video and terminated me."

I was good. I was great. I was busy moving freight. But I wanted to be funny, now the trucks will have to wait. I miss that icy freezer. I know that must sound odd, but now the smoke has cleared and my testicles  have thawed. I used to pick up pallets and I used to lift them high. It used to lift my spirits up. I felt like I could fly....

That's Blake Porter, via this Metafilter post by CrunchyFrog.

I enjoyed that. It was sweet and quirky, and I felt for the guy (even though I also think employers do need some rules about making your own videos at work, especially if you're working with heavy equipment like forklifts).

But it also got me wondering about Metafilter. I remember years ago, it had hot debate about political and social issues, but now it seems that everyone has agreed amongst themselves only to talk about sweet little quirky things and to be really nice to each other. It's a gentle pleasant atmosphere, but what the hell happened? What sapped all the vigor out of the place? If you go over there now, you'll see a post about what Isaac Asimov wrote about "1984" in 1980, how Jhumpa Lahiri is finding "quivering energy" in the works of Thomas Hardy, the rescue of a sea turtle, a walk to see (hear?) a sound sculpture, a bird that has relearned an old birdsong, a cat in a library, what rock art might be saying about Tasmanian tigers, etc. etc. 

Attempting to use Grok to explore my wonderment, I encountered the word "cozification." My search based on that word might have led me down various sweet quirky paths, but in the interest of keeping myself sharp and fast-moving, I decided to end this post with this screen shot (from Urban Dictionary) which I deem found art:

Meet Jeffrey Epstein.

wild find, how the media first introduced Jeffrey Epstein 25 years ago https://t.co/RZLXdHQvKr

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) February 10, 2026

AND: As long as I'm embedding things from Mike Benz this morning:

"Size of Life."

A beautiful and entertaining graphic depiction of the relative size of various life forms.

I've always loved perceptions about size. I've collected them over the years using my tag "big and small" — you know, the large boulder the size of a small boulder, the Santa Claus hat, and all the rest — so I'm happy to have something else, something so good, to add to my collection.

"The more I advance in my life, the more I fear humans. I’m more animal than human."

Said Brigitte Bardot, quoted in "Brigitte Bardot: I tried to kill myself many times. A miracle saved me/The 91-year-old screen icon discusses her struggles with depression as a young woman in a new 90-minute documentary titled Bardot" (London Times).

"Democrats say the use of silly inflatable costumes is a way to undercut Republican portrayals of such events as violent 'hate America rallies.'"

The Washington Post sets out to answer the question "Why protesters against Trump are wearing frog, chicken and T. rex costumes."

If you feel you need to put on a costume to disguise what you are, doesn't that suggest that you are the scary thing you're trying to cover up? I think of the wolf in sheep's clothing.

The image of wolf in sheep's clothing comes from in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus said: "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves."

From the WaPo article:

Vegetarian is not enough.

Photo by Meade, which he describes as "City bus 3 blocks from Ag school dairy building."

It's an impressive and persuasive slogan, but one might also say: Because you consume vegetables, rodents, birds, snakes, and amphibians die.

But the calf is a lovable being, one could respond, speciesistly. Look at its sweet face!

"A zoo in Denmark is asking the public for donations of unwanted small pets or horses to feed its captive predators."

CBS News reports

The zoo in northern Denmark said that chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs were an important part of the diet of its predators, which need "whole prey," reminiscent of what they would hunt in the wild.

"If you have a healthy animal that has to leave here for various reasons, feel free to donate it to us. The animals are gently euthanized by trained staff and are afterwards used as fodder. That way, nothing goes to waste — and we ensure natural behavior, nutrition and well-being for our predators," Aalborg Zoo said. 

The zoo said it accepts donated rabbits, guinea pigs and chickens on weekdays between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., but no more than four at a time.

They're eating the dogs! They're eating the cats! No, they are not. It doesn't say dogs and cats. It says "chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs." 

Here's the notice. Is that the zoo's predator or somebody's unwanted cat?

 

That's easy to translate and to see that's a lynx: "Chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs form an important part of the diet of our predators – especially the European lynx, which needs whole prey that resembles what it would naturally hunt in the wild." 

Did this "longtime Democratic researcher" really ask "around 250 focus groups of swing voters" to name the animal each political party reminds them of?

I'm reading this free-linked NYT article — "Six Months Later, Democrats Are Still Searching for the Path Forward" — because my son John posted about it on Facebook.

I just couldn't believe this:

One longtime Democratic researcher has a technique she leans on when nudging voters to share their deepest, darkest feelings about politics. She asks them to compare America’s two major parties to animals. After around 250 focus groups of swing voters, a few patterns have emerged, said the researcher, Anat Shenker-Osorio. Republicans are seen as “apex predators,” like lions, tigers and sharks — beasts that take what they want when they want it. Democrats are typically tagged as tortoises, slugs or sloths: slow, plodding, passive. So Ms. Shenker-Osorio perked up earlier this year when a Democratic man in Georgia suggested that a very different kind of animal symbolized her party. “A deer,” he said, “in headlights.”...

Somehow Republicans do way too much, so aggressively, but Democrats don't get anything done? And these were swing voters? Sorry. Not believed. Sounds too much like the opinion of someone with left-wing policy preferences. You want more from the Democrats and you want it faster. And those terrible Republicans!

Anyway, asking people what animal Democrats and Republicans reminded them of reminded me of the old Barbara Walters question "If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?" Yeah, be skeptical about that too because she didn't ask that question... other than that one time, after Katharine Hepburn started it by likening herself to a tree. Barbara Walters followed up with "What kind of tree are you, if you think you’re a tree?" Of course, Hepburn gave the answer nearly everyone would give if they were asked what kind of tree they are: Oak. And poor Barbara was forever after treated as if she asked everyone what kind of tree they were.

"They found that human wounds took more than twice as long to heal as wounds of any of the other mammals."

"Our slow healing may be a result of an evolutionary trade-off we made long ago, when we shed fur in favor of naked, sweaty skin that keeps us cool.... Each hair grows from a hair follicle, which also houses stem cells.... 'When the epidermis is wounded, as in most kinds of scratches and scrapes, it’s really the hair-follicle stem cells that do the repair,' Dr. Fuchs said. Furry animals are covered in follicles, which help quickly close up wounds in mice or monkeys. By comparison, 'human skin has very puny hair follicles,' Dr. Fuchs said. And our ancestors lost many of those follicles, packing their skin with sweat glands instead.... Most furry mammals have them only in certain places, mainly the soles of their paws. But human ancestors went all-in on sweat — modern humans have millions of sweat glands all over our bodies, and they’re about 10 times denser than those of chimpanzees...."

From "Humans’ Wounds Heal Much More Slowly Than Other Mammals’/We naked apes need Band-Aids, but shedding the fur that speeds healing in other mammals may have helped us evolve other abilities" (NYT).

If you had to choose between the power to heal fast or to cool fast, would you not choose the cooling power? It's what evolution chose for us, but not for all those other animals. Why?

"In order to create a 'snowy' atmosphere the tourist village purchased cotton for the snow. But it did not achieve the expected effect, leaving a very bad impression on tourists who came to visit."

Chengdu Snow Village confessed on its website, quoted in From "China snow village ‘cheats’ tourists with cotton wool and soap/Chengdu Snow Village, in Sichuan, was forced to apologise after visitors were left feeling ‘insulted'" (London Times).

Other cheesy tourism trickery from China:

"Many of the Badger Trust’s supporters are amateur badger enthusiasts, who belong to local badger groups scattered around the U.K."

"There are about sixty such groups, and they are 'very protective of badgers in their local area,' Hambly said. 'They tend to be people in areas who, for whatever reason, started to watch badgers at night.' A badger might amble into someone’s back yard, for instance, or be spotted walking alongside a country round. Some groups, like the Lancashire Badger Group, have hundreds of members, while others have just a few diehards. The Badger Trust also operates a helpline for distressed badgers. 'People ring up and say, "There’s a hurt badger, can someone come and help it?" Or, "A badger’s been knocked down," or, "A badger’s destroying my garden."' Actual contact with humans, however, is rare. Many badger-lovers have never even seen a live badger. (They love them from afar.) You might glimpse one cutting through a field only because it is following an ancient route; badgers will use the same pathways for hundreds of years. 'They’re quite mysterious,' Hambly said."

From "Britain’s Badger Wars/The animals are being killed in droves. Are they pests or political pawns?" (The New Yorker).

"Lemurs are strange in the way that the reclusive and wealthy are strange; having had the island of Madagascar to themselves evolve in..."

"... 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."

Writes Katherine Rundell, in "Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures" (commission earned) quoted in "A Pretty Girl, a Novel with Voices, and Ring-Tailed Lemurs" (Paris Review).

Hadn't used my "animals are jerks" tag in a long time.

Republicans pounce... on Peanut.

I'm reading "How the Death of a Celebrity Squirrel Became a Republican Rallying Cry/After P’Nut and a raccoon named Fred were taken by wildlife agents and euthanized, Donald Trump and local candidates accused New York Democrats of 'state overreach'" (NYT).

In the frantic last days of an election when candidates are scrabbling for any edge, the death of P’Nut (who also went by Peanut) has been pounced on by some Republicans as something of a fur-covered November surprise.... 

"Reminds me of that 'Chimp Crazy' thing I was watching. People love animals and get inside their fantasy."

Something I texted after receiving the following viral deer video (and agreeing with the guy who began "Nice story, too bad...."):

Nice story, too bad it’s made up of multiple random clips. Also, did dude repair the fence after cutting or just leave it that way for the owner to deal with?

— Jim McCaslin (@JimMcCaslin23) September 2, 2024

And if you're not familiar with "Chimp Crazy," check out the trailer:

People are delusional about wild animals. That reminds me to get back to my rewatching of "Grizzly Man."

"Furry is a fandom. We don’t think that we’re animals. I really like the idea of animals that walk and talk, so I’m going to dress up as one, as kind of a fun sort of cosplay thing."

Said a student named Strudel, quoted in "Students walk out of Utah middle school to protest ‘furries’" (abc4). Strudel explained that people who think they actually are a nonhuman animal are called "therians."

The student protesters object to the school's tolerance of the furries. There is a dress code banning things that "draw undue attention, distract, disrupt, or otherwise interfere with the learning atmosphere." You can see from the video of the protest, below, that signs say things like "Compelled speech is not free speech" and "I will not comply," so there seems to be more going on than a simple failure to enforce the dress code against the furries. I haven't watched much of the video, but I'm guessing the non-furry students are compelled to acknowledge the furries' professed identity in some prescribed way. And the article says the protesting students accuse the furries of "biting, scratching, spraying air freshener on, barking at and chasing other students." I'm guessing they are claiming a privilege to manifest behavior in line with their professed identity. How would that explain spraying air freshener? Perhaps that's a mellow substitute for a spray bottle of urine.

I'm not sure this isn't a hoax. There's plenty of video though:

"Where have all the emus gone? We have about a quarter as many as we did two decades ago..."

"... new data shows. Llamas and ostriches plunged even more precipitously. Meanwhile, the bankable animal superstars you grew up Seeing ’N Saying on Fisher Price toys — think chickens, cows, pigs and turkeys — haven’t lost a step. What happened to our loony livestock?..."

Asks Andrew Van Dam, in "The great American llama (and ostrich and emu) collapse" (WaPo).


Did any of you "invest" in wacky animals?


As in any investment strategy shaped like a pyramid, exotic livestock schemes rely not on selling animal products like milk, eggs, wool, meat or leather, but on selling the animals themselves to a new sucker.... [T]he classic mark for these dubious investments probably would have been a couple who had just retired or moved to the country and had a few extra acres burning a hole in their pockets.... During the boom years... every month as cadres of savvy bird brokers would spot new money the instant they walked in and bid up prices accordingly.... More dumb money flowed in as friends and neighbors worried about missing out on the ostrich-and-emu game.... [F]resh rounds of new rural residents [would] convince themselves it made sense to pay $40,000 for an emu....

ADDED: Is it true that the stress was on selling the animals and not on the products that could be made from them? I seem to remember the touting of emu meat. Here, there's this from 1992 in the NYT: "Emus and Ostriches Studied as Future Food":

"There is a huge market for ostrich hides, feathers and meat," said Dr. Kenneth Page, an avian venterinarian who has been working with Georgia's rapidly growing ostrich and emu industry for more than a year. It is $100 million to $200 million-a-year industry.

"The meat is red and it tastes just like steak, but it doesn't have any cholesterol," Dr. Page said. "In California, especially, it is becoming the new yuppie food." Ostrich and emu meat is also higher in protein and lower in fat than beef, he said....

And it wasn't just the seemingly amazing meat:

Ostrich feathers are used in the clothing industry and their hides are used for everything from billfolds to belts. "I like cowboy boots," Dr. Page said, "so I picked up a pair of those darn ostrich boots in October, for $695, and I understand that was a cheap pair."

Oil extracted from the emu, which is slightly smaller than an ostrich, standing close to six feet tall and weighing 110 to 115 pounds, can also be used as a pain reliever, its proponents say. Besides, said Charles F. Powell, the president of the Georgia Emu Association: "It's one of the best moisturizers on the market. When you put it on, it goes right down into your muscles without a greasy film or anything."

But there was still the worrisome news that the business had mostly to do with selling the birds (to suckers?):

[It] is essentially still a breeder's market. Because of the lucrative potential of the birds, nearly all are sold to people eager to raise ostriches or emus for themselves. A pair of mature breeding emus sell for $15,000 to $20,000, while an ostrich couple are close to $50,000....