Man versus beast stories of the day.

1. "Man 'jumped' by coyote saves himself by strangling it for 10 minutes: 'Either him or me'" ("He jumped on me and I caught him in the air, he was biting me, and so when I threw him down and I’m trying to slide out of the way, he just kept coming.... I had to rip my left hand out of his mouth, and when I got my left hand out, I just choked him all the way till the police got there....")

2. "Man dies in bee attack despite frantic escape attempt that had him drive through neighbor’s yard" ("Stephen Daniel... frantically jumped into his vehicle to get away, but the bees followed him inside and continued to sting him until he crashed into Chrishae Cooper’s property...").

Martha Stewart kept peacocks and there were also 6 "large and aggressive" coyotes. "Let's Get It On," indeed.

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This is a metaphor, but for what?

6 coyotes killed 6 peafowl, and there are still more peafowl chez Martha. 

Martha knows the Marvin Gaye anthem to sexuality pairs horribly with predation, but it's the video she has of the proud Blue Boy, who is no more.

Imagine the coyote: "We’re all sensitive people with so much to give/Understand me, sugar..."

IN THE COMMENTS: Wince quotes Martha's "RIP beautiful BlueBoy" and links to "Well, he made it. Blue Boy is dead":

America is in a creepy downward spiral... or so it appears in this awful juxtaposition at The Washington Post.

At 5:29 this morning, I took the screen-grab of the right top corner of the WaPo website.



Everything is dead or dying. Everything is wrong.

Imagine hitting this animal with your car, stopping, and picking it up — thinking it's a dog — and laying it down in the backseat:



Oh, but is it not a metaphor for the election of Donald Trump?

7:02 this morning.

1. Actual sunrise time was 7:10, which did not look that different. It was another one of those days when nature seemed to present me with the "subtle nuance" challenge.

2. The light of the state capitol dome predominated, and I thought about the balance between the government and nature — order and chaos. But which one is order and which one is chaos? You could take either side of that debate.

3. In the comments to yesterday's dawn-run post, Susan in Seattle said: "I visit here every day but am mostly under the radar ('lurking' sounds a little creepy). This post in particular, I really enjoyed; it's been rolling around in my head since I read it in the early morning hours today." I said: "Thanks, Susan in Seattle. It’s my favorite kind of post to write." So I'm doing it again.

4. I love repetition. The run to see the sunrise is a daily repetition, and the 9-point (will it be 9?) list could be a repetition as well. But this is only day 2 of that repetition, and 2 times is no kind of pattern. Got to have at least 3.

5. In yesterday's comment thread, Mr. Forward said: "I was training for the Birkenbeiner and I had a playlist where 'Cannonball' by the Breeders would kick in at the top of the hill and with the right snow would synchronize with the topography of the downhill plunge. Transcendent or close enough." Today, I asked Siri to play a running playlist that I've used a lot over the past 3 months and — just by chance — I got hit with "Cannonball." 



6. I had my AirPods in so I thought Meade was howling because he heard a coyote. I ask him now, and it turns out he wasn't howling, he was hooting. He heard an owl.

7. Was he trying to convey the message to me that the sounds of nature are superior to the podded-in music? I ask him, and he says, "No, no, it's not all about you. Get over yourself." You have to imagine the tone, which is humorous and a denial of what would be ever so slightly oppressive: hooting as a way to disparage listening to music.

8. The owl a Great Horned Owl. Sounds like this.

9. Why write lists that go to 9? William said yesterday, "A list that stops at nine leaves a vague sense of not being quite complete." I said, "I stopped at 9 because I was writing within John Lennon’s universe." Point #4 had something to do with the song "Across the Universe," and "Revolution Number 9" is another John Lennon song: "Revolution 9 was an unconscious picture of what I actually think will happen when it happens; just like a drawing of a revolution. All the thing was made with loops. I had about 30 loops going, fed them onto one basic track. I was getting classical tapes, going upstairs and chopping them up, making it backwards and things like that, to get the sound effects. One thing was an engineer's testing voice saying, 'This is EMI test series number nine.' I just cut up whatever he said and I'd number nine it. Nine turned out to be my birthday and my lucky number and everything. I didn't realise it: it was just so funny the voice saying, 'number nine'; it was like a joke, bringing number nine into it all the time, that's all it was." Order and chaos! Owls and coyotes!

"How to Haze a Coyote."

"Remember, hazing coyotes only works if everyone does it...."

IN THE COMMENTS: Freeman Hunt said:

"We can co-exist peacefully with coyotes like this..."

Cut to woman screaming at coyote, throwing things at it, and spraying it with a hose.

I love this video.

Waking up to the first snow of the season.

Pre-dawn view.

UPDATE AT 7:09: A coyote just trotted through the backyard. Almost got a pic.

"Some speculate that this adaptability to city life is because coywolves’ dog DNA has made them more tolerant of people and noise..."

"... perhaps counteracting the genetic material from wolves—an animal that dislikes humans. And interbreeding may have helped coywolves urbanise in another way, too, by broadening the animals’ diet. Having versatile tastes is handy for city living. Coywolves eat pumpkins, watermelons and other garden produce, as well as discarded food. They also eat rodents and other smallish mammals. Many lawns and parks are kept clear of thick underbrush, so catching squirrels and pets is easy. Cats are typically eaten skull and all, with clues left only in the droppings."

From an Economist article, "Greater than the sum of its parts/It is rare for a new animal species to emerge in front of scientists’ eyes. But this seems to be happening in eastern North America."

A coyote trotted down our street at 5:06 AM.

Never seen that before around here. Have seen foxes. I hope they, the coyotes, like the foxes, eat chipmunks.

Seen on the internet.

Grabbed this morning from a major news website:



I just wanted you to know what's out there. I'm not saying be afraid, be very afraid. But... pay attention.

At the Coyote Café...

... come inside!

Coyotes are running around in Madison, Wisconsin....

... and one seems to have killed a pet dog.

Last night — according to neighborhood email — somebody saw 2 coyotes chasing a rabbit near West High School.

I must say, there are too many rabbits around here. And you probably shouldn't leave your cats and dogs outside on their own.

Grizzly bear kills a man in Yellowstone Park.

The description comes out:

Marylyn Matayoshi told park officials that she and her husband were hiking back to their car along the Wapiti Lake Trail about 11 a.m. when they saw the bear and two cubs about 100 yards away. [Yellowstone Supt. Dan] Wenk said the couple had just emerged from a dense area of lodgepole pines into a broad meadow where the bears were.

The couple backed away, and then turned in the direction they had come. When they looked back, the grizzly was charging them, Wenk said. Matayoshi yelled to his wife to run, and she took shelter behind a fallen tree at the side of the trail, according to officials.

Wenk said the sow reached Brian Matayoshi first, fatally biting and clawing him. The bear then approached Marylyn Matayoshi, and picked her up. Wenk said it is likely that because she was playing dead, the bear moved on.

It was the first killing by a bear in Yellowstone since 1986, and the bear was protecting her cubs.

As long as we're talking about Yellowstone, here are some lush photographs of Yellowstone. I especially like the ones of Grand Prismatic Spring. Generally, I prefer landscape photographs to photographs of animals. People get strangely excited about seeing animals in Yellowstone. I mean, a chipmunk begging for food? A coyote running through grass? You probably have these things in your home town. As for the bigger creatures... I'd leave them alone.

Coyote...

... roadkill silhouette in frost and warmth.

Did Coyote ever catch Road Runner?

Yes!



I think this works as a political allegory, by the way. But for what?

"Una had stretched out on the bed of the guillotine; I lifted the lunette, made her put her head through it, and closed it on her long neck, after carefully lifting her heavy hair."

"She was panting. I tied her hands behind her back with my belt, then raised her skirt. I didn't even bother to lower her panties...." Etc. etc. "... Leaning over the lunette, my own neck beneath the blade, I whispered to her: 'I'm going to pull the lever, I'm going to let the blade drop.' She begged me: 'Please, fuck my pussy.' - 'No.' I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg."

Ha ha ha. And with that, Jonathan Littell ("The Kindly Ones") has snatched this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

Read all the finalists — and laugh (or climax!) — here. Be charitable. It's really very hard to write about sex. Have you ever tried to do it? If you have, I hope you had the sense to laugh at yourself.

ADDED: From the BBC::

Over the years, some of literature's most glittering names have competed for one of its least coveted prizes.

Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, John Updike and Philip Roth are titans among novelists, generally acclaimed for their representations of every kind of human experience - except one.

When writing about sex, says the Literary Review magazine, their standards slip.

Here's the Roth passage that got noticed this year (from "The Humbling"):

He had let Pegeen appoint herself ringmaster and would not participate until summoned. He would watch without interfering. First Pegeen stepped into the contraption, adjusted and secured the leather straps...

It was a big year for devices, apparently. Again, I'm cutting the most NSFW parts, which you can click over and read.

... There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though, in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be. She could as well have been a crow or a coyote, while simultaneously Pegeen Mike. There was something dangerous about it. His heart thumped with excitement - the god Pan looking on from a distance with his spying, lascivious gaze.

It was English that Pegeen spoke when she looked over from where she was, now resting on her back beside Tracy, combing the little black cat-o'-nine-tails through Tracy's long hair, and, with that kid-like smile that showed her two front teeth, said to him softly, 'Your turn. Defile her.'....

Oh, okay. I liked the coyote, though, Phil. That was good. And the "mask on her genitals," that "weird totem mask." That meant something.

IN THE COMMENTS: DADvocate wrote:

I've always wanted to write about nerd sex. Certainly, it would win the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

"After the proper amount of digital manipulation of each others genitalia, I inserted my penis into her vaginal orifice and began rhythmic thrusting motions at a cadence I had calculated to maximize her arousal...." 

Deadly coyotes.

RIP, Taylor Mitchell.

Coyote.

Fortitude.

See it?

ADDED: As a few of you have seen, there's a groundhog. You may remember that a few days ago, there were 2 coyotes in the yard here (in Ohio) and they were gnawing on a groundhog. Yesterday, I saw a few groundhogs in the yard and running into that spooky old garage. Today, we were walking down in the meadow at dusk, and, just after Holly (the dog) chased after a deer, we saw a coyote in the tall grass. It was keeping an eye on us. Were there pups somewhere? Were there coyotes all over the place in that grass? We made our way back to the house. Would a beast suddenly lunge at our backs? No, we're here. Unscathed.

2 coyotes in my (Ohio) front yard.

Gnawing on a groundhog.

IN THE COMMENTS: Fred4Pres said:

I had just had a quarrel with my girlfriend and I was driving her home late one night. As we rounded the bend to her parents home we saw a dead possum in the road and its mate standing over it.

She started crying and said "Look how sad he is that his mate died."

At that momemt, the possum ripped a chunk of meat from the dead possum, tilted its head back like a crocodile and wolfed down the chunk.

I replied, "Yeah, he seems really torn up about it."

We broke up the next day.