"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.

"When tourists go on vacation, the area around them becomes a liminal space. Their geographic location is no longer real..."

"... but a fantasy that they are living in. If tourists have the fantasy disrupted, they can get really mean. And that is why this raccoon biologist has to conduct her research wearing a bikini."

A discussion at Metafilter.

"There’s a strain of rabies where the animals get very, very friendly..."

"... [a] family saw a raccoon that kind of showed up on their front step and he was sick and he was so cute and wanted to be petted. And you know when raccoons aren’t barring their teeth they are pretty cute."

Said a health official quoted in "Outbreaks of rabies seem to be rising across the U.S., CDC surveillance shows/The CDC's rabies team says it's tracking 15 different likely outbreaks from New York to Oregon" (NBC News)(citing 6 deaths from rabies in the U.S. in the past 12 months).

"The family petted and fed the animal until it died. They called animal services to pick up the body 'and thank God they did, because when they sent the brain out to be tested, it was positive, and so the whole family had to get vaccinated.... Oh, my gosh, they never would have known if they hadn’t called animal services.'"

"This is how I put a bunch of raccoons in trench coats inside of a secret art gallery."

A great art project....

Easter cold open.

Meade's comment, on watching that with me: "You can tell from the audience's reaction that even though they want to be thought of as hating Trump, underneath they really... love Trump."

5 minutes later:

Me: "From the standpoint of not liking fruit."

Meade: "You forgot the raccoons."

"[O]ur upstairs neighbors acquired an emotional support dog for their teenager. The dog runs back and forth for 30 minutes at a time."

"At least three nights a week, it scratches a bedroom rug, waking us up throughout the night. We have shared our concerns with the neighbors, asking them to crate the dog at night and walk him when he’s rambunctious. They seemed receptive, but the problem persists. How can we balance the rights of people to have emotional support animals with our right to live peacefully?"

A woman who had heretofore enjoyed 37 years of pleasant life in her condo sends a question to the NYT real estate adviser.

I won't quote any of the answer. It boils down to: NOTHING.

I should add that "boils down" was not intended as any sort of reference to the last lines of the previous post. You can do nothing, nothing, nothing about that dog that is scraping at the other side of your ceiling all night long. You should have thought of this possibility when you chose to take up condo life 4 decades ago. Dog people good. Dog haters bad. Bad bad bad haters. You deserve to lie awake all night for your failure to love.

"Racism, dead penguins and retaliation: Why the Vilas Zoo lost its only Black zookeepers."

That's the headline for a Madison.com article about the zoo here in Madison. You might think racism is somehow killing penguins — those birds who might seem to embody the peaceful harmonization of black and white.

There were 2 black zookeepers, and each left to take a job at a zoo in another city. But their exit interviews contained some criticisms, including some things about the treatment of animals, most notably the decapitation death of a penguin. Who would decapitate a penguin?! A raccoon. Wild local raccoons take the liberty to come and go as they please, including slipping into the enclosures of captive animals. 

We're told that, according to an exit interview, the zoo's general curator, Beth Petersen "decided to stop trapping raccoons that got onto zoo property and instead put Epsom salts on the ground in an attempt to repel them." At least one raccoon was insufficiently repelled, got into the penguin exhibit, and bit the head off Alice, the "elderly African penguin."

"There was almost a celebrity-like aura around him. It wasn’t a normal class. He would go on these long tangents about life and spirituality."

Said Amelia Brown, quoted in "Past Students Say Professor of Rock ’n’ Roll Sexually Harassed Them/Six former University of Michigan students have filed legal papers accusing a former lecturer of sexually harassing them and the school of not doing enough to protect them" (NYT). 

The class Brown took with the professor, Bruce Conforth, was “Beatniks, Hippies and Punks.”

[One former student] says, according to the court papers, that Mr. Conforth pressured her into a series of sexual encounters, some of them in his campus office, and later, after she had graduated, raped her in his Ann Arbor apartment. A second former student, Ms. Brown, said she was pressured into a sexual encounter with Mr. Conforth after he told her he had feelings for her and pursued her for several weeks. A third woman said he aggressively kissed her. The other plaintiffs say Mr. Conforth propositioned them to have sexual relationships, at times sending them sexually-charged messages or emails and persisting even after they said no. One woman said he gave her a raccoon penis, suggesting it was a talisman.... 

You hear noises...

From the Wisconsin State Parks Facebook feed.

Raccoons of Instagram.

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@sonnysundancer wall in Cozumel, Mexico 🇲🇽(2019) • #sonnysundancer #urbanart #streetart #painting #streetartofficial #cozumel #mexico

A post shared by STREET ART OFFICIAL (@streetart_official) on May 18, 2019 at 5:23am PDT

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bank card (old comic)

A post shared by Poorly Drawn Lines (@poorlydrawnlines) on May 18, 2019 at 11:14am PDT

"This raccoon is unifying all of Minnesota."

Video #1.

More here.

ADDED:

The #mprraccoon is doing a little grooming now that he's a social media star. You know, on a 23rd floor window ledge. @MPRnews pic.twitter.com/pGcwh7OJ6L

— Tim Nelson (@timnelson_mpr) June 12, 2018

pt>

"Raccoon in a Dumpster"? Who knew "Dumpster" is a brand name?

Did you, like me, have trouble with today's NYT crossword because the clue "Raccoon in a Dumpster" seemed to refer to something more specific — a fictional character? — than just a raccoon in a dumpster? I see Rex Parker — who bills himself as King of CrossWorld (as opposed to just another king of one of many crossworlds) — also got tripped up by the capitalization:

And then there was the SE [corner of the puzzle], where the capitalization of Dumpster (49A: Raccoon in a Dumpster, e.g.) really, really threw me. I thought "Raccoon in a Dumpster" was a show or a meme or something. A title, at any rate. Certainly not a plain old raccoon in a plain old Dumpster-brand Dumpster. Argh.

Speaking of tripped up, I would never — like Rex — have written in "LSD" for the clue "Hallucinogen nicknamed 'embalming fluid.'" It took me a while to get to the right answer — PCP — but I know enough about LSD to know that "embalming fluid" is not an apt descriptive.

Anyway, here's the Wikipedia article for "Dumpster," which I'd never before understood as a brand name:

The word is a genericized trademark of Dumpster, an American brand name for a specific design.... The word "dumpster", first used commercially in 1936, came from the Dempster-Dumpster system of mechanically loading the contents of standardized containers onto garbage trucks, which was patented by Dempster Brothers in 1935. The containers were called Dumpsters, a blending of the company's name with the word dump....

Genericized. We should have been saying "Dumpster-brand garbage containers" all this time.

By the way, the answer for "Raccoon in a Dumpster" was "forager."

ADDED: I'm not coordinating my themes with James Lileks, but he happens to be writing about the NYT crossword this morning. Nothing about Raccoon in a Dumpster. He's talking about the perennial charge that the NYT crossword is old and white:

So the crossword is old and white. So what? Well, it’s in the Times, and thus it should be inclusive, and that means abandoning terms that Young Persons of Color don’t get, or, if they do get them, don’t find them appropriate for the newspaper....

This is a problem Rex Parker often writes about. I think what's more important than abandoning any terms is not having the puzzle full of words that older middle-class white people know fairly easily but other people would have to look up. It might be fun for me to fill in the names of characters from 1960s TV shows but just a drag for somebody who was born in 1995. As for now-frowned-upon terms like "Eskimo" — which Lileks discusses at the link — the problem is more the casual reliance on the word. It shouldn't be appearing in puzzles frequently, and it should have a clue that acknowledges that it's not currently in use, not something light-hearted like "______ Pie.'"

"I knew instantly it had to be rabid... Imagine the Tasmanian devil... I knew it was going to bite me."

"I didn’t think I could strangle [the raccoon] with my bare hands... With my thumb in its mouth, I just pushed its head down into the muck... It was still struggling and clawing at my arms. It wouldn’t let go of my thumb.... It felt like ‘Pet Sematary’... If there hadn’t been water on the ground, I don’t know what I would have done.... I’ve never killed an animal with my bare hands. I’m a vegetarian. It was self-defense... I always thought of raccoons as this cute, cuddly forest animal...."

Said Rachel Borch, who was jogging through the woods near her home in Hope, Maine.

"Since the Easter Egg Roll was revived under Betty Ford, most of the first ladies who have hosted the event wore suits, or at least jackets, suggesting it was a professional commitment."

"Hillary Clinton displayed her penchant for rainbow-colored pantsuits when she was host, resplendent one year in buttercup yellow, another in grass green. When the Obamas were in the White House, they significantly relaxed the rules, the president often going without a tie or jacket, and Michelle Obama most often in pants with a J. Crew T-shirt or cardigan and Converse (one Tracy Reese floral dress excepted). The message was one of a new, more relaxed, modern and active era."

From a NYT style piece explaining why Melania Trump's "classic... Easter dress... was actually something of a break with tradition." It seems as though Melania isn't so much the First Lady as a woman playing the part of First Lady, wearing "costumes for a series titled 'In The White House.'"

Here are a bunch of old photos from White House Egg Rolls of the past. Here's one showing Hillary in a suit that is not a pantsuit:



Here's how the First Lady (Grace Coolidge) looked in 1927:



Was there an Easter Raccoon back then? Actually, that's a Thanksgiving raccoon.

What a rain!

The sky darkened and the storm hit just as class ended today. Meade picked me up at the law school and we headed very slowly home in the TT. At the top of Lathrop Drive we saw a confused racoon rousted out of his sewer. Here we are stopped at the corner of North Charter and University Avenue, with the rainwater flowing up over the curb in a wave onto the sidewalk:



Look at that drain. You can see what flummoxed the racoon. Hail began hitting the windshield, and we headed for higher ground, into University Heights, where we saw a young woman running on the sidewalk with her feet plunging through ankle-deep water. What a crazy storm! It would have been better to shelter in place. As we arrived home — 1.3 miles from the school — the sun burst out and everything was fresh and pretty.

Inside, I reassured the dog and got big towels to soak up the rain that was all over the floor, and, outside, Meade took out the rake and cleaned up the leaves that had fallen. The leaves are still green here, and they mostly held tight, preserving our good hopes for bright fall-color season. But what a rain! The biggest rainstorm I've ever seen in Madison.

UPDATE: How much rain was it really? Only 0.91 inches. But it fell within about half an hour.

About that dog serial killer that had Marina del Rey in a panic...

... that man drowning a dog was not drowning a dog — he was washing a dog that was already dead — and the decapitated dog found in the same area was not a decapitated dog — it was the bloated corpse of a raccoon that wasn't even headless.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors had offered a $20,000 reward for — as the L.A. Times puts it ungrammatically — "information on whomever was responsible for the acts of cruelty."

[A] transient came into the Marina del Rey station Thursday night looking for his dead dog The homeless man said the dog had been struck by a car and he decided to take it to the beach to wash the carcass because he wanted to stuff the animal.... The homeless man said he tied the dog’s collar to a shovel to keep the body from floating away. He did this because he said he needed to leave the beach to retrieve some of his belongings in another location. When the homeless man returned, the dog was gone.... 

Question 1: What does a homeless person do with a stuffed dog? How does he get it stuffed? In a do-it-yourself effort? Maybe he envisions the dog standing watch over him while he sleeps — something practical.  Maybe he just liked how the dog looked and it fit a general approach to finding and keeping things things in the street.

Question 2: Should the homeless man get the $20,000?

"On several different occasions, I saw tourists just gushing over squirrels."

"They were taking selfies with the varmints in the background. Some had telephoto lenses and were shooting pictures like they’d stumbled on a bald eagle. I saw a whole family of Italians, three generations of them, gather around as they watched a squirrel eat a nut, or a pizza crust, or maybe it was a used condom. Who knows? Who cares? When did squirrels graduate to exciting wildlife? My dog would be appalled.... Which reminds me, last month, the Goldbergs were at the Copenhagen zoo. They had lions, some really cool vultures, and African wild dogs. They also had a big open-air exhibit of . . . raccoons. North American dumpster-diving raccoons. I thought it was hilarious."

From the depths a Jonah Goldberg column that I'm reading because there's material in it about Suzy Favor Hamilton, the topic of another post this morning. Go here for that. This post is about people who get excited about wildlife you think is utterly mundane and/or a nuisance.

"The way it’s packaged in the store, it’s so real, and it’s so fresh, and you don’t see chickens with their feathers and blood all over them, and their expression, with their tongue hanging out."

It = raccoon.

Inspectors from the LA County Health Department visited the Metro Supermarket in Temple City on Tuesday, after being informed that the market was selling raccoons as food.

Employees at the market declined to appear on camera, but did show entire raccoons, frozen, bagged, and selling for $9.99 per pound. The employees say raccoon is considered a delicacy in China.

Well, is that so terrible? Maybe we meat-eaters ought to have to see the "expression" on the face of the being whose death we find acceptable for our needs and pleasures. And why shouldn't the consumer take possession of the fur? Eat enough raccoon, and you could have a nice fur coat.

"Unscheduled, unsupervised, playtime is one of the most valuable educational opportunities we give our children."

"The value of free play,  daydreaming, risk-taking, and independent discovery have been much in the news this year, and a new study by psychologists at the University of Colorado reveals just how important these activities are in the development of children’s executive functioning."

Executive function is a broad term for cognitive skills such as organization, long-term planning, self-regulation, task initiation, and the ability to switch between activities. It is a vital part of school preparedness and has long been accepted as a powerful predictor of academic performance and other positive life outcomes such as health and wealth. The focus of this study is “self-directed executive function,” or the ability to generate personal goals and determine how to achieve them on a practical level. The power of self-direction is an underrated and invaluable skill that allows students to act productively in order to achieve their own goals.

When I was a kid, virtually all time not spent in school or sleeping and eating was free play time. Nobody ever spoke of "executive function" or projected developmental improvements of any kind. I was born in 1951, the same year as Bill Bryson, whose wonderful memoir "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" describes how we played back then:

[K]ids were always outdoors... and they were always looking for something to do. If you stood on any corner with a bike—any corner anywhere—more than a hundred children, many of whom you had never seen before, would appear and ask you where you were going. “Might go down to the Trestle,” you would say thoughtfully. The Trestle was a railway bridge over the Raccoon River from which you could jump in for a swim if you didn’t mind paddling around among dead fish, old tires, oil drums, algal slime, heavy metal effluents, and uncategorized goo. It was one of ten recognized landmarks in our district. The others were the Woods, the Park, the Little League Park (or “the Ballpark”), the Pond, the River, the Railroad Tracks (usually just “the Tracks”), the Vacant Lot, Greenwood (our school), and the New House. The New House was any house under construction and so changed regularly....

And when you got to the Trestle or the Vacant Lot or the Pond there would already be six hundred kids there...

Life in Kid World, wherever you went, was unsupervised, unregulated, and robustly—at times insanely—physical....

P-22, the cougar of Hollywood.

"By night, he cruises the chaparral-covered canyons, dining on mule deer, raccoon and coyote. By day, while tots ride the Travel Town train and hikers hit the trails, he hunkers down amid dense vegetation."

ADDED: This made me think of that "Six Feet Under" intro scene:



That startles me even when I know what's going to happen.