"A sign at a playground in Moraga, a 35-minute drive from San Francisco, advises parents that rattlesnakes are 'important members of the natural community' and to give the snakes 'respect.'"

"Across the Bay in the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame, an animal shelter has rescued a family of skunks from a construction hole, a chameleon from power lines and nursed back to health 100 baby squirrels that tumbled out of their nests after their trees got trimmed. With the exception of the occasional aggressive coyote, the animals that roam the hills and gullies of the Bay Area — turkeys, mountain lions, deer, bobcats, foxes and the rest of a veritable Noah’s Ark — find themselves on somewhat laissez-faire terms with the humans around them. Not so for the rampaging feral pigs...."

From "The Rampaging Pigs of the San Francisco Bay Area/A proposed California law would make it easier to hunt feral swine, the voracious “super invaders” that are the bane of some East Bay suburbs" (NYT).

Cyclist's wildlife encounter...

Cat problem is a skunk problem.

A letter to a real estate advice column (in the NYT):

A neighbor leaves bowls of food around the neighborhood for feral cats, even placing some on the grounds of the Russian diplomatic mission at the end of our block. I’ve asked her to stop, and I remove food when I can, but to no avail. The cats treat my garden like their litter box, track mud over my car and wail and moan when they fight or mate. Worse, the food attracts skunks. A neighbor’s dog was sprayed twice and my shuttered window was sprayed, filling my house with the stench. Another neighbor and I trapped seven skunks to be released in Pelham Bay Park, but there are more. What recourse do I have?

Sounds like he currently has 7 skunks in a cage and is relying on letter-writing to figure out what to do. Doesn't he have a bigger problem than the feral-cat lady. 

"Clad in outfits fashioned from the football-sized leaves of the skunk cabbage plant..."

"... they play an odd medley of instruments—trombones, kazoos, pots and pans—as they march forward, then backward down Elk Avenue, the main street in this Rocky Mountain ski town...."

As the cacophony swells, they chant letters spelling out four words: "Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory."...

The tradition... began in the summer of 1984... Two students started it...

The point of the costumes was to "be risqué in a biological way. Veratrum is just the plant that's everywhere out here, and has big enough leaves to make it possible to wear," [said Ecology professor Dirk H. Van Vuren]....

The original manifestation of this costume concept was nakedness underneath. One of the 2 founding students said: "People started running up at the end and tearing our skirts off of us... People were wowed. That was the best time I ever had at a parade."

Don't let the word "skirts" make you picture a female getting her clothes ripped off, wowing others thereby, and proclaiming it a great time. That was a guy, and now he's got it in the Wall Street Journal that "people were wowed" at whatever they saw.

These days the parade is "more family friendly" and "people just kind of attach veratrum to whatever they're wearing."

There's also the "RMBL Forward-Backward Marching Band," originated in 1976 by biologist Nickolas Waser who was "cynical about the political scene, so I think it had an additional meaning of marching forward and backward into the third century of the U.S." They played things like the Mickey Mouse Club song ("Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me...."). You can see how that would make for a mockery of patriotism. That's how some people feel about the 4th of July, but we're told it's "more family friendly" now, and I don't know what that extends to other than having a bathing suit under your skunk cabbage garb.

"This one here is the original sinsemilla, Bob Marley's favorite. And this one here is the chocolate skunk. It's special for the ladies."

Pot tourism in Jamaica, modeled on those wine tours people do in northern California.

Here, in Jamaica's verdant central mountains, dreadlocked men escort curious visitors to a farm where deep-green marijuana plants grow out of the reddish soil. Similar tours are offered just outside the western resort town of Negril, where a marijuana mystique has drawn weed-smoking vacationers for decades...

"I can get stronger stuff at home, but there's something really special about smoking marijuana in Jamaica. I mean, this is the marijuana that inspired Bob Marley," said a 26-year-old tourist from Minnesota who only identified herself as Angie as she crumbled some pot into rolling paper.

I have a problem generally with traveling to foreign countries. Is this what they mean by broadening the mind? Isn't it mind-expanding enough to consume the powerful Minnesota marijuana while playing Bob Marley records and contemplating the man who no longer lives anywhere in his natural habitat? Do people from Jamaica journey to Minnesota to think about Prince? (And he's still around. You might entertain the hope of actually seeing him.)

My mind is already sufficiently expanded to contemplate Bob Marley solely by reading about him and remembering hearing his music, and it's also expanded enough to imagine how bad I would feel getting near criminal activity in a foreign country.

I picture: "He was a 20-year-old American boy, up against a system he didn't understand, spoken in a language he couldn't speak...." Can you handle your legal problems in the language of Jamaica?



Yes, of course marijuana is still illegal in Jamaica. Here's another quote from Breezy, the Jamaican pot farmer quoted in the post title:

"The government needs to free up marijuana soon, man, because it's a natural thing, a spiritual thing.... And the tourists love it."

Ah, but what sort of bland old rule-abiding travelers would clog up the place, ruining the ambiance, if it weren't a crime? What's marijuana without the transgressive edge?

Massachusetts Senate candidate Gabriel Gomez brags that he can go longer without peeing than Rand Paul.

This happened during a debate last night with his Democratic opponent Ed Markey, who had praised Senator Paul for filibustering.

Gomez responded that he could have gone longer than Paul, who spoke for nearly 13 hours without urinating.

“I’ve gone lots longer than that in my time on the SEAL team,” said Gomez.

Is politics a pissing contest?

A pissing contest, or pissing match, is a game in which participants compete to see who can urinate the highest, the farthest, or the most accurately.

That's a more exciting game than a how-long-can-you-go-without-pissing contest. "Pissing contest" is an old metaphor used "to characterise ego-driven battling in a pejorative or facetious manner that is often considered vulgar."

Dwight Eisenhower is reported to have said of Senator Joseph McCarthy that he wouldn't "get into a pissing contest with that skunk." Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, used the same phrase in 1958 when asked why he had not responded to a statement by the French foreign minister that the French government had not been consulted about a crisis in Lebanon....

Consider the potential metaphorical use of a how-long-can-you-go-without-pissing contest. I note that it may work better in 2013 than pissing contest, since the reference is to an activity that — something Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles probably didn't think about — gives women equal opportunity.

In case you have trouble picturing women in a non-metaphorical pissing contest, Wikipedia — at the second link, above — recounts some Irish folklore:

In the story Tochmarc Emire several women compete to see who can urinate deepest into a pile of snow. The winner is Derbforgaill, wife of Lugaid Riab nDerg, but the other women attack her out of jealousy and mutilate her by gouging out her eyes and cutting off her nose, ears, and hair, resulting in her death. Her husband Lugaid also dies, from grief, and Cúchulainn avenges the deaths by demolishing a house with the women inside, killing 150.

Presidential Green Crack.

In the comments to "The cynicism question: What do you want — ἁτυφια or τύφος? Lucidity or smoke? Clarity or choom?," Meade directs us to Presidential Green Crack:

Strain Name: Presidential Green Crack
Grade: A+
Type: Sativa
Looks: shades of green and gold
Smell: smells really good, like clean green bud
Taste: almost tasteless, no skunk taste
Effects: creativity, precision to detail
Potency: I give this 4 out of 4 buds
Reviewed by: sharyna
Good Strain For: tedious work

That's not political satire — I don't think. That's an actual review of a strain of "medical" marijuana.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade said:

Strain Name: Presidential Green Crack
Grades: From college and law school? N/A
Type: Redistributionist
Looks: clean
Smell: clean AND articulate
Taste: almost tasteless, but definitely a skunk
Effects: creative spinning of details
Potency: I give this 4 out of 4 Pinocchios
Reviewed by: internal administration investigation
Good Strain For: relieving stress of 3AM phone calls

9-year-old girl in a skunk costume shot by a man who says he thought she was a skunk.

Sorry, I'm not believing this. How far away would the girl need to be to look like an actual skunk, and why would you shoot a skunk that far away? In fact, under what circumstances would you shoot a skunk? I don't hunt small varmints (if you will), but it seems to me that if you had a skunk in the vicinity, you wouldn't want to do anything to aggravate it.

"Skunk that bit person at Maryland restaurant was rabid."

Oh, good lord.

And I was just reading some Zagat article called "Worst Meal Ever: 21 Tales of Disastrous Dinners." Most were about things like a tuft of hair in the food or insects in the vinegar. Just a skunk in the restaurant is worst than all that. But the skunk in the restaurant bites you. And then on top of all that it's rabid!

Maybe we should eat in.

Searching for "ample art," I found a cool blog called judith2you.

"Ample art" was the ridiculous phrase used by the pool reporter to describe the room Sarah Jessica Parker had had prepped to receive the President of the United States and 50 of his glamorous friends. Here's the blog post about that. Trying to summon up a picture of "ample art," I thought of those big fat nudes by Botero. I did an image search on his name, which I used as a link in that blog post. But I clicked on the most obvious big fat nude, and it took me to a post at judith2you: "Judith meets Botero." It' a post comparing that Botero to a painting by Marco Palmezzano called "Judith with the Head of Holofernes." The blogger, Judith, comments on the the maid, who "put herself in danger in the midst of the Assyrian Army, she had to carry the bucket with a lifeless head stuffed in rotting meat...."

What is this blog? "That's Judith to you" is what you say when you're named Judith and someone presumes to call you Judy. The blogger's name is Judith, and she says in the sidebar:

... it's time to own my name. to be Shakespearean and wonder "What's in a name?" to learn about the artwork inspired by the name. to contemplate how a widow in a gleaming gown can decapitate a brute - and not muss her nails. join me in the bumpy ride through history and art and social change, all in the name of Judith.

She's been blogging for a year and has blogged about one a day, which substantiates the claim to being a real blog (as I see it). I've written before — I think! — about the idea of choosing one word, setting up a Google alert for it, and blogging based only on that word. What would your word be? In this case, the blogger has chosen her own name, and she's limited her subject to art, although she hasn't limited herself to the news of the day.

Here's her second post, where she contemplates the apocryphal, biblical character Judith:

... the reasons her story have persisted are as varied and complex as the artists who have depicted her.  “strength in weakness” is an overly simplistic explanation: Judith embodies (in political terms) “the people v. tyranny”, (in feminist terms) ”righteous woman vs. marauding man” and (in County Music terms) “git-er done gal v. skunk-drunk asshole.” not to mention, she was not afraid of a little blood and gore to make her point nor adverse to using her feminine charms to advance her true purpose.

... here is a woman you can admire. the men in her city were ninnies, ready to give up and be killed or enslaved. but she looked at her resources, figured she could seduce the guy, made a plan to freak everybody out by detaching and then displaying his head – and it worked. think of all the ways it could have gone wrong —

One - she couldn’t seduce the guy because (a) she over-estimated her charms or (b) he wasn’t interested in her type of womanhood or (c) he wasn’t interested in womanhood at all. “Sorry little lady but you’re just not my type.”...

More at the link! I did a search for Caravaggio — because I knew Caravaggio's painting of the beheading scene — and was delighted to find the Thanksgiving post "Judith demonstrates technique in how to carve a turkey without mussing your gown."

0 and O — Zero and Obama — visual harmony, at least, as the new job numbers for August are announced.

"The U.S. says the economy added no jobs in August, the worst number since September 2010. The jobless rate was unchanged at 9.1%."

Email alert from CNN. Here's the article:

"We expected a weak report, and what we got was even weaker," said Patrick O'Keefe, director of economic research at J.H. Cohn.

The report was partially distorted by 22,000 state workers in Minnesota returning to work after a temporary government shutdown in July, as well as 45,000 Verizon workers on strike in August.

Those effects made it hard to compare the August jobs number to the 85,000 jobs gained in July.

Still though, the overall figure is considered dismal in comparison to job gains of about 200,000-a-month earlier this year.

"When our attention is drawn to the Verizon strike and the Minnesota situation, it's akin to saying that a skunk had bad breath, and then it took a dinner mint. That doesn't suddenly change the fact that it's still a skunk and it still stinks," O'Keefe said.

Ah, but wait. The President is about to give a speech about to a Joint Session of Congress. Perhaps he has an idea for a better and stronger after-dinner mint for the skunk!

"It's not that we're against raccoons and skunks."

"We'll go through the proper channels now."

Just another gun rights issue here in Wisconsin.

There's also: "Walker says concealed carry bill should require training, permits."

"And that was when he discovered he had a special kinda way with animals."

"They just come right up to him like he was a natural part of the wilderness."



Have you been living free in harmony and majesty like we did back in the 1970s?

***

Charles Sellier Jr., the man who created "The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams,” has died at the age of 67.

Loosely based on an actual person who escaped into the wilderness in 1853 after being accused of a murder he didn’t commit, Grizzly Adams is a bearded, barrel-chested man (played by Dan Haggerty) who counts among his friends raccoons, skunks, ferrets, deer, coyotes, porcupines, an eagle and, of course, the abandoned grizzly bear cub who matures into a powerful companion named Ben.

ADDED: Did you have the same question I had?: Is Ben the same Ben as "Gentle Ben"? The answer is no: "there is no connection between the bears."



Wow! The 60s were so different from the 70s. The 60s had a lot of 50s in them, and the 70s had a lot of 60s, but not the part of the 60s that was leftover from the 50s. If you're not old like me, maybe those distinctions sound meaningless, but if you are, I bet you know exactly what I mean.

"Sarah Palin, she won't listen to their bunk. Sarah Palin's coming south to hunt some skunk."

Via Andrew Sullivan, who calls this "a fantastic nugget of hathos." I call it awesome. I do think "hunt some skunk" is an inappropriate metaphor after the Tucson massacre (though this performance predates that).

I got to Sullivan through the commenter 1jpb, who said: "Sully's got some funny stuff up. And, it's very civil (as it is when cons mock the BHO tribute videos)."

Singing to the glory of politicians should always appear ridiculous if not repulsive. Let's remember the classic benchmark of absurdity:



FROM THE COMMENTS: EDH says: "Notice, the 'Sarah Palin Battle Hymn' shares a martial theme if not metaphor with Amy Chua's 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.'"

You remember this dog.

You saw her in many posts, back in 2009, when I sojourned in Cincinnati and lived, for a time, in a little love nest with Meade. She was the dog next door, but Meade borrowed her and took her on many adventures, chasing deer, encountering skunks, and fending off coyotes. Her name was Holly, and I've made a tag to collect the 20+ posts with pictures of her.



She died yesterday.

"The government is pushing these food poisoning events because they want to over-regulate."

Writes commenter SWWBO in  yesterday's egg thread:

You should look into some of the regulations currently being considered by the FDA and USDA. These regs are going to increase the price of food considerably, if they are put into place - and they are doing it all under the guise of food safety.

These regs will also likely put small producers like myself out of business. I'll still raise chickens for our eggs, but I'll be disallowed from selling the eggs to anyone else unless I take some draconian steps and agree to paperwork for each individual chicken from hatching until death - if a skunk, opossum, raccoon, coyote or hawk kills a chicken, I'd have to report that to the government.

Ironically, the reason a skunk, opossum, raccoon, coyote or hawk could kill one of SWWBO's chickens is that "they are true free-rangers, they wander around the yard, the pastures and the woods." That makes the eggs taste especially good, those eggs that you won't be able to buy.

It's amazing, the human sympathy for animals.

Would you help a skunk with a jar of peanut butter stuck on its head?

The news from Ouray: An old woman was (perhaps) eaten by a bear.

"It was still unknown Saturday whether a bear killed [Donna] Munson or whether one or more animals consumed part of her body after her death. But people who knew her said she was an eccentric wildlife lover who had been feeding bears, elk, skunks and raccoons for years. Munson [had said] that 'when the time came, she wanted to go out with the bears.'... The night before her death, Munson planned to feed an injured baby bear hard-boiled eggs and yogurt.... And she had planned to swat a large bear that was bothering the baby bear with a broom...."

Put down that broom, large bear!

That was my grammar snark. My real commentary is: It sounds like a bad way to go, but Munson seemed to know what she was doing. It almost seems as though it's appropriate to say something I generally disapprove of: She died doing what she loved.

Some people just get carried away with animal love. Go to the link to read about her (now-deceased) husband, "Ridgway Jack," who made their home an "animal sanctuary" and let a fawn sleep in their bed. And read about her former tenant Tammy York, who said that Munson put wire fencing around the porch after York and her 2 children — a 1-year-old and a 4-year-old — moved in:

The bears would come within 6 feet of the porch and peer in the windows.

"We were in the zoo," she recalled, saying she moved out after about a year because the animals — especially the skunks — "got to be too much." While she lived there, a bear busted York's car window and left bite marks in her seat trying to get some leftover french fries.

Okay. Munson was completely eccentric and foolish, but let's think about York, who had 2 little children and took a year to figure out that she needed to move away. Well, face it: a lot of people are out of their minds when it comes to thinking about animals.

***

Munson was eaten in Ouray on Friday. Meade and I were in Ouray Tuesday through Thursday. It's a beautiful place. Here are 2 more photographs:

At the Twilight Café...

... talk to me about your fears. Last night, I was afraid of coyotes, skunks, poison ivy... scary trees....

"I asked my love to take a walk just a little ways with me..."

"And as we walked along we'd talk of when would be our wedding day..."



We took a walk down into the river bottoms late last night...



... on the banks of the East Fork of the Little Miami River.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade said:

What a wild walk that was. The murder, the music, the ecstasy.

And then the dog got skunked.