Archive for the ‘Mammals’ Category

I’m just a poor, dumb white boy from Hampden…

Thursday, October 5th, 2023

“There is a real danger with bringing fecal matter into the U.S.,” said LaFonda D. Sutton-Burke, CBP Director, Field Operations-Chicago Field Office, in a statement.

This is intended to enrage you. (#10 in a series)

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023

I’m going to put a jump here, for those of you who want to avoid being enraged. Something else will be coming along eventually.

(more…)

Obit watch: March 28, 2023.

Tuesday, March 28th, 2023

Things have been quiet on the obit front the past few days. Now watch as someone prominent dies later on today. (I don’t want this to happen, but it seems that whenever I’m thinking things have been quiet, something happens.)

In the meantime, Lawrence sent me a couple of obits a few days ago:

Michael Reaves, writer. He worked on “Batman: The Animated Series”, wrote some “Star Wars” novels, and had a lot of other credits.

Eric Brown, SF author and critic for The Guardian.

Great and good FotB Borepatch lost his beloved dog, Wolfgang. Those of you who are familiar with Borepatch and Wolfgang might want to send condolences his way.

Yet another thing I did not know.

Thursday, March 23rd, 2023

According to the bear’s owners, the Cocaine Bear has the authority to officiate legally binding weddings in the mall where it is kept due to Kentucky’s marriage laws. This claim is only partly true; the bear does not have the authority to solemnize weddings, but the state of Kentucky cannot invalidate marriages performed by unqualified persons if the parties believe that the person marrying them has the authority to do so. As such, it is a belief in the Cocaine Bear’s authority that allows it to officiate legally binding weddings in Kentucky.

So as long as you believe, the marriage is valid. But when you stop believing, the marriage is invalid. And Pablo Escobear’s authority to officiate weddings is a giant consensual hallucination…and doesn’t the fact that Wikipedia states the bear does not have that authority invalidate the claim that the parties believe the bear has that authority?

Mount Washington ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids…

Saturday, February 4th, 2023

…in fact, it’s cold as hell.

New Hampshire’s Mount Washington felt more like Mars than planet Earth on Friday as wind chills dipped below an unfathomable minus 110 degrees, a new record for the coldest wind chill ever recorded in the US.
Known for having some of the world’s worst weather, Mount Washington saw air temperatures plummet to minus 46 degrees with wind speeds averaging over 100 miles per hour with gusts over 125 miles per hour as the artic air mass wreaked havoc Friday, according to the Mount Washington observatory.

Meanwhile on Mars, temperatures on the surface this week reached a balmy high of 16 degrees with a low of minus 105, according to NASA. The space agency said temperatures of the red planet can fluctuate between minus 225 and 70 degrees.

This goes out to FotB RoadRich:

Nimbus the cat, who lives in the observatory with staffers, was reportedly cozied up and unbothered by the deadly storm, despite being a bit grumpy from taking his flea medication.
“He is actually sleeping through most of this event,” Tarasiewciz said.

Camel bites Kan be pretti nasti.

Friday, July 15th, 2022

A worker at a central Minnesota zoo was flown to St. Cloud Hospital on Wednesday after a camel got the man’s head in its mouth and bit down.
A second man who helped free the first also was bitten.

Deputies were told an employee was escorting a camel through an alleyway to prepare it for transport when the animal got the employee’s head in its mouth and bit down. The camel then dragged him about 15 feet.
A second employee, a 32-year-old Texas man, placed a plastic board into the camel’s mouth to release its bite from the first man, who was able to run to safety. The camel then charged at the second man and bit his head. He was able to get away on his own and declined medical treatment at the scene.

Obit watch: May 6, 2022.

Friday, May 6th, 2022

Mike Hagerty, character actor. Credits other than “Friends” include “Space Truckers”, two episodes of a spin-off of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s, and “Speed 2: Cruise Control”.

Lawrence emailed an obit for Kevin Samuels, a YouTuber I’d never heard of but who was apparently followed avidly by some and hated by others.

Edited to add: better writeup from NBC News.

Domino, popular and beloved University of Texas cat. (Hattip: FotB RoadRich.)

Three things I’m kind of looking forward to.

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022

1. The Bunk lies down on Broadway.

Wendell Pierce is ready for another run as Willy Loman.
The American actor, best known for his work in “The Wire,” first took on the titanic title role in “Death of a Salesman” in London in 2019, and even then he hungered to bring the performance to New York.

Rod Dreher and his family saw the London production, and he raved about it. This might actually be enough to get me to go to NYC. (Also, Mike the Musicologist and Andrew the Colossus of Roads were talking about Peter Luger on Saturday, and I’d like to take a shot at that.)

2.

(The Last Dangerous Visions explained, for those of my readers who are not SF fans.)

3. There’s a movie tentatively scheduled for February 2023. It sounds like trash, but fun trash.

Cocaine Bear follows an oddball group of cops, criminals, tourists and teens converging in a Georgia forest where a 500-pound apex predator has ingested a staggering amount of the white powder and goes on a coke-fueled rampage seeking more blow — and blood.

That’s right, a movie inspired by the true story of Cocaine Bear. How can you not be entertained?

Important safety tip (#24 in a series)

Wednesday, February 9th, 2022

Trigger warning for dog people, but: nature red in tooth and claw.

.380 is not a sufficient caliber for moose.

Also:

She said no musher would ever travel with a rifle or a large caliber gun, instead preferring to scare off animals with a flare gun. And with all the jostling of the sled, the larger guns could easily go off.

I’m sorry, but if your guns are going off because of the sled jostling, you’re doing it wrong, and should go find a qualified gunsmith.

Tweet of the day.

Friday, December 10th, 2021

I don’t live in NH, so I don’t have a roo in this fight. But I did read the text of the proposed legislation.

While I am generally supportive, my one concern is that the appeal process for denial of a permit is to the state fish and game commission. I think it would be better if the appeal process was handled by a separate dedicated judicial body…

…a “kangaroo court”, if you will.

(I’ll see myself out.)

“I feel blessed to live in such times.”

Monday, December 6th, 2021

That was a comment from a friend of mine when I sent this story around last month.

I didn’t blog it at the time because it was all rumors and I had no reliable or semi-reliable sourcing on it. But ESPN published an article over the weekend, so now it can be blogged.

Jeff Banks, who is an assistant coach at UT, and his girlfriend are being sued.

Why?

Their monkey allegedly bit a child.

According to the lawsuit, the child, identified as C.C., was trick-or-treating with two friends on Halloween and was invited to attend a haunted house. The lawsuit says that, after completing the haunted house, the child and his friends were taken to a monkey that Thomas kept in the backyard. According to the complaint, the child was told the monkey was trained to give high-fives.
“Instead of giving a high five, Danielle Thomas’s monkey aggressively bit down on C.C.’s hand and refused to let go,” says the lawsuit, a copy of which was obtained by ESPN on Saturday. “C.C. was forced to manually pry the monkey’s jaw open. There was so much blood that C.C. was unable to see the full extent of the injury.”

According to the lawsuit, “Instead of showing any semblance of care for an injured child, Danielle Thomas was instead worried about the risk of her monkey being taken away. … Danielle Thomas stated to the physician that the monkey had bitten her before and that she was fine, implying that the monkey therefore did not have rabies.”

The family claims that Ms. Thomas has not yet provided vaccination records for the monkey. It isn’t clear from the article if C.C. had to go through the whole series of rabies shots.

Interesting side note:

Thomas is also identified as “Pole Assassin” in the lawsuit, her stage name as a dancer. She once appeared on “The Jerry Springer Show” with the monkey.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…

Sunday, December 5th, 2021

…and I’m getting into the spirit.

Again this year, Daddy didn’t drink all the Xmas money, or have to spend it on car repairs. Daddy got his car inspected (they didn’t even want to replace the windshield washers) and has renewed his registration online.

I don’t want it to sound like everything is coming up Millhouse. A close family member has been in the hospital since before Thanksgiving. I’m hoping that, if the doctors can get them up and walking, we might be able to get them out on bond the later part of this week. Which will be welcomed by me. And their little dog, which we will call “Toto” to protect the innocent.

(On the slightly positive side, this gives me a chance to make onion dip. Or hot buttered rum. Or real eggnog.)

And work is still giving me tsuris. The good news is, after December 17th, I will be officially out of the office and on leave until January 10th. I probably will check my emails from time to time, mostly for the “fiddling while Rome burns” feeling of it all.

But I got to go to a Christmas party/appreciation dinner last week. And today I got to meet up with the members of what Lawrence likes to call my “shadowy criminal conspiracy” for the first time in a while. I missed the last meeting because of Tulsa, then we took two weeks off for Thanksgiving…

…and then after I finished running errands, I went by Sportsman’s Finest. They’ve decided to open on Sundays for the month of December. Which makes sense, right?

Turns out, the gun I had bought in Tulsa and had to have shipped to a transfer dealer had come in. (There were some issues that delayed the process. Nothing criminal or anything, just a shipping foulup and a couple of other little things.)

I don’t know if my readers who are not People Of the Gun understand this, but: when you get a gun transferred to a dealer for you to pick up, the dealer has to open the package and log the gun onto their own record books. So they know what you’re getting when it arrives. Which is significant in this case because…

…the owners of Sportsman’s Finest happened to have a bunch of stuff lying around the shop for this particular gun, and gave me over $100 worth of stuff to go along with it. Free. Gratis. No charge. Seriously. (I’m being kind of coy about the gun here because I’ve actually been working on a post about this specific gun: I just had to wait until it arrived so I could take photos. If I’m lucky and the weevils don’t get into the eggnog, I might be able to post that this week. I will say, it is a really old gun that isn’t made any longer, but is still held in high regard.)

(Not a Garand, Borepatch. Sorry. But you got me thinking about that as a possible next purchase. I believe I meet all of the CMP qualifications, and they aren’t getting any cheaper.)

And they also didn’t charge me for the transfer.

None of this was stuff that I was expecting. I was fully prepared to pay the transfer fee, and thought about arm wresting one of the owners over it. But I decided to do something else instead. The spare parts were just an unexpected, surprising, and honestly quite moving bonus. I wouldn’t expect them to do this for just any random murder hobo. I guess it just happens that I’m one of the murder hobos that they like for some reason.

Made my heart grow five sizes, it did. Not three, because fark the Grinch, stealing the roast beast like that and tormenting that poor dog, but five sizes.

(Mike the Musicologist: “You should see a doctor about that.”)

Anyway, if you need guns or ammo or fishing gear or other outdoorsy type stuff during the holiday season, please consider shopping at:

Sportman’s Finest
12434 Bee Cave Road
Austin, TX 78738
(512) 263-1888
9:00 AM – 7:00 PN Monday-Friday
9:00 AM – 6:00 PM Saturday
11:00 AM – 5:00 PM Sunday during December

Don’t expect free stuff until you get to know them, but they’re really nice people, even if you’ve never been in before.