I've looked at clouds that way...

Note: I've been working on this post for a while, or at least working on acquiring the images for the post. The text--it'll be grasshopper product, produced on the fly; the pics are pure ant product. (In case you don't read Julie Zickefoose's blog, check out this beautiful entry, which ends with her classifying bloggers as grasshoppers and ants. I'm always a grasshopper, just writing on the fly.)

I love clouds and have names for the different kinds of clouds I see but not like "cumulus" or whatever. I have my own little cloud names, coined over a lifetime of watching the sky. Here are a few of the clouds I've seen lately that exemplify the clouds in my lexicon.

1. First up is the "Ferris Bueller" cloud--those tiny puffs that insist on making themselves seen in an otherwise cloudless and spectacularly blue sky:

I call them Ferris Bueller clouds because of that part of FB's Day Off in which he says he couldn't possibly go to school on a day like today, and then they cut to several quick shots of tiny little clouds like these, as though they made the weather too severe to go to school.

2. Next up is the general post-storm cloud cover, featuring little splotches of blue:

I've always thought that it's almost cruel the way the sky always seems to clear up and turn beautiful right after a really fierce storm. This was especially true in Texas when, after a tornado would rip through, the sun would come out as if to spotlight the devastation. Has anyone else ever noticed this? The above picture wasn't taken after quite so fierce a storm--just the steady cold rain and windy storms that gripped Cape May for the first day and a half of this autumn's Migration Weekend. I was standing outside the convention center on Saturday, just as the skies were finally clearing and the Flock--Susan Gets Native, Laura H in NJ, Susan at Lake Life, and I--were about to go walk on the beach for the first time.

3. Next up is the kind of cloud that produces sunbeams:

This isn't the best picture, but you get the idea. When I was a kid, my little sister Mary and I would look for these clouds and the sunbeams, especially near evening; we would say that the sunbeams were God's robe coming down as he stood on the earth.

4. These are wispy, melting butter clouds:

This type looks the way butter does when you melt it, with the oils and stuff separating out. It's one of my favorite cloud types. I like the different textures and the way the winds slice the clouds into different bits at different altitudes.

5. The sunlight-diffusing morning clouds are another favorite of mine:

I like the pinks and oranges produced by these clouds and their effects on the morning sun, almost Monet-like in its translucence.

6. This is an example of a rather thin cotton-batting sky:

I have a slightly better though smaller example of a more dense cotton-batting sky here:
I remark on the "cotton-batting sky" more than any other kind of cloud cover, because it's my favorite. You'll see it before it rains or snows, when the cloud cover looks like cotton batting stretched out across the sky like a blanket, with thinner and thicker parts, but shielding out the blue behind it (except in the case of the thin batting in the first example). I wish I had a better photo, but lately every time I've seen it, I haven't had the camera.

7. I love clouds at sunset, especially the clouds high enough to look over the edge of the world:

See how there's dark gray evening clouds, shaded from the sunlight by the edge of the earth's disk, and then there are the higher clouds that are lit by the setting sun's last rays? I love these. It would be like getting an extra peek at the sunset, being up that high.

Here's another example, which also includes some really beautiful evening gray clouds, another favorite:


Clouds in the evening and at night, dimly lit by setting sun or moonlight, are beautiful to me.

8. Finally, there's the wispy clouds, smaller bits of what are usually called mare's tails:
These aren't the whole tails, mind you--just little splashes of tails.

I'll leave you with a photo of evening gray clouds I took on my way to calculus class one night. It was bitterly cold, and the moon was hanging in the sky, following the sun:

Winter blahs

Winter's not even officially started yet, and already I have the winter blahs. I find it difficult to post anything, difficult to go birding, difficult to do much more than sit on the couch and read Harry Potter books over and over, wishing I had a cool wand and could do magic.

Oh dear, I think I might have revealed a little more about the real me than I should've. . . .

At any rate, please excuse my sporadic posting.

I will say that I saw a great horned owl this morning on the way to work; I only wish we hadn't been running late (as usual), or I would've stopped and tried to get a picture. That's only the second time I've seen a GHOW that wasn't chasing me.

I went birding this past weekend with Roana and Nan from the State College Birding Club, and The Kid even came along. Em's developing an interest in birding, FINALLY! She always seemed a little resistant to get into birds when I would try to take her with me places, but she apparently saw a bald eagle flying near her dad's not too long ago, and it seems to have been her spark bird. I'm so excited that she's interested--I'll have a family birding buddy! We had a good time but didn't see anything out of the ordinary. I'm hoping for horned larks, snow buntings, and maybe Lapland longspurs sometime during the winter, when they are supposed to feed in newly-manured fields. Maybe we'll get a good snow soon and I'll spot some. All three would be lifers.

Speaking of which, I just checked my list and I'm up (drumroll please) 163 species! The Cape May trip really boosted my total. I wonder how long it'll take to break 200--probably a while, as I'm not really a chaser. With the surprising number of irruptive species being seen in my area this fall, though, I'm hoping to add at least a few more soon.

So--a rather lackluster post, but hey--it's a lackluster day.

Panic on the streets of London (although in this case I am referring to Oxford so the reference doesn’t really work)

Nick Griffin and David Irving came to speak at the Oxford Union on Monday. For those of you reading this blog who are unaware of the facts of the matter, David Irving is a Bad Historian who chats a lot of shit about the Holocaust not happening. Nick Griffin is the head of the political party the BNP, which is some bunch of jokers that spend their time smoking fat blunts and capping bitches. I was curious about them so I went on their website and the slogan was “People just like you making a difference” and then their first news story was “BNP call to ban Muslims from our skies” which I think pretty much tells the whole story. To be honest the entire BNP website is filled with such jokers – including high quality comedy like this:


(HAHAHAHAHHA brilliant)


… and frankly maybe it is a topic for a later blog post; I don’t want this post to get bogged down in complicated political discourse (and we all know that when I start talking about politics, the finely balanced and incisive analysis can go on for hours). But just to set the scene a bit more, here’s a picture of the two men in question:



You might not be able to tell, but that picture isn’t actually a photograph. In fact it was originally a WW2 propaganda poster (which explains why David Griffin and Nick Irving are destroying the Statue of Liberty which for some reason is bleeding); and I have cleverly photoshopped it to suit my purposes, for example, by adding the names of the two men in the place of ‘Hitler’ and ‘Mongolian Looking Bloke’. If you look carefully, you’ll also see that I replaced the word ‘PRODUCTION’ on the big spanner with the word ‘DEBATE’. This is because Luke Tryl, the greasy little Head of the Oxford Union who invited Griffo and Irvs in the first place, said that he was confident that Oxford Students would be able to “crush these men in debate” and so I have tried to reflect that viewpoint with the Nazi Beast being scared off by the spanner of Good Debate. I’m not sure exactly what Trylby was expecting, like, some philosophy student to make a really good speech and then both of these guys who have spent their entire life talking this shit to look at each other and then be like “You know what, mate, that is THE BEST ANALOGY that I’ve ever heard in my ENTIRE LIFE, and, wow, I’ve never heard that particular argument put before me so eloquently and I don’t believe it, my mind is totally changed, I’m gonna quit this job, marry a black man and open a kebab shop. In fact, come over here. High five, soul brother, high five.” I don’t know, call me a cynic, but in my imagination, the entire debate was always going to boil down to a bunch of spluttering undergraduates going “buh-buh-but RACISM IS WRONG!” and then the Griffmeister-Jay just reciting a list of facts and figures that don’t make any sense but sound impressive, and then everyone would go away feeling pleased with themselves. Pfft whatever.

Anyway so the situation was that these men were coming to speak about free speech, and like half the university had a massive hissy fit about it and essentially decided to have a protest outside of the Union; then when The Racists showed up they would be Shown The Error Of Their Ways by some students waving placards. I quite like the irony of having a forum about free speech with some people who want to crush the free speech of other people and so the only retaliation of the people who are pro free speech is to attempt to stop the free speech of the people who are anti free speech. Free speech was absolutely the phrase of the moment and I’m not gonna lie, I got fucking bored of hearing it being brought up every ten seconds. Personally, I think that the issue is that Luke Tryl can’t see the difference between ‘oppressing someone’s right to free speech’ and ‘not inviting random lunatics from off the street to speak in front of hundreds of people’… I pretty much think that THAT’S where the issue lies. Right, so I’ve put that one to bed.

Seriously, though: free speech is a big issue. I have thought it through, and on consideration I would probably describe myself as both a hero and a martyr of free speech; because of my adherence and commitment to it, I am forced to just sit back and watch as people post horrible horrible comments about me on my blog. And those hurt, y’know? The anonymous spittle-flecked rantings of someone I don’t know who posts how mean I am on my blog at three in the morning is something that will haunt me to my grave. These anonymous writers don’t know what it does to my ego to see the number of comments steadily ticking up to the highest numbers since February. But it’s bad, I tell you. So you can see that I’ve suffered dreadfully in my quest to uphold free speech, and so I felt personally invested in this debate and I knew that even if I couldn’t get tickets inside the chamber, I would BE THERE OUTSIDE to cheer on/boo (depending on what everyone else was doing). Plus, you know me, I’m a sheep, I’m an experience junky, I just want to be where the action is, so I was like ‘let’s go!’ and then I pushed over a chair to show how rebellious and anti-conformist I am. Matt, who was well up for it, got really annoyed with me and said “Look, if you’re not going to take this seriously then don’t even bother coming” so I had to put on a really stony poker face. In fact I let him go off to the debate first on his own so I wouldn’t embarrass him in front of his new protester friends.

But after a bit, I got bored of hanging around in the bar and so we rolled up. Being out on the streets were bizarre. We’d been warned for weeks in advance that all of Oxford would be in security lockdown, and now the day itself had come. It was very exciting, actually: there was definitely a thrill in the air, a sort of buzzing electricity that said “Something is happening tonight”; the atoms in the atmosphere were glowing faintly and the sky was screwed into a little ball of anticipation; even the trees were holding their breath and the birds had stopped singing. There was also a load of police horses wearing riot helmets and shinpads, which was neat. The real action of course was taking place on the street outside the Union building, which was crammed to the fore with angry people. There was barely space to breathe, and the police had formed a cordon around the outside of the door and had stopped letting people with tickets go in. There was also some guy with a drum who was playing the Macarena or something, which I felt gave the entire scene a quite festive atmosphere. I mean, the reporter on the BBC website summed it up best when he wrote “there was not a gown in sight”. This was true – nobody at all had chosen to dress up in their sub fusc which – as everyone who has never been to Oxford will know – is what we wear seven days a week. We also travel everywhere via punt. Because we are the height of civility. OR SO YOU WOULD THINK. One look at the crowd instantly quashed that idea. This was no time for sub fusc. This was time for angry white people holding these signs that said “UNITE TO STOP RACISM”. The funny thing was that the signs were designed with these stick figure characters on them clutched arm in arm and the only way that the designers had to distinguish the two was to give one of the stick men a square head:



What does that represent? Black people with square heads? Mongoloids? I thought it was weird. Briefly. But really I had no time to sit and ponder as I swiftly got caught up in the moment, what with all the shaking of fists and yelling of GO HOME BNP with the rest of the crowd. There was lots of jostling and whatnot and I’m not joking, at one point someone started a chant that was just ‘oggy oggy oggy oy oy oy’, except in this case it was ‘Nazi Nazi Nazi out out out’ which I honestly thought was one of the best things I had heard in my entire life. It’s a pity that nobody else agreed with me and so we went back with the failsafe OUT OUT BNP. Which was nice.

It didn’t stay nice, though. The thing with large groups of self-righteous people is that after a while, they start to believe their own legend, and then they decide that as they’re all yelling something that has moral superiority, that gives them the right to act like utter penises. So pretty soon people were climbing on the wall and abusing students who were trying to get in to watch the debate; and then they started to stop people going in – “we’re defending our right to free speech by not letting you go in and watch this man speak” and then some other people broke into the building itself and ran up and down playing the piano. The guy on the wall found out and was like ‘I HAVE CONFIRMATION THAT 50 PROTESTERS HAVE ENTERED THE BUILDING’ and then everyone WHOOPED and roared and high fived as though suddenly they were part of some huge anti-conformist letz take down de system rebellion. It was like in Star Wars when they blew up the Def Star and everyone was like chest bumping Admiral Akbar, but in this case the rebellion high command was just a bunch of randomers. Basically it got to the point where I was so sick of everyone acting like dickheads and going on about FUCKING FREE SPEECH that I set about making a small petrol bomb and then I just set fire to the entire street. Luckily my moment of madness was averted by the fact that I didn’t have any petrol or bombmaking equipment, so instead substitute ‘built a small petrol bomb with ‘said “fuck this”’ and ‘set fire to the entire street’ with ‘went to the bar and drank like eight Fosters and then tripped over the stairs’.

Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way pro the BNP (their banter is atrocious and Griffin has a tiny penis). On the other hand, I don’t think that being anti-BNP means you have to be pro-knobhead. I’m sure it’s possible to protest without turning into a utter twat. However, life hasn’t really taught me different. You might not know this, but I am an old salt when it comes to ripping apart authority in demonstration form. I once marched in protest against the jews or something, I can’t really remember , and honestly I wasn’t that impressed that time. Large groups of shouty self-righteous people always piss me off. Protesters, free-palestine guys, anti-animal testing, pro-free speech, hippies, treehuggers and vegetarians. They constantly turn me off the particular issue. If you want me to be pro anything, just show me some protesters and I will automatically support the other side, just because I want to annoy the demonstrators. This is why I’m a member of Seal Clubbers of Canada. Anybody who complains about anything is lame.

The irony of course is that it’s all two sides of the same coin: people who want free speech, people who want free speech as long as it doesn’t offend them, people who write anonymous shit on the internet, people who want free speech as long as it gives them the right to be utter cocks, the BNP and the OUSU, racists and anti-racists… they all believe they’re in the right. But being in the right doesn’t automatically give you the right to do whatever the hell you want. Everyone likes to just sit back and feel self-justified to act like enormous penises and it’s both annoying and headache-inducing. Rights and responsibilities, people.

I don’t even know what I’m talking about now, but I think that I can conclude by saying that I’m pretty much the only entirely blameless person in this entire situation.

Laid-back LOLcat Monday

Who can resist the LOLcat?

Ella

I have written about some pretty controversial things on this blog. I did a treatise on paedophilia during which I invented a reality tv show called “YO, MOLEST ME!”. During the Danish Cartoon beef a few years back, I made a series of comical pictoral oronyms of Mohammad (‘toehammad’ and ‘emohammad’ and ‘Ric Romerohammad’ etc) and inserted them at the end of every blog post for a month. I wrote a post that was basically a series of pictures of small animals getting flamethrowered/squished with a hammer/run over with a steamroller. Y'know what? None of that ever really got that vociferous a response. I think it was because I didn’t know where people’s hot buttons lie. Racism, paedeophilia and animal cruelty: not enough to get people het up any more. You people are too desensitised to violence and shock tactics and suchlike. Yet I write a post about being unable to open a tin of tuna and suddenly the switchboards light up.

…

After my last blog, the following comment was posted:

Anonymous said...
so you slept with this bitch Ella yet? You keep bringing her up, constant kind references. If it weren't for the fact that youra complete failure I'd assume your allready fucking her, But we all know your not, partly down to those deep down feelings of underconfidence and unwantedness that were made oh so much worse when you got cheated on. I bet they don't really help your confidence around girls. I guess thats why you praise them on blogs, because you havn't got the balls to say anything in real life.
Your a joke
2:17 AM

Right. Ouch. I’m a decent kind of guy and I appreciate healthy criticism as much as the next gee, so I didn’t delete it. I just left it up there. In fact, I’m barely going to discuss the actual content of the comment itself for fear of appearing pricklike and/or snipey – and we know that I’ve turned over a new leaf and am trying to curb my internet overreactions. Just rinsing every section of that and making a load of unjustified value-judgments on someone I barely know would be a really knobbish thing to do. It would seem like I was playing the role of some kind of internet tough-guy and posting horrible and unwarranted things about someone from behind the safety, anonymity and security of my keyboard. And frankly I would never do anything like that. In fact, I will just make a few general points about it and then we will be able to move on with our lives. I have some, just read them, note them, make of them what you will.

Point the First:The comment was posted at 2.17 in the morning
Point the Second: “allready”
Point the Third: The writer commented on the fact that I ‘haven’t got the balls to say anything in real life’
Point the Fourth: It was posted as ‘anonymous’
Point the Fifth: I am not ‘fucking Ella’ yet and if I was it would be no cause for sadness; in fact frankly it would be a cause for joy and dancing in the street. I also don’t constantly mention her for no reason (pfft, the idea)
Point the Sixth: "underconfidence and unwantedness". Neologistic.
Point the Seventh:You’re. You’re. You’re. YOU'RE.

THAT’S IT THAT’S IT. That is it. Those are the only real statements that I have to make about the actual content of the comment itself. Well, I have one more but I think that it can wait until I have finished the rest of this blog.

Of course, once that comment was posted, the message board/comment section/facebook/JCR/Oxford Journalism Scene/my parents became AWASH with speculation as to whom the writer could have been. After intense discussion and not a little bit of internet detective work, I tracked some IP addresses, and hacked some sub-servers and found out that I didn’t really know anything about computers. I then fell back to the wisdom of popular guesswork and thus, in no particular order, here are the most likely suspects as chosen by the mob. Ironically, I think that the beginning of this list could fit quite snugly in with the whole ‘people who hate me’ list which I have also been compiling:

Mike and/or Lucia
For some reason, Mike has been the suggestion offered by the greatest number of people. I don’t see where this has come from. This is not his style. Mike’s style is being overbearingly friendly and nice. I haven’t seen him being horrible to anyone ever (other than that one time when he got obsessed with my friend Joe’s girlfriend Kaitlin and then went out with her when they broke up, but that was strictly a one time thing). And frankly I don’t see why either of them would be that mad with me. Especially about Ella (even though Ella is more of a man/woman than Mike/Lucia will ever be). Plus they aren’t vindictive. Plus I haven’t done anything to hurt them at all. Plus why would they care enough to be blog-cussing me at 2.17 in the morning. That kind of behaviour is absolutely for social pariahs and people with skin complaints. So I want to officially cross them off of the list. But it was gratifying the number of people who independently decided that it was him and called him a knob. That was good.

Lucia’s Sister
She had detested me since I accidentally called her ‘fat’ three years ago and then she screamed me out of the house and my only response was to sing at her. Could she be the one who wrote it? Thinking about it: No. Not her; firstly I don’t think she reads this blog as much as she used to do, and secondly because I don’t think her fingers are thin enough to type individual letters yet. “Ho ho, a return to vintage early 2006 humour! Wahey!” [clam]

Anyone From King’s
You know when you cause someone so much hurt, and they do enough bad shit to you, and you two hate each other so much, that eventually you think to yourself “Seriously, Tom, you have burnt literally all of your bridges with this girl” and you essentially cut off all communications and never speak to each other again? Well that’s pretty much the situation between me and this independent boys school in West London. At this point, I honestly think that King’s College School and I can have no more to do with each other. I can’t even remember all of the reasons, but, following certain incidents and happenings, I’m pretty sure that there’s an entire year group that hates me. What’s really good is that there are still untapped wells of resentment out there. People who I don’t even know occasionally send me hate-mail. It’s brilliant and I know that I should be upset, but really, it takes a certain level of anti-conformist skill to make an entire school full of public schoolboys hate your guts (with the exception of my friend Pete and some dude called Alex Watson who apparently thinks that I am ‘cool’; cheers dude). So yes. There is a decent chance that the writer of that comment is from King’s.
But hey, joke’s on you, buddy, you got screwed over by the IB system whereas I did A Levels which are progressively getting easier every year, got all As and now go to Oxford! Gutted.

A Girl
I hadn’t even considered that it might have been a girl until Aime pointed out to me that both sexes can indeed operate keyboards. I was like woahhhhh. Although I do guess that that kind of makes sense; I mean what with all the stuff about my relationship with girls, perhaps the anonymous really is writing from a female point of view. Especially as the main attack seems to be along the lines of ‘You are too shy to talk to girls’ which to be honest I think is kind of cute and endearing and Seth Cohen-esque. OOH I KNOW perhaps it’s a girl who like, secretly loves me and is getting increasingly frustrated that I’m not picking up on her really obvious signals! Yes! I’m in there again!
Mmmmmmaybe not.
I mean, I’m an optimistic guy at heart and to be honest given enough alcohol I can translate absolutely any female signal into a booty call, but even I see the weaknesses in translating “you’re a complete failure” (my grammar) as a come on. Maybe I’m wrong and frankly, babe, if you want a piece of the Phizzle, you have to do it take a ticket and stand in line, I’ll move on to you shortly. Maybe just send me some money?

Someone who hates Ella
They did call her a ‘Bitch’. But who could hate Ella? That’s like hating the Sun or something. And when I say the Sun I mean not The Sun the newspaper. I mean the star that gives us warmth and light. We all in our own special way orbit around Ella. She is the ground under our feet and the air in our lungs.

nb: when I say ‘we all orbit around her’ I am NOT saying that Ella is fat because she isn’t, in fact she is perfection carved into a human form.
nnb: thinking about it, I want to retract the statement ‘Ella is the air in our lungs’; seeing as she smokes so many cigarettes that the air she exhales turns the end of the filter black, I don't think any of us should be inhaling anything when in her general presence

To conclude, I’m not even going to consider this as a possibility. You might as well say that Bigfoot wrote it.

Nick Griffin and/or David Irving

(I love how that is the picture of Griffin that the BBC decided to use on their story; the one with him staring with his weird mismatched eyes like someone out of a Gabrielle lookalike competition)

Griffin and Irving are these two brers who have been invited to speak at the Oxford Union about Freedom of Speech. Griffin is the head of the political party the BNP, which as far as I can tell is like the Boy Scouts except they don’t like uppity black people and immigrants, and Irving is some historian who says that the holocaust didn’t happen. Frankly, as a blue eyed blonde haired white dude, they technically should have no beef with me and I don’t really understand them bonding together to write mean posts on the internet about me. However, when it was announced that they were speaking, the whole university collectively weed its pants, threw its toys out of the pram, had a tantrum, etc, and since then there have been innumerable vociferous arguments, marches, rallies and newspaper columns protesting the obscenity of having these two angry young men speaking at Oxford. Today we were all sent an email warning us that Griffin was quite likely to bring “group of extremist party members who are violent against people who look like they aren't straight white caucasians” who would run through the streets and set fire to black people and threaten Hassan’s Kebab Van and stuff; like I said, I’m aryan as hell so I’m not that bothered (in fact I might join in, just for jokes) but I guess with all the rivers of hate that are unleashed wherever Griffin and Irving go, there is a chance that they probably could have had the evil inside them. So, uh... let’s give them like, a 6% chance of having written it.

My Mum
For: She has been getting pretty annoyed that I’ve not called her from University for the past four or five weeks. Against: I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know how to use a computer.

This dude

I don’t know why. He just looks pretty angry. And also kind of like a virgin, which would explain why he’s posting stuff anonymously on the internet at 2 in the morning. Hmm. On second thoughts, seeing as I got this picture off google images by typing “angry pathetic virgin”, it’s probably not him.

Someone Else
Ah, the magical Someone Else. Guilty of pretty much everything that is wrong in the world. I’m tempted to pretty much ascribe the culprit to being a member of this group. But still doesn’t answer the question… WHO? WHO? WHO? Because, as much as I wrack my brains, I honestly can’t think of anybody who I have pissed off THAT much in the past four months. I’ve been remarkably good. An angel, to be honest. Perhaps it’s Satan who is getting annoyed that I’ve stopped on the downpayments for my minifridge. That could be it. Why do I have a secret enemy? That's a bit worrying.

* * *

So the situation was that there was a mean comment on my blog and I wasn’t sure what to do about it. Respond, or not? Or turn the other cheek? Hmm. Well the fact was, I’d thought to myself previously “I should be less of a cock on the internet to people” after the whole debacle of, ooh, the last 9 months of my life. And so I was torn – respond, or give up the sweet and peaceful internet lifestyle I had adopted and grown to love?

In fact it was kind of like one of those Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, when Jean-Claude had quit the marines to be a fisherman or to whittle chairs or whatever, and then his old army captain comes along and is all like “Jean-Claude these guys have kidnapped the president” and JC is like “Sorry dude, you know I don’t do that any more” but then the army dude’s like “Yeah but they also kidnapped your sister” and then JC stands up in slow motion and throws down his fishing rod and ties a bandanna around his head and is like “This time it is personal” and then he roundhouse kicks a tree until it falls over (by the way I can do that now that I am a red belt at kickboxing).
Of course in this case it was more like “Tom, some guy wrote a mean comment on your blog comments, we need you to redress the balance and write a horrible blog about THEM", and I’m like “Sorry, I don’t do that any more” but then they were like “But the commenter called Ella a bitch” and I’m like “RAAAWR PLAYTIME IS OVER BITCHES” and I kick over a table of playing cards.
So I tied my metaphorical bandanna around my metaphorical head and settled down to write some kind of ribald and no doubt HILARIOUS rejoinder to that comment. But lo and behold, to my surprise I saw that other people had already been there and done it for me!

“At least put your name to it, you vicious bitch.”
“Only a moron would spell 'already' with two 'l's.”
“lets be honest we all know who that comment is.... hes a nob.”
“Hey anonymous cocksucker, put your fucking name on your piece of illiterate shit. You're the skidmark of a worm-ridden dog dragging its arse along the floor.”
“Anonymous,if you dislike this blog so much why did you go through it and count how many times he mentioned Ella? Get a life.”
Etc.

I have to say I was touched at the number of people coming out of the woodwork to leap to my defence. I’m not even joking it was absolutely worth having some anonymous dude insult the pants off of me, just to see all anonymous internetters leaping to my defence and saying how much they liked the blog! I love you guys.

xxx

ONE MORE THING. My final point to note about the content of that letter.
Point the Seventh: The whole thing about me being shit with girls. I’m sorry, anonymous friend, this is the only point that I’m gonna have to disagree with you on. Frankly, I am dynamite with the ladies. In fact, I might as well take this opportunity to wipe that smile off of your face with the news: I HAVE A GIRLFRIEND. That’s right. I really do. No joking. Somebody who was totally a girl (I know because the comment was highlighted in pink) wrote on my facebook Honesty Box wall that I was ‘fittttt’. Notice all the ‘t’s. There are five ‘t’s. That is how fit I am. Five times as fit. As a normal person. It’s getting pretty serious now, actually. I reckon she’ll tell me her name in a couple of weeks. So stick THAT in your Bacardi and sip it, Mr Anonymous.

I hope that it was Ella that Honesty Boxed me. Man it’d be so wicked if Ella and I fell in love and then we got married and lived in a little house with really good ventilation. Mmm. Ella Ella Ella. ELLA. She has now been mentioned 18 times in this post which, according to my official Ella-counter, is some kind of a record. 19 times now.

Funny book meme, interesting results

I heard about this meme from Patrick at The Hawk Owl's Nest, where you go to Amazon's Advanced Book Search, type your name under Title, and pick the most interesting result.

I did it two ways. First, I typed in both my first and last name (I don't have a middle name). I got three hits:

Okay--what in the world is up with that first one? Ooh, I see--it's an Oprah Book Club selection--it all makes sense now. See, not a lot of people know this, but Oprah pretty much bases her whole club selections thing around MY taste in books. No, really! Okay--get this: back in the late 1980s, I did my master's thesis on mother characters in Toni Morrison's novels; Oprah starts up her book/reading club and picks Beloved as the first club selection. See? What did I tell you?

Now, I realize that she hasn't picked any forensic science books yet; I mean, I don't see her having the Oprah-lovers of America read Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI, but you know--she focuses on fiction. Still -- I read Love in the Time of Cholera when it first came out; that's on her list. I majored in English and read all of Faulkner's novels (on a bet); she puts Light in August, As I Lay Dying, and The Sound and the Fury on her list. I'm a woman, and I have a heart; she puts Maya Angelou's The Heart of a Woman on her list. Do I need to go on? Puh-lease. It's so obvious.

But I digress.... Okay, the second one is YOU Staying Young. Uh... yeah.

And finally, Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld. (Is this Jerry's wife?) Well, I might be delicious, but I'm sure everyone knows it, so there's not so much "deceptively" going on.

After these weird results, I only typed in my first name, and this time I got a ton of books by some cookbook writer named Delia Smith. Believe me, when you have a first name that you have to spell for everyone, it's easier when your last name is something like "Smith." Anyway, she's written a million cookbooks and holiday books and stuff--she must be the Martha Stewart of the Delia world. Here's the best one:

You go, girl.

Happy Turkey Day!

Just think: for some people, a wild turkey would be a lifer.

Here's an interesting story to ponder while you stuff yourself tomorrow. Enjoy the holiday!

I'm thankful to have bloggy pals like you with whom I can share my little birdy adventures. Thanks for two years of fun!

We have a Code Red situation, people

My can opener broke the other day. Yes. I was just beginning to open a can of tuna – scritch scritch scritch* - when there was a sudden creaking noise. Something pinged off the can opener. The can of tuna fell out of the clutches of the can opener and toppled artistically into the sink, which was filled with yellow water and cutlery. Man, you should have seen my face. It was somewhere between :|, :S and :’(. With a little bit of 8-() thrown in for good measure. Had I been able to speak, I would have described myself as speechless and for a few seconds I could do nothing but gape, utterly aghast, at the now useless can opener that I still clutched in my quivering hand.

I mentally choked (rather like Eminem at the beginning of the film ‘8 Mile’, a tome that I base a lot of my lifestyle on). But I couldn’t even begin to react. As Marshall Mathers said, I only had only one chance to save this tuna and still have a delicious lunch (I was planning to make a tuna toastie). This was my one shot, my one opportunity, everything I’d ever wanted for– was I going to capture it, or just let it slip? Even as I sat there staring, my tuna was getting soggy and useless. THE CLOCK WAS RUN OUT, OVER, BLAM. I was rapidly blowing and it and all I could do was look lamely at my emasculated can opener. Luckily William Shatner was walking past the window and happened to look in and noticed; his reaction was both esoteric and shattering:


(NB: did not actually happen, is more of a description of my mental state)

However, the metaphorical William Shatner was enough to crack me out of my reverie, and with no further ado I leapt into action. The first thing to do was to rescue the tuna. I threw the can opener to the floor and plunged my hands into the murky depths of the sink, which contained a week’s worth of dirty washing up, as well as all the waste fluids that are necessarily produced by a busy teenager (I’m talking spat out toothpaste, phlegm, dregs of coffee/tea that never got drunk, bits of paper, ink, seaweed, manky vitamins, beer, etc etc etc). Frankly the water was congealing to the point that it was nearly solid in some places, what with all the oils and bits of bread and marmite floating about in there. However after stabbing myself with a concealed submarine breadknife and probably catching Veils Disease from the fluid, I managed to fish out the tin of tuna (get it, ‘fish out’, eh eh eh brilliant I’m wasted on you people). I examined it critically. Well. There was good news and bad news. The good news was that the hole made by the can opener wasn’t big enough to let the magically delicious tuna float away into the murky bottom of my abyssal sink. The bad news was that the hole made by the can opener wasn’t big enough to let the magically delicious tuna float away into the murky bottom of my abyssal belly, as, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t fit a fork into it to scrape the tuna out. This was bad times.

I turned to my desk, swept the complete works of George Eliot onto the floor, placed the partially opened tin of tuna onto the centre of my workstation, sat down on my chair, crossed my legs, made a little pyramid with my fingers, leant forward and glared at it. I don’t know what I was expecting – the can to open itself out of embarrassment, maybe? – but it just sat there, oozing delicious tuna smells and being infuriating. The more I stared at it, the more I wanted it. To understand the full scale of this calamity, you must start to understand my common nutritional intake as a student. It’s tea, coffee, and bread. That’s it. I have my bread toasted, I have it with marmite, I have it with melted cheese I have it with Philadelphia, but it’s pretty much the whole staple of my diet. And I don’t do meals any more. Today I got up at 930am and my sole solid food intake was a six-piece bread binge at 8.30pm, along with about four cups of tea. I’m hoping to just start not eating at all and just not notice the difference (which I think will do wonders for my Hustings application to be the college anorexia councellor – I’ll have some inspirational stories to tell the girls). So you can imagine that a desire to actually eat some tuna (in a toastie, with cheese and bread) was not just an idle wish – it was an all-encompassing quest, bitches. So. I got out a bit of paper and made a list of options (in fact I wrote them over my photocopy of the poem “Grief” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; I know it’s a devastating insight into the power of bereavement on people, but at the same time fair’s fair, and tuna comes first).

OPTION ONE: TRY AND FIX THE CAN OPENER
I picked it up and cast a keep technical eye over it. I put it down and made some calculations on a bit of paper, along with a small sketchy diagram of the mechanism of the opener. However I realised halfway through that I had no engineering understanding whatsoever so the can opener mechanism blueprint turned into a sketch of Top Cat, wearing a nazi uniform and doing Jessica Rabbit.
I screwed the paper into a small ball and threw it at the bin. I missed.

OPTION TWO: TRY TO SCRAPE THE TUNA OUT OF THE TINY HOLE USING SOME SORT OF SPATULA
The “Some sort of spatula” turned out to be a pen – the only thing small enough to fit into the hole. After two and half minutes of frantic scraping I managed to get out a flake of tuna that was about a square millimetre long. I eagerly gobbled it down and despite the overwhelming taste of ink, it was still the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten up to that point. However my pen nib was bent and leaking ink everywhere. So I threw it at the bin. I missed.

OPTION THREE: RENT ONE OF THESE HUGE SAW THINGS FOR A DAY AND TOTALLY POUND THE CAN OF TUNA INTO SUBMISSION

I realised pretty early on that this scheme was not only expensive, it was also impractical and unworkable. So I screwed the loan contract into a ball and threw it at the bin. I missed.

OPTION FOUR: THROW THE TIN OF TUNA AT THE WALL
It left a greasy sunflowery-oily mark on my Shaun of the Dead poster, sprayed gunk all over my bed, bounced, and landed perfectly the bin. I reached into the aforesaid receptacle to retrieve my lunch and I accidently put my hand into an expired pot of jam that had blue mould growing off of it. I experimentally licked the jam to see if it tasted anything like tuna. It didn’t. It tasted like Ella’s room, and did nothing to assuage the hunger pangs. I was getting increasingly desperate for the tuna, the sweet smell of which permeated every molecule in my room.

OPTION FIVE: LEAVE THE ROOM TO BORROW SOMEONE ELSE’S CAN OPENER, OR SOMEONE ELSE’S TUNA, OR BUY ANOTHER CAN OPENER, OR BUY SOME TUNA THAT DOESN’T COME IN A CAN
I was about to do this when I suddenly stopped. The first reason for my stoppage was that I was wearing only a pair of boxers. The second – and more pressing - reason was that I was highly wary of leaving my beloved tuna alone in the room. Knowing my luck, one of my friends would probably come along, see that the tuna was there, get obsessed with it, spend all the days and nights of the year obsessively going on about it, become the tuna’s best friend and be the popular one amongst all the other tinned fish products at the supermarket then buy his own can opener and eat it. It’s happened before, you know, and this time I was absolutely not letting Mike have sex with my tuna. It was time to take decisive action. MANLY ACTION. And of course, when I say “MANLY ACTION”, what I’m referring to is “STABBING THE CAN TO DEATH WITH A PENKNIFE”. That’s right, I did the patriotic thing and brutally rent my way in with a huge bloody blade. Truthfully, if I was writing an English Literature essay about the manner in which I opened that can of tuna, I would have to comment on the PHALLIC way that I repeatedly PIERCED the previously virginal lid with the big long PHALLIC knife so that the sweet fishy juices gushed forth. Bluntly it was pornographic. Aime would have written a good essay on it I think. When I was done I threw back my knife and leant back in my chair and accidentally knocked the wrecked remnants of the tin onto the floor. I cried out in horror, weighed up my options, and decided that a few hairs/scraps of paper/plasters/ants wouldn’t impede the taste too much, so I scooped it up and mashed it all back into the tin.

There was a heavenly moan of glee as I held my fishy snack aloft in both hands.

YES! I cried.

YES! cried passing neighbours of my room who looked in and saw what was achieved

YES! cried the tweety birds in the trees

YES! cried the clouds in the sky

NO! cried my tuna… but it was too late.

I put that tuna in some bread with some cheese and made a tuna melt. And frankly it was pretty nice. Not the best thing I’ve ever eaten, and candidly I think that the tuna detracted from the overall experience a bit. I mean seriously, putting tuna in the toaster? Bad move gee. But overall I’d rate it 7/10. Possibly not worth the effort. But the main thing was that I got to stab something and use creative visualisation, and to be honest, does anything else matter?

The answer is no.


*scritch scritch scritch is the sound that a can opener makes when it is busily opening a can of tuna

First snowfall

. . . and already I'm OVER IT!

Sure, for the first couple of years up here, it was cute. It was beautiful. It was wondrous and special. It was white Christmases and sledding and postcard-perfect winter scenes, just like I'd always imagined it would be when I was a kid living in South Texas, enduring 70-degree Christmas days and such.

But now? After five PA winters, I'm kinda tired of it. Sure, it's still beautiful and wondrous, but

--Not at 7:15 in the morning, when I'm digging the car out from under a night's snowfall.

--Not when I can't park in my driveway anymore because it's a hill, and if I park at the bottom I'll never get back up and out. (Not that I would mind it so much, but my boss might have a little to say about my not coming to work anymore.) Now I have to park in the little pull-off space up top, and I get covered by the snowplows every day.

--Not when I have to drive slowly and carefully, running the wipers constantly, washing the mud and salt off the windshield and trying not to think about the salt eating the car's paint and underside coating, rusting it from beneath.

--Not when the arthritis in my right foot and ankle are really bothering the heck out of me from the first snowfall to the last.

--Not when it starts getting dark at 4:30 in the afternoon.

I'll admit that I still love watching the birds at the feeders in the snow. They stand out against the pure white backdrop like little brown and red and blue gems. However, the light's usually so crappy that it's hard to get a good shot.

I still love looking out at the snow on the trees and the mountainsides, the fields covered with white blankets, the night-glow of reflected white between the clouds and the snow.

But I gotta tell you: this snow business ain't all it's cracked up to be.

We’re not in Oxford any more, Toto

I went home the other day. For a brief visit. To be honest, the main point of the visit was to pick up some prizes that my school had chosen to honour me with. I also felt like popping home and visiting my dogs and/or family and being like ‘cool sup gees’. So that is what I did, I bought a ticket and boarded a coach and set off on my way.

I began to feel nervous about ten minutes into the journey. Has anyone seen that film Sleepy Hollow with Johnny Depp? There’s this bit at the beginning when Johnny leaves his hometown on this horse-drawn coach and then travels into the middle of nowhere. And then as the opening credits roll you see him looking out of the window of his coach and seeing all this bad shit; like he sees this scary lake and then these creepy trees then these weirdo scarecrows then like these severed heads on sticks or something and you see his face being all ‘Hooooooly shit, dude’. That is kind of what I felt like as I travelled back to London on my coach. Except instead of scary lakes I saw a street with four kebab shops in a row, and instead of creepy trees I saw a guy in a tracksuit walking a mangy pitbull along a dual carriageway and instead of weirdo scarecrows I saw a burnt out car and instead of severed heads on sticks I saw Ashford. Frankly, Ashford is what kind of hammered the final nails in the coffin. I don’t know if anyone from the Ashford tourist board is reading this (probably unlikely) but seriously dudes, sort out your fucking town. It looks like something from a geography textbook about urban decay/tsunamis. The people there have a kind of hopeless look of desperation that clings to them as they crawl and stagger and gibber through the filthy stain-coated high streets and die quietly next to abandoned laundrettes with only the rats to mourn them. Frankly, the stench of death and rot hangs over Ashford like a smog. It’s kind of what I imagine Stoke-on-Trent to be like.

This was all especially shocking to the system considering that I was coming from Oxford, city of gentility and niceness. I mean, we have a lot of beggars at Oxford, who are a bit annoying, and many ugly people clogging up the streets, but equally all of the beggars have pet dogs wearing capes and we have loads of one-legged people hopping about the streets, which for some reason evens it out for me. I love Oxford, I really do. A lot of people in my year are all like THIS ISN’T A REAL PLACE I WANT TO GO HOME and are all fighting against the general levels of weirdness that fill the town, but frankly people like that are oddballs. I frankly like the fact that I can go outside and see a guy dressed in woman’s clothing listen to a bunch of Indian midgets cover Oasis on pan pipes, and then go and buy a venison-and-fig pastry from a covered market that also sells entire deer. It’s good. The worst thing that can happen in Oxford is that your tutor frowns at you. This I like. The worst thing that can happen to you in the outside world is that you get robbed, beaten up, peeled, skullfucked and then sold into slavery and death at the hands of slave traders. They probably make kebab meat out of you.

Anyway eventually after a long-ass bus journey, I arrived home and expected to be treated as some kind of conquering hero. I anticipated that my dogs would go mental and probably run into the walls; as it was they looked at me, wagged their tails, then walked off. I was like oh. The rest of my family were ok, though. My sister was happy enough to talk to me for about ten minutes and my bro was cool. Everyone admired the top that I'd bought from Primark for £6 and my parents both said that I looked very healthy and handsome. This was tempered somewhat with "you've gotten a bit fat" and "Do you know, when you look down your nose bends off at a weird degree?" but y'know, gotta take the ups with the downs. But overall going home was wicked. It’s amazing being back at your house, as it is basically like a huge hotel. There is always FOOD in the fridge and all the surfaces are more or less CLEAN and you can just click your fingers and my mum will make you cups of teas whenever you request them and you get to watch TV (which started to properly fuck me off after 45 minutes as I realised that for the first time in 6 weeks, people were talking down to me; I was like “dude, I’m going to Oxford University, you don’t need to talk down to me when you attempt to sell me ice cream…knobhead”).

Anyway after a bit we went to the prizegiving. I’m not really going to go on about it as I do every time I go to it (which is like three years in a row now). It’s usually the same; old men talk smugly about how good the school is and how proud they are of us, then somebody attempts to make some kind of political point about independent schools being the best – this year the headmaster had a kind of “fuck da government, we is INDEPENDENT TO DA CORE” thing going on which was cute, although he portrayed the school to be some kind of free thinking hippy community of joy and butterflies which to be honest it frankly is not.

Anyway, after that groovy love-fest I went to the pub with Curry and Julian and Joe and Patrick and Tom and Joe and Jack and some other people that you do not and never will know. It was really nice to talk to some people who were slightly less intelligent than me (I’m joking I’m joking) and catch up on old times, which mostly revolved around talking about me and the fact that I am studying English at Oxford. Frankly everyone was so impressed with my educational superiority that their eyes were like saucers and they kept asking if they could touch my skin. I generously said that they could. Because I am a nice guy at heart.

I nearly had a heart attack when I went to the bar to get a drink though. “How much is your cheapest drink?” I asked (I am a catch); and she said ‘Fosters, it costs £2.85’. TWO POUNDS EIGHT FIVE PENCE. IMAGINE HOW MUCH DRINK I COULD BUY WITH THAT ON CRAZY TUESDAYS (75p shots… I can’t even work out that sort of maths). I am not joking, I started to cry softly as I handed over my money and took my pint of weak-ass Australian shit beer. Every sip felt like acid in my throat (and not just due to the levels of sulphur used during Fosters’ production line) as I imagined all of the money I wasting. Kind of like in one of those cartoons when the really hungry shipwrecked sailor imagines his friend as a big juicy chicken, I was looking at my pint and just imagining the pound coin ten p that I’d lost on the deal. However I still needed to drink so I went to the bank, earnestly pleaded with my bank manager, worked out a small fixed interest loan, came back then bought another few drinks.

That was bad. What was worse was that, upon my exit from the public house, absolutely broke, I discovered I’d missed the last bus. BUSES. BUSES. WHAT IS THIS SHIT, I cried out aloud. Buses are not an issue when you go to Oxford. In Oxford, everything is at most ten minutes walk away. Anything more is simply obscene. I was thinking about phoning my mum and getting her to pick me up but then I figured that I couldn’t actually be fucked with that shit so I set off on the 4 mile walk by myself. Oh, did I mention that it was cold? It was fucking cold. It was so cold that when I had a wee against a fence, the coldness of the metal froze the stream of wee and it went inside my belly and I nearly bled to death.

As it was, I luckily had my iPod and so I listened to some absolutely superb hardcore music while kind of dancing along the road (nb: yeah I was a bit drunk). Even so I was steadily getting more and more cold. I am sure if I was a better writer I would be able to come up with a better set of similes than something along the lines of “I was as cold as ICE locked in a FREEZER made of ICE in THE SNOW” or something similar (Tennyson aint got shit on me). I got so cold that I briefly tried to hitchhike. As it was, nobody was in the mood to pick up a dishevelled looking 19 year old in a suit and a monkey tshirt who was randomly jumping up and down and hollering. Bastards. I couldn’t help thinking “In Oxford they would have seen that I was a fellow student and then picked me up”. As it was, as I trudged on through the arctic temperatures I got more and more annoyed with being home. The television was patronising, the alcohol was expensive and the drivers were mean. Frankly, fuck it all.

Eventually I got to within 5 minutes of my house and yeah, I was feeling low. But then something happened. Something amazing. Debaser came on my iPod. Now, if you don’t know me you won’t know about me and Debaser by the Pixies. It is frankly my most favourite song in the history of the world; that song has direct hardwires into the centre of the happy part of my brain and when it comes on I can’t help but go insane. So it came on. And I started running. I started sprinting down an empty country lane at 1 in the morning, steam rising from my skin, screaming the lyrics to Debaser into the night air. I ran past a horse in a field and frankly, it was astonished. Two foxes bounded joyfully out of a thatch and ran around me in little joyous circles. When I was running along I saw a puddle in the pavement and instead of just sidestepping it I launched myself into the air and did a little Billy Elliot style pirouette before landing. And all of a sudden it all made sense. It was amazing. No matter how shit the world, no matter how many twats and knobheads and Mike Younises that clog the streets and oil their way through the system, Debaser by the Pixies will always be here and this street will always be here and I will always be able to run down this street screaming this song and that is just awesome. And I like Oxford, but you can never run down a road screaming the Pixies at the top of your voice. Only at home. It is only when you have silence that you can break it. And I sprinted all the way home screaming these lyrics and just being happy that I was alive. Of course, I was so cold when I got in that I got chilblains on my legs. Seriously, fuck that shit. But it was worth it.

Anyway, I am back in Oxford now. Literally thirty seconds after I got off the coach, I passed two tramps wishing each other Happy Birthday. Fried Gold.

Oh my gosh, you can check the reading level of your blog! Got this link from D-Cup, who's one sassy broad. Mine:

As if! The funny part is that I put my other bloggy in there and got

I guess politics is a juvenile activity. Hee hee hee!!!

Friday Night Nibble

Keep your eyes on my badonkadonk-donk!

Raptorful morning

My drive to work is rather long each day because I have to first go from East Jahbib where we live, to downtown State College, then back up to Bellefonte. Some of the drive is two-way two-lane, but a lot of it is divided highway. Every morning along these roads I can expect to see at least two or three kinds of raptors. Today, however, was a truly raptorful morning! I saw

American Kestrel
Golden Eagle (HUGE!)
Red-tailed Hawk
Red-shouldered Hawk
Northern Harrier
Sharp-shinned Hawk
Cooper's Hawk

What a great day! But don't tell Kat, because she hates it when I bird while driving down the highway at about 70mph! Still, I wanted to get a photo of at least one of these guys, so I tried to pull over a couple of times but each time I spooked the bird with my 70-to-zero, slam on the brakes and pull over past that loud-ass rumble-strip on the side of the highway. Dangit! I would've had an amazing shot of the red-shouldered; he was in almost the same spot as the one I saw a couple of days ago--same bird, maybe?

Still--I'm so glad I attended that raptor ID workshop and that I spent so much time around raptor expert Susan Gets Native in Cape May. Otherwise, I would've missed most of these! The Golden Eagle was especially striking, sitting at the very tip-top of a tall snag near the highway. He was enormous. I read that they migrate through here, and just this morning I saw a posting on the listserv that someone had seen a golden near downtown. Perhaps this was the same bird?

I also saw a big flock of ducks (couldn't tell what kind) overhead. I sure do love ducks and geese. And raptors.

Can you pass 8th grade science?

I did, but I'm still not sure which question I missed. Check it out!

I like that little graphic of what I'm guessing is some sort of Neandertal man touching fingers with a space-age guy.

Mystery bird and a lifer

First, I saw a red-shouldered hawk! He was on a fenceline next to the highway on my way to work--woo hoo! Lifer! I'm reasonably certain on the ID as I'd boned up on them before my last field trip, when they were expecting to see red-shouldereds. (Then I ended up not going on the trip, and they ended up not seeing any of the potential lifers I'd wanted to see. So it all worked out.) Wish I hadn't been running late; otherwise, I would've stopped for a photo. Next time.

The mystery bird: This morning when we got in the car, I looked across the yard and saw a dark blue bird, like indigo-bunting blue, only the bird was larger than a bunting--maybe starling size, but with a long tail. He was eating seeds among the dried-up goldenrod next to the fence. I didn't have my binocs with me (dangit!), and we were as I said running late, so I just stared at him with my feeble eyesight. I have looked at the bunting pics online, and I know he was larger, slimmer, and had a longer tail. Almost like a grackle shape. Maybe he WAS a grackle? You know how they have that blue-black tinge to them. But up here in November? And it was completely overcast this morning, but he was decided blue even in the dim light. I wish I'd had my binocs to get some idea of beak shape, etc. but I didn't. Any guesses as to what I saw? Then I could look for photos and see if I could make a guess-ID.

I'll also do a run through the WhatBird ID site. I wish I'd had more time and my binocs this morning.... So frustrating!

Oh--one more thing--off to a good start on this year's Project FeederWatch. I had a good variety of birds at the feeder. I absolutely love doing PFW, because I really like keeping those records. I know I should probably do it even during the off-time of PFW, but for some reason, I don't. Maybe the added knowledge of knowing I'm contributing to a body of statistics spurs me on, even when I am sleepy, to get up and watch my feeders.

Strange spam address

This post is rated PG-13 -- maybe even NC-17! You've been warned!

You know how you always get those spam emails (I won't go into the topics themselves), and they'll be from an address that will have a suffix like "@mail.com" or "@hotmail.com." I get them too, even at work. So I got one earlier that caught my eye, because the address had "@geese.com" at the end Geese? The subject line and content of the email did not seem to be about geese! So I decided to explore and typed in http://www.geese.com/. Here's what geese.com looks like:

So now I'm confused. Why would (ahem) off-color emails come from an address at geese.com?

What's really sad is how the site is all about killing geese. Why isn't it killinggeese.com? Or huntinggeese.com? I don't know what I expected, but I guess I thought it would be more like a site with lol geese or something.

The bottom of the screen had something interesting, though:

In case you can't read those things at the bottom in the orange -- it says:

Grey goose vodka Squirrel Seagull Quail Duck as pet

Duck as pet!!! I want a duck! I want some grey goose vodka (dirty martini, lots of olives!)!

Oh, sorry--got a little involved there. Anyway--what a weird site that is. And I guess they also do porn emails. Weird.

BEHOLD THE POWER OF BLUE BOLT

I am so tweaked right now. I’m tweaked like a cheek at a granny’s picnic. I’m on edge. I’m on edge like Sylvester Stallone in the moderately successful mountain climbing action movie “Cliffhanger”. I’m wired like a bad kettle. I’m buzzing like a bee on crack. I’m bouncing off the walls like some sort of rubber egg. Man I’m tripping out; I look at the clock and I see that it’s 5.04 and I’m like “But shouldn’t it still be light out, it’s barely evening” but then I remember that it’s like 5.04 in the MORNING and I am like WOAH DUDE. I AM TEH HARDCORE. Hardcore like a peach.

But maybe I should backtrack. This day began, as most Thursdays do, with me needing to produce an essay. This week I had chosen to do one on the famous poet-lady Elizabeth Barrett Browning (or as I like to call her, Lizzie-B). If you will cast your mind back to the last essay I had to do, I likened the famous poet lady Christina Rossetti to an emo girl who cries in the toilets and cuts herself. If we take this metaphor (say that all of these female Victorian poets went to the same high school in California or something) and apply it to Lizzie-B, I would say that this week’s essay revolves around one of the Cool Girls in school; possibly head cheerleader, or at least a preppy girl with big boobs who all the men wanted to dry hump (figuratively; I am of course talking with reference to her poetry). Lizzie-B is going out with the head quarterback of the Football Team. Of course, you must recognise that I am talking in the fluent language of metaphor; I highly doubt that Robert Browning would really be any good at American football. Pinball, perhaps. Maybe, just MAYBE he’d be a dab hand at Air Hockey or even Water Polo - and I reckon that once his team won, he’d probably air-thrust his groin into the face of the defeated team and say something like “BOO-YAH, that’s how we do things down here! Welcome to Milano, bitch!”. However, in terms of poetry, Browning’s up there throwing the American football around and tackling people, and then locking the nerds like Matthew Arnold or Tennyson in lockers (and then Tennyson would write a 133 canto elegy to the woes of being stuck in a locker all evening called “Ad MermorIAmGettingThirstyComeOnGuysPleaseLetMeOutOfHere”). Ok, I think at this point I have officially lost roughly 96% of the readership of this blog – ie anybody who doesn’t have a basic knowledge of Victorian Romantic Poets, and thus I am going to make a smooth transition into the long and complicated story of how I got completely buzzed on caffeine.

Basically I had four or five coffees in quick succession.

Well, that was easy. No, I’m joking. Basically, the night beforehand I had decided to stay up til past 2 reading riddles on the internet (seriously not a joke). After that, I was so pumped and awesomed up by my own sense of rugged individualism that I didn’t really get to sleep til about 3. Then I woke up at 930 and I was like “Right lads, time to write this essay”.

I think that this week’s preparations have to set me some kind of personal benchmark so far for the least pre-preparation for doing an essay. Originally I was going to do my essay on Middlemarch, which is about 800 pages long. I’d decided to get an early start and catch up on loads of reading and do loads of work and write an amazing essay, so on Tuesday I got loads of books out about MM and George Eliot. Unfortunately, for me, ‘Getting the books out and then looking at them proudly’ constitutes a hard day’s work; I cycled to the library, got the books out, went home, balanced them on the desk and looked at them. Proudly. “Yep,” I said to myself “I am prettttty good at this whole studenting lark”. Then on Wednesday morning I realised that I hadn’t done anything. I took a long, long look at my copy of Middlemarch, which I was using to do step ups on, then sighed and threw it onto a roaring fire and looked for something else to write my essay on. In class, ONE POEM by Lizzie-B was read out and I was like “Meh, she’s ok.”

The good thing about English Literature is that you can pretty much set your own essay titles, so that meant that I could do a really easy question for myself on Lizzie. However I didn’t exactly know what to write my essay on as I had only read one poem; I checked me list and it told me to read this poem called “Aurora Leigh”; I was like cool so I opened the book, saw that AL was 322 pages long, and nearly threw my copy onto a roaring fire. However I decided against this as my roaring fire was already clogged up with the complete works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Middlemarch, a couple of back issues of the Oxford Student, a framed picture of me and Mike playing Frisbee in the park, several small waxwork models of my own penis, every Bryan Adams record in Oxford, my signed photo of OJ Simpson, three boxes filled with children’s letters to Santa, and some coal, and so frankly there wasn’t much room left in it. I then noticed that Aurora Leigh was split into nine parts, and the first part was quite short, so I swiftly changed my title from “…the works of any Victorian poet” to “in Book One of Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning”. Then when my tutor asks me why I didn’t read the rest of the poem, I could just say something like “Well essentially I was a bit restricted by the question”. I was like wicked and high fived myself, then played air guitar for a bit.

Fuck, this is turning into a post about why I wrote my essay on Lizzie-B and not on me drinking Blue Bolt. Ok, so the fact that I was constantly drinking coffee is sorted, yeah? No problems with that? GOOD. Basically the idea was that if you drink coffee, but then stop drinking it, then you crash and fall asleep and that’s no good; so the best thing is to drink loads of coffee and then worry about crashing when it is time to go to sleep. Which is what I am doing now. After about my third cup I was literally shaking. I don’t just mean that my hands were quivering a bit. It was like my body had been plunged into icy water. The skin and flesh next on my shins was literally quivering. It was amazing and slightly frightening. It also made typing my essay difficult and I started to write utter bullshit. I still don’t know what a “oxymoronic dichotomy” is but I still used it and I think that that is something to be proud of. I was about to pour myself another cup of joe when I glimpsed something silver peeking out from under my desk.

“Of course!” I bellowed. “The Blue Bolt!”

For those who don’t know what Blue Bolt is (you freaks), it is an energy drink manufactured and sold by Sainsburys. It is essentially a knockoff version of Red Bull, and probably a bit stronger, with the added attraction that a litre of ‘Bolt costs the same as one can of ‘Bull. So that’s what we drink. I was the one who got the Balliol Bloc onto the ‘Bolt and I feel that is something else to proud of; anyway the day previously I had bought some for jokes and forgotten about it. But then I saw it and I remembered it and I thought to myself “This would be a pretttty good time to have some Blue Bolt, don’t you agree Thomas?” and then I was like “You are right Thomas” and as I was congratulating myself on being so damn clever, I sat down on the edge of my chair by accident and scraped all down my leg and it really hurt, but luckily nobody saw or will ever find out about it, which can only be a good thing. To celebrate this act of good luck, I poured the entire bottle of Blue Bolt into a pint glass and drank it. I topped this off with another coffee and some cheese toasties, then got back to work on the essay. I then started spasming madly due to the massive caffeine rush, fell off my chair, banged my head on the desk and then landed awkwardly on my Batman action figure and stabbed myself in the elbow with his ears, but I recovered my poise with – I feel – a sense of intense grace and precision, and got back to work.

I’m of the opinion that I write a lot quicker and with a greater sense of fluidity when I am utterly monged off my head on taurine. My previous essays have been around the 2000 to 2500 word length, but this one rapidly swelled to 3700 words of pure fried gold. As well as taking up my old hobby of playing hundreds of games of internet minesweeper in a row without winning a single one, I made lots of very good points about femininity or something (I can’t remember) and topped it off with a brilliant conclusion – essentially, Lizzie-B didn’t really care either way. Then I edited it a bit and sat back and thought “You know what, Tom, that is probably the best essay ever written about this subject ever. It’s so good that the tutors will be jealous and want to steal it. Frankly if I was you, I’d go back and add in a load of redundant points, pointless shit and utter rubbish to make yourself look more like your fellow English students”; so that’s what I did and if I’m with you in my tutorial tomorrow, trust, my original essay was much better.

After that was done, I went for a walk around college. As - at this point – it was like 1 in the morning and raining, I decided to put on my black wifebeater and parade around showing off my biceps like a kind of puny English Ryan off the OC. After a bit, I ended up hanging with Ella who – lest we forget – is my Queen and yours. Ella was playing on her guitar, however she only knows how to play the Libertines’ “Music When The Lights Go Out” really badly, whilst singing in a voice akin to a three year old pretending to be a grumpy ex-army gentleman. With throat cancer. So we walked up and down the corridors, Ella in her long coat and cigarette bouncing off the walls and squealing, me playing the two or three chords on the guitar.

We went to visit Aime. Aime was having a really bad essay crisis and had apparently already broken down and cried for about an hour while staring at the wall and self-hating. Due to her inability to write an essay on Middlemarch. However, she then drank an entire bottle of Blue Bolt (seriously bad move, Aime). If we consider that Aime is a lightweight at the best of times, her reaction to Blue Bolt was the same as Ella’s reaction to a bag of cocaine. She was literally insane; cackling, bouncing around the room, laughing for about thirty seconds at anything and everything, before suddenly plunging into fits of anger or sadness or panic. Me and Ella were both in that state of caffeine buzzage (Ella had also had about eight coffees, although hers were ‘mexican coffees’ which means that she just put 20% Kaluha in them) when you’re just chilled and enjoying life. So we lay on the best and were well amused by Aime for a bit, until she started getting stressed about her essay. At this point – about three thirty AM - Ella remembered that she hadn’t even started her one yet so we went back to her room (on the way we visited Matt who was writing an essay on John Ruskin and drinking Blue Bolt). There we HAD SEX. No I’m joking; in fact I think it’s on the verge of blasphemy to suggest such a thing. What we actually did was: she sat at her desk and smoked and swigged Blue Bolt from the bottle and wrote her essay and said that Descartes was a twat for being born in the 15th century or whatever because it made her complicated conclusion (which was, I think, something along the lines of “language is shit”) slightly less watertight. I lay in her bed and drew two pictures. The first was a picture of a giant robotic spider with a man’s head quoting the poetry of Wallace Stevens to a small girl. The small girl was Ella and she was saying ‘oh fucken mint’ which is what Ella says a lot. The other picture was a picture of a scary looking clown with the words BEWARE FIDDLER THE PAEDOCLOWN on it. I was really pleased with these pictures and then The Mighty Ella told me that they would both be put on her wall and I was pleased.

Then I realised that it was nearly five and I made a mad dash back to my room to catch some Zs. Of course I realised that I was not in the mood or state of bodily stimulation to even attempt such a foolish act, so instead I listened to The Smiths and The Pixies and The Kings of Leon and Ryan Adams and Rufus Pinwheel and other famous bands and I wrote this blog about how I am too wired up on Blue Bolt to sleep.

There is no real moral to this blog post; it’s not like I’m trying to make a point about anything. I mean, it’s 6 in the morning and I haven’t slept, you’re just lucky that I’m still typing words. Hmm. Moral moral moral. I guess the moral of this story is related to 24. In 24, Jack Bauer stays awake for a fucking long time; like, at least 24 hours but seeing as the day began at like midnight, probably much much longer as well. I always wondered how he stayed awake, but now I realise that it is probably because he was drinking Blue Bolt constantly. Also this blog shows the effect of drugs on people not designed to take them – Aime’s life was completely torn apart by the Blue Bolt, which turned her into a paranoid shit talking self hating gibberer, whereas me and Ella just stayed cool and stylin’ off our Blue Bolt. Of course I won’t be cool and stylin’ when the caffeine wears off and I crash – and judging by how things stand now, I reckon that could very possibly be at 1.25 (my tutorial is at 1.30). But oh well.

I think that maybe the caffeine is affecting my brain in strange ways, as well. I was looking on BBC news and I saw this photo, and every time I look at it I crack up laughing for no reason, to the extent that my sides actually hurt and I have to force myself to start coughing so I can get some exercise in. Look at the photo and imagine that it's 620 in the morning, you are fucked in the head on Blue Bolt, and you are generally too clever for your own good:


DOGS. WEARING HULA GARLANDS. BRILLIANT.

Another snapshot into the crazed academic pressure cooker that is Oxford University.

Reading Kingbird Highway

I just finished Kenn Kaufman's birding classic, Kingbird Highway, and it struck such a chord in me that I thought I'd blog about it. Most birders have probably already read it, so I'll try not to spend too much time blabbing about the "plot" such as it is, because there's so much more to the book.

On the surface, Kingbird Highway is a fascinating look into one young (18)man's "Big Year," trying to see as many bird species as he can over the course of a year. He's competing against other birders for the record (626 species), and his competitiveness reaches a level of obsession that drives him to hitchhike all over the continental US, Alaska, and Baja California (Baja was included in the American Ornithologists' Union's coverage area back then). He sleeps on roadsides, eats cold soup straight out of the can for breakfast, endures blazing heat and freezing cold, sometimes goes hungry for days, and works picking apples to scrape enough money together to take a few pelagic boat trips and two plane rides in Alaska. He lives on about a dollar a day, and his Big Year cost him a total of less than $1,000, which is pretty incredible even by 1973 standards.

The book is also a great picture of the country in the early 1970s, with all the "longhairs" and "hippies," the popularity of hitchhiking as a real mode of travel, the undeveloped areas on the coasts and other birding habitats, and the truly rugged nature of living on the road. Further, it's a study in pre-Internets birding: small telephone networks of birders who'd call one another when a rare bird was seen, meaning that by the time news of a rare bird got out, the bird might already have moved on by the time you heard about it, much less got there to see it. He meets most of the big-time birders of the day in person on his travels, depending on "friend of a friend" introductions to help him find his way in strange territory.

As a beginning birder, I appreciated learning about his field craft: finding birds on territory, differentiating habitats, sticking with a spot until you find a bird, and really studying each bird to get more than just the typical fieldmarks you find in a guide. I'd really like to get one of the Kaufman guides; I bet there would be tons of information in them.

The idea of doing nothing but birding, living for the next bird, full-time, is enchanting to me. I would love to live that way, but I have a family; it just wouldn't be possible, or even desirable--they need me, and I need them. Still, when something mundane like work or school trumps birding on my schedule, it's a sweet fantasy to think of leaving those things behind and just going birding any time I want.

His writing is at once straight-forward and lyrical; he appreciated not only the birds but everything around him as he traveled the country. His eagerness to learn more about each bird instead of just checking it off a list and moving on finally turns his obsessive quest into a chore by late September of his year, but he sticks with his commitment. He probably wouldn't have gone on to write his field guides had he not learned the value of truly studying each bird and enjoying it for its own sake. That's an important lesson for me, as I work to not only see (and count) new birds but to learn more about bird behavior and bird life; to see birding only as "listing" is to shortchange both the birds and yourself.

He doesn't end up setting the record; another guy who has the money to travel as fast as he needs to beats his list--but only by three species. Still, by the time you learn this fact at the very end, you really don't care anymore than he does. His Big Year changed him forever, just as beginning to bird has changed me--in ways I never anticipated. I have new birds, new friends, and a new life in the blog universe.

Now if I could only get the similarly titled Gordon Lightfoot song "Carefree Highway" out of my head, I'd really appreciate it.

Writing an Essay on Christina Rossetti

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