Coyote Crossing

A little treat, shot in the Mojave Preserve:

About 15 years ago in this exact spot, a couple horses wandered over to Zeke to check him out. I’ve always assumed they belonged to some rancher, because they were not at all skittish — I placed my palm on one’s forehead to tell him to leave Zeke in peace, and he nickered softly at me, then walked away. In that linked post I called him a gelding, an assumption based on his brawniness and sweet nature. Now I’m not so sure. Could he have been a wild horse habituated to tourist carrot handouts? Or just Zeke-infatuated into placidity?

Anyway, it’s a sweet memory and a lovely video. Enjoy.

1 comment on "Wild Horse Canyon Road"

Tracks found in dirt road in Joshua tree forest, southern Nevada, January 4. Can you identify them without clicking through to the Flickr site?

Update: obviously *I* couldn’t. The caption has been corrected.

12 comments on "Identify this missing bird"

I’ve been asking people over on Facebook to donate to the Desert Protective Council as a birthday present, and today my DPC colleague mentioned she couldn’t find the link here. Because there wasn’t one! Here it is.

The last couple days have been good, with much spoiling by The Raven and hiking and scenery and and soaking in tubs and eating Japanese food and one um shall we say rather jarring discovery out in the desert.

My favorite part was the surprise The Raven had for me out in the wilderness: she’d arranged for three dozen Mojave green rattlesnakes to spell out “Happy Birthday Chris” on a bare stretch of desert we were planning to hike through, and the plan was that when we got to this certain spot they’d all start rattling festively, seeing as they each came with their own included party noisemaker. Sadly, snakes can’t spell very well, but I tried to have a hapy birtdday anyway.

The jarring discovery was documented here, and don’t click that on a full stomach, and let me just say that I have a post on coyote hunting coming up in relatively short order.

Even so, it was good to get to Wee Thump again.

5 comments on "Back out from the outback"

I turn 50 on Monday.

In Internet time, that’s like a frillion years.

I spend so much time thinking in terms of ten-thousand year intervals, glaciers advancing and retreating like metronomes and continents waving to one another as they sidle on past, that there are times when fifty years seems like hardly any time at all. I remember a toy I lost in the supermarket about 47 years ago, for instance — okay, it was a doll, all right? You got a problem with that? Huh? — and I don’t quite still want it back, but I remember the loss pretty damn clearly. I remember conversations I had like they took place yesterday though decades have passed.

So fifty doesn’t seem to me all that old, except when I get in One Of Those Moods, and Those Moods made ten seem ancient when I got them then, which I did.

It was kinda interesting, then, to read a rather sweet Financial Times “end of decade” story by Christopher Caldwell on how we perceive the past, with events we’ve lived through seeming much more recent than they really are, and events that may have happened just a few years before we were born consigned to history. (Hat tip to Barry for the link to the article.) In that article, Caldwell proposes a mental exercise:

Measure the number of years back to a certain event in your life – say, your entry into university, if you attended one. Then measure the same number of years back from there. Invariably, the event in the middle will seem closer to this year than to the older date, even though it is equidistant from the two.

He provides examples:

It is particularly discomfiting to play this game with cultural products that are supposed to be, by definition, new, fresh and youthful, like rock music, for instance. The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) is closer to the second world war than it is to the present. The Beatles’ release of “Love Me Do” (1962) is closer to the first world war than to us. Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock (1954) is as close to the Spanish-American war (1898) as it is to us. There is nothing hipper than hip-hop, but the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (1979), the first rap song, is closer to Al Jolson’s last hits than to the songs in the rap charts now.

It’s not every day I turn half a century old, and so this seemed an interesting game to play. My birth was half a century ago, and it seems recent. People my current age when I was born no doubt thought their own births — a century ago — just as recent, unless they were in One Of Those Moods.

Then I started looking into it, and I started to feel One Of Those Moods coming on, because I realized that when people who were my current age the day I was born were themselves born;

• Mark Twain was still alive.
• Harriet Tubman was too.
• as was Rasputin, as well as Buffalo Bill Cody
• John Muir was still walking the mountains of California, and would until an ill-advised trip to Barstow ended his life four years later.
• the distinguished scientists Alexander Emanuel Agassiz, Alfred Russel Wallace, Booker T. Washington, and Joseph Dalton Hooker were still alive scienting.
• Elizabeth Blackwell,  O. Henry, William James, Winslow Homer, Julia Ward Howe, Mary Baker Eddy, William S. Gilbert, Civil War nurse Clara Barton, author Bram Stoker, and Ambrose Bierce, the inventor of snark? All still alive.

Also still alive for the birth of that hypothetical, youthful 50-year-old attending my own birth? Everyone killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the sinking of the Titanic, and World War I.

And my dad’s father, who’d been born the year before. Next year I’ll be as old as he was when I was born. Now that’s old.

10 comments on "Half a century"

Page scanned from A description of the nature of four-footed beasts: with their figures engraven in brass (1678); Chapter X. Of the weesels.

The author: Joannes Jonstonus. The scan: from Wisconsin.

(An important note to my regular readers: Yeah, yeah, allayouse. I see it. It’s just a long “s.” VVeefuls don’t really do that to eggs, whether pigeon, Raven or crow. Grow up, willya?)

2 comments on "Of the common VVeefel, or ferret"

3 comments on "Avenue D Sunset"

It’s almost exactly two years old at this point, and it links to a post at the Old Blog that I have long since taken down at the request of the guest blogger, but this post by our friend rrp remains one of the most cogent and thoughtful essays on blog discussion dynamics I have seen. The essay has to do with blog wars, but it’s relevant to the less unpleasant aspects of online relationships as well, and to other facets of writing for an online readership.

Starting off with a description of some of the real-life meetings, good and bad, in which she’s taken part, rrp moves on to the blog world.

Put three posts side by side. Make A a calmly argued, logically structured, even beautiful essay. Make B a full on emotional diatribe, making sure to keep it somewhat coherent. It can’t read as flat-out insane. Make C a sardonic, clever piece of wordplay that manages to make any opponents look like fools. How will they rank? Well based on my experience C will get the most attention, B next and A will come in a sorry last.

This rings true. I’ve written all three of the above, if you stretch rrp’s definition of “A” just a little bit. The posts that fall into category C are the ones that still get spasms of blog traffic, even years later. I’m really good at writing C, whether it’s snarky one-liner reductio “Shorter” comments on other blogs, or rewriting Eliot’s poetry to make fun of wingnuts. I lately feel kinda sick to my stomach when I look at some of those old posts, most of them written in a form of anger that I can only describe as something akin to the abuser’s mindset.

Writing in category B is a little healthier. Rants are often provoked by righteous anger, as opposed to the curdled, denialistic loathing that taints much online snark in category C. Bad things happen, and anger is an appropriate response to them. Anger expressed in public will always draw some attention. A couple weeks ago there was this thing floating around Twitter that basically said “either you go wade into this blog fight on the same side as me or you don’t care about the lives of trans people,” and some smart and thoughtful people helped spread the message despite the manipulation and the bloody-shirt-waving. Prairie fires of this sort of anger lick back and forth across much of the political blog world a lot these days. In the desert, fires like that have a peculiar effect, changing the structure of the landscape. Wildfires tend to favor grasses, which can burn and grow back. After a few seasons, the fires don’t hurt much as they periodically burn over the same spot for the dozenth time. Of course at that point, not much interesting grows there between fires.

rrp really gets down to business when she contrasts offline behavior with online, a topic on about which I have been known to yammer:

What does this have to do with online political work? Well, take an audience that’s predisposed to regard the medium as entertainment and primed with the dynamics I’ve described and it’s a recipe for disaster. The behaviors that lead to the worst real-world meetings are the following:

• Rigidity
• Insecurity
• Loud, Obstinate Ignorance
• Concealed Motives
• Poor Faith Arguments
• Unexamined Motives

In the online environment (and out here in the world too) all of these are lethal to progress, but the last three are especially guaranteed to derail and destroy useful discussions. It’s easier to construct snappy comebacks when you don’t believe in what you’re writing (poor faith arguments) It’s easier to pour out an enraged rant when you’re reacting and typing first, without thinking about why a particular post is making you crazy (unexamined or concealed motives).

But thinking through your own reactions takes training and it takes time. And time is at a premium in a online discussion. ...[I]n an online discussion, you have to hit it quick or the moment will have passed you by. That wonderful thing you were going to say loses its context and relevance. It will disappear without an answer, without an echo, without a sound. So there’s every incentive to type fast, to type first thing that comes to mind, to type the words that will have the greatest impact.

You’ll probably type what you feel not what you could have thought if you had a day or so. You’ll probably type out of your reactions rather than your principles. And you’ll type for your audience, wanting to please, instruct, anger, enlighten, and entertain.

There’s more.

It’s a year and a half since I’ve promised myself I wouldn’t wade into the slagfights anymore. I haven’t, mostly. I still watch them, partly out of interest in the issues being fought over, and partly out of self-defense—my name still gets dragged into the things now and then, despite my long absence from the roster of combatants. There are plenty of crucial issues at the center of these fights: human rights, respect, justice, peace, taking place across seemingly intractable divides of gender and race and ethnicity.

There are, I have no doubt, people learning hard-fought personal lessons amid those fights. I wouldn’t say nothing is gained in the fighting. But I still see a lot more flinch-apologies than I do dialogue, a lot more defensive bluster than listening: fire-adaptations any ecologist will recognize handily.

In the meantime, I have spent this last year trying to get my writing closer to what rrp describes as category A, generally forsaking the other stuff. Despite rrp’s well-argued analysis of the dearth of response such writing gets, I’ve heard from plenty of you — rrp included! — that you find some value in the attempt.

That response from all of you was a good thing in 2009, and here as the year ends, I want you to know I’m grateful for it. Thank you.

3 comments on "Online fires"