Chris

Writing more than a century later the writer W. H. Murray agreed...suggesting that "to know Staffa one must go alone".

Well, I just don't do well in large gatherings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staffa#19th_and_20th_centuries

Yahoo/AP headline: "Study: Chimpanzees, apes plan for the future just like humans"

Oh? It's a wonder they're not already extinct, then.

Mostly what I accomplished this afternoon is this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Zucker

...the point where the State of Vermont would balance perfectly, if it were flat and weightless, and all of its 608,827 residents (based on census 2000) were of identical weight.

http://www.historicvermont.org/markers/markers4.html

"Elephant males spend a part of every year in musth. During this time, the male makes crisscrosses over large areas in an irritable state hoping to find a female ready for breeding."

Would that be in Florida, or Michigan?
---
"NARRATOR: Far from being rare freaks of nature, the Nukers began to suspect that all galaxies could have giant black holes at their hearts."

Just because they're astrophysicists, doesn't mean you should assume they're freaks.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2000/massivebholes_transcript.shtml
http://www.light-science.com/articles1003.html

I am no stranger to controversy
Than I am to anything else.

Jeez, what does it take to get a comment out of you people? Christine told me directly that that clip of swinging goat balls was like a parody of YouTube, that she couldn't believe I had posted it. Yes, exactly! It's such a ridiculous forum. I thought my video was stereotypical. Yet out of you, not even an emoticon!
---
Some Indian-American overachiever was recently made less than full valedictorian because the rules state that the valedictorian shall be the student with the highest GPA over four years of high school, and she completed the coursework in three.

Says her father,

"I have not heard of any educational institution penalizing a student for excellence – for completing a demanding set of classes 'too quickly,' " said her father, Deepak Datta. "Anjali's experience will surely send a strong negative signal to other talented students trying to excel.

"They will most certainly be discouraged from trying to do their best – instead will be more focused on gaming the system."

Oh? And if a student is focused on gaming the system to get a dubious honor from a third-rate school system, rather than pursuing excellence, why should I care? Ms. Datta, take your 5.898 GPA (WTF?!), and hope that causes everyone to overlook the fact that you were subject to a bunch of dickheads in a state full of asswipes.

I just joined the YouTube generation!

If a woman goes to a bar and orders sex on the beach, the bartender should not take her littorally.

http://www.sover.net/~tiplady/Evidence.pdf

Okay, so I'm a little late on this, but I think it was really nice of Ben & Jerry's to give freaks their own day.

Now that Mick has stabilized from his severe anemia of last week, I will relate what should have been the most exciting animal news since the new kid. On or about Friday the 4th, the neighbor called Christine in the afternoon to say a large moose was headed her way. Christine didn't see him, but I later tracked him as shown below. He seemed to specifically avoid coming on our property.

He went all the way across the neighbor's lot and into the road rather than cut across our brook.

Who put the bop in the suboptimal?
Who put the dip in the nonserendipitous?
...
Probably Brian Setzer.

Just when you thought it was safe to rely on the goatcam audio...

Christine left Sunday for NYC. Bennie was bulging dramatically and looked ready to kid at any moment. Christine said, "I hope Bennie waits until I get back." So I monitored the audio constantly, leaving it on overnight, playing it at work, etc. Tuesday I got to work and the buzz came back. So I quit work early, came home, and took the camera apart. There were, to my surprise, no ants or dead flies in it. There were a couple of places where the board with the sensors joins to the main board, for some reason not run through normal connectors, but just butted against each other. They offered no resistance when I pulled the boards apart:

I guessed they must be the problem, so I soldered them together, as they should have been in the first place:

That seemed to fix it.

Christine flew in late Wednesday, except the flight was delayed for weather, and we didn't get home until two-thirty in the morning. I turned on the goatcam audio before bed and Bennie was making noise constantly. So after five minutes in bed I got up and went out to the barn. She was pawing the ground, staying in the far corner of the barn, etc. I came back in to watch the goatcam in the warmth and within ten minutes we heard a kid, born ten minutes to four. Back out to the barn, waited for Bennie to lick the kid clean, applied iodine to the navel, and then waited for the kid to find a teat. Last year one of the twins died because he couldn't find the teat, and we couldn't seem to help him. It's fantastically frustrating to watch the kid continually go too high, go right past the udder, and come out the back. Especially so in the middle of a cold night. After several abject failures we both grabbed the doe and the kid and put them in the right positions. I held up the teat to stick it right in the kid's face. That seemed to work, so we retreated again to watch some more. The kid still went too high, so we intervened a second time, and agreed that that should be enough to get the kid through to the morning. We got back to bed about five-thirty, which for us is beyond all bounds of normalcy.

As Christine said, I was still very worried the next day. The horror of last year's death seemed too easily repeatable. Christine reassured me throughout Thursday that the kid was doing fine, but I didn't really relax until Friday. So this picture I took this morning really is a triumph, though hard-won, and with a little humor to relieve the tension:

We are now prepared to kid.

Yesterday we crotched the does. Bennie, the dark one, is huge; Morgaine doesn't look preggers at all. Morgaine had a bloody discharge in November so she probably isn't due for another month. The goatcam is up and running at http://wiseacres.dynalias.com:8080.

I turned on the goatcam audio yesterday and got a really loud line-noise-type hum. Which is really strange inasmuch as the camera runs off DC and transmits the audio as PCM. After a lot of fiddling and blowing dust off, the hum seems to have gone away. The current working hypothesis is that an actual bug crawled into the camera case and died, and that I managed to dislodge it from the relevant circuit. Further investigation will have to wait until summer after the kids are weaned.

----

From studying AP photos and footage of the NYC crane collapse I have come up with the following description of the physical circumstances, which seem to be notably missing from press reports.

The crane was located on E. 51st Street in front of the building under construction, on the north side of East 51st, just east of the smaller existing building on the northeast corner of 2nd Ave. It fell southward across the street, striking the east side of the brick building on the southeast corner. It struck at the setback above the 13th floor; the crane came apart at its bolted joint near that line of impact.

The upper portion of the crane rolled over the remaining setback floors of the brick building from the 14th to the 18th, starting the crane rotating end over end. It came free of the brick building, falling ten stories and striking a four-story building on the north side of 50th St. That building was almost completely crushed. An adjoining gray 6-story building on the NE corner of 50th and 2nd had damage to its SE corner from the 4th through 6th floors.

The crane came to rest with its top on the ground to the north of 50th St., and the sheared joint into 50th St. That is, that section had rotated through nearly 270 degrees as it fell over a hundred feet. It also rotated a quarter turn about its long axis.

Damage to existing buildings was confined to the three buildings mentioned above.

As to the statement by the builder that the disaster was a freak accident, I call BS on it. Allegedly a piece of steel fell and sheared off one support. The loss of any one support should not have resulted in the crane's falling over. If for some reason there was no way to provide additional redundant supports, the failed support should have been protected from falling objects. And, falling steel at a building site is not a freak occurrence.

Sunday Christine made biscotti which I was eating while watching TV Sunday night. I got up and there was a brown thing on the floor.
-What's that?
-It must be a biscott. I just vacuumed in here.
-Then I'm eating it.
-Off the floor?
-You just vacuumed in here.

Left, Don Harron as Charlie Farquharson, as seen on Hee Haw in the '70's. Right, a recent picture of Steven Spielberg, apparently as Charlie Farquharson.

We saw Persepolis tonight. It put me in my siege mentality. People are so mean and stupid, it's a wonder anything like freedom and justice exists at all. To my mind anyway, the Iranian police busting the alcoholic party in Teheran are the exact equivalent of police busting 20-year olds for drinking, and anyone for smoking pot, in this country. I know it's unjust; it rankles. It's one more reason to despise Americans in general.

I'm going to go check my ammunition again.

On a positive-ish note, I was greatly pleased that Jon Stewart, in response to Romney's exit speech:

"...I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror."

said quite simply, "Fuck you!". When I had heard Romney earlier that day, I had the strong urge to go run him over. It comforted me to know that my disdain was not a lone candle in the darkness.

A merry Jule to you all, however you choose to celebrate it.

Thursday I took the day off from my job and cleared the snow off the house. I found these drifts radiating from the corner of the chimney. And once again, I didn't fall off.