dancing with myself
If you're line dancing by yourself, are you point dancing?
behind the scenes at the zoo
We won a VIP tour of the Milwaukee County Zoo in a charity raffle, and took the tour today. We weren't sure what to expect after reading the 'Instruction and Safety Sheet' that came in the mail:
- There is no guarantee where your tour will stop.
- In circumstances where there are children on the tour who are under 12 years old, for safety reasons, the tour stops will be limited.
- Avoid making any loud noises or sudden moves.
- Do not allow the animals to touch you.
Maybe we were going to see something that would emotionally scar children, like feeding live rabbits to the leopards. Maybe we'd have to wear very, very long gloves and lift some unsuspecting animal's tail.
We met our guide, Jessie, near the entrance. She had been volunteering at the zoo almost two decades, and I doubted that we'd stump her with our questions or shock her with immature behavior (like deliberately mispronouncing 'macaque'). She would be driving us around in a large golf cart, and that alone was going to be cool.
We started in the Aquarium Reptile Center, where we got to feed some gigantic fish in the Amazon exhibit, and saw the giant octopus get fed. Jessie explained the procedure that zookeepers are supposed to follow in case they're bitten by one of the many poisonous reptiles in residence:
- Make sure whatever bit you is contained in its cage.
- Grab the identifying sign on the cage and stick it in your pocket, so that if you pass out before help arrives, they'll at least know what bit you.
- Go to the exit door. Grab the map to the hospital and the boltcutters.
Apparently there is always a car kept near the north exit of the center, and there's a drive that leads directly from the center to a city street - a road reserved for this particular emergency. At the end of the drive is a padlocked and chained fence; the boltcutters are for cutting the chain, which would be a few seconds faster than fumbling for the key to the padlock. Personally, I think driving through the damn gate might be a real time-saver.
In fact, much of the tour served as a reminder that The Animals Would Eat You If Given the Chance. Like the shredded hammock, made from retired firehoses, that hung near the grizzly enclosure, or the hard plastic cat toys from the feline area that now looked like carpet remnants. Fortunately, there are a number of carrion-eating birds around that would clean up the mess.
There are peacocks all over the zoo; the colorful males constantly strutting their stuff to disinterested females. That was another recurring theme. Note to female rhino: your options are limited, so you might want to consider giving the male rhino the time of day.
We got to see the underground stalls where many of the animals are kept at night and over the winter, and we discovered that, yes, there's a division of Purina that makes moose chow. We learned that monkeys pick at one another not to get fleas, but to pick off dead skin, which is an excellent source of protein. (As my wife pointed out, we should go home and shake out the carpets - a hidden benefit to having several cats!)
One of the highlights to the tour was seeing the wolves up close. The Zoo added a wolf exhibit a few years ago, but you could rarely see them from the public viewing area. When we walked around at the back of the enclosure, four of the wolves came walking up to the fence, apparently thinking that we were bringing them food. They were taller and skinnier than I expected, and they regarded us quietly with disconcerting stares.
All in all, an amazing look at a side of the zoo that few people get to see.
life /q
Sometimes you just gotta go to the DOS prompt to get things done. Like the other day, when I was working with a consultant on setting up a Web site, and we had to use cacls to adjust all the file permissions. I typed in the command, then waited for about two minutes while cacls faithfully reported how every single file - thousands of them - had been altered.
Many DOS commands allow you to force them to be 'quiet' - that is, to not bother with displaying the results. For cacls, you can use /q to skip the results. I had neglected to do that.
"I think this would've been a lot faster if I had suppressed the output." I paused. "Which is a lot like life."
Despite this pearl, I'm thinking the consultant still billed me for those two minutes.
Father's Day
I've said before that my wife tends to come up with thoughtful gifts that put my efforts to shame. This Father's Day, she did it again by asking our contractor neighbor to finish the stair railing that I just hadn't gotten around to doing. Since last fall. Our neighbor managed to do in about two hours what would have taken me, oh, another couple of months to get to.
She asked me to get the mail the other day, and I didn't even notice that the railing had been replaced, even though it was mere feet from the mailbox. She laughed at me as I reported back that the mailbox was empty, and she suggested I go look again. In my defense, I think I had long since adopted a habit of not looking at the stairs because it would remind me of my procrastination. It's a self-defense mechanism, really.
She also got me a copy of The Plague, which is one of my favorite books; I had left my last copy of it on a plane somewhere. I suspect that wasn't on any list of 'dads and grads' gift suggestions. And a book stamp, so I might actually get back some of the books I loan out, or at least cause some embarrassment to the borrowers.
And a copy of Frog and Toad Are Friends, a book which I read as a child. Read it to my son this evening, and he couldn't stop giggling - I didn't recall that Toad actually bangs his head on the wall in his efforts to think of a story to tell to his ailing friend Frog. My wife thinks Quinn is ready for the Three Stooges, but I'm not sure that's ideal for his formative years.
Meanwhile, my friend Dan loaned us a kid's bike, and so we engaged in the rite of passage that is teaching your child to ride. The other rite, though, appears to be a shooting pain in my back, between my shoulder blade and spine, that may have something to do with pushing said bike and toddler while someone learns the finer points of pedaling. Like how pedaling backwards makes the bike stop and causes Daddy to run into the back tire.
Then at lunch, Quinn took a page from The Exorcist, but with tomato soup instead of pea. I ended up spending the next day or so taking care of both Quinn and my wife as they recovered from some kind of stomach issue. I'm pleased to report that we got Quinn to throw up into a bowl instead of his bed or the couch. (Gift idea for my wife: new mixing bowl.)
My wife apologized several times for this lackluster Father's Day, but truthfully, it wasn't such a big deal. But I also got an excuse to spend a day curled up with my son on the sofa, which isn't a bad reminder of what this fatherhood thing is about.
humanity does a Houdini
Recently finished The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. The book is actually a series of essays built around what may sound like a gloomy premise: if all humans were to suddenly disappear - and by suddenly, I mean mid-sentence - what would happen to the planet? Weisman's point is that understanding the mess we would leave behind may help us to figure out how to start reversing the damage now.
And it's a lot of damage. Consider nuclear plants left unattended, oil refineries slowing failing and exploding without human oversight. But even if the last person off the planet remembered to turn out the lights, our mess will linger long after we're gone. One word: plastics. Of course, we're just following in the footsteps of our ancestors, who managed to kill off a number of species that are now only visible on The Flintstones. But even if you think locally and could care less globally, the first chapter of the book talks about how a typical home would succumb to the elements, which you can also see as a multimedia presentation on the book's Web site.
As an aside... Weisman wisely doesn't spent any time trying to come up with a plausible scenario for the sudden loss of all the "ugly bags of mostly water," but if you want one, you don't have to look far.
I enjoyed the book. I felt it dragged on in places, but the book was fascinating overall. Weisman does propose a solution to lessening humanity's impact on the planet, perhaps the only solution we may have available to us. The book isn't a novel building up to a surprising or dramatic conclusion, so I think it's OK to tell you that it's about spawning less. It's not the worst idea.
