Nature, green in tooth and claw

Ever wondered what that Biblical expression about the lion lying down with the lamb might look like in real life, and just how wonderful it would be to see a video in which 'nature, red in tooth and claw' wasn't the modus operandi? Have a look at this ad, which comes surprisingly close to achieving just such a concept.

Marley & Me

The other day we bought a puppy, a Pomeranian cross.   For some reason by the time I got home from work he'd acquired the name, Marley, which seemed to suit him just fine, in spite of the fact that at present he's little more than a couple-of-hands-lengths piece of creamy brown fluff. 

My daughter had a book called The Dog Whisperer, by Jan Fennell.   My wife has been reading it and picking up tips about training the puppy.   So far things are going well, helped by the fact that the little bloke is pretty amenable anyway. 

A friend of ours called up to see the puppy.  She's a great dog lover herself, and brought with her a DVD of a movie called Marley & Me.   Our friend probably enjoyed the movie a good deal more than we did, but we cringed at the way in which the labrador in this film is allowed to wreck everything in sight, chewing up furniture, books, carpets, floors, walls, and more.  Kathleen Turner, who gets fourth billing in the cast, has a three minute scene as a dog trainer.   This dog is even too much for her.   (Why they don't try another dog trainer is beyond me.)  This dog is never given the slightest bit of discipline.   The married couple, played by Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson, react to his every piece of wrongdoing with mild expressions of surprise, and seem won over by his (very) occasional moments of tender loving care for them and their kids.

Apparently this movie was based on a bestseller in which just such a dog featured.   The book was based on bi-weekly columns in which his exploits were given prominence, and won for the newspaper a huge following.  (This must have been some time ago; newspapers are lucky to increase their readership at all these days.)  I can only think that the columns/book must have been a good deal more amusing than this movie.  It never knows whether it's supposed to be a comedy (dog pulling owner through all sorts of 'funny' settings), a schmaltzy piece of family history, a story about the ups and downs of marriage (nothing particularly drastic), what happens when a person writes a column but wants to be a reporter (Wilson's character seemed particularly dense at this point) or...who knows?   My wife asked: who is this film meant for?  

I checked out what Roger Ebert had to say.  He coped with it, but I don't think it's his favourite movie of all time.   But I was amazed by Stephanie Zacharek's review (she writes for Salon.com).  Normally this woman will see through anything that's intended to pull the audiences' heartstrings in a cheap fashion, and she begins her review by discussing that.   But perhaps she's lost an important pet at some time; whatever the reason, she gives the thumbs up to this movie.

Well, we can't agree all the time, Stephanie.

It makes you weep

In the video below, you can see President Obama interrupting a review with CNBC to swat a fly, which he then manages to dispatch to wherever persistent flies go.



Unbelievably, a group called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is now calling this piece of nifty fly swatting an 'execution!' They want the President to show more compassion, even to this least of 'animals.' I'm not sure that the fly would have been pleased to have been included in the animal kingdom, being an insect by nature, but plainly Bruce Friedrich, the Vice President for Policy and Government Affairs at PETA thinks it should have been.

"We support compassion for even the smallest animals," says Bruce Friedrich, V.P. for Policy at PETA. "We support giving insects the benefit of the doubt." He continues by saying that PETA supports "brushing flies away rather than killing them" and was disappointed that the President had killed the fly.

I'm not exactly sure how the fly should have been given the benefit of the doubt: had it just taken diet pills, and so was a little more dizzy/buzzy than usual? Had it stumbled into the White House under the illusion that this was actually Fly Heaven and therefore, being an otherwise well-behaved fly, it had every right to be there? Was it protesting some particular fly Policy or Government Affair and hoping to heard by the President himself? Had it been swatted out of the room next door by some underling? We'll never know.

In case you think I'm anti-fly, I'm not. Many years ago a friend of mine expressed distaste at my longstanding habit of swatting flies with a newspaper and squashing them on the window. I forsook the habit from that time on, and have tried to let the plainly unhappy creatures back out into the wild. I still don't care for their propensity to find their way into the house in the first place, particularly when there is food on the table, but I forgive them for doing something they're probably built to do. I haven't yet understood why God made them in the first place, though I guess something's got to clean up the dung on this planet, and flies seem to have first dibs at the task.

I still don't understand why it is that when I sit in the bay window in my house, enjoying the sunshine and trying to do the cryptic crossword, flies seem to think I will enjoy their interminable buzzing. Our cat, which is now about seven months old, was so fast when she was a kitten that she could chase and catch flies - and eat them. Now that's dispatching. It was difficult to discourage her.

Meanwhile, Bruce Friedrich's group sent the president a Katcha Bug device, which traps bugs and allows their safe release back into nature. (Bruce is also on the governing board of the Catholic Vegetarian Society, the advisory board of the Christian Vegetarian Association, and is a founding member of the Society of Ethical and Religious Vegetarians. Groups I never knew existed.)

Checking up on the stats

I’ve mentioned the articles I’ve got on Triond before in these posts, so I probably don’t have to explain again that it’s one of these sites that you write for and leave your articles on in perpetuity – or at least for as long as the Internet lasts. And the incentive to do so is that they pay you. A modest sum, to be sure, but there are no strings attached – like having to have $50 or $100 on your account before they’ll fork anything out.
Anyway, I’ve now had articles on there since 7th November, 2006, and the current list numbers some 74 pieces.
I was curious to see which ones had been viewed most often, and since Triond helpfully provides such information, I can tell you that a piece called A Future Without Plastic has had just under 600 reads, which may not sound much, but is still more views than any of the posts on this blog have ever had.
Second in line is another ‘green’ piece: The End of Petroleum. This one is considerably behind the first in having only 517 views. Then we have another big drop (partly because the piece appeared five months later) to 349 views on Where Are the Willy Wonka Children? I always find it hard to believe that this one has had anywhere near that number of views; it seems a fairly innocuous topic to me. Plainly celebrity is more important than I thought.
Even more absurd, in a way, is the fourth: How to Wake Up, which is a jokey piece on getting out of bed in the morning. Why this should have been a hit I don’t know. It's also just about the youngest of my pieces on Triond.
The problem, as you can see, is that if I was trying to gauge what to write about so that people would be encouraged to come back again and again, I’d be struggling on the basis of these first four. And number five doesn’t help balance things up: Ten Places in Britain You Might Not Want to Move To.
Okay, I understand that people seem to like lists, but this is actually the first of the top five to have focus on a list. So that doesn’t help much either.
We’re now down into the views in the 200s, with New Zealand Factoids. Not the name I gave the piece, incidentally. I don’t know why they changed it from New Zealand Facts, as it's the only time they've ever done it!
This is followed by Possums and Prostates. Good grief. Here’s a medical piece that got almost no views for weeks on end and then suddenly took off. Perhaps some prostate sufferers discovered it.
Animals, Collectively, is another one of those tidbit types of writing, in which I talk about the collective names for certain animals. Again, hardly rip-roaring stuff, but that hasn't stopped it being popular.
With 150 views we get to World’s Steepest Street Not Always the Easiest to Live On. This was popular when it first arrived – perhaps because of the ‘World’s Steepest’ element – which is maybe why it’s up there with the first ten.
And the 10th place goes to Classical Music Isn’t Always Classical, which was an attempt to explain that we often call music Classical when it isn’t in the least bit ‘classical,’ just serious – or ‘fine,’ as they now say on our Concert Program.
So there you go. What' s interesting about the top-viewed list is that it doesn't entirely connect to the top earners. Eight of the top viewers are on the top earners page, but not necessarily in the same order. Two articles, The Need for Electricity, and A Green Roof Over My Head (both environmental items, so maybe there's something to be said for that area after all) managed to sneak into the top earners, with the electricity item coming third.

Dreams of being a stuntman

When I was a kid, we used to go to Saturday morning movies. These were specially run for kids, and used to show ancient serials, films made on the cheap. They were great fodder for kids who loved to see what would happen next, and who enoyed plenty of knockabout action.

The boy who lived a couple of houses away from me had a big back yard (he lived in a house built onto the corner shop). One of our kids' games was to make up stagecoaches from the boxes lying around the yard, and copy the cowboy stories, or the cops and robber serials. We’d pretend we were stunt men and would fall off these ‘stagecoaches’ and roll around the ground. In fact, one of my dreams in those days was to be a stuntman. Having seen what they have to put up with since, the dream has faded. Plus I don’t enjoy hurting myself!

I once watched a group of filmmakers shooting a scene for a short film. It was the bit where the main character was supposed to fall headlong down a manhole. The street had been built up, so that instead of sloping, it was flat. A pretend manhole had been built into this ‘street’ and the poor old stuntman spent the afternoon being dropped headfirst down this hole.

I was in a play last year, and actually had my own ‘stuntman’ for one short scene. I was supposed to be dropped into a hole, headfirst, and then had to stand on my head while the animals who’d put me there debated as to what I was. We managed to fool most of the audience most of the time. I’d rush off, chased by the animals, and my stuntman would reappear, still chased. He would be caught and dropped in the hole, and then, when they let him out again, he’d rush back off and I’d rush back on.

In spite of the fact that he’s a couple of inches shorter than me, and has a completely different body build, we got away with this trick night after night. People believe what they to believe.

In the short film, when I eventually saw it, the main character ran down some stairs, out the door and fell headlong into the hole. There was no doubt in the viewer’s mind that he’d fallen into the hole and not someone else.

Good old anonymous stuntmen.

Touchy-feely giraffe

When we went to the Royal Norfolk Show early in our stay in England, we saw children everywhere carrying large stuffed toys, many of them as big as the children themselves. It was only when we went for lunch that was discovered that the tent was right opposite the lunch place.
Apparently they call stuffed animals plush animals in the US, and there’s a site called The Jungle Store where you can get plush animals of every kind. Being a giraffe fan, I checked out the choices for giraffes. There are some 178 possibilities, but far less when it comes to the plush kind. Some of these look rather like short-neck giraffes, if there such a thing, but there are a couple of delightful characters that have a proper long neck, or at least an attempt to make the animal appear that way. Their names are Orson Jnr and Orson Snr - the latter is the better of the two in neck length. He retails on the site at US$20.95, but I’m not sure that spending that amount of money on a stuffed toy is quite what my wife would consider to be an essential purchase.
It strikes me that plush is a rather odd word to use instead of stuffed, since it’s normally associated with the feel of the material something is made of (softer than velvet but feeling like it), or else (according to the One Look Dictionary) means characterised by extravagance and profusion, something that stuffed toys are really not usually characterised by. Perhaps plush toys are made of something softer to the touch than velvet.
Maybe I should buy that giraffe after all, to check it out.