disecting genius

the master: mr. walton ford

toxoplasmosis, sea otters, and toilet training this cat

i have recently acquired a cat-i kind of had to do it. she was a stray-hungry, sweet, and oh so pathetic. i named her cleo and soon she will have a bitchin gold collar and a proper scratching post. i'm glad i was able to give her a home and she and bella dog get along fine. bella watches her nightly freak outs with an equally amused and unimpressed attitude. they are both adjusting well i suppose and the only real issue is that bella like most dogs, loves to eat cat shit. she lurks around the corner waiting for cleo to take a dump-hilarious and disgusting. i've created a barrier but the whole cat box thing has always bothered me so i thought i would train cleo to go to the bathroom in the toilet. how great would that be? i wouldn't have to buy litter, i wouldn't have to smell or clean up piss and shit clumps, and i wouldn't have to strategically place the box out of bella's reach plus it's the best thing ever to see a cat take a pee in the toilet. however, in my research i found that flushing cat poop down the toilet is a serious threat to sea otters. WHAT?!
you've probably heard of toxoplasmosis as it relates to pregnant women. the parasite can cause serious birth defects and is transmitted by eating meat that hasn't been cooked all the way, drinking contaminated water, or having contact with cat feces. cats become hosts to the parasite after eating other infected animals like mice, rats, and birds and after ingestion the oocysts or eggs of the parasite are passed in the feces. aside from being harmful to fetuses, toxoplasmosis is not a threat to humans. it is however, a reason for concern among scientists studying the cause of death in coastal sea otters. not to bore you with too much information, the basic point of concern is that a large percentage of sea otters (as well as other marine mammals such as dolphins and whales) are dying of toxoplasmosis and there is a direct link to contaminated cat feces.
so basically, flushing cat poop down the toilet living so close to the ocean is not cool. here's why according to Report on Toxoplasma Gondii: Its Sources and Impacts on Sea Otters, and What Municipalities Can Do to Help Reduce or
Eliminate These Impacts: Oocysts may survive up to 18 months in soil under favorable conditions, and wastewater treatment practices are not designed to destroy the highly resistant oocysts of Toxoplasma gondii. Cat owners should be urged to bag and dispose of cat feces and cat litter in approved sanitary landfills where runoff is controlled, rather than flushing it down the toilet.
Crap!

new banksy=dope!

http://www.woostercollective.com/2008/10/the_village_pet_store_and_charchoal_gril.html

our present day mass extinction event-holocene vs. history

1 in 4 mammals will go extinct in our lifetime. does this seem like an absurdly high number or is it relative to what we know about the history of mass extinction events?

65 million years ago during the cretaceous-tertiary extinction event 75% of earths flora and fauna went extinct, including the dinosaurs (which ironically enough in this particular post, made room for mammals to dominate).

251 million years ago the "great dying" or permian-triassic extinction event occured where 96% of all marine life and 70% of life on land (plants, insects, and vertabrates) went extinct. the great dying was huge!

We are presently living within the era of the holocene extinction event, which biologists are deeming the most accelerated mass extinction event in history. It is estimated that half of the species alive today will be extinct in the next 100 years.

that reality is a harsh one to accept and conjures up a lot of emotion. who doesn't cringe at the notion of gorillas and orangutans being extinct?! maybe you don't. is that a bad thing? maybe not.
most people are empathetic-we experience the feelings, thoughts, and attitudes of those around us which in turn influence our actions. during catastrophic events like 9-11 or hurricane katrina thousands of people not even in new york or new orleans felt the sadness, the anger, and despair of those in the midst of it all. so in a world where half of the species we have grown up to know or at least be aware of dissapear (a world that would also nonetheless be struggling with a myriad of other harsh changes related to global warming, over population, etc.) is it a disadvantage to be empathetic?

colony collapse disorder

my mind has been wondering and wandering about the possibility of life without honey bees. each day i find at least one bee dead or circling the pavement as they do right before the proboscus rolls out at its last breath. honey bees are by far the biggest part of my collection and the sole inspiration for keeping track of my thoughts and my findings in this blog. i'm not sure if my sudden affinity for bee collecting and what scientists have coined colony collapse disorder are in any way related but, timing has made me take note nonetheless and the fact that the bee population is dwindling right before my feet is a bit unsettling. hives are begining to look ghostly with just the queen and a few attendants in house. this a relatively current phenomena which spans the globe but one of the biggest losses in population has occured in the hives of the U.S. could it be the IAP virus? mites? global warming? electromagnetic waves? i'm sure these are all factors and one thing to point out is that scientists are studying colony collapse disorder in harvested hive sites so is this happening in the"wild"? are the bees that i find in my neighborhood dying of the same things effecting domesticated bees? are the bees in my neighborrhood even wild?

death head

zaque brought back a pigeon skull he found in oregon for me. it's great. it still has the black tissue tips on the end of the beak-about 1/4' long. i put it on the window sill with the other one we had found about a month ago. what a pair.

do i really need another one?

i'm gonna try and bring this blog back around to the objects of expiration tip and keep it dead centered and a la naturale as much as possible. oddities and such.....

checkout bryan's work in the catskills-so good

"in the comfort of crickets"
http://www.fecalface.com/nyc/

tko

yesterday i watched a bird get knocked out. it slammed into a glass door and dropped straight to the ground. brutal. i watched it laying there helpless, motionless, except for it's little torso racing up and down with each dazed breath. for a good ten minutes it remained like that and we just stared. and then it opened its beak. i thought outloud "oh no! it's gonna fucking die!" (i tried to rescue a bird once that a neighborhood cat was having a go at and it opened its beak right before it croaked). as i waited for the chest to drop and be still it started to blink. it came on real slow and it was still just lying there then out of fucking no where little tweety flipped around and onto its feet! it was a bit startling-especially since i was just looming over it waiting for it to stop breathing. it was kind of funny. it stood there on it's feet-maybe with a sore leg or wing and eventually hobbled over to some shade. it seemed like it was going to make it. poor thing got messed up!! i'm glad i didn't have to bury it-there were no dandelions around.

mad respect

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26436974/wid/18298287/?GT1=45002

objects of expiration/existance

today i found a fresh, plump cricket. it was so cool until i lost it in the crack of my sisters VW-sorry sis. guess it wasn't very good luck after all-oh well. i found it at the ashram this morning up at swami's. such a pretty place. the living things i saw today were just as cool as the lost dead one i found including a hellicopter huge orange dragonfly, some wicked spiders, and some old fox tails like the ones i used to grow in colorado. as the girls did their paharanas or indian meditation- aka really strange breathing/arm girations, i practiced what i like to call my chicken breast pose. i woke up to ants tickling my arms and the sun burning the soles of my feet-much like what a raw chicken breast might actually experience when left out in the grass. anyway, it was good times all around and then we went for some waves.

Crapper

You've always wanted to know the origin of this word right? Lucky for you i found some craptastic information on it.....
Popular wisdom attributes the derivation of this slang term for lavatory to Thomas Crapper (1836 - 1904), the supposed inventor of the flush toilet. Unfortunately, Thomas Crapper didn't invent the flush toilet. He holds nine patents for plumbing-related inventions, including three for water closets, but flush lavatory, properly called the "Silent Valveless Water Waste Preventer" was patented in 1819 by Albert Giblin. Nevertheless, Crapper is the name that people remember. He was certainly well-known in his day as a sanitary engineer. He had a thriving plumbing business and was sanitary engineer for several members of the royal family. Poopin good times!

mmmmmm wood!

so i'm not clairvoyant. that was pretty clear. but in insecty news (buggy news sounds way better but as you all should know, bugs have mandibles and not even half of the insect population does, so it's kind of not proper to use bug when refering to an actual insect-k?-k!) i neglected to collect any of the three gut laden sidewalk specimens i found today including a caterpillar :( and a wasp-damn! but this morning i did watch a carpenter bee remember his hole in an old wooden telephone pole, fly into it, mosey around in some sod, fly back out, and give bella dog a "kiss" before flying up into the sky. it was great. i know you're jealous.

of another way

i had another vivid dream last night. this one involved lightning. it was so real. so cool. kind of scary. apparently we're supposed to have a thunderstorm this evening in san diego. have i become clairvoyant?

objects of expiration/manifestation

found a couple things today. a fairly large honey bee in my neighborhood this morning and a really small, really pretty moth on broadway and 13th this afternoon. both on the sidewalk as usual-just about to get squished by my ratty shoe. over the weekend i was in colorado and while picking wild raspberries in the middle of no where i remembered a somewhat creepy dream i had the night before. there were strange and colorful insects crawling all over the greenery-somewhat similar to the landscape that triggered my memory. i didn't find any insects hiding beneath the raspberry leaves but on another day later i helped my friends' 4 year old catch grass hoppers in their vast backyard of fields and hills. we ended up catching about 5 and i learned that the brown stuff all over my hands wasn't blood or guts but spit up. they're defense is brown spit. how cool. anyway, we found a rock hard frog that had turned black in the sun along with various bones of who knows what. sugar, their beautiful white pitbull pup came running up to us and the marks on her back reminded me that there were coyotes that ran around here. that night i had another dream-more like a nightmare. instead of insects and greenery i was back in the office at work being bombarded by not usually bitchy co-workers. it was so real. and here i am this evenging typing away from my desk. i hope i dream of ice cream and money tonight!

where my bugs at?

no new dead stuff to write of latelly :(

friends or food-we can have both right?

a refreshingly honest article
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/opinion/31kristof.html?em

objects of expiration:

bee # 3 found today-noonish near corner of union and f. an excellent specimen-fresh from the sky.

people of the world

it's my ongoing list of places to explore. if you've been here let me know, if you're from here let me stay, if you're going- holla! let's do it!!
la paz, bolivia
petra, jordan
cusco, peru (mancora, punto hermosa)
cappadocia, turkey
dominica
iceland
macedonia (peshna cave)
lithuania
buenos aires, argentina
praque, czech republic
portugal (monchique, madeira)
crete, greece (selakano, aspros potamos)
rotterdam, holland
gdansk, poland

computerism

one of the setbacks of being "connected" is being connected. we find things we don't want to but can't resist looking for. we stumble upon things that show us what we didn't really want to see. things that keep us connected to the past and mindful of our future, albeit sometimes a future we aren't necessarily ready to accept. why do we do it to ourselves? why do i do it to myself?

this is a weird story about beijing/the olympics

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/sports/olympics/29beijing.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

neither crawling nor flying no more: objects of expiration

i'm a collector. i have some cool art and some random "antiques" but, my favorite things to collect are dead. i'm starting a little project to keep track of all the who, what, where, when, and why's of all the expired happenings that have made it into my curio box or into my freezer. a recollection of collection if you will. we'll see how this goes......
i'll start with today:

the who-honey bee (x2)
the what-
the where-both found on the same block, though seperate squares of the sidewalk near the horton grand hotel-3rd and island, downtown, san diego ,ca
the when-monday morning july 28 at about 8:30a.m.
the why-

will i ever know the what or why of this scenario? do i find these bees or do they find me? if i were to leave them on the sidewalks where i usually find them, would they just get squished into the pattern of the concrete they rest on, or get eaten, or what?

longing for a grope

i'm feeling nostalgic lately and wondering what exactly i'm nostalgic for. i get all "ohhhhh" when i see a picture of a goat herder or read about life in gdansk in the 17th cenury (named danzig pre WWII-sweeeeeet!).
i've never even touched a goat tit! who is this 90 year old lady in a tattooed potty mouthed body anyway? what the hell am i doing in san diego and how did i get here?
i think i do belong on a farm somewhere. i want to continue my life with a land line, no car, listening to my boombox with my generic myspace page but, the museum!!! but, the fantomas show!! but, tom's sailboat!!! could i survive?
of course i could but what level of survival are we talking about?
living on a farm is the epitome of survival to me. you grow your own, take care of your own and there you have it. the simple life without "may cause cancer" and "new", "best", "you must have it to fit in and keep up with the people around you" over here. that's what's killing us isn't it? not only the obvious health hazards of eating shite all day laden with chemicals and whatever else but, the psychological hazards of needing. needing to fit in, needing to buy this, needing to look like that. the thought of living in a rural landscape just sounds nicer and makes more sense to me. so what keeps me on the other side of the grass?
is it the traffic? that guy who jumps out at me yelling how much he loves pussy? maybe it's the fifth time i can expect to have a run in with the cops?
no! it's not all this crap its the culture (well kind of culture in san diego). the city has true gems of piss and blood that country bumpkins can't attest to (although, we all know a bit about country life as a teenage boy don't we?)
i guess i need a little bit of both city and country. maybe san diego isn't the best inbetween (ya think!?) and maybe i can just start making my own jam or some shit. look out pussy man i might go country on your ass next time! i might give you some homemade jam.

in the begining

so i had to try out the blog thing. we'll see how long this lasts and if the goal to get writing more will be achieved or not...