Joe Blog: Where Joseph Kirkland Blogs

This cat fights fires.

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:26:27 -0700

This cat fights fires.

Henry Jamison Handy (b. 1886, d. 1983)

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:07:00 -0700

This post will be most appreciated by Craig, I think, so I will dedicate it to him. The video above accompanies it.

Olympic breaststroke swimmer (bronze medal winner), inventor of new swimming strokes, water polo player, maker of scores of training/ informational films. All these and more make up the man called Jam Handy.
During and after college, Handy worked for the Chicago Tribune in advertising.
He observed that enthusiastic salespeople who were siked about their products sold more and began to study what made people buy.
Handy left the Tribune and began work at a company that used slides to train workers. This segued into Handy making instructional, informational films.
WWI gave Handy the opportunity to make films training soldiers on equipment.
Jam Handy Organizations was formed - their largest customer was the auto industry.
It is estimated that Handy produced over 7,000 films during WWII and is reported to have taken only 1% of the revenue as profit.
He didn’t have a desk and thought pockets were a waste of time, so none of his suits had them.
Handy kept on swimming up until a few days before his death - what a spry old man!

First Post of Its Kind (on Joe Blog)!

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:58:51 -0700

Here are some of my favorite stills I pulled from the documentary I’m cutting.

Believe it or not, neither of these things (Henry Groppe or windmills) play a major role in the film, they’re just my favorite things.

Veisalgia

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 17:06:00 -0700

My mom came to visit in February. The plan was that she was going to make my friends and I vegetarian chili one night. That day, she and I bought ingredients and all of that. When we returned to my house, all my friends were “sick.” At first, we didn’t understand what that meant or why they were all sick, but we finally realized that they were actually just hung over from the previous night’s debauchery. Sure that’s not really the correct word for what I’m talking about, but if you click on that link right there, you’ll see why I had to use it. I’m not going to get into hangover symptoms but instead focus on what causes them.

1904 saw the word “hangover” used in its contemporary context.
Hypoglycemia, dehydration, B12 deficiency and the presence of the chemical acetaldehyde are thought to be some of the main contributors to hangovers.
25-30% of drinkers do not experience hangovers and at their worst, symptoms can last 2-3 days after drinking.
Some symptoms are similar to those of “acute ethanol withdrawl.” Simply put, it’s a lesser (much, much lesser) version of what you’d experience if you were a recovering alcoholic.
Ehtanol dehydrates because it’s a diuretic. Dehydration, in turn, leads to headaches, dry mouth and lethargy, and let me tell you a little something about headaches.
The brain, when dehydrated, shrinks a bit and pulls away from the skull, causing one to have a headache.
When ethanol metabolizes, the body’s production of Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH) increases. The buildup of such can decrease the generation of glucose in the liver and lead to hypoglycemia.
When liver enzymes break ethanol down, it’s converted to acetaldehyde (ethanal)and then to acetic acid. Acetaldehyde is 10-30 times more toxic than alcohol in addition to being carcinogenic and mutagenic. It’s also flammable. On a more positive note, it’s found in coffee, ripe fruit and fresh bread, so it can’t be as bad as it sounds.
There are a lot of chemical breakdowns that occur which I’m not going to get into, but I will say that the end result is a lack of glucose to the brain. Glucose provides that brain its energy, so this energy deprivation accounts for moodiness, inability to concentrate, etc.
Another chemical, gluthathione, is used by the liver to filter toxins from the bloodstream. Alcohol can deprive the liver of this chemical so toxins and free radicals are more present in the blood.
Hangover symptoms are exaggerated by the presence of a byproduct of fermentation that is called cogeners.
Interestingly enough, cogeners are sometimes “naturally” found in sweet liquers to enhance flavor and in red wine. Thus, distilled alcohols like vodka do not contain such chemicals and that is part of the reason drinking “colorless/less sweet” alcohols may not result in such bad hangovers.
Lastly, B12 deficiency is the result of 1 molecule of ethanol producing 2 molecules of NADH during metabolism. B12 is a coenzyme that is utilized in that process.

I got the picture from here. Maybe I’ll get more hits now that I linked that page? That was my intention in doing that.

Toyger

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:40:14 -0700

I can’t tell you how much I hate the name “Toyger.” It looks like Toyota and sounds like the name of a small dog. Also, I’d like to make it clear that I’m not for the genetic manipulation of animals (breeding, if you will). It’s strange and kind of cruel. That being said, I would give my right arm for a Toyger, or maybe I’d trade in my right arm for a right arm that doesn’t have wrist pain (via transplant) and then trade something a little less valuable for a Toyger, like a sweater or shoes or something. I’d trade in my social security card for a Toyger, or my laptop. On second thought, I wouldn’t trade any of those things for a Toyger. What would a fair trade be? Let me think about this for a second. I’d trade my printer and all of my CDs for a Toyger. I’d even throw in some DVDs, like a signed copy of Dodgeball (signed by Stuart Cornfeld, producer).

Toyger breeding began in the 1980s with the aim of breeding a cat that looked like a little tiger, a “toy” tiger if you will.
Judy Sudgen, the woman who came up with the idea, says that her intention was to make people want to care for and save wild tigers.
I’m having a lot of trouble paraphrasing this for some reason, so I’m the next few bullet points are straight from wikipedia.
“The breed began development in 1980 when Judy Sudgen, a breeder looking to clarify the mackerel markings in tabbies, noticed distinctive markings in two of her cats. These markings, occurring on the head, an area normally devoid of distinct pattern, first inspired the idea of a tiger-like tabby.”
“After importing a tom from the streets of India with noticeable head markings, the quest to develop tiger-like, circular face markings in the cats began.” I’m going to comment on this bullet point: how funny is that - a cat from the streets of India was “imported” because it had something cats rarely have. Imagine the search for that one cat? Did someone scour the earth to find it or was it just a “happy coincidence” that it was even noticed?
“The introduction of the Bengal breed into the gene pool was a move on Sudgen’s part to produce a ‘big cat body.’”
The breed is far from being perfected. They hope, by 2010, to have rounder ears and a wider nose. Other traits are further off in the future.

I intended for this to be a short post and it is. I’m a little disappointed in the fact that my head was empty and I couldn’t paraphrase. Whatevs. I guess all I really wanted to do was put pictures of Toygers on my blog.

Synæsthesia

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 13:20:00 -0700

“T’s are generally crabbed, ungenerous creatures. U is a soulless sort of thing. 4 is honest, but… 3 I cannot trust… 9 is dark, a gentleman, tall and graceful, but politic under his suavity.”

– Synesthetic subject report

From the Greek σύν (syn), “with,” and αἴσθησις (aisthēsis), “sensation.”
Synesthesia is when a sensation experienced by means of one sense translates itself as also being experienced through another sense.
Examples: Grapheme → color synesthesia is the phenomenon in which one sees letters and numbers as being inherently colored.
Ordinal linguistic personification is a form of synesthesia in which numbers, days of the week and months “evoke personailities.”
With spatial-sequence synesthesia, numbers and such are seen at different locations in space or distances from the person perceiving them.
One with lexical → gustatory synesthesia tastes a taste when hearing certain sounds.
Visual motion → sound synesthesia is a form in which one hears sounds when seeing visual motion.
Last example: In sound → color synesthesia, people see color when they hear sound. Different notes and pitches evoke different colors.
About 1 in 23 people have these cross-sensory experiences.
Usually, synestheisa is passed on genetically, but people who have taken drugs, are blind, are deaf, are epileptic or have suffered a stroke sometimes experience it as well. In the latter cases, it is called “adventitious synesthesia.”

Someone was talking about synesthesia the other day. Was it Will? Craig? I remember them describing the way synesthetes see numbers.

For all the varieties of synesthesia one may experience, there are some overarching similarities:
It is an automatic, involuntary response.
It involves much affect and is memorable.
The images have a definite “location,” though recent research has found that sometimes the experiences are just “known” as opposed to seen or felt or heard every single time.
Synesthetes aren’t necessarily very imaginitive people, they are “generic” and “consistent.”
Apparently Pharrell Williams and John Mayer have it. Nabokov did as well.
Synesthesia, despite being, technically, a neurological thing, is not linked to other psychiatric or neurological abnormalities. Neurological here just means “of the brain” as opposed to having the negative connotations it often does.
The experiences are rarely less than pleasant or neutral.
To my understanding, synesthesia does not encompass more than 2 senses at a time.
Grapheme → color and days of the week → color are the most common.

While we’re on the subject of neurology, let me just share this story that’s finally losing the spot it held this week as “The most important/ exciting thing that’s happened to me this year.” My hand’s been asleep for a couple of weeks and so I went to the neurologist to see what might be the cause. The doctor put metal on my hands and arms and gave me electric shocks! Can you believe it? I do because I was there, but I still can’t get over it.

This post is fated, and by that, I mean this: I was going to post about Masons yesterday but decided...

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 09:56:00 -0700

This post is fated, and by that, I mean this: I was going to post about Masons yesterday but decided it was too complex a subject to tackle and it would have to wait for another day. Last night I went over to 985 only to walk in on a conversation about Masons.

The Freemasons are the oldest fraternity in the world and, though no one is entirely sure, probably dates back to the stonemasons of the Middle Ages.
Masonry as we know it came to Britain in 1717.
Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Paul Revere, etc. were masons. Apparently all those guys were. You know, the Founding Fathers. From the sound of it, our country was founded by Freemasons.
Masons congregate at lodges. There are 13,200 in the United States.
The lodges are sometimes referred to as “temples” because Masonic symbolism, of which there is an abundance, originated in King Solomon’s Temple.
In short, Masons want to better the world and better themselves while keeping company with men whom they respect and enjoy being around.
They spend $2 million a day making things better in the United States - donating to charities and providing for the disadvantaged.
Three levels of membership exist: Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft, Master Mason.
According to the “What’s a Mason?” pamphlet I’m consulting for much of this information, Masons are only secretive in 2 ways: the ways in which they identify themselves to each other (“grips and passwords”) and ineffable secrets (here they stress the difference between “can not” and “may not” - these secrets, they argue defy verbal description, it’s not that they wouldn’t want to tell other people).
Masonry is not a religion, though you must believe in God to be a Mason. Atheism is not permitted.
It is a ritual-heavy organization and there is a Volume of Sacred Law kept handy in the lodge at all times.
I was surprised to read that one can apply to become a mason - it’s not just some sort of nepotic (?) thing. The applicant is questioned and observed, then his membership is voted upon. Usually, interested men get in.

Freemasonry doesn’t sound nearly as exciting as I hoped it would. It’s time to see what Wikipedia has to say about this.
Man, nothing cool! Where to now? Conspiracyarchive.com, I guess. Alright, nothing much there either, except some really vague ties to the occult and witchcraft and such. There you have it, I guess. Masonry isn’t all that ridiculous or creepy or whatever. Just a bunch of men having some laughs, sharing some secrets, shaking some hands. NBD.

OMG - update: I’m listening to NPR on my computer so that I can listen to “Car Talk” while I’m doing work in my living room. Anyway, that song by Cake came on that says “the stone mason does all the work.” Can you believe it?! There’s more here than meets the eye, but I’m just too lazy to look further into it.

Mental Health. A Breather, If You Will.

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:46:00 -0700

I finally caught up on my sister’s new blog and what a good thing to have done, as it inspired the post I’m about to write. As you may or may not know, I was in a music video once for a Boston-area band, September Twilight.We had to wear masks to filter out all the asbestos and lead paint that was floating around the condemned building, but I ended up not wearing the mask most of the time, as it was a hassle to take on and off for every take, so I opted to risk asbestos inhalation. The shoot ended with me going to the emergency room and getting 2 staples in my head. I wish I had a picture of the blood pouring out of my head, onto my shoulders and white dress, but as we were all in a state of panic when it happened, no such picture exists and all I have to offer is this, taken after I cleaned up and went to the hospital:

Anyway, what I kind of glossed over just then was the fact that we were in an abandoned insane asylum in Grafton, MA. Between takes we went off and explored the place - the shock treatment bathtubs, the incinerator in which the dead were burned (but only after they were cut in 2, as the oven wasn’t large enough to accommodate full-sized bodies), the cafeteria that was in the basement, right next to the incinerator, crumbling walls covered with satanic graffitti, etc. Shock treatment, right? Lobotomies? Drains in the middle of the floor to drain blood or whatever else from a room? Get out of here with that stuff.

Of Greek origin: Lobos=lobe of brain, Tomos=to cut/slice.
Lobotomies were used in the 20th century as a cure for certain forms of mental illness (schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, defiance, teen angst, etc.).
During a lobotomy, the connections to and from the prefrontal cortex of the brain are severed.
Dr. Gottlieb Burckhardt of Switzerland was the first to use an early form of this psychosurgery in 1890 (he removed parts of the brain). Out of the 6 patients he performed lobotomies on, 2 died but the remaining 4 exhibited altered behavior.
In 1935, a Portuguese physician aspired to achieve a similar outcome but through different means: he drilled holes in the skull near the frontal lobe and injected alcohol to destroy the tissue.
In 1949, he won the Nobel Prize for this “breakthrough” procedure!
Walter Freeman, an American neurosurgeon, was intrigued and in 1936 started performing (and perfecting) lobotomies.
He realized, however, that the way in which he was accessing the brain (through holes drilled in the skull) would be too costly to perform on those who actually needed it most (patients in mental asylums).
Going in through the eye sockets proved a less expensive but no less effective way of getting the job done (transorbital lobotomy).
To make a long operation short: an icepick-like object was inserted under the eyelid, right underneath the eye socket. It was hammered in to break a thin layer of skull and cuts were made in that part of the brain. This was done on both eyes.
As anesthesia wasn’t readily available or affordable in asylums, it was recommended that patients be rendered unconscious by electroshock.
Only after the drug Thorazine was introduced were lobotomies no longer in vogue and only then were they viewed as a “barbaric mistake,” though several countries, including the US, continued the practice in small numbers through the late 1980s.
About 40,000 lobotomies were performed in America, turning those who received them into idiots. Seriously, many who received lobotomies exhibited infantile behavior or felt that they were missing a part of their soul. Apparently, others were just fine afterwards, but I think more often than not, nothing positive came from the surgery.
A quick note on shock treatment: it is still used today for cases of severe depression or mania that don’t respond to any other forms of treatment.
1 million people worldwide consent to and undergo electroshock each year and, from what I hear, to positive results!

German Expressionism

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:45:00 -0700

Sike. Oil.

The US produces 5,064,000 barrels/ day.
The US exports 1,433,000 barrels/ day.
The US imports 12,036,000 barrels/ day.
The US consumes 20,680,000 barrels/ day.
The world consumes 83,607,000 barrels/ day.
The world produces 82,532,000 barrels/ day.
Canada is the #1 oil importer to the United States.
Saudi Arabia takes the cake for most oil produced and exported worldwide.

The idea that we can drill our way to independence or at least to yield an amount of oil that makes a difference and helps our cause is complete fallacy.
It takes about 5-12 years for a prospective site to yield oil, once production begins.
Refineries in the US are currently running at or near capacity, so even if we were to find and produce enough oil to sate the United States’ appetite for such, we’d have to ship the oil we produced in the US to be refined overseas or in Mexico or wherever and then ship the refined product back to the United States.
This would (and does, because we currently do this) add $20/25 to the price per barrel.

Truth be told, I got some of these facts from the people that are interviewed in the documentary I’m cutting, so some of them may or may not be entirely true, though I tend to think that most if not all are. Whatever. Sometimes I feel like I can pass facts off as true even if I’m not 100% sure whether or not they are, which is one of the reasons I started this blog in the first place.

You know how sometimes people use a generic name when they’re giving an example (i.e. “Any John Doe can do that puzzle”)? I was watching that documentary The Corporation yesterday and one of the guys was talking about deforestation or something and the generic name he gave was JOE BLOGGS! I was in such shock that I paused the movie and Maura and I looked at each other for about 30 seconds in disbelief, then I continued watching.

The picture that is below this sentence is a sad picture. The facts that are below this sentence...

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:51:00 -0700

The picture that is below this sentence is a sad picture.

The facts that are below this sentence aren’t really that great, but I wrote them already, so…here they are:

Benjamin Harrison was the last president to wear a full beard.
No president since Taft has had facial hair. Don’t let it get you down, though, because Obama’s all about change and I have a hunch that this will include reintroducing beards into the White House.
“A man without a moustache is like a cat without a tail.” - Arab Saying
“Men may not destroy the hair of their beards and unnaturally change the form of a man. For the Law says, “You will not deface your beards.” For God the Creator has made this decent for women, but has determined that it is unsuitable for men.” Apostolic Constitutions (compiled c.390, E) 7.392. (1)
Disturbingly, all of the “fictional characters” wikipedia lists as having beards are wizards.
Pogonology: the study of beards.
Pogonophobia: self-explanatory and fair enough, I guess.
Pogophile: I made that up.
Lord, there’s even an art movement called beardism, started in the 1960s. Here’s the definition: “Beardism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected alternate history, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought married to the progression of industry (industriosophy). It tends to ruin once and for all other pseudo-psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life whist wearing a beard.”

Believe it or not, I’m bored of this post but…I don’t know, whatever. I was kidding when I said the results were fascinating. [Ed. Note: After revising my post, there’s no longer a sentence in the introduction paragraph that says “the results are fascinating.]

Lighter Fare Than Hitler's Mustache

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:50:39 -0700

This post is about Fluxus and an artist named Daniel Spoerri.

Briefly, Fluxus was a group of artists from around the world who blended “artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s.”
Such media included not only art and literature, but also architecture, music, urban planning, and design.
Fluxus was influenced by Dadaism and espoused the concepts of anti-art, anti-modernism, minimalism and performance. Furthermore, it was considered to be an attitude as opposed to a movement or style of art.
Five words: small, short, simple, brief, funny.
Four more and a comma: spontaneous events, audience participation.

Daniel Spoerri was involved in Fluxus (as was Yoko Ono).

Swiss, born in 1930.
Jewish by descent, Christian by conversion, had his real name changed in order, essentially, to escape Nazi persecution.
Spoerri was best known for his snare-pictures, which he explained as follows: “objects found in chance positions, in order or disorder (on tables, in boxes, drawers, etc.) are fixed (‘snared’) as they are. Only the plane is changed: since the result is called a picture, what was horizontal becomes vertical. Example: remains of a meal are fixed to the table at which the meal was consumed and the table hung on the wall.”
Will mentioned that one such snare-picture was created when Spoerri invited Fluxus artists to dine and at a certain time, told them to step away from the table and leave everything as it was. He then affixed each object to the table and called it art.
The Anecdoted Topography of Chance is where things get interesting. On October 17, 1961, at precisely 3:47pm, Spoerri outlined in pen(cil) all of the 80 objects that lay on a table that stood near the entrance to his hotel room.
The table was blue because his wife, Vera, painted it so.
Spoerri then numbered the objects and wrote a brief description of each as well as recorded the memories and associations each evoked.
What resulted was not just a “map” of the objects on the table, but also a sort of autobiography of selected parts of Spoerri’s life.
As much of Spoerri’s work involved food, he referred to his art as “Eat Art.”

From what I gather, Spoerri is still alive, but I’m not going to stray beyond wikipedia for this one. Care to know more? Ask Will Todisco!

Not Approved for Moms and Dan

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 15:58:00 -0700

Because I spelled his name right on the first try, I’m going to post about Tsutomu Miyazaki.

Tsutomu Miyazaki, Japanese, was born prematurely in 1962. His incomplete fetal development left him with the hands of a deformed person: “gnarled” and “fused directly to the wrist.”
“Mild-mannered” photo-technician by day and necrophiliac vampire by night, Miyazaki mutilated and murdered 4 young girls between 1988-9.
He ate one of the hands of one of the girls and drank her blood.
Calling to mind the late Albert Fish, Miyazaki terrorized the families of his randomly-chosen victims - he sent them letters recounting in graphic detail the horrific acts he committed.
To the family of Erika Nanba, he sent a postcard on which the words (cut out from magazines) spelled out “Erika. Cold. Cough. Throat. Rest. Death.”
Another victim was left to rot on a hillside near Miyazaki’s home. After some time had elapsed, he returned to the body, removed the hands and the feet and kept them in his closet, where they remained until his arrest.
It didn’t end there - he burned her bones, crushed them to a powder and mailed them to her family along with a few teeth, photos of her clothing and a postcard, which read “Mari. Cremated. Bones. Investigate. Prove.”
July 23, 1989: Miyazaki, while trying to use a zoom lens to violate a young girl, was attacked by the girl’s father.
Miyazaki fled but returned to pick up his car, at which time he was arrested.
Upon investigation, over 5,000 videotapes were discovered in his house, the footage on which ranged from horror films to anime porn to videos of his victims.
Miyazaki was dubbed the “Otaku Murderer,” and allow me to digress in order to explain the term “otaku.”
Ripped straight from wikipedia, “Otaku is derived from a Japanese term for another’s house or family (お宅, otaku) that is also used as an honorific second-person pronoun.”
In the 1980s, it became a slang term used by anime nerds and such to refer to those who are obsessively interested in anime, manga and video games.
Shout out to my sister, because she’s not one such person.
Otaku was thus given a bad name.
There is speculation that reports of Miyazaki having an extensive collection of anime porn and such was fabricated so as to make a stronger case for him being a deviant and for his actions to be more accessible and understandable to the Japanese people (frame of reference type thing). (There are 2 separate thoughts here that I fused together, perhaps unjustly so, but I’ll leave it at that for brevity’s sake).
Side note: Why the police attempted to manipulate public opinion and make Miyazaki out to be a monster is beyond me because it seems there was never any question or dispute as to whether or not he committed these acts. He did and said so himself.
Tried in 1990, Miyazaki spouted nonsense and spoke of his “rat man” alter ego, of which he drew pictures during the trial.
The court ruled him “sane” (my term, but what I’m trying to say is they decided he was not schizophrenic) and sentenced him to death by hanging in April of 1997.
Miyazaki considered his murders a job well done and never apologized for his actions.
He ended up being hanged on June 17, 2008 (I can’t believe that slipped by me). Here’s where it’s confusing, though, because that April 1997 death sentence was upheld twice, so it doesn’t seem like the hanging was a court-ordered thing. Some suspect his execution was related to the Akihabara Massacre (a shopping mall murder spree), but that’s another story for another time.

I suspected that Palermo was in Italy. I was right. I had the most delicious dinner tonight, and I...

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 03:40:00 -0700

I suspected that Palermo was in Italy. I was right. I had the most delicious dinner tonight, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

Oratorio de San Lorenzo is a small Baroque church near Palermo.
The monastic order that founded the church “looks after the unwanted dead.”
What does this mean, looking after the unwanted dead?
Simply put, it means that the church is filled with rotting corpses and skeletons, but that’s just the half of it.

What, are the corpses wearing clothes or something?

Yes, they are.

Let me guess, they still have their hair, too?

Funny you should say that because, yeah, some of them do.

So what are we dealing with here, rows and rows of dead people with hair and clothes?

Yep, that’s exactly what we’re dealing with here. Can I continue with the bullet points, please?

Okay, but can I see another picture, please?

Fine.

You know the catacombs in Paris under Sacre Coeur (or is it Notre Dame?) It’s nothing like that. The bodies are intact. They come alive at night. Seriously, though, the “corpses are treated as characters in a play.”
Standing (irl they’re hanging from hooks), sitting, you name it. These corpses do it all.
From my understanding, the bodies are arranged by rank. Monks come first, then priests, then bishops, all wearing the appropriate attire.
To uphold whatever “lifelike” illusion they’re trying to achieve, some of the corpses are stuffed with straw to give the corpses a rotund, healthy appearance.

Another picture? Man, I usually only post 1 – I think you’re being a bit greedy. Fine, fine. I’ll indulge your whim, your greed, if only because I couldn’t choose my favorite.

I’ve got so many posts lined up, but work keeps me busy these days. Speaking of work – so...

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:53:01 -0700

I’ve got so many posts lined up, but work keeps me busy these days. Speaking of work – so I’m sitting here, working, and all of a sudden I smell one of the worst smells I’ve ever encountered. It smelled like the most intense burning you can imagine. Burning mixed with dirt. It gave me an intense headache, which, I’m sorry to report (sorry to myself, mostly), is probably here to stay for the rest of the day. It’s 10am. Suffice it to say I’m in for a long day. Speaking of long days, let’s talk about cat tails.

I found this answer on WikiAnswers. It’s not what I’m looking for, but I absolutely hate it and think it’s such a dumb answer: “[cats have tails] because they are so soft and snuggly that they love to rub it around the things they love, like their human pets.”

Give me a break. Even though it has to do with cats being cute, I can’t even stomach it. Furthermore, it doesn’t make any sense. Is it just the wording? When’s the last time a cat rubbed its tail on things it loved, anyway? I like to think I’m somewhat of an expert when it comes to cats and I can’t even picture what this person is trying to say.

Tails are composed of vertebrae, muscle, ligaments, tendon and love. Is it an extension of the backbone, you ask? “Yes,” I say. Yes, I believe that to be true. I’m not going to go so far as to say it’s an extension of the spinal cord, but I will say it’s part of the backbone.
Cats use their tails for balance, for maintaining their center of gravity and as a counterweight during sudden shifts of direction while moving at high speeds (on highways and such).
Tails can also be an indicator of temperament. Some refer to this as being a cat’s way of “talking.” I don’t subscribe to the use of that word in this instance.
Damage to the tail results in damage to the nerves, as nerves extend through the tail from the spinal cord.
Some Manx cats have no tails, which is probably just a result of a “small “gene pool”” on the island on which the cats bred (Isle of Man).

Cats, right?

Elephants! by Cathleen Keyser

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:43:00 -0700

Just a moment ago, as I started to think about what I was going to write, I thought I heard a gunshot, so know that as I write this brief introduction paragraph, I’m filled with fear.

Remember when I was changing the color of my blog and wrote that I was looking for guest bloggers? If you don’t, you can click on that link and revisit history. Anyway, this post is something written by one such person and I love it.

Adult elephants typically weigh around 10,000 pounds and can crush and kill any other land animal including rhinoceroses.
Crushing by elephants was a popular method of execution in Asia for thousands of years, and eventually made its way westward, to be used by the Romans and the Greeks.
Instead of throwing victims under the elephants to be trampled (a common practice with military leaders such as Hannibal or Perdiccas (a successor to Alexander the Great) who used elephants in their armies), executions would involve impalement, torture and dismemberment.
Since this practice involved the use of a tamed elephant, Asian elephants were mainly used since they are easier to control than their African counterparts.
The decline began with, like many other things, colonialization and the expanding British empire of the 19^th and 20^th century. Gradually the practice became outlawed in parts of Southeast Asia and South Asia. Crushing by elephants however is a major job hazard for elephant keepers.
Elephant keepers are predominantly male. There are three different Sanskrit words to describe elephant keepers:

Reghawan: those who control elephants through love
Yukihiman: those who control elephants by using ingenuity
Balwan: those who control elephants by cruelty.

Bull elephants occasionally suffer from periodic rages called musth. You can tell a musth elephant by its raging desire to kill you and the tar-like secretions that are coming out of the sides of its head which happens to taste “unbelievably foul” according to Wikipedia. Musth is thought to be linked to sexual arousal.
Crushing by elephant is not to be confused with elephant crushing, which is a method of domestication for wild elephants. In elephant crushing, the elephant is put in a cage, restrained with ropes, and is subjected to all kinds of acts (stabbing ears with nails, beating, sleep-deprivation, starvation, etc) to “break” the elephant into submission. Elephants born in captivity do not go through this.

Two Elizabeths, Written By A Third Elizabeth

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:11:00 -0700

First things first, I need to get a few things off my chest:

Elizabeth Taylor has violet eyes.
Elizabeth Taylor has two sets of eyelashes.
Elizabeth Taylor has never impressed me with her “great beauty.”

She’s fine looking, but I don’t understand all the fuss. Moving on to another Elizabeth: Lee Miller (1907-1977). Despite her being from the 1920s/30s, she has a contemporary face. She could easily fit in with today’s crowd. At the LACMA, there was a portrait (painting) of this guy from the 1700s or earlier and he looked like such a modern day man, Maura and I could not believe it. Lee Miller is another one of those people.

American photographer, fashion model, WWII correspondent for Vogue and muse of Man Ray.
Lee’s father, Theodore, introduced Elizabeth and her brothers to photography and he often used her as his model.
Conde Nast, founder of Vogue, stopped Lee from walking in front of a car in Manhattan and consequently “discovered” Lee. He featured her on a cover of the magazine in March of 1927.
1929 found Lee off to Paris in hopes of apprenticing for Man Ray. She became not only apprentice, but lover and muse as well.
Lee often photographed for Man Ray so that he could concentrate on painting, so many photos “taken by Man Ray” during that time were actually taken by Lee Miller.
Involved in the Surrealist movement, Lee’s circle of friends included Picasso and Cocteau.
Lee moved back to New York in 1932 and opened a photography studio but abandoned the business in 1934 when she married and moved to Egypt (where some of her best photographs were taken).
Lee succumbed to ennui and returned to Paris 3 years later.
During WWII, Lee lived in London and decided to pursue photographic documentation of the war. Simply put, she became a photojournalist.
She documented the first use of napalm, the horror of concentration camps, dying children in Vienna, and execution and was photographed in Hitler’s bathtub (see above).
Lee became a depressed alcoholic, had a baby, moved to England, became a gourmet cook, then became even more depressed (in part because of her then husband’s affair with a trapeze artist).
She died in 1977 and her ashes were spread throughout her herb garden.

Jesse Camp

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 13:55:00 -0700

Josiah A. Camp, III was born in 1979 and grew up in Connecticut.
His mother, Henrietta Camp, was the principal of Frank M. Kearns school in Granby, CT.
JC, a vegan, failed English Literature his senior year of high school and never graduated.
Who cares about that, though, because he walked around campus carrying a large silver rectangular boombox and made funny announcements at school meetings.
He entered an MTV contest and passed himself off as a homeless person, hoping that voters would feel bad and vote for him.
Whether this tactic worked or not is uncertain: voters were to cast their votes online, but due to a flaw in the system, the user “UglyPig” was able to cast 3,000 votes for Jesse Camp.
He beat out Dave Holmes and was crowned victor.
JC hosted TRL on and off for the next year.
After his MTV stint, Jesse Camp formed a band, “Jesse & the 8th Street Kidz.”
An outraged America rejected the (intentional) misspelling of the word “kids,” and refused to support such mockery of the English language.
In reality, the album went platinum, but the band was dropped from their label.
In 2006, Jesse Camp worked at a pet store in Los Angeles.
In 2008, he worked as a telefundraiser for Telefund, raising funds for this and that.

Jesse Camp and I seem to have similar daily routines, causing us to be in the same place at the same time several times a week. That is why I chose to write this blog. As I type this (I am typing and not looking at the screen), I am staring at an old man with a beard, a jaunty hat, a blue and white checked button down long sleeve shirt with the sleeves rolled up (in the pocket are a few pens), a brown belt, khakis (no pleats, thank god), and dark brown boots (as far as I can tell). He’s holding a book and I think he just got hip to the fact that I was staring at him.

Indian Reservations

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:27:00 -0700

I’m on vacation in Arizona and New Mexico for the week. The picture above? I took it at a pow wow I went to a couple of years ago. I don’t want to go into the history of reservations and why Native Americans were forced onto these plots of land. Instead, I will focus on reservations today: August 7, 2008.

310 Native American reservations exist in the United States.
550+ Native American tribes exist in the United States.
The quality of life in some reservations is likened to that in developing countries, with some reservations being considered the poorest counties in the nation.
The unemployment rate is high on reservations and many of the NAs exist solely on government subsidies.
Why don’t they just get a job, you ask? Reservations are located in some of the most remote, barren regions of the country. They’re far from centers of commerce and there’s not much they can do with the land.
Not all reservations are such bleak places. According to a poorly written article plagued with misspelled words and poor grammar, the reason such poverty exists is because of corruption and poor tribal handling of the money and the land.
After rereading the above mentioned article, I realize I was rash in my judgement regarding spelling and grammar - only one word was misspelled.
The tribal councils are supposed to have jurisdiction over their tribe’s reservation.
In reality, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service of the US Department of the Interior have a hand in what goes on on reservations.
Of the approximately 2.1 American Indians that live in the United States, 400,000 live on reservations.

I was looking for more facts to bullet-point - things along the lines of education/ careers, things kids do for fun, crimes committed, etc. Sadly, those things were nowhere to be found (nowhere on the first couple of pages of google search results, at least). Did I ever tell you about the time I saw a praying mantis get hit by a car and explode?

Blackouts, or, Highlighting in Pink

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:31:00 -0700

An alcohol-induced blackout is a period of amnesia in which the intoxicated brain cannot form memories. It’s as if the brain’s ability to transfer memories from short to long term storage is blocked.
The sort of amnesia blacking out causes is anterograde amnesia, in which events occurring after the amnesia are forgotten, as opposed to retrograde amnesia, in which events prior to that which caused the amnesia are forgotten.
While blacked out, a person engages in behaviors (walking, talking, etc.) as they normally would.
There are two types of blackouts: en bloc blackouts and fragmentary blackouts.
Blackouts en bloc are when the drinker cannot remember any details of the period in which they were intoxicated despite anyone’s best efforts to remind them.
These types of blackouts usually seem to have a “distinct onset,” though the drinker usually falls asleep before they are over.
Though the person in this type of blackout can carry on conversation and recall things that happened a short, short while ago, he or she will not be able to remember something that happened, say, 2 minutes ago.
Blackouts that are fragmentary leave the drinker with a spotty recollection of the previous night’s events.
People that experience this type of blackout remember things here and there but do not know pieces of their memory are missing until someone reminds them. The person can usually vaguely remember at least some of the events after being reminded and thinking about it for a bit.
The latter form of blacking out is by far the more common.
During a blackout, there is no loss of consciousness, as there is when one is passed out.
Blacking out is not necessarily associated with a high level of intoxication. One may appear only moderately intoxicated, though the next day he or she will have no recollection of the previous night’s events.
Instead, blacking out is related to a rapid increase in one’s blood alcohol concentration.

Why are some people more prone than others - genetic predisposition? drinking on an empty stomach? being 2 fast 2 furious? prenatal exposure to alcohol? The world may never know, but one thing can be certain

Four Guys

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 02:35:00 -0700

I’ve decided to try something old today. I’m calling it “Four Guys.”

Erte

Romain de Tirtoff - Russian-born French artist and designer.
Art Deco.

Aubrey Beardsley

Oscar Wilde claimed the British Beardsley to be his invention.
Aestheticism, Art Nouveau.

Alfons Mucha

Czech painter.
Art Nouveau.

Edward Gorey

American writer and artist.
Cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats.