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Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

It’s not even safe to go out and pick up 2 days worth of poop anymore.

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Nature & Respite

You are here: Home / Archives for Nature & Respite

You Never Know When You’ll Need That…

by Tom Levenson|  October 30, 20202:53 pm| 104 Comments

This post is in: Humorous, Not Politics, Open Threads, Sports

I’ll give our English cousins this: they don’t throw stuff out, and they know where to find it when the occasion demands it.

In case you thought Cambridge ceremonies were just for the tourists: the porters in my college have been delivering food to self-isolating students & announcing their arrival with an actual plague bell pic.twitter.com/YbF5cOngWA

— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) October 30, 2020

You Never Know When You'll Need That...

 

In a nod to modernity they have fitted the plague bell to a golf buggy which is kinda weird

— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) October 30, 2020

In other news from bizarro land–this time from the much less tradition-soaked environs of the left coast bjmkkj [leaving that in as an example of Champ’s typing skills],* Nathan Fenino and David Wharton in the LA Times report on the UCLA football team’s dining habits. The food bill for the currently mediocre wearers of the light-blue and gold ran to $5.4 million  in 2019–during which the athletic department as a whole ran a deficit of $18.9 million.

I do love this article, mostly because it is devastating without ever overtly saying what the writers clearly mean.

The culprit, or, if you prefer, the mastermind behind UCLA’s fine football dining is formerly wunderkind-ish coach Chip Kelly, who did well at Oregon, badly in Philadelphia, worse in SF, and is now struggling to achieve mediocrity in the Pac 12:

Kelly started providing breakfast, lunch and dinner for his players, using UCLA Catering & Conference Services most often. During four months starting in July 2018, for example, the program spent $2.2 million on meals. The price per head ranged from $40 to $53 a meal, according to invoices reviewed by The Times, plus occasional late-evening snacks at $29 a person.

What lay behind such a generous food budget?

Science!

The coach was focused on “body composition,” wanting his athletes to possess more fat-free mass, a higher ratio of lean muscle. The team often worked with UCLA caterers, Kavarsky said, “to source the right type of proteins, carbohydrates.”

Menus featuring ostrich burgers, wild boar and venison offered different amino acid profiles. All of this came at a cost.

Brilliant, I’m sure. But strangely, UCLA’s competition manages (most of them) to feed their guys for much less:

By comparison, other Pac-12 schools spent from $399,000 to $1.2 million on non-travel football meals in 2019, according to financial disclosures filed with the NCAA. That doesn’t include Stanford and USC, which don’t have to provide the information because they are private.

Powerhouses such as Ohio State ($3.4 million) and defending national champion Louisiana State ($381,000) didn’t come close to the Bruins’ total.

(A UCLA response noted that some schools have football or athlete only dining halls, which the Bruins do not, and that a lot of spending gets tucked in there, and off the athletic department’s books. Still–the sample is big enough to give a sense of the scale of demented spending in Westwood.

But hey, the proof is in the pudding, amirite? Better nutrition and happy players must lead to gridiron success, right?

Ummm:

The increased spending at UCLA has not translated into success on the field so far, with the Bruins going 7-17 under Kelly. Average game attendance at the Rose Bowl has declined steadily, hitting a low of 43,849 in 2019. At the same time, ticket revenue dipped from $19.8 million in 2014 to $12.5 million last season.

If I were a CA taxpayer, I’d be pissed.

And with that, I hear there’s some drama going on in more consequential corners of the polity. But there are plenty of places on this blog to discuss that.  Let’s treat this as an absurdity-themed open thread?

*Bonus Champ pix:

1: This morning’s portrait. Tres chic!

You Never Know When You'll Need That... 1

2. We know how this ends…

a:

You Never Know When You'll Need That... 2

b:

You Never Know When You'll Need That... 3

I once could see, and now I’m blind…

Over to y’all….

You Never Know When You’ll Need That…Post + Comments (104)

I Love It When A Plan Comes Together

by ruemara|  October 30, 202012:08 am| 57 Comments

This post is in: Election 2020, Not Politics, Open Threads

Ahh. Let’s go back to last year at just about this time. Picture it, a young (sorta, if you squint) ingenue about to sign away their freedom – I mean, swear fealty to these United States of America that has nurtured and abused- trauma- wait, I gotta think. Made life interesting on a near daily basis for our person. Here’s pictures!

  • I Love It When A Plan Come Together 2
    Registered to vote the same day
  • I Love It When A Plan Come Together
    Getting all citizeny here
  • Making the best choice
  • A real ballot box, thank you

Well, I am pleased to report –

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

  • VOTE ACCEPTED BISHES!
  • Eating a sandwich of RESPONSIBLE VOTING
  • Santa Cruzing
  • Golden Gating

Not a bad birthing day present, using my power to vote. I like to think of us as a million middle fingers raised in a salute to the GOP. And it all happened thanks to you curmudgeonly lot. Here’s an update & open thread. Don’t bust up the joint. Plus, here’s the obligatory smug cats pictures.

  • Hime is pleased to not live with one of Those humans.
  • Odo is concerned you haven’t noticed how good looking he is.
Obligatory cat pics

I Love It When A Plan Comes TogetherPost + Comments (57)

Floriduh! Man Decides To Investigate the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party!

by Adam L Silverman|  October 28, 202010:54 pm| 266 Comments

This post is in: Cat Blogging, Faunasphere, Nature, Nature & Respite, Open Threads, Pet Blogging

I meant the title to the post literally, not figuratively.

EXCLUSIVE: A man who paid $150 for a “full-contact experience” with a black leopard says he had to undergo multiple surgeries after he was mauled by the animal in an enclosure behind a Davie home https://t.co/x0zlA4G9Ne

— WPLG Local 10 News (@WPLGLocal10) October 28, 2020

DAVIE, Fla. – A man who paid $150 for a “full-contact experience” with a black leopard says he had to undergo multiple surgeries after he was mauled by the fully-grown animal in an enclosure behind a Davie home.

A picture obtained by Local 10 News shows Dwight Turner’s heavily bandaged head and ear after the savage attack, which detectives from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission say happened behind a home on Earnest Boulevard on Aug. 31.

The man who lives there, identified as Michael Poggi, has a Facebook page saying he runs an animal sanctuary for rare and endangered animals.

I think I’ve identified the problem:

Investigators say Poggi charged the 50-year-old Turner $150 for a “full-contact experience” with his black leopard — to “play with it, rub its belly and take pictures.”

FWC’s report says that once Turner walked inside the enclosure, the leopard attacked.

Imagine that!

The injuries were so severe, the report says the victim’s scalp was “hanging from his head and his right ear was torn in half.”

Authorities say Poggi was charged with allowing full contact with an extremely dangerous animal and was cited for maintaining captive wildlife in an unsafe condition.

Attempts to speak to Poggi at his home have been unsuccessful.

Authorities say he is licensed to have the leopard. They say Poggi admitted to them what he did was illegal.

Yes, in Floriduh! you can get a license for a leopard. Who knew? Floriduh! Man knew…

I would think the lesson here is not to play with, rub the belly of, and take pictures with an actual leopard.

Best wishes for a full recovery for the leopard, who I’m sure was traumatized by all of this stupidity. And also for Mr. Turner.

Open thread!

Floriduh! Man Decides To Investigate the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party!Post + Comments (266)

Saturday Morning Open Thread: Literally Smashing Pumpkins

by Anne Laurie|  October 24, 20207:57 am| 331 Comments

This post is in: Biden-Harris 2020, Nature, Open Threads

Tis the season…

They did the mash! Big thanks to giant pumpkin growers Larry Nelson and Jim Paino for the gourd time! pic.twitter.com/GSY23qJoBV

— Oregoth Boo (@OregonZoo) October 23, 2020

I know this point was made repeatedly last night including by me, but after sleeping on it, I wonder if people aren't still underrating the importance of the debate having been Trump's best remaining opportunity to climb back into the race and it seemingly having been squandered.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) October 23, 2020

One of the fun things (the most fun thing?) about my job is I get to see lots of internals that don’t get released at all, and they tell a pretty similar story. Depending on the day of the week and specific district, Biden is usually overperfomlng 2016 numbers by 8-13 points. https://t.co/gBBBP6mltn

— Jacob Rubashkin (@JacobRubashkin) October 24, 2020

never count on the youth vote but if they actually pick *this* year to actually show up the polls may be complete garbage and not in a good way for president boomer meme

— kilgore trout, biden wi-fi switchman (@KT_So_It_Goes) October 24, 2020

Democratic supporters in The Villages, a conservative retirement community in central Florida, are becoming more active as campaigning for the 2020 presidential election enters the home stretch https://t.co/EpX82mxO9Q pic.twitter.com/hzlM4HEzuH

— Reuters (@Reuters) October 24, 2020

Saturday Morning Open Thread: Literally Smashing PumpkinsPost + Comments (331)

Tuesday Evening Respite Open Thread: Dogs: We Don’t Deserve Them

by Anne Laurie|  October 20, 20206:16 pm| 67 Comments

This post is in: Dog Blogging, Nature & Respite

SOUND UP ???? pic.twitter.com/9O43bfCyJO

— Jay Arnold ?? (@jadedcreative) October 16, 2020

This is how tornadoes start.

📹: https://t.co/gyWCZaAi7i pic.twitter.com/zulVVPHpep

— Paul Bronks (@SlenderSherbet) October 14, 2020

show full post on front page

People in a Moscow park were treated to a skateboard performance by a French bulldog named Nord Boss ?? pic.twitter.com/E8eU40kDMY

— Reuters (@Reuters) October 16, 2020

"How could you???"

(📹: Imgur user GhostTater) pic.twitter.com/NpDdreetvb

— Clare Logan 🎃 (@withchillies) October 17, 2020

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. 🔊

📹: https://t.co/Ucr3cQRDXo pic.twitter.com/WckFTScG4e

— Paul Bronks (@SlenderSherbet) October 13, 2020

How to assert your dominance (step one) – WALK LIKE A BOSS…

(📹: Reddit user moondragon7) pic.twitter.com/v4MOOK6t8B

— Clare Logan 🎃 (@withchillies) October 14, 2020

"Leave it, Gary, he's not worth it…."

(📸: Reddit user alfaguara27) pic.twitter.com/wBZdSypjO2

— Clare Logan 🎃 (@withchillies) October 17, 2020

Tuesday Evening Respite Open Thread: Dogs: We Don’t Deserve ThemPost + Comments (67)

Excellent Read: Bears vs. Libertarians

by Anne Laurie|  October 17, 20203:33 pm| 124 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Glibertarianism, Nature & Respite

In New Hampshire, the forces of libertarianism clashed head-on with the primal forces of nature, and the latter kicked everybody's ass with the well-trained shock troops of the primal forces of nature: bears. https://t.co/biOR2hy4e0

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) October 16, 2020

Courtesy of Mr. Pierce, the New Republic reviews Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’ book on “The Town That Went Feral”:

… Hongoltz-Hetling is an accomplished journalist based in Vermont, a Pulitzer nominee and George Polk Award winner. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears) sees him traversing rural New England as he reconstructs a remarkable, and remarkably strange, episode in recent history. This is the so-called Free Town Project, a venture wherein a group of libertarian activists attempted to take over a tiny New Hampshire town, Grafton, and transform it into a haven for libertarian ideals—part social experiment, part beacon to the faithful, Galt’s Gulch meets the New Jerusalem. These people had found one another largely over the internet, posting manifestos and engaging in utopian daydreaming on online message boards. While their various platforms and bugbears were inevitably idiosyncratic, certain beliefs united them: that the radical freedom of markets and the marketplace of ideas was an unalloyed good; that “statism” in the form of government interference (above all, taxes) was irredeemably bad. Left alone, they believed, free individuals would thrive and self-regulate, thanks to the sheer force of “logic,” “reason,” and efficiency. For inspirations, they drew upon precedents from fiction (Ayn Rand loomed large) as well as from real life, most notably a series of micro-nation projects ventured in the Pacific and Caribbean during the 1970s and 1980s.

None of those micro-nations, it should be observed, panned out, and things in New Hampshire don’t bode well either—especially when the humans collide with a newly brazen population of bears, themselves just “working to create their own utopia,” property lines and market logic be damned. The resulting narrative is simultaneously hilarious, poignant, and deeply unsettling. Sigmund Freud once described the value of civilization, with all its “discontents,” as a compromise product, the best that can be expected from mitigating human vulnerability to “indifferent nature” on one hand and our vulnerability to one another on the other. Hongoltz-Hetling presents, in microcosm, a case study in how a politics that fetishizes the pursuit of “freedom,” both individual and economic, is in fact a recipe for impoverishment and supercharged vulnerability on both fronts at once. In a United States wracked by virus, mounting climate change, and ruthless corporate pillaging and governmental deregulation, the lessons from one tiny New Hampshire town are stark indeed…

If the Libertarian vision of Freedom can take many shapes and sizes, one thing is bedrock: “Busybodies” and “statists” need to stay out of the way. And so the Free Towners spent years pursuing an aggressive program of governmental takeover and delegitimation, their appetite for litigation matched only by their enthusiasm for cutting public services. They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of $1 million by 30 percent, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case, and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube hits. Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. “Despite several promising efforts,” Hongoltz-Hetling dryly notes, “a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services.” Instead, Grafton, “a haven for miserable people,” became a town gone “feral.” Enter the bears, stage right…

show full post on front page

What was the deal with Grafton’s bears? Hongoltz-Hetling investigates the question at length, probing numerous hypotheses for why the creatures have become so uncharacteristically aggressive, indifferent, intelligent, and unafraid. Is it the lack of zoning, the resulting incursion into bear habitats, and the reluctance of Graftonites to pay for, let alone mandate, bear-proof garbage bins? Might the bears be deranged somehow, perhaps even disinhibited and emboldened by toxoplasmosis infections, picked up from eating trash and pet waste from said unsecured bins? There can be no definitive answer to these questions, but one thing is clear: The libertarian social experiment underway in Grafton was uniquely incapable of dealing with the problem. “Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.”

Grappling with what to do about the bears, the Graftonites also wrestled with the arguments of certain libertarians who questioned whether they should do anything at all—especially since several of the town residents had taken to feeding the bears, more or less just because they could. One woman, who prudently chose to remain anonymous save for the sobriquet “Doughnut Lady,” revealed to Hongoltz-Hetling that she had taken to welcoming bears on her property for regular feasts of grain topped with sugared doughnuts. If those same bears showed up on someone else’s lawn expecting similar treatment, that wasn’t her problem. The bears, for their part, were left to navigate the mixed messages sent by humans who alternately threw firecrackers and pastries at them. Such are the paradoxes of Freedom. Some people just “don’t get the responsibility side of being libertarians,” Rosalie Babiarz tells Hongoltz-Hetling, which is certainly one way of framing the problem…

The bear problem, in other words, is much bigger than individual libertarian cranks refusing to secure their garbage. It is a problem born of years of neglect and mismanagement by legislators, and, arguably, indifference from New Hampshire taxpayers in general, who have proved reluctant to step up and allocate resources to Fish and Game, even as the agency’s traditional source of funding—income from hunting licenses—has dwindled. Exceptions like Doughnut Lady aside, no one wants bears in their backyard, but apparently no one wants to invest sustainably in institutions doing the unglamorous work to keep them out either. Whether such indifference and complacency gets laundered into rhetoric of fiscal prudence, half-baked environmentalism, or individual responsibility, the end result is the same: The bears abide—and multiply…

It will probably surprise no one that my sympathies lie mostly with the bears.

Excellent Read: Bears vs. LibertariansPost + Comments (124)

Respite: More Champ (With Bonus Tikka)

by Tom Levenson|  October 15, 20207:07 pm| 72 Comments

This post is in: Cat Blogging, Not Politics, Open Threads

I hate every GOP fettering gob these days. And DiFi can kiss a stoat–or rather did, in that embrace with Lindsey Graham. I’m ecstatic that Twitter is down: let tech-failure save me from myself.  This XKCD cartoon from a couple of days ago completely speaks for me:

Respite: More Champ (With Bonus Tikka)

 

So yeah. I need a respite. How about you?

And I realize I’ve been remiss in updating the Champ saga. She’s ridiculously cute (as kittens kind of are on their default settings), and, with very occasional exceptions, she’s managed to avoid the shoals and hidden rocks as she navigates the Tikka-verse.

To lead off, perhaps the single most squee picture I’ve ever taken (sorry son!):

Respite: More Champ (With Bonus Tikka) 1

 

Then there’s the glamor pose…

Respite: More Champ (With Bonus Tikka) 2

And here’s Tikka and Champ, socially distancing…

Respite: More Champ (With Bonus Tikka) 5

This may not end well (it didn’t):

Respite: More Champ (With Bonus Tikka) 6

And last–here’s a couple of portraits.

First, me and the little one, and my man Oppie, keeping the morning watch. (Edited to add…this one’s for Cheryl):

Respite: More Champ (With Bonus Tikka) 4

And here is the once and future King, Tikka, first of his name, in all his glory. Long may he reign!


Respite: More Champ (With Bonus Tikka) 8

Soundtrack for this post?

“FEEEEEEEELINES…NOTHING BUT FEEEEEEEEEEEEEELINES…”

#SorryNotSorry

This thread…it is open for anything but Republicans.

Respite: More Champ (With Bonus Tikka)Post + Comments (72)

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