Words for the wise from the mouth of a fool.
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The weblog of Seth Johnson -------------- INKSLINGER.ORG -------------- OD ARCHIVES -------------- FEEDS Posts:  Shared Items:
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Thursday, February 14, 2002
Wednesday, February 13, 2002
Busy, busy day, so not much time to update. And right before I'm about to leave town for a few days, too. Sorry about that.
A couple quick links, then off to pack:
- Washington D.C. seems to be inviting in Big Brother
- I saw a lot of barges on the Mississippi River growing up, but I never saw any of them do this
- As promised, Extreme Ironing
- Excellent blogging by a guy working at the Winter Olympics
- Terrific Google search that hit my page today. Wish I could have helped you, friend.
Tuesday, February 12, 2002
You'll have to scroll down a bit to find it, but if anyone ever starts putting together a team to make the game describes in Lileks' bleat today, I want in.
Entertaining and informative!: Completely brilliant found poetry on Lampshade's page today, and a simultaneous warning to make certain you know the settings on every computer you use.
And a cool link I meant to post yesterday: The Secret Lives of Numbers.
On the off chance you care, from the list of Oscar nominees I'd now like to post my favorite pick. Not who will win (and possibly not who I would have nominated), but who I'd like to see win out of the options provided:
- Best Picture: ``Gosford Park'
- Actor: Denzel Washington, ``Training Day''
- Actress: Halle Berry, ``Monster's Ball''
- Supporting Actor: Ben Kingsley, ``Sexy Beast''
- Supporting Actress: Maggie Smith, ``Gosford Park''
- Director: Robert Altman, ``Gosford Park''; Peter Jackson, ``The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring''
* An answer to this question, read on AICN: "Come What May" from MOULIN ROUGE was not nominated, due to the song being written for Baz Luhrmann's ROMEO AND JULIET... Strange technicalities - same reason that "As Time Goes By" didn't win for CASABLANCA!"
Monday, February 11, 2002
On Saturday my friend Chris took me down to visit Valley of the Kings, an animal sanctuary where he volunteers. I can only sum up the afternoon by saying it was a pretty amazing experience. I've taken a couple swings at writing some sort of cohesive narrative to explain it here, but thusfar I've failed. But here are some fragments and impressions:
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* Valley of the Kings definitely isn't a zoo. First, you get much closer to the animals--there was a moment when I looked to my left and realized that only a piece of Cyclone fencing stood between me and five tigers looking at me intently. Then I looked to my right into a cage where three male lions were wrestling around. All in all, it evokes a feeling of primal caution. Not fear, the setup is more trustworthy than that, but caution--I found myself listening carefully to distant sounds, the monkey part of my brain constantly monitoring for the moment when the Big Bad would be coming to get me...
* Walking around the sanctuary also made me realize how clean zoos are. In some senses I missed that--permafrost plus melted snow plus oversaturated gorund meant I spent the better part of the day wandering around in ankle-deep mud--but in others it reminded me of what zoos enable visitors to forget: that the big cats are meat-eating engines of the first order. Chris told me that the sanctuary goes through nearly 2000 pounds of meat per day, a quantity driven home when I saw a guy wheelbarrowing in one cage's lunch: half of a cow. Granted, there were five lions in the cage, but still...
Yeah, no butcher-shopped meat for these animals--bone, hide and all were dropped into the cages. In another cage I saw what was left of a sheep chained to a post; Chris was quick to point out that the chain wasn't because the sheep was put in there alive, Jurrasic Park-style, but only so that the volunteers only had one area of the cage to clean up after mealtime. Later, though, I watched a tiger get leverage on a deer carcass and rip it in two with one tug so that he could drag part off to a distant corner of the cage. I guess sometimes even chains aren't strong enough.
* It was interesting to get that close to tigers, and even more interesting to discover how friendly they were. Though some were aloof and wouldn't come down off their chosen perch, others recognized Chris and came down to rub up against the fencing and say hello. (Later, when we came walking around with a ten-pound pack of chicken drumsticks they were even more friendly, but that's to be expected, I suppose.)
* On the drive down Chris gave me the safety run-down, which basically boiled down to "just do what I say and you'll be okay." Figuring that my typing speed might suffer if I lost a hand (or the seats of my car would be ruined if, as Chris explained was more likely, I got urinated upon when wandering too close to a lion cage), I followed his instructions implicitly. We were walking around a barn at one point when he suddenly said, "Don't look in there," indicating a barred door off to the left. I can't tell you how strange a moment that was--after walking past cages of lions and tigers (okay, and a few piglets) to wonder what might be in that cage that was so dangerous I shouldn't even look.
(As it turns out, the cage held two agressive male lions who waited for people to make eye contact and then charged at the door--nothing dangerous, just sparing the lions a bump on the head and me a moment of shock.)
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Like I said, I'm still sorting out my thoughts about the whole experience. I'll have pictures to share with you sometime next week; hopefully I'll be able to tell you more then.
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