This is the Weekend to Get Outside
Published: Saturday, February 20, 2010 at 8:25 a.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, February 20, 2010 at 8:25 a.m.
If you've been waiting for the weekend to get outside, today is the day.


There's only a 10 percent chance of showers and the temperatures may even hit the low 70s. Not what the average for this time of year is - 72 to 74 - but better than the 30s Polk County had earlier this week.

Sunday is good, too, according to Bay News 9 forecasters but all good things come to an end.

There's a 60 percent chance of rain on Monday and another cold front headed this way.

The birds read the newspaper Saturday.





This bird has the most delicate feathery veil that extends past the more sturdy tail feathers. As with all of these, you can click to enlarge.


The pelicans get bumps on their beaks during breeding season, apparently.


Sometimes we just like to stand around on one leg.


In the background, you can see the black swan nesting. In the foreground, you can see the mate shooing us away.






It's hard to see here (I didn't want to get closer and disturb them) but two of these storks are sitting on the ground with their knees bent and their feet stuck straight out in front. I have not seen this before.


Turtles were loving the sun.


This really doesn't look like an urban lake, does it? But it's right downtown.




Gratuitous swan pic, with cygnet in the background.




Another gratuitous swan pic


Then today (well, yesterday now) we went to Clearwater. It was a bit cooler than Saturday, but lots of people at the beach.


Here's a pirate ship.


You can't see here how pretty the colors of the sea and the sky were.






And we saw dolphins, for the first time. I first saw something big come out of the water and go back down, and told R and pointed. We watched until it happened again - there were two or three of them surfacing together. Subsequently we saw them a few times, mostly in the wake of a boat. It seems they like to follow boats around; the wake feels good to them or something. If you maximize this video and look real hard, at about 26 or 27 seconds you can see one.



Pretty good weekend. Now back to earth.

Friday night music.



Excessively cool.

Tribalism. It's what happens when people turn their brains off. That's my opinion, anyway.

I find that I baffle people from time to time when I don't fit myself into a pigeonhole. Several months ago somebody turned up on the Volokh Conspiracy and left a comment that included the word "Oduma". I remarked that when I ran across that word I put everything else that person said on automatic scroll-by, and he subsequently referred to me as a liberal. Whereupon one of the regulars with whom I'd butted heads a few times said, "if Laura is a liberal, then, geez, I must be somewhere to the left of a hippie in a Che t-shirt playing hacky sack at a 'save the whales' rally."

But I can't find a pigeonhole I'm comfortable with. I'd be a libertarian, except that the way that plays out, it seems that the strong and powerful people are able to bully everybody else, and they reject thought-experiments in which government intervention is ever needed to keep other people from being run right over. Privilege is one thing, I guess, and total disregard for the fact that one is privileged in ways that others aren't is something else again. It's either a lack of respect for people not like them, or a lack of imagination -> lack of empathy, or both.

OTOH, I don't trust the government to do any more micro-managing than absolutely necessary. I think we need regulating bodies like OSHA and FDA and EPA. We don't need paternalistic meddling that leads to learned helplessness. One problem I see with the point of view I'll call left-wing, for lack of a better word, is that as long as one's motives are pure, the outcome must be good. It's a heart-over-head approach and it can lead to tragedy. See, for instance, this awful story; or closer to home, the war on poverty's no-man-in-the-home rule that probably contributed substantially to the breakdown of the family. There is most definitely something to be said for "first do no harm".

Anyway, one of the problems with tribalism is that it causes people to excuse things on their own side that they'd never tolerate in the other. And that interferes with those people being held accountable. It also causes people to be overly optimistic about politicians on their side. I read about people expressing frustration about President Obama not ending DADT, and I understand their distress. But there are those who are disappointed that he hasn't done anything about same-sex marriage, totally ignoring the fact that he specifically said he favored a one-man-one-woman definition of marriage; or stating that they assumed, when he said that, he was only placating the troglodytes. It's the same kind of confirmation bias that has led the climate "scientists" into the sloppy habits and wrong conclusions that are now coming to light.

Another problem with tribalism is that people are hypercritical of those they perceive as being on the other side. I think it's counterproductive to be so polarized that we reject allies on issue A b/c we differ with those same people on issues P and Q. It doesn't promote the kind of unity I think most of us would like to have - where we have diversity of thought and ideology (so that we don't go over a cliff on left or right) but we also have common goals and can work toward them together, generally wish each other well, and have an atmosphere of civility and respect.

I wrote here about different kinds of political moderation, and here about a deliberate attempt I made to set aside my bias when I read the text of one of President Obama's speeches. I think it's also important to be aware of the bias of people who report that public figure X said this or that. To look for transcripts of speeches instead of relying on second-hand reports, summaries, or characterizations, especially when the speaker is a person we are predisposed to disapprove of. I actually avoid reading some news sites that I think are biased the way I already think because I don't want to be confirmed in my own biases.

And bias shouldn't be another word for conviction. I've written before, a few times, about how I came to be pro-life. That is a conviction I came to after thinking about the issue of abortion, and that I've confirmed for myself by revisiting my thought processes a few times over the years and finding them still valid. There are pro-lifers among the Democrats, of course, and pro-choicers among the Republicans, and I assume that these are people who also thought through the issue and came to their own conclusion. But I fear that there are people who pick their opinions like the old-fashioned voting booths set up for illiterate people, where you could just select the donkey or the elephant at the top of the list of candidates, and go on. Brain turned off.

Well, a week has passed since I last posted, and once again I have stuff going on that I don't want to blog about - work, mostly. Again. It's probably a good thing that I've started doing Wharton Wednesdays b/c otherwise this poor blog might get a bit neglected.

Well, I did call my dad this evening to wish him a happy birthday - his 78th, which is quite respectable.

Here is a bit from The Glimpses of the Moon. Wharton had a thing about the children of the rich being physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually neglected; and perhaps overly aware of material things.

When she woke the next morning the sun was pouring in between her curtains of old brocade, and its refraction from the ripples of the Canal was drawing a network of golden scales across the vaulted ceiling. The maid had just placed a tray on a slim marquetry table near the bed, and over the edge of the tray Susy discovered the small serious face of Clarissa Vanderlyn. At the sight of the little girl all her dormant qualms awoke.

Clarissa was just eight, and small for her age: her little round chin was barely on a level with the tea-service, and her clear brown eyes gazed at Susy between the ribs of the toast- rack and the single tea-rose in an old Murano glass. Susy had not seen her for two years, and she seemed, in the interval, to have passed from a thoughtful infancy to complete ripeness of feminine experience. She was looking with approval at her mother's guest.

"I'm so glad you've come," she said in a small sweet voice. "I like you so very much. I know I'm not to be often with you; but at least you'll have an eye on me, won't you?"

"An eye on you! I shall never want to have it off you, if you say such nice things to me!" Susy laughed, leaning from her pillows to draw the little girl up to her side.

Clarissa smiled and settled herself down comfortably on the silken bedspread. "Oh, I know I'm not to be always about, because you're just married; but could you see to it that I have my meals regularly?"

"Why, you poor darling! Don't you always?"

"Not when mother's away on these cures. The servants don't always obey me: you see I'm so little for my age. In a few years, of course, they'll have to--even if I don't grow much," she added judiciously. She put out her hand and touched the string of pearls about Susy's throat. "They're small, but they're very good. I suppose you don't take the others when you travel?"

The Volokh Conspiracy has a feature called Saturdays with Stendhal.

I've not read any Stendhal.

But I thought I might take a leaf from their book, and have Wednesdays with Wharton.

Here's a bit from The Custom of the Country.

Mrs. Spragg, once reconciled--or at least resigned--to the mysterious necessity of having to "entertain" a friend of Undine's, had yielded to the first touch on the weak springs of her garrulity. She had not seen Mrs. Heeny for two days, and this friendly young man with the gentle manner was almost as easy to talk to as the masseuse. And then she could tell him things that Mrs. Heeny already knew, and Mrs. Spragg liked to repeat her stories. To do so gave her almost her sole sense of permanence among the shifting scenes of life. So that, after she had lengthily deplored the untoward accident of Undine's absence, and her visitor, with a smile, and echoes of divers et ondoyant in his brain, had repeated her daughter's name after her, saying: "It's a wonderful find--how could you tell it would be such a fit?"--it came to her quite easily to answer: "Why, we called her after a hair-waver father put on the market the week she was born--" and then to explain, as he remained struck and silent: "It's from undoolay, you know, the French for crimping; father always thought the name made it take...."

I took some pictures of F's cats when they were with us last week.

Turtle had arranged herself on a cushion that happened to be on a chair I happened to want to sit on, so I moved both cushion and cat to the floor.



Perhaps Turtle's coloring could be a bit more felicitously arranged.

Tomato, on the other hand, is gorgeous. I couldn't really get a pic of her b/c she would not be deterred from trying to catch the cord dangling from the camera.



For a while there, Turtle was a very cuddly kitty but Tomato would bite you if you looked at her. F paraphrased Elizabeth Bennett to say that one cat had all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it. But Tomato has mellowed upon maturity.

F worked part of the day Monday, all day Tuesday, and missed today. Her boss wants to put her on desk work only for a while. I wish there was some way to know how long it will take her to get her strength back. One of her coworkers told her that when he had mono his doctor told him to double up on the vitamins. I told her that certainly would not hurt. (She takes Flintstones with iron.)

So a full week after the blood sample was taken - I am not kidding - it now is revealed that mono is in fact being had, in addition to having previously been had, which I strongly suspected.

When we look back, it appears that F must have had it for quite some time, b/c she's been battling fatigue and headache and so forth for a while.

Think she's turned the corner, though. We're going to go shopping in a moment so we can gauge how much strength she actually has right now. There's the possibility of her returning to work on Monday, for a half-day at least.

Mrs. Who told me not to have any more crises.

The continuing saga........

......F is with us again, and has been since Friday night. So are her cats. I have four angry little animals in my house, and one sick daughter. To make a long story short, we are waiting on test results to see if she has mono. If she does not have mono, she has one nasty virus.

And so it goes.

F has been with us this weekend. She'll be going back home when she finishes reading her book about Princess Alice. Evidently she is finding it quite the page-turner.

We've had her this weekend because F has been battling some kind of virus or something and she called Friday night with a headache, fever, and feeling like crap. So her dad went to get her when he got off work early Saturday morning. I made soup, with just a little bit of chicken b/c F is more about the vegetables; and onion, celery, red bell pepper, carrot, potato, okra, tomato, yellow squash and zuchini, and alphabet noodles. Added some purchased chicken broth. Lots of sleeping, drinking fluids, and Mommy soup has done the trick - she looks like she feels OK now. (Oh - and I made her a nice dinner a while ago, catfish, fried okra, and salad. When she saw the okra she told me I am a nice mommy. Right, and don't you forget it, I told her.)

The rest of the soup is in tubs ready to go back to Kissimmee, along with some other stuff.

I've had discussions with people about jobs elsewhere in the country, but how could I leave her?

World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research.

Speculative and informal claim by little-known scientist during phone interview -> article in pop sci mag -> benchmark report by IPCC. This is what happens when you don't bother to check out info that confirms what you think you know: you wind up with egg on your face.

It'd be funny if so much weren't riding on the shoddy work and the outright lies. Well, at least there appeared to be one hell of a party in Copenhagen. And that's the important thing, right?

Leaned over to pick up a glove from the floor this morning ... and wrenched my back.

%&*(^ the aging process. I mean for real.

I was able to go to work today but was stiff and walking slow. People asked if I didn't want to go home - why? I can hurt here or there just as well. Half an hour ago I took some Soma I had left over from a previous adventure (and I can't help remembering the tranquilizer Soma in Brave New World, "A gram is better than a damn!" with which I heartily agree) and so I will have to go to bed in a moment.

WHAT NEXT. (Don't answer that.)

So three people have been reported to have opened their mouths.

Evidently, according to the new book Game Change, Bill Clinton tried to get Ted Kennedy's support for Hillary over Obama in the last primary and he said this to him:

A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.

And Kennedy took this as a racial remark, and became very cold to Clinton afterward.

I don't know whether Kennedy took it that way or not (and in fact I don't know that Clinton even said it) but I really don't believe that if Clinton said it, he meant it that way. I don't think he would have had that thought, that as a black man Obama was meant to be a servant, and if he had, I don't think he would have voiced it expecting to get support. He probably meant that Obama was a newcomer in the political arena and that Hillary had paid her dues and was ready for entry into the old boys' network of Democratic politics.

One of the irritating things about the current state of race relations, of course, is that the worst possible construction is routinely put on what people say. Was it Eric Holder who said that Americans need to quit being too cowardly to have a real conversation about race? Ha ha.

The second remark is Harry Reid's, as reported in the same book, and acknowledged by him:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada described in private then-Sen. Obama as "light skinned" and "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." Obama is the nation's first African-American president.

Once again, I'm not seeing the big deal here. The word "Negro" is not in current use very much, but I'm not aware of its being a pejorative. Reid's point was that Obama's presentation is mainstream enough that he could be a strong presidential candidate, and in fact he was. It would be nice if such things as skin tone and dialect weren't relevant to a candidate's acceptability, but we'd be better off if a lot of things were less relevant: how physically attractive a candidate is, for instance, especially a female.

The third remark, by Blagojevich, is a big deal.

I'm blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived. I saw it all growing up.

So Obama is less black than Blagojevich because he was raised in a wealthier household. "Black" is equivalent to "not affluent". Charming.

Not funny.

CNN:

Brennan: Some Guantanamo detainees will go to Yemen

Washington (CNN) - The United States still intends to send some Yemeni detainees at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, facility back to Yemen despite a terrorist threat there, President Barack Obama's terrorism czar said Sunday.

...

Closing the Guantanamo facility is necessary because al Qaeda and others have used it as a propaganda tool against the United States, Brennan said.

Some time back, I read a blog post by this man in which he said that he was going to stop worrying about things he could not help. I think that was in the context of Obama's election but I can't find it. Anyway, I decided to pretty much adopt that point of view, but sometimes I cannot stand the stupid.

Let's announce, in a news medium that's read all over the world, that we undertake major policy decisions in response to al Quaeda propaganda. I believe that is the definitive exposition of the idea that "the terrorists have won".