Waterboarding Your Cat

Water boarding has been in the news lately, but it has been well known to the American Army ever since the Spanish American War of 1898 left the USA ruling a lot of truculent people in the Philippines. Simulated drowning, called the "water cure", was used to force potential terrorists to give up information. It continues to be used today, for ostensibly the same purpose. The justification for using water boarding was that it was a means to an end which justified the practice.

It is for those same reasons that I advocate water boarding domestic cats for the purpose of administering pills. The cat in the picture has been medicated several times with the water board technique (AKA the Gestapo Method), and this has enabled him to recover from fights with large rats which infest our neighborhood. The procedure is as follows:

1. Position pill and dish of water with spoon on table beside chair.

2 . Sit down on chair with cat wrapped in towel.

3. Hold cat upside down in lap and force jaws open with fingers of left hand.

4. Drop pill in back of throat and follow with a spoonful of water, while holding cat in position upside down with jaws forced open. Cat must swallow or drown.

5. Take advantage of the moment to interrogate kitty about any feline crimes or plots that have not been uncovered.

6. Hold the cat and pet it for a while after administering the pill. NEVER let the cat think that it escaped from you and somehow won!

Cowboys in Uniform

Early in the morning of Wed, 12 Jan, in Toronto, a deranged and barefoot man named Kachkar hijacked a pickup truck with a snow plow blade on the front of it. He drove up and down, deliberately damaging vehicles, until a Toronto policeman named Russell placed himself in front of the truck and fired 3 shots at the driver. Why did Sgt Russell put himself, on foot, in front of a snow plow truck being driven by somebody who was obviously out of control? He could have rammed it with his police cruiser; it was only a pickup truck. Backup cars could soon have boxed it in. He could have shot out the tires.

But Russell didn't do any of those things, and I think I know the reason: Sgt Russell was angry and he decided to kill Mr Kachkar. By shooting from in front of the truck, he could claim he was being attacked by a man with a deadly weapon. He got that right! The part that didn't work out was he missed, 3 times, slipped on the snow and got squashed. A bit later, other police boxed the plow truck in so it couldn't move or hurt anyone else. And then they shot Mr Kachkar, apparently purely for revenge, and he is fighting for his life in the hospital. If he survives, our legal system is going to try to lock him up for the next 25 years at a cost to taxpayers of over $100,000 a year.

The entire problem might have been prevented by better mental health services. If not, the rampage could have been limited to property damage, except for the bloodthirsty approach of trigger happy cowboys in uniform.

Handsome and Horny, Northern Pintail

Any duck this good looking ought to be content with the ladies who naturally fall for his charms, right? Not the Northern Pintail, about whom, National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds says,"Male Northern Pintails are aggressive, often forcing their attentions on females of other species." Seems kind of like the handsomest man in town breaking into the zoo and molesting the purple-assed baboons!

I Finally Got A Mud Hen

Now that I am an old coot, I am confessing something from a long time ago: When I first got a .22 rifle, I took it to the pond on our farm and shot at anything that moved. I soon discovered that the American Coots always seemed to dive just as I pulled the trigger. After a great waste of ammunition, and the happy survival of the coots, I returned to the house in tears, wailing to my Mother that I couldn't hit the mud hens. Mother was quietly on the side of the coots, since we didn't consider them fit to eat and there was no reason to kill them.

I wish I could show her that, more than 50 years later, I finally got one!

Shamrock Spider

Fall is the time for big spiders, especially the big-assed Shamrock spiders that hang around my house in Vancouver, BC. This one was in her web in a tree in front of my house on a windless day - important because if the web flutters even a tiny bit, it is impossible to focus on its owner.

She was about the size of the end of my little finger and very pretty, if you like spiders.

I used a Pentax K20D with a Tamron 90mm macro lens and a Pentax AF160FC ring flash. Using the flash allowed me to stop the lens down to f32, enabling maximum depth of field. The tiny aperture and 1/180 second exposure makes everything but the spider appear dark, even though it was a bright afternoon.

What is wrong with America

These are 2 letters I wrote to The Economist regarding the article:
"Where has all the greatness gone?"

Jul 20th 2010 12:00 GMT
The USA cannot pretend to promote democracy in the world when millions of its own citizens are disenfranchised. A country that has the world's highest rate of incarceration, that denies the vote to those it locks up, usually even after their release, cannot claim to be a champion of freedom. Taxation without representation is wrong, but incarceration without representation is far more evil. Convenient, however, for the police-judicial-prison-industrial complex!
Instead of treating the Constitution like Sharia Law and revering the founding Fathers like Muhammad the Perfect Man, Americans need to see them as the slave-owning, imperialist ethnic cleansers that they were, and drag their political system into the 21st century. The Electoral College, Senate rules and filibusters make a mockery of the will of the people.
Americans also need to become aware of other places in the world and of other people, if they want other nations to respect them in turn. If you look at an American field guide to North American birds, you will notice that the maps end at the Mexican border; the birds just disappear when they cross the Rio Grande. In 1980 Mount Saint Helens erupted near Seattle; about 50 deaths; every American knows about it. In 1982 El Chichón erupted in Chiapas, Mexico, killing 2,000; 99% of Americans never heard of it because it didn't happen in the USA.

Where has all the greatness gone?
Jul 20th 2010 5:21 GMT
Richard D. Quodomine asks what is my solution to over incarceration in the US.
The problem is especially difficult because most criminal law, and consequently most incarceration, is state jurisdiction. Perhaps what is needed is a federal habeas corpus type statute that requires the state to prove, at regular intervals, that continued jailing of a person is necessary for public safety. In Canada this would be as simple as an act of Parliament, but in the US it might require a constitutional amendment. It would free a great many people and make large amounts of public money available for better things.
All citizens must have the right to vote, incarcerated or not, if the USA aspires to be a democracy. Prisoners can vote in Canada and, although I can't prove it, I think it has a rehabilitative effect.
The US needs to stop locking up citizens for drug possession, lower the drinking age to 18 and the age of sexual consent to 14 (which is what it was in Canada until the Harper Conservatives got hysterical and raised it to 16 recently).
The US needs to take 99% of its guns out of circulation and destroy them. It is true that people kill people, but with guns it is so easy that they kill many more people, and then something has to be done with the murderers. Just having a gun gives someone the concept of solving problems by killing someone; the same is true of having large armed forces.
The US needs to provide a route to citizenship for the 12 million undocumented immigrants within its borders who are being cynically exploited because they work hard, cheap and scared and don't join unions.
When Americans address these problems, and fix their health system, perhaps they will be entitled to speak of greatness. At the moment, America can only refer to its exceptionalism, its dysfunctionality.

My Koran

I have been looking all over the house for my copy of the Koran, so I could burn it in solidarity on Saturday with Rev Jones in Florida. I was going to put slices of bacon between the pages, to make it burn better, and encourage it with some old lawnmower gas. Waste of good bacon, though. Trouble is, I have only one, and after I burned it I would have nothing for reference when some Islamist moron quotes it. I am certainly not going to pay Moslems money to buy another one! Do they give them away free someplace, like the Gideons give away Bibles? I would just as soon burn a Bible except that Christians don't give a shit; they have more sense.

Maybe I will just eat a ham sandwich and smudge the pages of the Koran as I munch; seems kind of lame, somehow.

Longshoring on the Amazon

These pictures were taken in Leticia, Colombia during December 2009.
Unloading fish and pigs from river boats is hot work in the humid Amazonian heat.

Cooking a Plecostomus

The following is an entry I made when I was in Leticia, Colombia, on the Amazon River in December, 2009. I was not able to upload it at that time and place.

"Quien madruga, Dios le ayuda", that is "God helps those who get up early". I have never been an early riser, but I have been wrenching myself from bed at 5 am the last couple of days because that is when things happen here along the river. Boats are unloading at first light and the market is in full swing before 6. Small craft come in loaded to the gunnels with fish on ice. I don't know where they get the ice though - they sell it on the docks, but it wouldn't last long in this heat. Maybe larger boats with refrigeration provide ice up the tributaries where they catch the fish.

River water is muddy, so visual lures are useless. It is necessary to use bait the fish can smell. I am told piranas are a nuisance if you are trying to catch something larger, but they make good bait on a big hook.

Among other fish, I notice they catch red tail cats, which Wikipedia says are not eaten because they have dark meat according to a book by Herbert Axelrod. Well that is bullshit; red tail meat is not especially dark and people are buying them in the market without reservation.

I had a red tail cat which lived by itself in an 130 gallon tank until the aquarium sprung a leak in the middle of the night and I had to kill my pet. I was more attached to that fish than any I have had; I would catch night crawlers for it every time it rained and it would come to the surface whenever I entered the room, waving its foot long barbels above the water.

Notice the dark colored fish in the top photo; these are plecostomuses, an armored catfish I would have considered inedible, but people here tell me they make good soup stock. I always kept a plecostomus in each tank because they eat the slime and algae off the glass and keep the tank clean. My plecos also enjoyed zucchini, and for a long time my son wouldn't eat that vegetable because he considered it fish food.

From Vancouver Aquarium and from my own tanks I also recognize arrawanas, red hooks, piranas, pacus (kind of a big vegetarian version of piranas) and oscars. Some of the cat fish have heads over a foot wide. I have not seen them landing any piraracus and I suspect they may be fishing them out; I think I should avoid eating them.

Richardson's Ground Squirrels, AKA Gophers

I just went back to Alberta for a family reunion and had a chance to photograph some Richardson's Ground Squirrels. "Gophers" we called them, when I was a murderous kid with a .22 rifle on a farm in Saskatchewan in the 1950's. I thought shooting gophers was fine sport until I discovered that all I had to do was sit very still with the muzzle of my gun at the entrance of the hole the animal had gone down, and pull the trigger when it stuck its head up again. I killed one gopher that way and afterwards I left them alone.

Sluggish Sex

Hey buddy/honey? Wanna get it on? I'll stick my whanger in your hole, and you stick YOUR whanger in MY hole. And afterwards we'll each go and lay eggs. Look closely and you can see both penises. Slugs are hermaphroditic - don't tell the Pope; IT'S UNNATURAL!

The proposition was accepted and I caught this couple hanging from a thread of slime off my porch In flagrante delicto. They completely ignored my flashlight, not the least bit shy at being photographed.

The Cats Are In The Bags

Nylon grocery bags make a great way to transport your kitties. Cats like going into the bags because it feels cosy in there, and if there are 2 of them , they can feel each other through the fabric.

Tie the handles together, leaving just enough room for the cat to get his head out and look around. Then put the seat belt through the handles so the cats are secured in case of an accident.