This is a set of diagrams that I found God-knows-where, God-knows-when, probably late at night. They look scientific, like something that would accompany a research paper, and have something to do with the reproductive cycle of squid. I have no idea if I have them in the right order. A couple of them don't work very well.
Why did it take me this long to post something about the death of Carrie Fisher? Actually, it took me half a bloody century, and I'm still not sure about it. But I have come to the conclusion after blogging for a while that people either read your stuff, or they don't. They watch your videos, or they don't. It's a capricious thing, so you might as well follow your heart and do what you feel like doing, what your conscience tells you to do at any given moment. And it is here that I find my satisfaction. Is there a "message" in all this? There probably is. It's something that each person will hear in a different way, according to their own prejudices.
(Movie theme) "Oh there's a creature
From the haunted sea,
And he doesn't
Like you, and he doesn't like me
He bounces up and down in the water
(boing, boing, guitar riff)
And doesn't really do what he oughter"
The experiment: cropping some of my thousand or so Harold Lloyd gifs (most of which I made myself over the thousand or so years I've been in love with him). It was an interesting experiment to remove all the extraneous material from these tiny little ten-second movies, and some worked out better than others. I didn't even think I could crop gifs, in fact I probably couldn't, until the apps or programs or whatever-they-are became more versatile/easier to use. Things that aren't dead-easy aren't in my internet vocabulary.
I ended up with gifs that are extremely tiny, 1/4 the size of most of them. If you blow them up very much, they're too blurry to bother with. In some cases the effect is startling: Harold's face is zoomed in a little too close for comfort. We're not used to seeing him on a screen the size of a postage stamp, but neither are we accustomed to looking so deeply into those expressive and slightly haunted eyes.
Harold's director Hal Roach famously said, "Harold Lloyd was not a comedian. But he was the best actor playing a comedian the world has ever seen." It's true that Harold's was the humour of humiliation, social awkwardness, rejection and pain. How he made humour out of that is anybody's guess. But the other "big two", Chaplin and Keaton, also used pathos and struggle to good effect, and turned it all into laughs. I think it was Jerry Lewis - whom I hate - who said, "Comedy is a man in trouble." About that, I think he had a point.
Bosley is the name we gave to a very strange duck who lives with a flock of mallards in Como Lake. We kept wondering why a very large, piebald duck would hang around with wild birds like that. He looked more like a domestic duck than a wild one. Finally, unable to get any information about him, I sent a gif of him swimming to the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, one of the world's foremost institutions of aviana/birdology.
They got back to me right away, to my surprise, telling me that their best guess is that he's a hybrid of a mallard and a magpie duck, a large-ish domestic duck raised for meat. (See example below). It made sense. These ducks are black-and-white, whereas Bosley's markings have the mottled brown tones of a mallard - in particular, a female.
So it shouldn't have surprised us to see a male mallard chasing after her. She was waddling around on land - the first time we've seen her (him? Still not sure) do that. We've been watching her for a couple of years now, and it's amazing how we see her almost every time we visit. Once when all the mallards had flown away, we saw him (her?) in the very middle of the lake, dabbling and paddling around alone.
I can see why one of Bosley's parents would want to run away from home if he or she were about to become dinner. But it is obvious this is a true adoption. I mean, if the rest of the flock wants to mate with you. . . The mallard drake might have been pursuing (her) romantically, or chasing (him) off as a rival. But now that I look at that mottled brown breast, I seriously wonder if Bosley is really a Boslette.
It's a funny video, and unique among all our Bosliana.
BLOGGER'S FOOTNOTE. I found a very strange group of pictures of ducks very similar to Bosley (see example, above) - only they were even more mallardy (or mallardly) than our Bos. I say more mallardly because some of them even had the iridescent green heads of the mallard drake. This was on a duck forum of some kind, and everyone took a guess at what kind of ducks these were. They came up with half a dozen names of very exotic-sounding purebred breeds. Fuck, guys! These are bastard pretenders, the love children of two duck species, and you cannot admit it because mallards are just too common. They're like pigeons, really. Only little kids like them.
I love seeing and filming the first ducklings of spring, but I was saddened to see this little guy running around peeping frantically. I am almost certain he was separated from his mother, or she lost track of him (not hard to do looking after 24 babies at a time). Ducklings can swim and feed themselves immediately upon hatching, but they have little sense of direction on their own, and have to be herded and tended to keep predators away. A duckling this tiny would be a tender morsel for a crow. My hope is that he or she found a new flock or clutch or whatever you call those darting swarms of golden fluffballs in the lake. If Bosley can make it with a flock of mallards (I deal with Bosley in another post), maybe this teeny one can rejoin the duck race.
In a dark room, I can sometimes see these four white paws walking along with no cat attached to them. Or so it seems. When he lies down, Bentley's paws form a neat pile, white with pink toes. Sometimes they look more like gloves. Actually, his paws are FIVE colours: pink, white, grey, brown and black. Talented cat - eh?
Beavers have been an ongoing concern - read, "plague" - on Lafarge Lake for many years now. This is a small lake in the centre of Coquitlam, a seething urban community which for some reason attracts all manner of wildlife. But beavers aren't particularly welcome here when all they do is chaw down every tree in the vicinity and chew up branches all over the place to make their twiggy, branchy lodges. I wasn't even sure what a beaver lodge looked like, until I saw this. I knew beavers had moved in, been relocated, and come back, many times already. There are even articles about it in the local papers. And it was obvious something was going on when I saw that wire mesh around the bottoms of most of the trees.
Then this! Proof positive that the Lafarge Lake beavers have made a triumphant return. It was actually pretty cool, and now I'm having fantasies of seeing a real beaver, which I never have in the wild before. (And I call myself a Canadian!) And a baby beaver - I think I'd die with joy. They're pretty secretive, and they must do most of their work during off hours, because dams and lodges seem to spring up overnight. But there is babymaking going on in there, make no mistake.
Deep inside the burrows of the nightmare (to the Park Board, which is getting sick of setting out humane traps and relocating beavers a few hundred miles away, only to have them come back in a month), we can see the inner workings of the lodge. It's cleverly constructed so that you can only access it from underwater. Unless you're the Park Board, carrying dynamite.
But they'd better not! WHO could blow up a baby beaver (also known as a kit)? You'd have to have a heart of cold, hard steel. For more information, see the aged but still relevant blog post below (which got over 6000 views when I first put it up! Still trying to figure that one out.)
