Monday morning inspiration...

Consider the honey badger...

(Language warning.)

"And that was when he discovered he had a special kinda way with animals."

"They just come right up to him like he was a natural part of the wilderness."



Have you been living free in harmony and majesty like we did back in the 1970s?

***

Charles Sellier Jr., the man who created "The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams,” has died at the age of 67.

Loosely based on an actual person who escaped into the wilderness in 1853 after being accused of a murder he didn’t commit, Grizzly Adams is a bearded, barrel-chested man (played by Dan Haggerty) who counts among his friends raccoons, skunks, ferrets, deer, coyotes, porcupines, an eagle and, of course, the abandoned grizzly bear cub who matures into a powerful companion named Ben.

ADDED: Did you have the same question I had?: Is Ben the same Ben as "Gentle Ben"? The answer is no: "there is no connection between the bears."



Wow! The 60s were so different from the 70s. The 60s had a lot of 50s in them, and the 70s had a lot of 60s, but not the part of the 60s that was leftover from the 50s. If you're not old like me, maybe those distinctions sound meaningless, but if you are, I bet you know exactly what I mean.

Leopard vs. crocodile.

"It just doesn't make sense. The meat you get out of a crocodile is just not worth the risk it takes a predator to acquire.... I drove away, elated in disbelief. It may have been the most amazing thing I've ever seen."

"For only the second time in Wisconsin state history, no one was killed during gun deer season..."

"... except for deer."

"Before we set up a watch in my village of Little Melton, about 90 per cent of toads were being squashed to death at our crossings."

"Now it's down to about 10 per cent.... On a warm, wet night they can all come out at once... I was the only person scheduled to patrol that night, and there I was frantically trying to place as many as possible in the bucket to take to the pond, while phoning for patrol reinforcements and trying not to tread on any toads myself."

Toad patrol, in England, home of Toad of Toad Hall.



ADDED: From pre-Althouse+Meade days:

Meade said...
Great buzz!

Maguro said...
Ugh...hate those $#%^*! Japanese Beetles!

Meade said...
Here, Maguro, I feed them to a toad.

Ann Althouse said...
That toad video is fascinating. I watched it 3 times. The speed is amusing, as is the subtly satisfied look on the toad's face. He's not that pleased. But he's pleased. You can tell.

Meade said...
Yes, Japanese Beetles are $#%^ers. They devour roses. No roses, no hortporn. No hortporn, and all I'm left with is my monochromatic imagination. That toad has become so addicted to Japanese Beetles, he waits at the greenhouse door every morning for me to bring him his fix. Every day he leaves a toad turd the size of your pinky finger with recognizable Japanese Beetle exoskeletons in them. I feed the turds to the roses and the cycle is oh so satisfyingly complete....

AND: Later, Althouse and Meade, having found each other, go searching for something — it was morels — and find a toad.

Shrimp attack!

"Killer shrimp assault British shrimp, threaten ecosystem."

The Brit shrimps need to man up.

A Saturday ride on the Military Ridge Trail.

We began in Blue Mounds:



We got all the way to Ridgeway, 10 miles down:



And headed back:



To make a 20-mile ride...



... which seemed about right.

What made it especially nice? Llamas...



... and, on return home, pizza, Meade-made:



So beautiful!

"All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions."

"In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it."

The hostage-takers manifesto.

ADDED: The guy seems pretty clearly crazy, and I hope no one dies and he gets the help he needs, because this manifesto — PDF —  is hilarious, but if anyone dies, it might be wrong to laugh.

Saving the environment and the remaning species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.

Of course, the Squirrels. That's such a childish list of animals, and not just because of "Froggies." These are the animals in a children's picture book or Noah's Ark toy.

The humans? The planet does not need humans. You MUST KNOW the human population is behind all the pollution and problems in the world....

I disagree. Around my city, geese are crapping everything up. I notice that no birds got on Lee's list of favored creatures.

These are the demands and sayings of Lee.

How religion-y, and yet he hates religion:

Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! 

He hates everything that human beings have produced. It's all filth. Even the ideas. He gets his ideas from a gorilla:

The Discovery Channel and it's affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other's inventive ideas.

Here's the book. A gorilla tells us what to do. Example from the pages cited:

We could pension off our teachers, close schools, and open up the city to our children. Let them learn anything they want. We could take that risk....

Quinn has been hyped by Oprah Winfrey: Here's an Oprah interview with  Quinn:

WINFREY: You say that y--hundreds of years from now, children will look back on our society and call us monsters. Why?

Mr. QUINN: I think so. Yeah, because we're g--we're--we continue to take and take and take and consume and consume and consume everything in sight. And in 100 years, if--if there are still people around to think about it, we're going to look back and say, `My God, these were terribly greedy people. What kind of people were they? They were hard to understand, who had no thought for us, for the future of--of the human race.'

WINFREY: How are we monsters? In what ways are we devouring the world?...

ADDED: The man was killed. The hostages all survived.

[T]he suspect had "metalic canisters" strapped to his chest and back. When Lee was struck by police bullets, one of the canisters "popped." Police have not confirmed if the canisters were a bomb, but Manger said the "device may have gone off" when he was shot.

Aw, come on now, you can't expect me to follow this sign.

Don't you realize how much a blogger loves lynx?

That squirrel-beer reminds me of a cigarette dispenser my grandfather had.

Ah! Yes! Like this:

"What Pets Can Teach Us About Marriage."

I will not click on that link no matter how long it lingers on the "Most Popular" list on the NYT website. No no no. I see what they are doing, and I'm interested that so many people are so easily played by that title, but I will not go there. I resist!

UPDATE: Uh oh! Looks like somebody could have used a little NYT advice:

Even the Dog Whisperer couldn't talk, demand or otherwise coax his way out of this one.

Cesar Millan's wife, Ilusion, filed for divorce Friday after 16 years of marriage, citing irreconcilable differences as the reason....

"The River of Crawling Death." "Red Tide of Death." "Mad Monkeys Manned the Life Boats." "Flying Rodents Ripped My Flesh." "Chewed to Bits by Giant Turtles."

Let's read vintage men's magazines.

I love the artwork!



And this one reminds me that Meade and I need to go out for a walk:

Oh!

"It doesn't matter what an animal does, or where it does it, it will be deemed fair game for the documentary."

"Human notions of privacy which rest on ideas of location or activity are ignored in terms of animals."

An academic agonizes.

Imagine the roles reversed. The animals somehow take over and they are making David Attenborough-style videos about human beings.... Well, picture this, but with people:

"Are zoophiles attracted only to sexually mature animals — and if not, does this make them 'zoopedophiles'?"

"Do zoophiles find particular members of their preferred species more 'attractive' than other individuals from those species, and, if so, are they seduced by standard beauty cues, such as facial symmetry in horses? What is the percentage of homosexual zoophiles (those who prefer animal partners of the same sex) over heterosexual zoophiles?"

Questions, questions. I must say I've never thought about any of those questions before.

Animal dentistry.

How does a hippopotamus get its teeth cleaned? Zebra.

Long snow shadows and, in the distance, a golden glow.

In the garden, there were long shadows on the melting snow...



... the golden pavilion glowed in the setting sun...



... and I got distracted by the birch tree that a beaver had reduced to a stump....

"Are you guys really out here to get me into trouble?"

A very sympathetic presentation — in the L.A. Times — of a man who is found guilty of violating the Endangered Species Act. Jerry Snapp had a "Cabinet of Curiosities" that he displayed at various renaissance fairs and craft shows. He acquired the carcass of an Asian elephant that had been born in Thailand and shipped to the U.S. in 1966 (before the enactment of the ESA) and that lived out its life in zoos.

Snapp paid cash, and a forklift dropped the box onto the truck. Once home in Riverside, he found a corner of his property sheltered from the breeze and added dermestid beetles. Soon he could hear them chewing away, a sound like a child eating Cheetos.

It took two years, and when the beetles were done, Snapp washed the skull with peroxide, named her Tiffany -- the glittery name from a tiara that he had saved from a Halloween costume -- and put her on display.

But, years later, when he tried to sell it across state lines, it was a violation of the ESA.

In the end, [the government agent] wasn't concerned that it had come from the zoo. That it was on the market was enough. It fueled an appetite for endangered species, and his job -- indeed, the government's job -- was to stop the trade of illegal wildlife products in the United States.

And that's the key: stopping the trade to protect the animals. Snapp was only successfully prosecuted because the government was able to convince a jury that "Snapp knew that selling the skull across state lines was illegal and ... he was a regular in the trade."

He may have broken the letter of the law, but as he saw it, he hadn't endangered any species by trying to sell the skull. He saw himself as no different from piano manufacturers who ship antique ivory keys around the country....

Of course, legally, it's not a question of how he sees it. The ESA contains the penalties the government saw fit to enact. Apparently, the theory is that the market in animal body parts endangers the animals that are still alive. A man can convince himself that what he wants to do isn't really the problem that led the government to pass the law, but that doesn't entitle him to do the things that the law proscribes.

I have an idea: Sweater Christmas!

Let's buy Christmas (and Hanukkah) presents. Why not agree amongst your loved ones that everyone will buy a particular type of present? For example: Everyone buys everyone a sweater...



... or a scarf. Have Sweater Christmas. Or Scarf Christmas. Or Sweater/Scarf/Gloves Christmas. It would be so much simpler and nicely reciprocal. And if people are traveling by plane, it will be easy to slip these things into the suitcases and nothing's going to get broken.

Or do you think you need to be more creative? If so, I have a suggestion! It's The Hoof Candle, from D.L. & Co.:

$150.00!

Aunus, the roman version of pan, is the companion of the nymphs and god of shepherds and flocks. His lower half being that of a goat represents our barbaric nature or beastial side of our humanity: indulgence and celebration. The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans often designed their furniture with the legs of beasts, this grounded the pieces to the earth and paid homage to the animal nature in all humans. D.L. & Co.'s Effigy Wax Sculptures are exquisite, exceptional works of art, each a timeless treasure to appreciate and admire. Due to the non-linear shape of the sculpture, the wick does not run from the top to the base.

Aunus, my ass. Sweater Christmas, okay? That will serve my "beastial" nature quite well enough.

IN THE COMMENTS: The comments are off to a great start, with Pogo:

I'm gonna have an Ambien n' golf club Xmas.

Hold the Escalade.

And Wardwood, "Sweater and animal":

8,000+ words on Elizabeth Weil's marriage.

In the NYT Magazine. Seriously, I did not see the value of all this. Help me out. I agreed to talk about it on a Bloggingheads episode, to be recorded in a few hours, and I cannot figure out what is interesting here... aside from the fact that the husband's cooking obsession entails the use of very expensive ingredients. There were those "Taoists Thrusts" for the "Multi-Orgasmic Couple," which were mainly about visualizing one kind of animal or another burrowing into some sort of hole, but really, I found nothing to justify all this blather about one couple. And this is a condensation from a memoir. There's nothing even wrong with Dan. He works out. He cooks.

He was now reading Soviet-era weight-training manuals in order to transform his 41-year-old body into that of a Marine....

On a ho-hum weeknight Dan might make me pan-roasted salmon with truffled polenta in a Madeira shallot reduction.

She's vaguely dissatisfied with the man even as she feeds us the stuff of envy. Yes, your man is very muscular and he feeds you delicious food and you feed me 8,000 words.