Welcome to Snark Week 2018!

By: | July 23, 2018

It’s been another year full of terror and destruction and to celebrate everything that makes us afraid, the Discovery Channel is hosting its annual fear fest, called Shark Week. But we at LWON have always felt that fear of sharks is just a cheap and easy way to tickle our amygdalae. And while we may be cheap, we are anything but easy. So we have come up with a full week of posts about animals that you really should be afraid of. They might seem cute and fluffy on the outside but at their worst, they are the stuff of nightmares.

And at their best they are the stuff of those weird dreams that seem really vivid but make no sense once you wake up.

 

 

Can’t get enough Snark? Why not graze on the terrifying tales of Snark Weeks past:

Snark Week 2017, featuring abusive blackbirds, an immense, near-spherical raccoon, and the vile creature that will gnaw on your soul – and then poop on it.

Snark Week 2016, featuring testicle-eating assassins, chihuahua terrorists, and the animals so vile they come out of the womb with horns.

Snark Week 2015, featuring flesh-ripping alien fleas, bovine murderers, and the unfairly beloved animal whose terrifying extra neck vertebrae allows them to turn their terrifying neckheads 270 degrees.

Snark Week 2014, featuring squirrels hell bent on world domination, more feral roosters, and a furry virus that has spread across the United States to total devastation.

Snark Week 2013 – the very first! – featuring the ant that kills cows, the bird responsible for five deaths and $425 million in damages, and an animal so vicious he is known only as Little Red Bastard.

The Last Word

By: | July 21, 2018

July 16-20, 2018

“Inscrutable, argent agent of the crepuscular” — To what does Rebecca refer? Find out in the poem she wrote this week.

Guest Robin Mejia reminds us that child abduction by the state has a history, and in El Salvador the legacy has been an enduring solidarity among victims and the equally enduring struggle for reunification.

As if local newspapers weren’t in bad enough trouble, the new paper tariffs against Canada have caused newsprint prices to explode, forcing Christie’s local paper to move online.

Before you start saying something crazy happened—and before it even has a chance to happen—decide on your base rate probabilities, says guest Julie Rehmeyer whose cat came back, the very same day.

What does the practice of counting sheep as a way to fall asleep have in common with the nursery rhyme Hickory, Dickory, Dock? I’ll tell you.

 

Image: Julie’s beautiful cat.

Guest Post: The Candi Cane Cooper Caper, or, The Mathematics of Dr. Dolittle

By: | July 19, 2018

A few weeks ago, I started a long-anticipated, summer-long camping trip, with my dog Frances, my cat Lao, and my husband John joining us part of the time. One evening, we were in our camper van in an enormous meadow filled with wildflowers overlooking the Sangre de Cristo mountains.

John had just rejoined us after a few days away, and Frances and I both went running out to greet him. Then John hopped in to the van to say hi to Lao, expecting him to come meowing. But there was no Lao.

I was immediately concerned: Lao loves to greet his daddy. We began whistling the Lao whistle around the van. Ordinarily he comes pretty quickly, often at a run. But no kitty appeared.

John didn’t say anything to blame me, but he asked an awful lot of questions as we looked. “When did you last see him? How far from the van did he go? How long did he stay out? Was Frances out too?” I couldn’t help but hear each question as really meaning, “Were you careful enough with him?” Lao was John’s cat when we met, and they were tight. Plus, John is generally more cautious about Lao being out than I am, checking on him more frequently. And the truth was that I’d been pretty absorbed in my work that afternoon.

Guilt seemed to coagulate into molasses in my brain, clogging my synapses. All I wanted to do was cry, but I tried to prod my brain back into action. What could have happened? A car might have hit him, but then we would have found his body. And it was such a big, open meadow — would a predator really have ventured out to get him in the middle of the day, with Frances around to boot? Maybe it had been a raptor — but didn’t they mostly hunt in the evening?

After three or four hours of looking for Lao, it got dark. John is the most optimistic person I know, but he was sitting in his car, alone, his head in his hands. “I think he’s gone,” he said.

 

Later, we sat in the van in misery together. It felt just awful to do nothing, especially looking at John’s crumpled face. But we were both worn out, and we’d already looked everywhere we could imagine. Then an idea occurred to me, a weird one: What about calling an animal communicator? Continue reading →

Support Democracy, Subscribe to Your Local Paper

By: | July 18, 2018

For as long as I could read, I have started my day with the morning newspaper. I’ve had a subscription to a printed daily newspaper, and oftentimes two, for all of my adult life. It was a sad day at my house when the Denver Post stopped delivering to our part of Western Colorado in 2009, leaving us with only one daily paper, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. (We also subscribe to an even more local weekly paper.)

And now, life as I know it is ending. Over the weekend, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel announced that it will cease publishing a printed paper on Mondays and Tuesdays. The Sentinel will still put out a paper on those days, but it will be availably only electronically.

I’m crushed. It’s not that I can’t read papers electronically; I already do that with national papers. Instead, it’s the thought of beginning my day without a newspaper spread across my breakfast table that gets to me. The physicality of the paper is an important part of the experience. As I wrote here previously,

A story in newsprint has a genuine quality to it — a paper’s signature columns and font make the words seem weighty and bona fide. It exists in the physical world, not just the cloud. A newspaper clipping can survive 100 years inside someone’s desk drawer or a shoebox in the attic, but the fate of our digital files seems less certain. Not so many years ago, someone advised me to back up my digital files on floppy disks and put them in a safety deposit box. Today, I would have a hard time accessing such files, but I can still read newspaper stories my mother clipped decades ago.

But what I mourn about newspapers is more than just their visceral pleasure. It’s the sense that I’m holding in my hands the news of record — the same accounting of events that my neighbors and friends are reading too. We may not always agree with the newspaper’s decisions about what to cover or how, but our sense of what’s happening in our community begins at a common place, one that attempts to provide an objective report. Of course you can also get this by reading the paper online, but on the internet you have more opportunities to seek out stories you want to read and skip the ones that are boring but important.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: This Isn’t the First Time Central American Children Have Been Taken Away

By: | July 17, 2018

On November 14, 2017, about 25 women gathered in a large white community center in Morazon, a remote district in eastern El Salvador along the country’s border with Honduras. The meeting was in second floor room with a polished wood ceiling and windows overlooking tiled roofs and trees, some full of flowers. The women sat in plastic and metal chairs ringing three of the room’s four walls.  Most were middle-aged, wearing skirts and sandals. Their faces showed the strength and the wear that’s the norm for their generation in rural El Salvador.

It was a beautiful day. Some of the older women had brought daughters and granddaughters; some of the second generation were there on their own. But all of them were missing something. All of them had had a child taken by their government during El Salvador’s civil war in the eighties.  Many of these disappearances remained unsolved more than two decades later.

In adult disappearances, urban intellectuals or opposition members were taken by authorities and never heard from again. The child disappearances were different. The military took children from poor families in rural rebel-controlled regions with less regard to individual identities, in a conflict where entire communities in rebel controlled regions were considered the enemy. And most of the children were kept alive. Some grew up in orphanages. Some were kept by the forces that took them—“given to general’s wives to raise.” And some adopted by couples in the US and Europe who were told they were saving war orphans.

Continue reading →

To My Companion Who Has Faithfully Returned

By: | July 16, 2018

Curve of silver,

Scythe becoming,

Calends pass as you appear

Bowing toward Venus.

The evening star gleams just beyond your embrace,

And you curtsy to it, reaching

Like a dancer, arms outstretched and back bent, arching

While Jupiter, behind, tries to catch you

And in a few nights, will succeed.

 

Twilight sky full of blinks,

Innumerable glitterings,

Firefly, Star, Satellite, Jet

And you, oddly different —

Not quite dominant,

But ascendant,

Inscrutable, argent agent of the crepuscular,

That moon, which the sky never saw even in dreams, has returned.*

 

*After Rumi, Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi
Photo credit: Top, NASA Scientific Visualization Studio; Middle, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata, via Twitter

The Last Word

By: | July 14, 2018

A green Adirondack chair with a pillow, with grass growing in front of it.July 9 – 13, 2018

“Leaf hoppers, previously unnoticeable, now erupt in little clouds as one moves through the grass. There are definitely more butterflies. Neighborhood cats delight in stalking through our miniature veldt, like tortoiseshell lions.” Through neglect, Emma makes herself a little paradise.

Cameron worries about the missing California clouds. In the skies above southern California, summer cloud cover has decreased by 25 to 50 percent since the 1970s. Less cloud cover means lower moisture—and less moisture ramps up fire risk.

Exercise is supposed to be Cassie’s reprieve from the writing process: the frustration, the self-doubt, the second-guessing, the feelings of worthlessness. Yet somehow her kettlebell instructor has taken exercise and imbued it with the very worst parts of the writing process: the frustration, the self-doubt, the second-guessing, the feelings of worthlessness.

What do you do with yourself when you break up with Facebook? Helen posts status updates to herself, and now to us at LWON.

Erik says it’s hard to argue that a strong, hairy, large-browed protohuman wouldn’t take one look at a modern human and burst out laughing. The problem is our “neoteny”: to some extent, we are animals that never truly reach adulthood but rather become a sort of giant breeding baby. All of humanity as one big overgrown baby. You know what? In light of the past two years, it’s as good an explanation as any. 

Cloud Cover

By: | July 13, 2018

When I turned on my phone over the weekend after a blissful week without cell service, I got an increasingly alarming series of messages from friends at home.

A fire broke out near where I’m dogsitting

If I get evacuated can I bring the dogs

I am going to text your mom

I’m evacuating my brother

I took a little comfort in the last message in one group text, from a neighbor to someone who needed a place to stay: There’s a key under the mat. And later, when I found out that the fire was contained with no injuries reported, and a small crew of evacuees had found each other safe at our empty house, I felt even better. But like my cell phone, I was plunged back into reality: it’s fire season again.

This fire ignited and spread during the combination of a 100+ degree day and strong Santa Ana winds. Elsewhere in southern California, more fires burned in the mountains and near the beaches. Farther north, friends drove past flames on both sides of the interstate as they crossed from Oregon to California, coming home.

Many factors contribute to fires, from temperature to wind to the length and timing of the rainy season. And according to a paper this spring in Geophysical Research Letters, the risk of fire could be increasing when we’re missing a key ingredient of Southern California summer weather: clouds.

Clouds have usually been a defining factor of summer here. I’m a relative newcomer, but I quickly got into the summertime weather conversations that revolve around May Gray, June Gloom, and occasionally No-Sky July and Fogust. (A little further north, Karl the Fog has a lovely twitter account if you’d like to hear about socked-in San Francisco, from a fog’s-eye view.)

But as the researchers looked at the skies above southern California, they saw that summer cloud cover has decreased by 25 to 50 percent since the 1970s. They looked at hourly records of the skies collected by California airports, finding that the cloud base has risen, lifting the gloom between 150 and 300 feet. When the team combined these records with vegetation moisture data from the U.S. Wildland Fire Assessment System, they learned that less cloud cover meant lower moisture in the hills around Los Angeles—and less moisture ramps up fire risk.

Southern California’s cities are part of the problem. The concrete jungle soaks up the sun’s rays and radiates the heat better than a Baywatch lifeguard. This heat burns off the summer fog more quickly, earlier in the day. And in the autumns that followed clearer-skied summers, the region’s plants were drier.

Fire is complicated, though—our fires last fall came after drought-busting rains in many parts of the state, and were fueled by the added vegetation, not the cloudless skies of summer. But Park Williams, the lead researcher, has said that that absence of clouds can add to an already precarious fire picture.

Karl, don’t you want to head south for the summer?

*

Image by Sam Lavy via Flickr/Creative Commons license