Tag Archives: animals

Black Eye for Conventional Wisdom

Posted on May 29, 2012 by | 5 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Back when  I was a real smart cookie I knew all manner of things needed doing to straighten out this country and this world.  I used to sit around with others whom I allowed to be real smart cookies, too, telling one another how stupid everyone who disagreed with us.  They thought they were real smart cookies, too, which proved how stupid they were.

During that general time period Their Majesties, Gerald Ford, then Jimmy Carter, were telling us we needed to turn down the thermostats, drive slower, become energy independent as a nation.  Find alternatives to the conventional energy sources.  I think my group of real smart cookies agreed with this, though I don’t recall anyone liking it much.

But one thing we did agree on.  Nuclear energy needed to be developed and used a lot more than was happening at the time.  Seemed the only thing that might fill the bill until something else was developed.  Gradually we got so hardened in our opinions about it we made excuses and apologized anytime anything happened suggesting we might re-examine our opinions and debate points.

Along came Three Mile Island, and naturally we didn’t need to know much about it to agree among ourselves it was just a shrill scare thing.  Hanoi Jane Fonda came out with a movie named “The China Syndrome” and a lot of monkey wrenches got thrown into the mix, people opposed to more nuclear plants. 

Then that plant in the Ukraine went sour.  Spewed all manner of radioactive crap into the sky for a longish while.  We real smart cookies saw that as an indictment, not of nuclear power, but rather of Soviet technical, engineering and construction skills.  Another indictment of Communism.

Somewhere back there I quit thinking about all that, didn’t bother knowing so much about it as I became less smart with the years.  I sort of lost track of the whole issue, had no idea whether they were still building, not building, using, not using nuclear power plants.

About a year ago my friend, Rich, started telling me about a tsunami hit Japan, did all manner of damage.  Some included nukes on the Japanese coast.  I suppose I didn’t think a lot about it.  Just another disaster somewhere for people to tell one another about while they waited for the coffee to perk.

But Rich kept updating me and the Japan nuclear part of the tsunami and earthquake began swelling into something trying to rattle how smart I used to be.  Japan was letting a lot of ugly into the Pacific and into the sky.  “Man, they need to do something about that crap!” I declared to Rich.  “I feed my cats a lot of fish that might be coming out of the north Pacific.”

“Would you rather feed them fish out of the Gulf of Mexico?  Fish coming out of there are loaded with carcino-whatchallits from the emulsifiers they used from the BP oil spill.”

I thought about that a while and decided I didn’t need to track down an instrument to measure the gamma radiation in the cat food.  Trade a headache for an upset stomach, more-or-less.

But at least I don’t have to have all the answers anymore, don’t have to know what anyone ought to do about anything.  Takes a lot of weight off, me not having to do anything but concern myself about what to feed the cats and chickens.

Old Jules

 

5 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Country Life, Current Issues, Emergency Preparedness, Government, Politics, Science, Survival

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The 21st Century Through Mirror Sunglasses

Posted on May 28, 2012 by | 3 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

For six days this Australorp hen’s been sitting on a golf ball and two chalk eggs.  Every day I go out and rob the real eggs from under her, stroke her, talk to her, listen to her grumbles, whines, complaints, leaving that golf ball and the chalk eggs to give her something to hope for.

Highly-bred hens such as this one are somewhat similar to 21st Century human beings in some ways.  They’ve had almost all the instincts bred out of them in favor of, either producing a lot of chicken-meat in the least possible while, or producing as many eggs as their bodies allow.  Australorps hold the world record for the most eggs produced by a single hen during the span of a year.

The cost, from the perspective of the hen, is they’ve mostly lost the instincts required to cause them to go broody.  The instincts required to survive as a  species.  Same’s true of my Americauna hens.  Great layers, lousy instincts.

So I’m prone to have a warm place in my heart for a hen when she goes broody, even though I don’t need any more chickens, don’t want any chicks.  It’s the mawkish sentimentality in me, I reckons.  I feel a lot of sympathy and tenderness for a hen trying her best to hatch clutch of eggs, even if the eggs are chalk and golf balls.

I try to simulate a pair of mirror sunglasses when I go out to lift her off the latest eggs, hers and those the other hens try to sneak in under her to give the species another microscopic shot at survival.

Those imaginary mirror sunglasses mightn’t be necessary to me to get through these final decades of my life, but they certainly make it easier to watch what’s going on around me.  Human beings sitting on golf balls and chalk eggs, allowing instincts to creep briefly into their behaviors occasionally, probably won’t hatch.  But it appeals to my mawkish sentimentality side and there’s no harm in it.

At least no harm that would be neutralized by me not indulging. 

A creature pays his money and takes his chances this lifetime.  Even if the creature’s a hen and the eggs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. 

Old Jules

3 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Human Behavior, Senior Citizens

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Cunning, Intelligence and Free Ranging Chickens

Posted on May 21, 2012 by | 15 comments

I don’t think this applies to caged chickens, but my experience with caged birds is limited.  All I can actually tell you is that free ranging chickens are some of the most cunning, cagy, calculating, communist creatures on the planet.

A free ranging hen can calculate to the second how long it takes my eyes to narrow, my jaw to clamp, pause listening, and spring out of my chair when I’m trying to do something on the comp and I hear a chicken on the porch.

A free ranging hen can judge almost to the inch how far and hard a person can throw a rock with any accuracy.  A free ranging hen can predict almost exactly how far and how fast a 70 year old man can run swinging a stick before he gives out.

A free ranging hen is able to predict within a few seconds how long and how loud it can cackle and raise hell just outside the window before it needs to start dodging rocks or running into the bushes.

A free ranging chicken recognizes a slingshot and knows the difference between a slingshot stretched as an empty threat, and a slingshot with just about a bellyfull of chicken games.

A free ranging chicken usually won’t eat ants unless it thinks a person would rather it didn’t, in which case it will.  The whole flock will stand on a red ant bed pecking, so long as the ants aren’t carrying off their feed to the ant bed.

A free ranging chicken will ignore hard cat food scattered around on the ground away from the porch, but it will sneak around trying to find some on the porch everytime it thinks a person’s in the middle of something needs concentration.

I subscribe to the philosophy the reason the chicken crossed the road was for practice.  Training dodging cars.  And motivated by some human being not wanting it to cross the road.  Try to get a chicken to cross the road and it’s going to stay home cackling under the window or crapping on the porch.

Old Jules

15 Comments

Posted in 2012, Animals, Chickens, Country Life, Free-ranging-chickens, Homesteading, Human Behavior, Nature, Poultry, Solitude, Texas

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Morning Gratitude Affirmations

Posted on May 17, 2012 by | 4 comments

A previous blog post from April 10, 2005

Hokay.  I try to think of five particularly communistic things going on in my life every morning, every evening, during the day, to find reasons for being grateful for.  It’s a ritual I try to practice constantly, but if I begin the day with it, it’s a lot easier to remember for the rest of the day.

Soooooo.

I’m going to let the numbers on the lottery draw last night be my first, even though it’s really easy.  Those numbers did good and I have a lot of good feeling about what hit last night.  It’s cheating, but I’m going to be grateful for that anyway.

Hokay.  Number two.  It snowed last night.  It’s April, everything was budded out, and it damned well snowed.  Maybe you think I’m not grateful, but I am.  If the frost gets those buds for a third time there ain’t going to be any apples, apricots, grapes, pecans, but there’s always another year, and we need the moisture, probably more than we need the fruit this year.  It’s been a long drought and the moisture deficit isn’t entirely made up, even with all the rain and snow this winter.  Yeah.  I’m grateful.  Yes, I am.  I can feel it, reluctant, squirming, fighting every inch of the way, but grateful is emerging.

Number 3.  Tres.  I’m grateful for these affirmations.  That’s an easy one too, cheating, but they’ve had an enormous influence on my life for the past decade, and sometimes I forget to be grateful for knowing how good they are for me.  And besides, it fills a slot, allowing me not to have to confide to you what some of the ‘really communist’ troubles I’m going to have to be grateful for before I get past these affirmations in my private mind, this morning.  But those are none of your business, so I’m going to try to keep this clean and well lighted.

Number 4.  Quatro.  Lessee.  A cat just took a dump on the rug over there across the room.  Knows better than that, but did it anyway.  It means, hopefully, that the cat was communicating to me the litter box is getting too full.  I’m grateful that cat reminded me of my neglect.  I haven’t cleaned it up, but when I do I will examine the stool and make certain the cat wasn’t telling me something else, something more important.  I’m grateful a cat will tell a person willing to listen what’s going on with it, what sort of health problems might be hidden there in that pea brain, wanting to come out but not knowing how.

Number 5:  Half an hour after daybreak and the wind’s coming back up outside.  I’m grateful for that wind, that howling and clattering of things loose on the porch, the rabid windchimes, the cold air whistling in around the old wooden frames of the windows.

Maybe you think I’m not grateful for that wind, but I am.  Here’s why.

Hmmmmm.  Hmmmmmm.  I am.  Just give me a minute here.

Ahhhh..  I’m grateful for that wind because it’s going to melt the snow quickly.  Maybe even soon enough to save the blossoms and buds.  Maybe that old wind will just evaporate enough of the snow, good old wind, temperature 37 degrees F, maybe it will have all that snow gone in no time at all and the new grapevines won’t lose their buds, the apples will be okay.

A lot of people mightn’t be grateful for that wind howling to blue blazes out there, me sipping my coffee here, typing, feeling the cold air on my bare ankles, but I am.  Yes, I am.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Adventure, Animals, Country Life, Human Behavior, Lottery, New Mexico, NM, Placitas, Spirituality

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No Limit to Benevolence

Posted on May 16, 2012 by | 11 comments

I’d just settled in for my afternoon nap when the phone rang.  Sheeze!

Radio announcer voice explained he was Dan Somebody-or-Other with the Police Benevolent Association fund raising.

“This number’s on the no-call list.  It’s illegal for you to call here.  Same as if you’re giving me a ticket for five miles over the speed limit.”

“Uh…”

“I paid a $35 fine for a burned-out license-tag bulb last time I had any dealings with your kind.  Think of that as my contribution.”

Spang hung up on me just when I was getting warmed up to ask to see his license and proof of insurance.

Meanwhile, went up atop the hill with my spyglass.  Counted 14 buzzards circling around the ranch house for the 4000-plus acre ranch half-a-mile to the north.  Widow lives there alone, but maybe she had grandkids visiting killed something last night.  The buzzards are swooping but not landing, maybe skittish because it’s so close to the house and barn.

No buzzards circling over toward Gale’s, the new neighbor’s place, or the CopShop Party Hunting Cabin.  Only other buzzards swooping are probably checking out a coon that was on the front porch a couple of nights ago, tore half-an-ear  off the invader cat.  I shot it through the window screen during a pause in the action and it flopped some, dropped a lot of blood on the porch.

But by the time I got my shoes on and went outdoors it was gone.  Looked around all over from hell-to-breakfast for it next day, but couldn’t locate it.

Buzzards think it’s under a clump of dead cedar 100 yards from the cabin.   Glad it didn’t die on the porch and dump all those fleas for the cats.

Built a humongous rock and brush dam I’m hoping will prove to function as though a beaver built it.  I’m a firm believer the only reason a beaver dam holds water is because nobody ever told it science don’t allow beaver dams to hold water.

Old Jules

11 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Country Life, Government, Human Behavior, Outdoors, Police, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Texas

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Nocturnal Target Practice? Poachers? Or Just Shooting a Prowler?

Posted on May 16, 2012 by | 3 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

1:55 am I must have been on the verge of awakening anyway.  Someone fired off six rounds from what might have been a .22 magnum rimfire pistol, rapid, but somewhat spaced.  Then a pause, maybe to reload, then a single shot.  Close enough and loud enough to get one of the roosters crowing and me considering the matter.

Then, 2:15 am, ten, maybe 13 rapid fire shots from a large-bore autoloading pistol.  Afterward, silence.

It’s none of my affair, but I’ll confess to lying there awake pondering it all.  Doesn’t make any sense at all.  That first six shots sounded aimed, maybe someone shooting a coon, hitting, but not getting a killing shot.  Reloading, issuing a coup d’grace. 

Okay.  But what about the second set of shots, thinks I.  Something didn’t die, or run away?  Someone crawling around amongst the ticks and rattlers looking for a target to shoot back at?

What the hell?

I don’t mean to be nit-picky and overly critical, but I’m thinking it might have been poachers who didn’t have a clue. 

Dammit, that isn’t the way you road-hunt deer.  You use a .22, spot it between the fences, drop it with one shot, get it into the trunk or back of the truck and get out of Dodge.  And you don’t road-hunt on a road where there’s only one way out [back the way you came], such as this one.

That’s all assuming it’s outsiders.  Anyone living around here hungry for deer meat would just knock one on the head with a hammer daytimes when they’re trying to run them out of the front yard.

Okay, poachers road-hunting seem unlikely.

On the other hand, those cops from Beaumont who rent the lease half-mile southeast of here were up there a few days ago.  Maybe they just got noisy-drunk again and had a firefight over one of their lady friends who sometimes squeal and go shrill after midnight.  That might make sense.

Or maybe the new neighbor was just trying out his night-vision on something moved in the bushes and the dog barked.

Hell, I don’t know.  Ain’t my affair.  I’ll keep an eye open for the vultures circling, anyway.

Old Jules

3 Comments

Posted in Adventure, America, Country Life, Human Behavior, Police, Texas

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Cacahuate Japones and Other Weirdness Among Townees

Posted on April 26, 2012 by | 11 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.  This is the real, honest-to-goodness, 2012, worn down to a small nub ‘me’ coming to you this morning from the Middle of Nowhere.

I’m a bit stiff and sore, slow getting moving this morning, so I’m stalling the inevitable by sharing a few bits and pieces of a reality that’s becoming decreasingly real.  The package above might save me a lot of words, say it more succinctly than anything I could contrive.  It’s no surprise those things ended up hanging on a rack in the Dollar Tree store.  Maybe the lousiest marketing strategy for a food item in the history of mankind.

Then there’s this:

I’m the sort of person who naturally does everything bumper stickers tell me I ought to do.  Keeps me following a straight and narrow path in one hell of a lot of mutually exclusive directions.   So when I saw all those blue plastic drink cups pushed into the chainlink fence across from one of the thrift stores in Kerrville, I immediately resolved myself to quit using AB, whatever the hell that is.  I figured it must be the latest recreational drug of choice.

I thought on it a lot driving back to the Middle of Nowhere, tried all manner of words beginning with A and B, certain there was something out there I needed to quit using.  Got on the Internet when I arrived home and did a Dogpile dot com search on AB Use.  Couldn’t find a damned smidgen about it.

But I swear to you, if I ever do find out what it is, I’m dropping it out of whatever it is I’m doing with it.

As for everything else, I’m having a fine old time devising and constructing a watershed management plan here the likes of which very few of me in my past lives have ever done.  I’m tackling that runoff water from rainfall if we ever get any, making it stand up on its hind legs and whinny, then behave itself.

I’ll probably post a few pics of some of it, though it’s just mainly a matter of persuading water to treat the thin soil here with more respect than it’s done in the past, explaining to it about how the damned cattle aren’t fighting over every blade of grass anymore.  Showing it the error of its ways.

Other major events around here worth mentioning won’t bowl you over more than that.  The invader cat’s decided to demand a lot of petting when he’s here, which pisses off all the other felines.  But he’s only here Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, nearly as I can figure.  There’s a ranch woman a mile or so to the west feeding him sometimes, Gale’s heard, and I always see him coming out of the woods to the east.  Makes a series of stops, I reckons, trying to keep everyone happy.

Then there’s the other project, the subtle energy investigation.  Major steps forward, lots of learning, mind openings, having to go back and recalculate a lot of areas because previous premature assumptions stopped me before they were thoroughly tested.  But the doors are opening more daily and the corridors behind them are narrowing.

Any day now I expect to have a lot better understanding of the mechanism.  But it’s clear it involves reflective light from unlikely celestial bodies, and evidently includes interactions between the axial tilts of various objects and that of the sun.  With complications resulting from Old Sol’s communistic notion he doesn’t have to spin at the same speed at his equator as he does in his other body parts.

That’s about all worth mentioning for the moment.  Thanks for the visit.

Old Jules

11 Comments

Posted in 2012, Animals, Astronomy, Human Behavior, Science, Solitude

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If You Can’t Trust an Oak, Who Can You Trust?

Posted on April 1, 2012 by | 4 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

The analogy between Robert E. Lee, Gettysburg and that oak is still nagging at me, but I doubt I’ll belabor this post with the troubling similarities between the two this morning.  Though I might.

Gale came down the morning after the Gettysburg event and we performed an after-action analysis of the damages, the implications, and ultimately the other oaks surrounding the cabin showing some level of potential for similarly Gettysburg-like thinking.  We concluded there’ll be several other trees coming down because they’re already losing bark, or obviously dead.  Others I’ll prune the larger branches on the cabin-side so’s the weight left will cause them to fall away from anything they can damage.  Hopefully.

Fact is, the leverage a few MPH of wind in the upper growth exerts a huge mechanical advantage and a person might be prone to over-confidence about the salubriousness of fooling with the weight and balance.

Somewhat the way Pickett trusted the judgement and wisdom of old Robert Lee until the pricetag of trusting was already paid.  Lee locked his mind in one direction and managed to blind himself to the obvious, and he said what Pickett wanted to hear. 

But I said I wouldn’t go there this morning, and I’m not going to go there just because old Pickett spent the rest of his life blaming Lee for allowing him to do exactly what he wanted most.

Even Meade, the Union commander, trusted Lee so much he was ready to abandon the superior ground, pull back his larger force, more guns, rather than mistrust Robert E. Lee, his opposing commander.  Meade’s officers voted to hold position, or there’d have been no Gettysburg.

But I said I wouldn’t go there this morning, and I’m not going to go there

A while back I was trusting the invader cat to be a pregnant female because it was pacing around meowing something awful.  Trusting it other times to be a female in heat for the same reason.  But I discovered around the same time I made the discovery about the oak, that the invader cat has a pair of jingle-bollocks.  I don’t know why the hell it’s meowing.  But I trust a pair of jingle-bollocks more-or-less completely when it comes to it.

A lot more than I’m ever going to trust an oak again.

Old Jules

Today on Ask Old Jules:  1940′s and 1950′s in the USA?

Old Jules, what were some of the social, political, and religious aspects of the 1940’s and 1950’s?

4 Comments

Posted in History, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Texas

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When Bad Things Happen to Good Megafauna

Posted on March 26, 2012 by | 10 comments

Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Old Sol and I continued our conversation from the previous morning yesterday.

“So.  You’re saying you think I need more diversity in my art?”

“I’m sure as hell not saying you need more ego.  You’ve got more than enough of that, what with your astrophysicists, Hopi Witch Doctors and Mayan-bean-counter buddies.”

“That was a hurtful thing to say.  What are you so irritated about this morning?”

“I’m not irritated.  Sometimes your bluster’s a bit tedious though.  You’re forever trying to take credit for everything that happens, whether you had anything to do with it or not.  But the most cataclysmic event, for instance, that’s happened since man has been around, you had nothing to do with.”

“Um.  You’re referring to the megafauna?”

“Yeah.  Millions of rhino, mammoth, hippos, sabre-tooth tigers all killed in the space of a few days.  Lots of them frozen fast enough to keep them from decaying much.  Carcasses stacked up like cord wood over half the planet.  If you’re able to do that, big fella, I say go for it.”

“I never said I did.  That wasn’t me.  We stars are mostly uniformists, gradualists, except for a few rare renegade exceptions.  We don’t go in for drama.”

“Okay.  I’ll buy that.  I envy you, though, getting to see all those giant beasties wiped out.”

“Yeah.  It was a sight to behold.  Just out of curiosity, what do you think happened?”

“It’s obvious what happened.  All a person has to do is discount everything he believes he knows already that would keep it from happening.  Then allow himself  to look at whatever options are left on the plate.  There aren’t many.”

“I’m about out of time.  But you’re admitting the reason nobody looks at the obvious isn’t my fault?”

“No.  I guess it isn’t.  They’re all lap-dancing to their own agendas.  Sometimes you end up as part of the agenda, is all.  I reckons.”

Old Jules

Today on Ask Old Jules:  Adopting an Illusion?

Old Jules, if you act like something for long enough, will you become like the illusion?  If you acted as a good moral, rule-abiding citizen, could you eventually adopt those beliefs and habits?

10 Comments

Posted in Animals, Astronomy, History, Human Behavior, Liars, Nature, Science, Solitude

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Commitment to Dogs That Won’t Hunt

Posted on March 23, 2012 by | 20 comments

Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Searching around in my mind as I drove to Kerrville yesterday I was trying to find something, almost anything, the word ‘we’ could be applied to that included all of humanity.  Not an easy task, despite most of the lofty notions humans have about themselves.

Intelligence and thinking came to mind, but didn’t survive even long-range scrutiny.  Whatever else we might be, human beings are only intelligent when compared to one another within a miniscule range of options.  Probably the least intelligent human being able to function is somewhat smarter than the next-best up for consideration in the animal kingdom.  And a few notches up on the yardstick, the smartest human being isn’t much more intelligent.  But there’s enough difference top-to-bottom to demolish the word ‘we’ when it comes to defining anything all humans have in common.

As for thinking, there’s just not a hell of a lot of it going on.  The overwhelming majority of humans are riding along on shock waves created by thinkings of an underwhelming few individuals.  Of the several billion humans on this planet there’s not more than a shot-glass full who could figure out how to manufacture a lead pencil.  Or, for that matter, a shot-glass.  Or build a fire without materials provided by some autopilot composite of individuals not-thinking somewhere else.

Pride held up a lot better, but as I turned it over examining all the nuances I found it was handcuffed to something else.  Commitment.  This species couldn’t have survived this long without it any more than a tribe of beavers could survive without the non-thinking commitment to building community dams.

And pride is the glue holding it together.  A necessary virtue to keep things moving, even though the commitments most frequently to dogs that don’t hunt, haven’t hunted for centuries, but nobody’s devoted enough thought to the matter to notice.

When I was a kid the adults used to say if a snapping turtle ever got a bite on you it wouldn’t turn loose until it thundered.  One of the places in this reality where the word ‘we’ can be applied to humanity is our commonality to that imaginary snapping turtle.  Commitments come along, sometimes the result of someone thinking something, sometimes just out of the blue, and ‘we’ lock our pride into it and don’t turn loose until it thunders.

When I began this post I intended it to examine human commitments to failed ideals and myths.  I planned to reflect on our often failing repeated attempts to commit ourselves to individuals, to political parties, to geographic boundaries.

But I’m going to have to save that for some future post. 

I was watching bumper stickers as I drove along considering all this.  Proud to be an American.  Proud to be a Texan.  Proud to be a Native Texan.

Presumably those declarations are a source of pride because of the effort and personal hardship involved in achieving them.  If pride had anything to do with personal achievement.  Or thinking.

Old Jules

Today on Ask Old Jules:  Views on Atheism?

Old Jules, what is your view on my religion? I’m an atheist.

 

20 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Communication, Current Issues, Education, History, Human Behavior, Solitude, Survival

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