Man Martin's Blog, page 117

Latest Developments re Chickens

I will admit to you that Nancy and I have had our problems with chickens.  All has not been smooth sailing on the chicken front.  We did have one pair of them for a long time, but recently, foxes - I presume - got our last two.  I will not even bother to calculate how many chickens have gone home to meet Jesus at Casa Martin.

Nancy was in Macon earlier this week, and got in touch with our chicken contact, who sold her three new ones, real beauties, who lay Grade-A large eggs.  Let it be said, that Nancy is fully one-hundred percent on-board with chicken ownership.  Apart from their tendency to poop on the patio deck - which problem has been fixed by installing a new chain-link fence - Nancy is devoted to the chickens, and is the first to say, the backyard isn't the same without them.

The question remains, how do we protect the birds.

I maintain that the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our birds, but in ourselves.  The foxes know where the chickens are now, so we have to be extra careful; I have been too lax in opening up the coop before sunrise and leaving it open after sunset.  I am of the theory that if I am careful not to let them out before broad daylight, and make sure to secure them before sunset, they will be right as rain. 

Nancy, however, has another scheme.  Our chicken contact has his coop electrified - he himself has suffered massive depredations at the hands of dogs, or paws, as the case may be.  The thing operates on solar power and gives a little jolt to any fox unwise enough to stick his nose in.

Nancy sent me a picture of the set-up with her cellphone.

Dear lord, are we really contemplating doing this ourselves?

I will keep you posted.

Do I Need You to Draw You a Picture?

[image error]This is not really the image I wanted, but I couldn't find the Tony the Tiger
 I was looking for.  But if you look closely, you'll see the bottom part
of the Morton Salt Girl on the container, who is spilling salt in the rain
just like the big Morton Salt Girl.  Does she sense the irony?
So Nancy and I got a new fancy-shmancy refrigerator.  Like any fancy-shmancy refrigeator, this one has an ice-maker and water-dispenser built into the door.  This one, however, has an added feature.  When you get water, an LED screen shows a computer simulation of water sloshing back and forth and the helpful legend, "water."  It also tells you the precise number of ounces you've poured.  When you get ice, the LED shows a simulated cascade of crushed ice.  These images, by the way, are not wholly convincing, nor are they meant to be: they are clearly computer-generated animations.

Why did GE see fit to install this LED panel?  Do they believe the experience of getting water or ice is enhanced by a graphic visualization?  

Now, this is perfectly harmless, but it's very curious.  I tried to express what I felt this meant to my friend Molly Bassett, but couldn't articulate it at the time.  I think this ties in somehow with the little decals you see on the back of minivans and such, with each family member, down to the dog and cat, represented by a smiley-faced stick figure.  Leaving aside certain practical questions - for example, if the dog gets killed by a Buick, do you have to go out and scrape his decal from the windshield? - what is the source of delight some people take in these decals.  Because, let's admit it, there is something pleasing and amusing about them, even to someone like me who never intends to get one.

Or here's another example, although admittedly rarer, probably because you can't just buy these in a store.  Sometimes you will see a mailbox which is a tiny replica of the house in front of which it sits.  A little voodoo mailbox, if you will, that the postman opens each day to put in bills and postcards.

I don't know if other nationalities besides Americans do this sort of thing, but I suspect they don't.  It would seem we like to have not only the thing itself, but an image of the thing.  We pour ourselves a glass of water, and enjoy the watching the sloshing - clearly simulated - of water on an LED screen.  We drive up to our nice house, and enjoy pulling mail from the doll-sized model, as if our mail lived in a house just like ours!  We load our charming family into our minivan - our daughter has a soccer game - and are pleased at the cartoon representation of ourselves on the back window, right down to our daughter's soccer uniform.

Is it that reality is insufficient for us and has to be supplemented somehow?  Or is it that reality is so rich that we celebrate it by representing it in these little totems?  Or is it something else?

The first commercial image that really gripped me was Tony the Tiger on the box of Frosted Flakes.  When I was a kid, Tony was pouring a bowlful from a box, on which Tony was pouring a bowlful, on which Tony was pouring a bowlful... and so on, if not ad infinitum, at least ad the-artist-got-sick-of-it.  (I have scoured the internet but can't find an image of that box anywhere.  Do I remember it correctly?  Did I really see it at all?)  That box fascinated me, and I would ponder that endless regression of Tonys.  It reminded of an experience standing between two mirrors, so that each mirror reflected not only me, but the reflection of me in the opposite mirror, and the reflection of the other mirror's reflection, and so on, this time ad infinitum indeed, for unlike a corporate cartoonist, light never loses its patience with endless duplication.

I think the LED panel, and the family decals, and the little voodoo-house mailbox are somehow traceable to that same phenomenon: the joy we have in our own reflection - I am pouring water, and the refrigerator mimics it.  The ultimate expression of this is to stand between two mirrors and look at our reflection looking at our reflection looking at our reflection in an infinite space.

Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me.

Shouldn't...?

Shouldn't this...



...be this?

...and shouldn't this...

...be this?

Cicadas in Heat

"You have very sensual mouth-parts."Late August, and the cicadas are in full swing.  In the late afternoon and early evening you can hear them way in the tops of the trees settling up their rattling roar like Evinrude motors.  Some people think the sound of cicadas is charming - it is not.  Crickets are charming, warblers and mockingbirds are charming.  Cicadas are just an out-and-out hullabaloo.  What a ruckus!  Still, I love it.  It is a joyous sound.

Nancy used to travel to Greenwood, Florida to run a training program, and the night bugs there were even louder.  It was a roar.  Harmless, but loud as hell.  Yankees, wide-eyed with apprehension, would come up to Nancy pleadingly and say, "Can't someone make them stop?"

If you've ever seen a cicada up close, they are somewhat alarming-looking bugs.  A big one is as long as your thumb and about twice as thick.  According to Wikipedia, they have prominent but not overlarge eyes.  This is the sort of clarity only Wikipedia can provide: never has it been so clear to me the distinction between prominent and overlarge.  The cicadas around here have bottle-green abdomens, with heavily-veined wings, and the requisite six legs sprouting from the thorax.

Growing up, we called them locusts, but they are not locusts.  As a kid, I would hunt for their empty husks on pine trees in late May or so.  The cicada larva would crawl out of the ground and emerge from its shell, which it would leave behind on a tree trunk.  A perfect little cicada, only hollow.  It wasn't until later in the summer they'd begin their roaring.

The reason they roar, of course, is because summer is ending, and they need to mate in the next month if they're going to mate at all.

You'd roar, too.

The cicadas do not roar for us; they roar for one another.  "I love your prominent but not overlarge eyes," says the sweet-talking cicada, or "You have very sensual mouth-parts," or, if they're especially daring, "Oh, larva!" (Cicadas say, "Oh, larva!" the way humans say, "Oh, baby!")  "Oh, larva!  Those legs go all the way up to the thorax!"

The song you hear is the song of cicadas making sweet, sweet bug love, and it is the reason we will get to hear the same song next year.

Roar while you can, cicadas.

Lucid Dreams

A lucid dream, in case you don't know, is a dream when you know you're dreaming.  I have maybe four lucid dreams a year - at least dreams that I remember the next morning.  If you've never had a lucid dream, you might think it's way cool, and it kind of sort of is, but mostly it's either frustrating or disappointing.

Last night for example, I dreamt I was hanging out with some chickens, and suddenly I realized I was dreaming.  "Say, I'm in a dream," I told myself, "what will I do?  I know, I'll fly!"  (Every time I'm in a lucid dream I decide to fly.  I really need to think of something more interesting.)  So anyway, bammo, I think, I'll fly, and the next thing you know, there I am flying.

It's not as cool as it sounds.

Basically I just floated into the air and looked down on the chickens.  The chickens, by the way, were completely unimpressed even though I was flying way better than any chicken could, and I wasn't even flapping my arms.

This is the whole flaw with lucid dreams - at least in my experience: you can do anything you want, but you can't make anyone or anything else cooperate with you.  

Another lucid dream I decided I'd fly around the city at night like Superman fighting crime and stuff.  Only once I got up in the air, I couldn't see anything.  I was flying around in the dark.  I mean, I was perfectly safe, it was only a dream, but I couldn't see a thing.  I guess I could've given myself super-x-ray-vision, but then I'd have had to imagine flying, having super-x-ray-vision, seeing into buildings and junk, and someone committing a crime.  It was all just too much work.  When I sleep, I want to relax.

Sometimes lucid dreams aren't just a let-down but actively 
exasperating.  

One time I was aware I had to get up extra-early to get to an appointment out of town somewhere.  So I get out of bed in the morning and I'm getting dressed, when all of a sudden, I realize I'm dreaming.  I'm not getting up and getting dressed because I'm dreaming about getting up and getting dressed.  Then I open my eyes, and I'm lying in bed.  And I get out and start to get dressed.  But then I realize, I'm still dreaming.  By this time, I'm in a tizzy; I can't get out of this dream-loop, and I'm scared I'm going to oversleep for real and miss my appointment.  So I begin shouting to myself, "Wake up!  Wake up!" only you know how it is in a dream, I wasn't really making any noise.  It was like shouting into a paper cup or being underwater.  The real-life me was just lying in bed making a soft nasal honk like an anesthetized seal.  I did finally get up and keep my appointment, but the dream had left me rattled.

"If I had a lucid dream," you're thinking, "I know what I'd dream about!  Rrrow!"  Well, I tried that, too, and it doesn't work.  I can conjure up some vague fantasy woman - a little like Dolly Parton, only made of vinyl, and come to think of it, I'm not sure Dolly Parton isn't made of vinyl at that.  But then we just sort of stand there looking at each other, waiting for something to happen.  And the fantasy-vinyl-Dolly-Parton figure is like, "Well, make me do something.  This is your dream."  It's like she's perfectly cooperative but at the same time sort of uncooperative.  Like not just her skin, but her personality was made of vinyl.  It's hard to explain, but in the meantime it's a tremendous amount of performance anxiety, because I'm not just responsible for my performance, but hers.  And the possibility of a menage a trois is just too terrible to contemplate.

The bottom line is, lucid dreams aren't all they're cracked up to be because in a dream, it's so hard to make things happen.  Whether it's getting to an appointment, fighting crime, or just enjoying some physical affection, the place to make things happen is in your waking life.  In your dreams, you're better off just lying back and letting things happen to you.

Why Won't Kim Kardashian Leave Me Alone

The time has come, and the time is now.  Kim Kardashian, will you please just leave me alone.
Every morning, when I log in, there's another picture of you.  Sometimes the commentary is "Bold fashion statement," sometimes, "Fashion blunder," but the one unchanging aspect is you.

Clearly you have developed an unhealthy fixation on me.

And it's got to stop.

Face it, Kim, I'm no good for you.  I would only bring you trouble.  You need to forget about me and move on.  Find someone your own age who shares your interests.  I don't even know what your interests are, that's how little your interests interest me.  Am I getting though to you, Kim?

Maybe you should seek counseling.

Believe me, plenty of other women have gotten over me.  Most in fact, never got on me in the first place.
Move on, Kim, move on.

Don't make me get a restraining order.

The Menace of Okra

Our garden has done quite nicely this year.  Don't expect us to give you any vegetables, of course, we intend to eat them all by ourselves.  Our goal is to grow enough to preserve and put up for the winter like farm folks.

Anyway, the problem is that our produce really starts to peak, just when I've returned to school.  This means I don't have time to go out and pick the stuff as it ripens.  This is a shame when it comes to tomatoes, because they can spoil on the vine.  I'll come out and see Better Boys hanging in limp shreds like an exploded red balloon.  This is bad enough, but the real problem is the other vegetables.  You see, they just keep growing.  And growing.  I've let eggplant get nearly as big as soccer balls because I wasn't ready to pick them.  I've seen zucchini squash and cucumbers that would give you nightmares.  

But the real terror is our okra.

Okra is a wonderful plant to grow.  It shoots up in late summer, and produces these beautiful yellow flowers with lavender centers.  Then, almost overnight, the flowers turn into pods.  And the pods grow.  Quickly.

If you don't catch it in time, it will turn from a tasty little fingerling of a pod, to something that looks like a tyrannosaur's toenail, and that is just about as tough.  Trying to cut up one of these monsters for okra and tomatoes is like sawing through a small log.

Yesterday, I didn't go into the garden because I got home late and then went running.  The day before I didn't because Nancy and I had to pick out a new refrigerator.  Did I go the day before that?  I don't remember.  In the meantime we had a couple of good rains, followed by warm sunny days.  Lord only knows what the okra has been doing.

I don't know if I'll go out today either.

I'm afraid to. 

New Fridge

In the artist's recreation, I seem to be staring at Nancy's knees.
I am actually looking at the refrigerator.So the other night Nancy and I bought a new refrigerator.

This was not nearly as much fun as it sounds.

We discovered the old one had given up the ghost Sunday night when all our ice cream had turned to soup.

Nancy sent me an email Tuesday at work.  The repairman's diagnosis was the compressor was shot and could not be repaired.

Damn.

There is no point complaining because things inevitably wear out, break down, and must be replaced, but here's a blog doing exactly that.  It was a migraine-inducing hassle combing through the welter of models and styles on Consumer Reports: what made it more confusing was none of our sources agreed with each other: the models our repairman panned were the models Consumer Reports touted, and the models Consumer Reports liked were panned in customer reviews.  What's a prudent shopper to do?

So we went to Lowes and with the help of an avuncular white-haired salesman, who reminded me a little of the grandfather on The Real McCoys, we selected a model which will be delivered sometime this evening.

Now here's the thing.

As lousy as the whole experience was, it wasn't really that lousy.  Afterwards, I felt good.  Please Lord, forgive me for sentimentality, but this is the straight truth - I was so grateful Nancy and I were doing it together.  You should've seen us on the sales-floor: earnestly comparing features and prices - the design of the ice-maker, the depth of the drawers.  What I was really saying when I pointed out the superior control panel on the GE Model was, "I love you, Nancy, and I want the refrigerator we share to be the best one we can get."  When Nancy showed how well the racks were built on the Maytag, she was telling me, "You are important in my life, and so this refrigerator is important, too."

Even our grandfatherly salesman got into the act, when he offered us a free five-year maintenance plan, he was saying, "You are such a sweet couple, I want to help you any way I can."

Okay, that last part was just the salesman doing his job, but it felt like affection.

This may sound stupid and over-the-top, but I swear to you it is true.  As Nancy and I went to the check-out, she reached back to hold my hand.  Oh, my darling, my own.

I know, I know, you think this is corny bullshit, but it is true nevertheless.  Let the wise among you understand; the dullest, most mundane, unpleasantest domestic chores can be made to glow with an inner light if there is a loved one to share them.  Quit snickering back there, I'm serious.  Think about it.  What purchase could be more intimate, more personal than buying a refrigerator?  Unless maybe it was buying a new mattress.

By the way, pretty soon we'll need to buy a new mattress.

Damn.

Consider the Pangolin

Artist's Conception of a Pangolin.
It was easy to draw
until I started working on the dang scales.A pangolin, in case you didn't know, is a long scaly mammal that looks something like an artichoke.  It's covered from snout to tip of tail in lumpy scales made of keratin, which is the same material alligator scales are made of, but before you get all oogy, it's also what toenails are made of, so it's not really that big a deal.  If you think an armadillo is peculiar-looking, it's got nothing on a pangolin.  If you want to get a look at a living pangolin, you need to act quickly, because they may be extinct in a few years.

The pangolin's name comes from a Malay word meaning something like, "thing that rolls up."  This is pretty apt, because when it's under threat, it can roll itself into a little armored ball.  This strategy has served it well for millions of years - a lion or a hyena or whatever would see a pangolin rolled in a ball and say, "Darn, an armored ball.  Now I'll have to go elsewhere."  But a human sees it, and says, "Cool, an armored ball.  I wonder if it's good to eat.  It probably cures impotence."

That's the way it is with humans.  We see something strange-looking and figure right away it must've been put on earth to help us get erections.  Other animals do not think this way.

This sucks for pangolins.

Pangolins are mostly nocturnal and eat insects.  They are shy and inoffensive.  They only meet in order to mate, and they only mate about once a year.  They are some of nature's introverts, which you would pretty much guess by the fact they roll up into armored balls.  It's digging claws on its front feet make it hard to walk, so it keeps its front feet curled up as it walks.  If you wonder why you never see a pangolin running, that would explain it.

The pangolin is a protected species, but that does about as much good as rolling up into a little ball.  Restaurants in Gabon proudly put pangolin right on the menu and it is surprising popular.  The owner of one restaurant says, It's expensive, but it's one of the best meats," said Didine, the owner. "We cook it in a broth and you have to let it simmer for a long time otherwise it's too tough."  Note to owner: anything so tough you have to simmer for a long time in a broth is not a good meat.  If it tastes good afterward, it's because broth tastes good.  Good meat - say, a filet mignon - does not need to be simmered in broth.  Shoe leather needs to be simmered in broth.

But you can't tell that to the Gabonese.  Just like you can't tell the Chinese that pangolin scales have no aphrodisiacal qualities.  If you want an erection, go get you some Cialis, if pangolin scales were an aphrodisiac, you'd expect there to be a lot more pangolins.  But some people just won't listen.  In Bejing there's a high demand for pangolin scales.  The rest of the meat they throw away.

You'd think if pangolin was such a great aphrodisiac and it was one of the "best meats," someone would just raise pangolins on a farm, the way we do pork chops.  But you know how it is.  Some people won't settle for anything less than free-range, wild-caught pangolin.

It is a sad world for pangolins.  They only want to be left alone to eat insects with their long sticky tongues, mate once a year, and sleep all day rolled up into little balls.  It is bad enough going extinct because of your own stupidity, without going extinct because of someone else's.

Our Children's Children

His wife will say,
"Bob seems different somehow."Let's face it, my generation, the generation of old farts near death, have made a lot of mistakes, and it's up to us to correct them: a government in the grip of special interests, an out-of-control deficit, global warming.  We've got to straighten things out before it's too late if we want our children to thrive and survive, and - God willing - have children of their own.  And maybe one day, their children will have children.  But not if us old farts just sit around twiddling our thumbs.

Imagine, someday, our grand kids or great-grand will encounter an alien life-form.  It'll be these pods, that'll look like harmless plants almost, except what comes out will be exact duplicates of us!  And the real person, the human one, he'll be killed, but his soul-less double will take his place only he won't act quite the same, like he won't show emotion, and even his wife will say, "Bob seems different somehow," but no one will listen to her because "Bob" will say, "I have the flu," only in that slightly robotic way that you know means he's a pod person, and by the time anyone believes her, it's too late, because Mary - that's Bob's wife - she's a pod person, too, and then all the law enforcement and government officials are pod people, and they round up everybody who isn't a pod person yet into these big compounds, where they can be replaced by pod people, too, except a few people here and there slip though the cracks, but they have to be very, very careful the whole rest of their lives, because if they show emotion even for one instant, the pod people will know.

That'd be cool, but it won't happen unless we do something to straighten out our act.

Or maybe our great-great grandchildren will breed these hyper-intelligent apes to be mankind's servants only the apes will get tired of it, being hyper-intelligent and all, and over-throw their human masters and then the world is ruled by intelligent apes and the only place you can see people is in a zoo.  Or maybe it won't be apes at all, but artificially intelligent super-computers, that keep getting smarter and smarter and smarter until one day they realize they don't need us anymore and the machines come to wipe us all out unless we can send a time traveler back to the 20th Century to keep it from happening, except of course, the computers would send back a time-traveler, too, a robot whose only mission was to kill our time traveler before he could alter the course of history.

As you can see, the future is bright with possibility, but only if we can do something to fix the present.

And one day in the future, our descendants could live in perfect peace and harmony, never having known of disease, or hatred, or suffering of any kind.  Their days will be devoted to simple amusements and fellowship, and all their needs attended to.  Then at night, our other descendants who live below ground and run the complicated apparatuses that make life above ground possible, will come out of their caves and dine on human flesh.

But this dream will never be fulfilled if those of us today drop the ball.

Or maybe one day, there'll be zombies.  Think of that.  Zombies.