Man Martin's Blog, page 189

Chickens Under Attack

EXHIBIT A
Artist's RecreationThe other day my chicken Sorche was attacked by a hawk.  This event was very traumatic for everyone concerned; even the hawk did not emerge entirely unscathed.
The way it went down was in this manner.
Nancy heard a terrified squawking and ran outside - the chickens had already run to their pen, Sorche minus a good many tail-feathers, and somewhat scratched on her nether regions.  A hawk perched nearby staring into the pen with an intensity that can only be described as hawk-like.  Nancy could almost hear the hawk calculating how to get in there with the chickens and counting calories.  The chickens were in hysterics.  You don't know what hysterics are until you've seen chicken hysterics.
Nancy shouted at the hawk and threw rocks.  Parenthetically, I will add this is one of the reasons I love my wife.  There are women out there who would not throw a rock at a hawk.  Nancy is not one of those women.  Perhaps there are women out there who can hit a hawk with a rock; unfortunately, Nancy is not one of those women either.  On the other hand, I doubt if I could have hit it either, so who am I to judge.
Finally, the shouting accomplished what the rocks could not, and the hawk grudgingly flew off with an I'll-be-back sort of expression on its beak.
So what to do, I ask you.
EXHIBIT B
Sorche, Minus Significant PlumagePart of the point of raising free-range chickens is letting them range freely.  This indeed, would seem to be a sin qua non where free-range chickens are concerned.  But I don't intend raising chickens merely as fodder for any old passing hawks.  And while I fully respect that the hawk is a magnificent creature and has a place in the ecosystem, I don't see how that ecosystem legitimately includes eating my personal chickens nor do I find anything especially magnificent in chasing tame birds unable to fly and whose only defense is squawking as loudly as possible in the hope a rock-throwing woman will come to their aid.
So what to do?
I will also point out that it is against the law to discharge a firearm inside the county limits.  I already thought of that.
EXHIBIT C
The Martin OrdinanceBut here's what I'm thinking.  It's legal to shoot off fireworks in Georgia now.  Did you know that?  Nancy and I have a set of several skyrockets- still in their shrink-wrap - in a bedroom closet.  I'm pretty sure you didn't know that.
So next time that chicken-eating hawk shows up, I'm going to give him a sample of Hong Kong's Best and Brightest and see if I can't take a few tail feathers off him.
So what do you think all you folks in blog-reader land?
Shall I

1. Have the fireworks handy against the next advent of a hawk.
2. Keep the chickens in the pen and tell them freedom is the price they pay for security.
3. Get a shotgun in spite of local ordinances, plug that winged son-of-a-bitch and figure out what to say to the police later.
or
4. Get rid of the chickens and just buy my damn eggs at the Kroger like a normal person.

I await your collective wisdom.

Here Come the Armadillos

One of the weirder side-effects unforeseen by the climate change guys is the spread of armadillos into north Georgia.  They've been creeping up slowly from Florida for years, but recently I've sighted them in south Metro Atlanta.  Armadillos are shy creatures, and if you were an armadillo you'd be shy too, and most of us who've seen one at all have only seen them as roadkill.  As far as most people know, the natural habitat of an armadillo is the middle of a blacktop road with a Uniroyal tire tread running down the middle of its back.  In reality, most armadillos live a full, active, fulfilling existence - burrowing, hunting for grubs and invertebrates.  Now it is also evident that also have rich and rewarding sex lives and like to travel.
Armadillos didn't originate from Florida; before 1924 the only armadillos in Florida were in a zoo.  In those days Floridians, thinking armadillos were interesting and exotic, wanted to see one for themselves.  Be careful what you wish for.
Joshua Nixon, a zoologist specializing in armadillos (my goodness, the careers people have!) conjectures that armadillos may even be traveling by train.  This is not entirely unheard-of; New York pigeons have long been known to commute by subway; nevertheless, it's hard to imagine an armadillo dashing alongside a moving box car and leaping on.  Parenthetically, Nixon lives in Michigan, which is about as far from where the armadillos are as you can get, which ought to tell you something.
Armadillos are harmless unless you're an insect or an invertebrate, or unless you're a plant growing on top of where an armadillo thinks there might be insects or invertebrates, or unless you have a yard.
Fortunately, armadillos are edible.  I have appended an actual recipe below.  I don't know what armadillo tastes like, never having eaten it.  Normally, outre entrees are compared to chicken, but I could not find a single internet reference comparing armadillo to the taste of chicken.  This may be a warning.  Here's the recipe:


Armadillo Au Vin   
INGREDIENTS:1 1/4 cup dry white wine1/2 cup oil2 cloves garlic, crushed (optional)1/4 cup buttersalt and pepper, to taste1/2 teaspoon thyme1/2 teaspoon rosemary1 medium onion, sliced thin1 armadillo, cleaned and cut into serving pieces1 1/4 cup light cream1 tablespoon brown mustard1 tablespoon cornstarchDIRECTIONS:Mix all ingredients of marinade and add armadillo. Marinate about 8 hours, turning meat occasionally. Remove armadillo and reserve marinade. Melt butter in deep skillet and brown armadillo pieces. Pour in marinade and bring to a boil. Stir in seasoning, cover and simmer until tender (about 1 to 1 1/4 hours.) Remove skillet from the fire and place armadillo pieces on a warmed platter. Mix mustard and cornstarch, then mix in cream. Return skillet to low heat and stir in this mixture a little at a time. Stir sauce until hot, but not boiling, and thickened. Pour sauce over armadillo. Serve with steamed rice.
Sounds almost good enough to eat, doesn't it?    Unfortunately, The New England Journal of Medicine has linked eating armadillo meat to leprosy in humans.  But - that's only if you eat it frequently, and, after all, how many nights a week are you going to eat Armadillo au Vin anyways?

Happy Birthday, H P Lovecraft. (I know you're out there)

H P Lovecraft
Can't you tell just to look at him
he writes creepy stories?Today would've been the 122nd birthday of Howard Phillips (H P) Lovecraft, or, as his friends knew him, "Bunny."  (Okay, I made that last part up.)  Lovecraft wrote some conventional horror stories, but his big contribution was the notion that at a vast, multidimensional universe of malevolent beings lay outside our ability to perceive and conceive, and that while we couldn't grasp their nature, they could quite easily - and contemptuously - grasp ours, and sometimes, under the right conditions, they could break through.  The chief of these eldritch beings was Cthulu (Lovecraft loved the word "eldritch," he just about couldn't write a sentence without throwing it in somewhere.)  Lovecraft also came up with the Necronomicon, an unspeakable book of evil rites, translated by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazzarad.  There has not been a horror writer since who would not acknowledge Lovecraft as a primary influence.
I first came across Lovecraft when my mother was going to school at UGA during the summer.  Del Ray Publishing (I believe it was) had re-released some of Lovecraft's book with lurid covers - green blobbish faces with shards of glass sticking through, and like that.  C S Lewis once wrote that there could be faces so terrible, of such anguish and horror, that one could look at them and never be the same afterward.  For me, the faces on those covers was what he was talking about.  I asked my mother Mur about them, and she said, yes, they were exactly the sort of thing I'd like.
I read "The Shuttered Room," first - technically by August Derleth, but very much in the Lovecraft mode - and I was hooked.  My only big exposure to horror fiction up until this time had been Edgar Allan Poe and Rod Serling.  (Books of Twilight Zone stories were regularly on newsstands.)  I'd read Masque of the Red Death and Other Stories by Poe.  Big disappointment for a twelve-year-old.  And Serling was fun, but jokey.  Besides which, too many of his stories were clearly intended to teach you something.  Lovecraft and his followers didn't teach you anything except the universe was incomprehensible and probably out to get you, and the less you knew about it, the better.
This is some of the actual cover art that drew my attention
back in Athens, Georgia all those years ago.
Lord, but I was a dumb kid.I haven't re-read Lovecraft in a decade, but this is the time of year I loved to return to him, when the weather was getting cooler and leaves would fall from the trees.  Cool enough to read outside, and no mosquitoes.  Lovecraft isn't something I wanted to read in a cramped room when ultra-dimensional creatures with tentacles and wings might come poking through the walls.  I wrote my own imitation of Lovecraft once, a story about a coin that had the power to summon an eldritch monster from a nearby swamp, and another Lovecraft-inspired story about a fishing lure that brought up fish not only from the bottom of the river, but from both ends of time.
I'm pleased to say my daughter Catherine and son-in-law Drew are also Lovecraft fans.  Drew appears regularly in performances of Lovecraftian stories with the Atlanta Radio Company, and for my graduation, Catherine gave me a Cthulhu PhD plush toy.
Lovecraft's life was beset by ever-deepening poverty, accompanied by literary obscurity so thick it could've concealed a freight train.  His fame was assured by other writers; in spite of personal failure - I love this part - Lovecraft was an indefatigable correspondent and generous with his time and advice with others.  It was they who kept reminding the reading world of Lovecraft, Lovecraft, Lovecraft.
Thanks to them, and thanks to you, H P.  I'm sorry I said your name was Bunny.
Happy birthday.
My Cthulhu PhD Doll.
Catherine and I once made a Miskatonic Universtity T-Shirt
(Miskatonic was a Lovecraft creation, cool name, huh?)
The University motto was, "Semper Malis," Always evil.

Update from CERN

An International Team of
Journalists struggles to come up
with a metaphor for
9.9 Trillion DegreesIt's easy to get distracted from things owing to the Olympics, the presidential race, the Mars rover landing, and that pesky mildew that keeps forming on the refrigerator gasket, but in case you missed it, the large Hadron Collider at CERN has created a man-made temperature of nine point nine trillion degrees Fahrenheit.  That's trillion with a t.  If it was only nine point nine billion, you'd probably say "No, big deal," but when it's nine point nine trillion, people sit up and pay respect.  Of course, that's Fahrenheit; it's only five trillion or so Centigrade, and it is dry heat, but still it's pretty darn impressive.  We might well give a thought to these European scientists who are out there creating incredible temperatures while the rest of us are out living our lives.
Journalists have been stumped coming up with descriptions of nine point nine trillion with a t degrees.  Some favorite words are "scorching," "sizzling," and "scalding."  They might as well say it's "balmy."  Anything in the trillions of degrees is way beyond scorching.  That's like saying being stuck in the bathroom when the only toilet paper in universe is on the far side of Andromeda is "inconvenient."
You might ask yourself what benefit to mankind is achieving a temperature of nine point nine trillion degrees. You might ask yourself, but don't ask me because I haven't the foggiest.  This is only the latest achievement out of CERN, the most famous being, of course, the possible discovery of the Higgs Boson, or so-called God Particle.  I bet whoever nicknamed it that is kicking himself right now.  Call something a "God Particle," is guaranteed to attract attention like sticking a flashing neon sign on it.  Here these researchers have created a temperature of nearly ten trillion degrees, and all anyone wants to talk about is the "God Particle."  Higgs Boson is just one kind of Boson out there; there's lots of other Bosons, but you never hear about them, do you?  Does anybody even talk about CERN's discovery of W and Z Bosons in 1983, or the discovery of a direct CP violation in the NA48 experiment?  They do not.  That's the problem with the cutting-edge research biz.  If you do something run-of-the-mill, people just say, "So, still selling insurance?" and you say yes, and then you talk sports.  Or better still, they don't say anything at all.  But if you're at CERN, you're expected to come out with something new every day.  If you tell them you're accelerating particles at each other at fantastic speeds to settle questions of quantum physics and discover the origin of the universe, they'll say, "Still?  But what have you been doing lately?"  Something like creating the hottest temperature ever recorded is likely to elicit a, "Whew!  Scorching!" which is good for one conversation, then they want to know if you've ever personally seen a God Particle and what it looks like, and if you think the God Particle would be interested in meeting them.
Then the conversation turns to that stubborn mildew on the refrigerator gasket.

Amazing Optical Illusions

The human eye is a tricky mistress; we trust her at our peril.  She says that two lines are equidistant and we believe her, then the next thing we know, we're waking up in Bangkok with a missing wallet, a headache, and a tattoo we'll never be able to explain to our wife.
Try these amazing optical illusions on yourself.  If that doesn't work try them on someone else.



These two figures seem exactly the same in every way.  And yet the one on the left is entirely different.  Don't ask me why this is.











Stare at these concentric circles for an hour without blinking.  Not easy, is it?












If you drink two martinis very quickly, the object will seem to rotate counter-clockwise.  Drink three, and it will rotate clockwise.  Drink five and it will disappear entirely.  Science has not been able to explain this.









Would you say this shape is a hexagon or an octagon?  Either way, you'd be wrong.









This shape looks a square, doesn't it?  Measure the sides and you'll find they are all exactly the same.  Measure the angles and you'll find each one is exactly 90 degrees.  It looks exactly like a square, and any measurement you can perform on it will show it is a square.  This is because it really is a square, which only goes to show how little we really understand.

The Loch Ness Monster: Proof at Last!

For years you skeptics have pooh-poohed the very idea of the Loch Ness Monster.  ("Pooh-pooh," you skeptics pooh-poohed, "Loch Ness Monster!  The very idea!")  You thought there was no more truth to the legend than the Abominable Snowman or Body Thetans.  But I bet you're just eating your hearts out now that there's CONCLUSIVE proof that the Loch Ness Monster, or Nessie as her fans call her, or just plain Ness or N as her close personal friends and family do - really exists.  A Scottish captain, George Edwards, has taken the best picture to date of the monster, showing beyond a shadow of a doubt a lump or possibly a bump in water that might very well be Loch Ness.
Legends of the monster go back 1400 years or more when Saint Columba, called Cauloughrrr in Galeic, (His gangsta name was Co-Daddy) visited the region and was told of a   river monster that ate anyone who tried to swim across.  The saint gave the monster a good talking to, explaining it wasn't nice to eat people.  Seeing the error of his ways, the creature reformed and has been vegetarian ever since, as far as anyone can tell.  The pagans were so impressed by this miracle they immediately converted to Christianity and forswore all their heathen practices of worship except golf, which is still devoutly practiced every Sunday in many parts of the world.
Nevertheless, in spite of this compelling historical corroboration, the scientific community scoffed, but they can scoff no more.
Edwards took this remarkable picture in November, but withheld the information because he was going through a difficult personal patch, which is perfectly understandable.  World-changing discoveries are often withheld for just such reasons - Newton did not publish the Principia for years because he kept getting sick headaches, and Einstein put off publishing his special theory on account of an extended losing streak at the track.  I myself have several shocking photographs of my own abduction by aliens, but can't bear to share them until certain very personal memories have had a chance to fade.
Don't even ask me about it.  Like I said, it's personal.

Guns, Gals, & Good Books

Susan "Dead-Eye" Jimison
Weapon: Ruger 357
Recommends: Harlan Coben Sherry Haney
Weapon: 38 Smith and Wesson
Recommends: Kenneth GoddardIt was the first Thursday in August in the city that never sleeps - Alpharetta - one of those days when the humidity smacks you in the face a hot fist; the rain had come down harder than a fat stockbroker out of a twenty-story window earlier that day and traffic was snarling like a pit bull that hadn't seen kibble in a week.  I was running late - no big deal - except these are the sort of dames you don't keep waiting.
Not if you know what's good for you.
Tylene Foster
Weapon: Ruger 380
Recommends: Marcus LuttrellGuns, Gals, and Good Books meets once a month at Peerless Books to do a little target practice and discuss literature.  After I finally arrived at Peerless - they'd waited for me, thank goodness - they drove me to a nearby shooting range in Sandy Springs.  I shared a van with club founder Susan Jimison, along with Diane Smith, Tylene Foster, Sandra Dickson, and Marsha Etheridge.  I felt both jittery and utterly safe - as one is prone to feel in a vehicle with four gun-toting women.  Along the way, they showed me their firearms; Dianne - the one with the Tea Party sticker - had her gun in a black plastic case, but some of the others had fancy-shmancy purses, with a holster built right into the side.
Diane Smith
Weapon: 9 Millimeter
Recommends: Nelson DeMilleWe also talked politics, and I discovered they are conservative Republicans - I've already mentioned Diane's "Tea Party" sticker - not entirely enthusiastic about Romney, but dismissive of Obama.  They are not the sort who'd ever describe themselves as feminists, but in a way, that's exactly what they are: the sort of feisty, no-nonsense, self-confident women who wouldn't think twice about picking up a good 38 Special and popping a cap in the ass of an unwelcome intruder.  These are Southern ladies of the old school: gracious, hospitable, and charming but not the sort to put up with any nonsense and who won't hesitate to cut you off at the knees if you cross the line.  I did everything I could to ingratiate myself with these women.
If anybody messes with me - so long
as he wears a shirt with a big red oval,
and stands perfectly still five yards away,
and if I can borrow a gun - he'll be sorry! Dianne McNaughton
Borrows Weapon
Recommends: Michael ConnelyIt was "Ladies' Day" at the shooting range, which meant they got to shoot free.  Other parts of the country have Ladies' Nights at bars; we have them at shooting ranges.  We handed over our drivers' licenses to the man behind the counter, and he gave us paper targets, protective goggles, and ear muffs.  The targets ranged from old fashioned bull's eyes, to silhouettes of people.  (These are the ones we used.)  Some really fancy ones featured a miscreant holding the gun to the head of a female hostage in case you wanted to be prepared for an especially glamorous opportunity for heroism.  I believe I also saw some zombie targets, although these may just have been hippies.  After selecting our targets we went behind one door and then a second door into the range itself for a little fancy shootin'.
Sandra Dickson
Weapon: Smith and Wesson
Recommends: Kay HooperDiane and Sandra were kind enough to let me try my hand with their guns, and I'm pleased to say, I acquitted myself tolerably well.  (My target is pictured herewith.)  Sandra's is equipped with a laser pointer which makes a very cool little red dot wherever you're aiming and made me wish I'd opted for the ruffian-with-hostage or zombie-possibly-hippie target instead of the plain silhouette I was shooting at.
If you've never been to a shooting range, the way it works is, you attach your target to this doohickey, and press some buttons on a touch pad which sends it scooting down a long dark hallway, to whatever distance you desire.  While you're waiting your turn, every once in a while there's a loud wham! as someone fires a gun, which you can hear even through the ear muffs and is pretty much guaranteed to make you jump the first four or half-dozen times you hear it.  If one of these ladies were defending herself against an attacker; she wouldn't need to hit him in his vitals; the sound alone would be enough to scare him off.
Marsha Etheridge
Weapon: Smith and Wesson
Recommends: Craig JohnsonAfter you've fired as many rounds as you like, you press another button, and the target comes scooting back, executing a little pirouette when it reaches you, so you can examine your handiwork.  The back wall is pocked with little holes; gleaming brass shells litter the floor.
The guy shooting next to us, the quiet sort with forearms as big as my thigh, who did not seem to be having nearly as much fun as we were, solemnly loaded bullets in his chamber, and fired off one thoughtful round after another, as if dutifully eating a plateful of vitamin pills.  He very precisely put holes in his old-fashioned bull's-eye target.  My escorts, whose marks-person-ship was just as good or better, had targets shaped like humans, and cheerfully compared notes on how well they'd done when they got the targets back.  They seemed interested in which shot would have killed him, but I pointed out - quite reasonably, I think - that any of the shots would have given him second thoughts about breaking and entering.
This stylish handbag is practical,
fashionable, has a pocket or place
for everything a gal on the go needs,
including a handy little side-holster
built right in!
This sporty zebra-stripe holster
handbag is for a gal on the go
with a bold fashion sense who's
maybe going to a party
and wants a gun along.On the other side of the shooting range is a shop where you can buy your shooting accessories, such as the holster-purses mentioned earlier and large buckets - as large as economy-sized kitty-litter buckets - of freeze-dried food you can have on hand in case society breaks down or there's a zombie apocalypse or something.
Having finished our shooting and shopping - no one bought the freeze-dried food, although Susan expressed interest - we drove back to Peerless Books, where wine and cookies were laid out in anticipation of the evening's discussion of Lisa Gardner's Catch Me.  (Guns, Gals, and Good Books exclusively selects crime fiction in keeping with their theme.)  Not having read the selection, I left before the discussion got underway, with my bullet-riddled target under my arm and a big smile on my face.  I discovered a ladies' Gun-and-Mystery Book Club is as unlikely and yet apt a combination as chicken-and-waffle restaurant, and I was left wondering what other unlikely combinations might be waiting out there to be discovered: Archery and Love Stories?  (Cupid connection.)  Nunchucks and Slapstick? (Get it? Nunchucks, slapstick?)  Nevermind.  Some things just can't be imitated, like Susan Jimison and the rest of the gals with guns.

My Unsuccessful Attempts at Wildlife Photography

I've been trying to get pictures of the birds who visit our suet cages, but it's a lot harder than you'd think.
A Mockingbird. They almost look like Catbirds, but they have
white stripes on their wings.  Just missed him,
This one was a Catbird. The second he flew off, you could
tell he didn't have stripes.
The female Cardinal looks a lot like the male, but's more
of a russet color than a red. If this one had hung around
you'd have seen what I mean.
I've seen this little fellow a lot, but I haven't been able to
identify him yet.  I don't expect this picture will be much help.
You're not going to believe this I swear it was an
Emperor Penguin.  Ran to get my camera and
- whoosh! - he was gone.

Consumer Weirdness

This product is available at Lowes Hardware, Amazon, and many other fine retailers, I'm sure.  It's a Mason Jar with air holes in the lid and bears the legend, "Interact with your butterfly!  Tap on jar once to make him open his wings, twice to make him flap, three times to make him fly."
But don't worry, Mom!  No actual butterflies are harmed in this interaction!  It's battery-operated.
Americans are deeply, deeply weird.  

Why Do You Live There?

Nancy Zafris asked me, "So why do you live in Georgia?"
By the way she asked it, I felt like she expected me to have a damn good answer ready, which I did not.  I love Nancy Zafris, but anyone who knows her will tell you she has a way of putting you on the spot.  You've heard the expression "like a deer in the headlights," well, when Nancy Zafris asks you a question, you feel like a deer with a troubled conscience being asked by a particularly insinuating headlight to recall where you were on the evening of January the 21st.  I felt the implied corollary to her question was, "Why would anyone live in Georgia?" and that on my response hung not only the validation of my life so far, but perhaps the dignity and worth of an entire state.   My response was a muttered justification having to do with the principle of inertia: I was raised in Georgia, went to school and college in Georgia, fell in love and got married in Georgia, got a job and bought a house in Georgia.  If you keep that sort of thing up, pretty soon you're bound to look around and discover you live in Georgia.It was only when I got home, I realized what the answer was.Here's my answer. These are Cone Flowers, a native plant
Hyrdrangeas - they go crazy this time of year.
This plant is taller than I am
In the foreground is my chicken, Sorche.  My other chicken,
Loretta is in the bacckground
 These are eggs Loretta and Sorche
left me. Tomato plants
The yellow flowers are lantana.
They have a not-unpleasant
waxy smell inexplicably attractive to butterflies
(Butterflies not pictured)
Knock-out roses.  These rascals seem to bloom
forever, and when the gardenia is in bloom, too, the
combined fragrance almost makes you drunk.

Cucumbers are camera-shy, and it's very hard to get a
decent photo.  You should feel flattered.
Eggplant aren't as hard to photograph
as cucumbers, but they ain't easy
Crepe Myrtle. Some people say Crepe Myrtle is a no-account
tree.  Those people are wrong.
Daffodils.  Wordsworth once wrote
a poem where "daffodil" was both
title and last word.
Sweet Basil.  The yellow flowers are Goldenrod.
A basket of goodies from the garden and
chicken coop.
If you think cucumbers and eggplants are hard to photograph,
you should try catching a warbler at the feeder. The woman reading in the pool is my sweet wife Nancy.
She did not know I took this picture.

 ...And that's why I live in Georgia.