Category: Wordery

Brazilian Beaver

The Famous Canadian beaver (Castor Canadensis) is the second largest rodent in the world next to the Capybara. While the Capybara is thriving in it’s South American climates, like Venezuela, its much smaller rodent cousin Castor Brazilensis is not faring as well. Unrelenting clear cutting along the Amazon in Southern Brazil  is threatening the habitat of this much smaller rodent. Like the Canadian beaver the Capybara is able to manage a wider range climate conditions, however the Castor Brazilensis is much more vulnerable to temperature. Efforts to re-establish Castor Brazilensis in cooler climates have failed. None of the transplanted Brazilian beavers survived the winter in the Washington State’s Olympic National Park. Clearly this charming, industrious and vulnerable creature can only survive in its native habitat within Brazil’s wet lands. Clear cutting exposes beavers to harsh penetrating climates. It is time for beaver lovers everywhere to stand up and push for harder regulations in Brazil’s wet lands.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faueBMiceHo
Castor Brazilensis in its native habitat near Manaus Brazil.

Pictureless Points of Profoundity

I have received a few complaints of all the images that are in my blog. I was under the impression that a picture was worth about a thousand words, and that by including a picture I had put together about a thousand words  of writing. I now realize that this is a very old measure of the value of a picture. The kilo-word metric of a picture’s value predated both digital photography and the intertube’s access to every picture anyone ever took of anything. The actual value of a picture has significantly dropped  due to this proliferation of pictures. Using the Wolfram|Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine I was easily able to determine that the number of pictures available to anyone imbibing from the intertubes has increased by a factor of 10 to the 13th (that is a 10 followed by lots of  zeros). This means that a picture’s value has been diluted to literally nothing, or a number approaching nothing (1000 divided by 10 followed by lots of  zeros is a small number indeed).

Those Darn Terrorists

When I was training in Vancouver one of my teachers was shot and wounded by a sniper that hid in the bushes near his home. When I was training in Hamilton another one of my teachers was shot and wounded by a sniper.

Yesterday a young, moderate, democratic congresswoman from Arizona had a bullet shot through her head by a clearly despondent and widely read young man that lives in her home state. Congresswoman Giffords was literally  targeted by Sarah Palin and the Teabagging party  because the congresswoman supported health care reform. Take a look at the image below. Congresswoman Giffords’ riding (district #8) was targeted with the site of a gun in the picture below.

Many people considered the choice of a rifle scope cross hair to identify politicians those who are supportive of health care reform  a bad choice that could lead to violence.  Since the shooting of congresswoman Giffords the Palin site has taken the advertisement down.

A common definition of terrorism is :

“the calculated use of violence (or the threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature.”

Since Ms. Palin’s office was publicly and officially advised of how dangerous the advertisement could be (even by Ms. Giffords herself) is there not a component of culpability in this terrorist act?

Anatomy of Bad Parking

I shot this with my Acer Android phone. It is a Mercury Cobalt of indeterminate age diagonally parked in two spots of a Walmart parking lot. I found it very funny. The parking arrogance is also accentuated by the fact that the Hummer is parked perfectly.  It seems like really low rent bad parking to scratch proof your low rent car at the temple of low rent purchases. At least it led to some amusing Demotivational attempts.