Christmas weaselpr0n!
Stoatpr0n, actually. Badger gave me this present early, presumably to keep me quiet while he did his end-of-year accounts.
It’s the September, 2008 issue of the BBC’s nature magazine, Wildlife, which features the best goshdarned weasel photography I’ve ever seen.
The photographer is Spaniard Oriol Alamany who chased a family of stoats in the Pyranees to get these shots (the little one looking into the camera is Mama Stoat, with her three fine sons. They grow to weaselhood so quickly!).
The whole magazine is slick and impressive. I’d ask Uncle B for a subscription, but magazines always pile up on me and become a throbbing locus of angst and guilt.
Not really something you want for Christmas.
December 23, 2008 — 8:57 pm
Comments: 19
I…I feel a thousand eyes…watching me…
Weasel Towers. But I didn’t take these pictures, O imaginary friends who live in my computer. Google Street View has reached Weaseltopia! Seven months ago, the Google Street View Van drove down Weasel Street and hung a right on Stoat Boulevard.
How do I know when? Replacing the garage doors was the first thing I did to fix up the house, about six months ago. Just prior to that, one of the bottom panels popped out of the old door. It was too warped to pop back in, so whenever I went to work, I propped the panel up against the opening. This, because my cats came and went through the garage, but I wanted to discourage dogs doing the same. Yeah, I know it’s lame. I am fully aware of all my deeds of lameness. Anyhow, you can see the arrangement plainly in the top photo.
This thing is spooky. Gliding up and down the street, swiveling around, looking up and down. Check your town. If they’ve come to Providence, they’re really expanding.
I found out by accident. I plugged my street address into Google Maps (looking to check the probable size of Damien’s territory — meh. Still missing. Don’t want to talk about it. Acutely bummed), and up pops a thumbnail of my house. “Whuzzit?” I said blearily, “yarrr!”
This morning, the Real Estate Lady is in Weasel Manor taking pitchers. I am now officially On The Market. W00t!
She says I can’t live in the basement any more. That it would creep people out. I asked if she would mind following me around for a while and warning me about anything else I do that might creep people out. That could be very useful.
Secretly, I am plotting to defy her. Upstairs, there are no curtains or shades or carpets and very little furniture. It would be like sleeping in a junior high gymnasium. With the lights on. It’s dark and cool and quiet in the basement. I think what I’ll do is slap together a Potemkin village of a master bedroom upstairs, and continue sleeping in the basement. In a sleeping bag or something.
Creepy? I’ll show her!
May 15, 2008 — 10:54 am
Comments: 62
And now for something cheerful and stupid
Must…lighten up…top…page. Too…depressing. Ah, here we go. Daily Mail to the rescue. Here are some images from the Cloud Appreciation Society. For a nominal fee, you too can join the society like 9,613 of your fellow cloud starer-atters. They have a manifesto and certificates and buttons and everything.
Back to the Mail, here’s my favorite headline of the week: Dingo baby mum says she’ll support McCanns. Thanks, but…ummm…
There’s a cat at Downing Street again: meet Sybil (named after Sybil Fawlty). Her predecessor, Humphrey, was evicted during the Blair years. Rumors Cherie had him offed were so pervasive that she was forced to call a press conference and have herself photographed smiling and holding the beast. That didn’t stem the impression that she had him evicted (or worse), so Humphrey was periodically photographed in his secret London home standing on the day’s newspaper. He died last year, age 18.
Doofuses Wed. The Society for Creative Anachronism doesn’t have a branch in the UK, but chubby people everywhere seem inexorably drawn to period costume. I feel for the horses. Though at least these people had a real live castle to get married in.
Man shoots honkin’ big pig. Sad story, actually. He’s a farmer in Devon and he was raising a herd of wild boar. Animal rights activists destroyed his fence and set a hundred of them free (including many pregnant sows), so hunters are having to track them down and kill them. I fail to see how this is a victory for the animals.
Thank you, Mail. And now let us turn to the BBC, where Mighty Weasel Brings Beeb to its Knees. This article about Muslims fasting during Ramadan began with “Thirty-one-year-old Sumaya Amra is just one of the billions of Muslims who takes part in the holy month of Ramadan by fasting in daylight hours, each day for 30 days.” Oh, I don’t think so, Auntie. I left a comment (which didn’t get published), but it was corrected to “billion or so” not long after. I don’t for a moment think the original was an accident. Reminder: the BBC pulls this shit all the time, and you can track it at BBC-Biased.
September 12, 2007 — 11:09 am
Comments: 25
Gaia stole my new tripod!
See, on Saturday, Weasel really does go for a little tramp in the woods. This is made possible by a hand-held GPS device — I own the same make and model those British sailors apparently had, but let’s not talk about that or I’m going to want to nuke somethin’ — without which I can get lost on the way to the little stoat’s room.
Mine is set to record a ‘bread-crumb’ trail as I hike. I usually upload this and superimpose my path over Google Earth when I get home, to scope out what the hell just happened to me. So it is that I can tell you right when Gaia hooked her sticky fingers in my pack and stole my brand new tripod on its first outing.
I know where I stopped to take a picture of my butt in the woods, like I promised you guys (I erased it. Only thing worse than a picture of one’s butt in the woods is an unflattering picture of one’s butt in the woods). I jammed the tripod in one of the water-bottle pockets of my pack after that.
The gaps are where I spread my stoaty wings and flapped serenely into the warm upcurrents of a Spring morning. Or maybe where the GPS lost signal. Lousy signal day, this. That angry knot at the top is where I left the path and attempted to bushwhack across to another path. It isn’t marked “swamp” on the topo. But it is one.
Have you ever hiked swamp? Uff. Little humps of soggy sphagnum moss, each with a sickly tree in the middle, separated in the winter by ice, in the summer by stinky puddles, and in the spring (what it is now) by puddles of stinky ice. Navigation is by island hopping, judging distances and leaping from one quivering, insecure hummock to another, clutching at trees that won’t take your weight and landing on solid ground that isn’t and won’t, either. Rot-nourished scrub everywhere, grabbing your jeans, pulling off your hat, tearing at your pack.
My pack…
Somewhere in that vile soup an innocent-looking young rhododendron shoot wrapped a tendril around my gorillapod and nicked it. I started to re-trace my steps, but my heart wasn’t in it. I felt like I had just had an all-body floss with a blackberry bush. Stupid, spiteful nature.
Want a free tripod? Go to N41.93488, W71.75488. Wear good boots.
Mobbed by tits
On my way back to the car, a little bird landed on a branch right at my elbow. I stopped and stared at him. Another, identical bird landed next to him. I lifted my camera slowly, and two more landed on the ground to my left.
Soon, six or eight of them had gathered. I stood still, and they hopped and twittered all around me. I suppose it might have been some kind of territorial aggression, but it didn’t look it. It looked like plain old curiosity. Or the sheer pleasure of being a gang of small birds in the woods.
So, what is this? A tit? A chickadee? I swear I’m not asking so I can keep saying “tit.”
April 2, 2007 — 11:41 am
Comments: 12
Gorillapoloozala
Hey, check this thing! It’s a Gorillapod. It’s a sort of flexible tripod. Those legs are cleverly jointed so that they bend easily when you want them to, but are sturdy and hold their grip when you let go. So you can use it as a standard tripod, or hook it around a limb or throw it over a cubicle. And the two joints directly under the camera make it easy to move it level it once you’ve got it in position.
I’ve been hankering for a tripod, but the little ones are such crap and the big ones are so heavy. This thing is perfect to take out in the woods. It’s light and strong and I can wrap it around a branch and take pictures of my butt. It was a little cheaper in my store than it is buying directly from them.
Get one! I command it!
I was in the camera store to have a passport photo taken. I had the last one taken there ten years ago (by the same guy, I think). Ten years. Ten years that have marched across my face in combat boots. With cleats. I consoled myself that at least I wouldn’t have the same short geeky haircut this time. No. But I have a clump of rogue hair sticking out over my ear. A Nerd Flag. Nice.
March 29, 2007 — 5:02 pm
Comments: 7
Damien communicates with the mothership
I tend to fire off dozens of photographs at a time and then evaluate them solely by thumbnails. As a result, I often don’t notice oddball images like the one above, taken when Damien was about eight weeks old. Directly above his face, just out of the shot, is a two-bulb fluorescent desklamp of the kind once used by draughtsmen (I got it from work when they shut down our ink-and-paper drafting operations), but with modern warm fluorescent bulbs. This light frequently confuses automatic exposure controls, which seldom get the white balance right for it. I take a lot of very yellow pictures under this light.
The cats are oddly fascinated by it. Charlotte in particular — who experiences the world largely through her nose — greets this lamp by starting at one end and smelling carefully down its entire length. And sometimes all the way back up again. I suspect it smells like delicious houseflies.
March 27, 2007 — 5:54 am
Comments: 4
It’s here!
I’ve been agonizing about a new digital camera ever since mine started to go screwy a year ago. So far, I’ve bought good quality point-and-shoot cameras, and I’ve been happy. But I use a camera enough to merit something better. I’ve been teetering between high-end point-and-shoot and low-end digital SLR (even if I could scrape up the money for a high-end DSLR, I’d be scared to use it). Here’s what it came down to:
Sony Cybershot DSC-H5. Somebody at work just bought one of these. It’s slick. It’s a high-end point-and-shoot, so you can compose with the LCD (only one digital SLR will do that — I love to shoot using the LCD, not the viewfinder). Plus, it’s got a 12X optical zoom Zeiss lens with image stabilizing. Plus, it takes regular old AA batteries, which is sweet. Downside? Sony. They make beautiful stuff, but they abandon product lines, leaving you stranded. My poor Clié was traumatized when they bailed on the PDA market.
Olympus Evolt. Low end DSLR. The newer versions support composing on the CRT. Also, they sell it bundled with a wide lens and a long lens, so you’d be all done buying gear. All my early digital cameras were Olympi, and they make splendid optics. Downside? All my Olympi eventually broke on me, so I think their stuff is delicate. And a complete kit it may be, but at getting on for $700, it’s a little more scratch than I want to fork out.
Some flavor of Canon. In the days of film, it was Canon for me. My A1 was a dinged-up, ruggedized thing of Road Warriorific beauty. They’re certainly a major (maybe THE major) player in the digital market. It’s what they’re using at work right now. But…I dunno. My last point-and-shoot (the screwy one) was a Canon, and defective from the get-go. To be fair, I know someone else who got brilliant pictures out of the same model, but I didn’t and I’m inclined to be grouchy about it.
So I went for the Nikon D40. Not because I had any blinding insight, but because I missed a shot last weekend on account of my duff camera, and I thought, “Shit! Get off the pot! Choose now!”
This one has gotten great reviews. It’s Nikon’s newest, and its most entry-level. The image quality (everyone says) is equal to better models, but with some of the (so complicated I would undoubtedly never use them) bells and whistles stripped away. Around $550.
It’s beautiful to hold. Much smaller and lighter than any of the other SLRs I tried (which relieves me of one worry — that I’d so hate lugging around all that camera, I wouldn’t). All the controls are in easy reach of the index and thumb of the right hand — I started to feel at home within minutes. Big, clear LCD (even if I can’t compose with it), and a great menu system (I’m allergic to product manuals, so this is a must).
I haven’t had much chance to shoot with it yet, but I think I did the right thing. Expect more searingly observant photo essays of the alienation of young people in urban society adorable cat pictures.
February 22, 2007 — 7:00 pm
Comments: 8