To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
I got tired of these old games just cluttering the shelves in my desk, so I decided to mount them on the wall:
I put some adhesive-backed Velcro on the back of the games and the loop side of the Velcro on the wall (with a couple of staples to help the adhesive). Now, when I want to play, I can just reach up and grab one for a dose of 1980 electronic blip goodness, and when I’m not playing, they display rather nicely.
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So the other night, I was sitting down for my once-every-sixteen-years viewing of the Richard Grieco film (If Looks Could Kill) when the telephone rang.
It was a student at Marquette University, calling to check my phone number, address, and whatnot and to see if I’d simply overlooked sending them a check.
She asked for my current address, having established logically that my phone number was still correct. Then she asked me the best part of the Marquette experience for my lo those 20 years ago. I’m sure I said something curtly. I was a commuter, essentially, since I lived in my father’s basement for the duration, so my job was way off campus on the Northwest Side and most of my friends where on the Northwest side (either people who worked in the grocery store where I plied my trade at the time or a guy who lived two doors down from my father, whom I’d gotten to know during summertime visits to Milwaukee).
My distance from Marquette as well as my upbringing that differed from the suburban put a lot of distance between me and the school as An Experience. By the time I had spent enough time with any of them to make anything like friends, I was a senior and off to live the life of a wage slave in Missouri while the rest of them prepared for a life in the Academy and the gossamer feel-good shawl of Progressivist thought.
The best part of Marquette University, I realized after the phone call, was the library. In those slightly pre-Internet days, the Memorial Library had books on everything I wanted to read. I spent a lot of time as a freshman blowing off Biology and Sociology to read Black Like Me, then a collection of Langston Hughes to see what the title of Black Like Me was from, then serious scholarly studies of Ed McBain, and some Existentialism for fun. That, coupled with the big Swedish mechanic who lived next door, had a library in his basement, and asked me if I’d read this or read that and how could I be an English major without reading them? made me who I am educationally today more than the Marquette University community and its $11,000 a year ticket ever did.
So I cut short the connect-and-make-them-feel-a-part questions with a declaration that I wasn’t going to contribute. She said okay, and then I asked how much Marquette cost.
$30,000 a year, she said. Without emphasis, because this is the milieu in which she swims.
“It sucks to be you,” I said.
She giggled and said, yeah, but that’s why scholarships are so important and that the tuition was only 3/4 the cost of educating a student.
“Someone’s getting overpaid. You could get a couple tutors and have them spend 40 hours a week with you for that,” I said. And I rang off shortly thereafter. Ringing off happens when you read a lot of British literature, and by British literature I mean “Agatha Christie” and “Alistair MacLean.” See, Marquette wasn’t influential in making me sound like the hoity-toity affected Anglophile.
After I did, I kind of felt bad for her. She was a junior, working the phones to work off part of her $30,000 a year. At some point, $120,000 is too much for what a college degree buys you. It took me fifty hours a week of working while I was going to college and ten years’ worth of student loan repayment (coupled with a good marriage which allowed me to be DINK to pay those loans off in only 10 years). And I left school only $20,000 in the hole with an English/Philosophy degree. For the first couple of years after I graduated, I made somewhere in the middle teens in income, sometimes working two jobs for that amount. I cannot in my mind justify spending what amounts to a middle manager’s salary to go to school. I cannot imagine coming out of school with $60,000 in debt and stacking produce, if I was lucky to have any job in 2010.
Instapundit talks a lot about the higher education bubble about to burst. It’s going to happen, and I feel really bad for the last people in the scheme like this poor kid, calling hard-hearted Hannahs like me for a pittance against her pitiable annual costs.
Oh, and without segue, I’d like to point out I’m a little miffed what college costs have done to my personal puff narrative. Working fifty hours a week while in school to cover the shortfall between my remaining grants and loans, begging the bursar to let me register for the next semester when I was a couple hundred behind in my monthly schedule (he laughed even then, commenting about how much other students owed), and paying off $20,000 in debt. Kids these days are going to look at my hardships and say, “You pansy, you had it easy.” And then they’ll get into grad school to get the Master’s Degree they’ll need to work in outcalling sales in 2020.
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We’ve had the RCA dryer before we were a we; my beautiful wife bought a Radio Corporation of America (!) dryer when she was my beautiful girlfriend in Columbia. It moved with her to St. Louis, it moved in with us in Sycamore Hills, it moved with use to Casinoport, it moved with us to Old Trees, and then it moved with us to Nogglestead. It had travelled very well and has voted for Democrats in five different Congressional Districts.
But a couple weeks ago, it started making metal-on-metal noises when running. We had to replace our three-year-old washer (bought new when we moved into Old Trees) when it’s agitator passed from this life to the next. A repairman who came to check its pulse said that modern washers and dryers have a lifespan of about seven years. So when the dryer started making noise, I warned that we were going to have to spend money on it before long.
A couple times in the recent past, I’ve opened the dryer to find it full of dry clothes and the timer set to the start time. Sometimes, we loaded the dryer and saved its run for naptime or children’s bedtime to introduce some white noise while they slept. We’ve been doing this since Old Trees, when the dryer lie between their bedrooms and the rest of the house. We hoped the white noise woud mak the noises we made elsewhere. At any rate, I found the dryer had not run and assumed I had failed to start it.
However, one day, I started it at naptime, and it stopped post-haste. I tried it again, and it started again and stopped. I wondered what could cause it. A clogged dryer vent? I went to the south side of the house, where a vent opens right next to our air conditioner (I’d joked with the home inspector, “May the best appliance win!” because warm air blowing out on a running air conditioner makes the air cooling less efficient, but the joke is less funny when you explain it even if the explanation lies in the same set of parentheses as the joke itself). I went out and opened the vent to take a look in, and the vent cover, one of the little louvred vinyl jobs, opened on a 2 inch PVC pipe. That’s odd, I thought.
And then something dark appeared out of my nowhere and hit my knuckle, causing a great disturbance in my pain-free morning. What was that, I wondered? Biting horsefly? Spider? The rest of the hive of wasps that had been hiving in my air conditioner’s casing came out to answer my challenge. So as my middle finger swelled (all the easier to see when displayed, bonus!), I got a can of waspicide and went the whole Anakin on them (I killed them. I killed them all. They’re dead, every single one of them. And not just the men, but the women and the children, too. They’re like animals, and I slaughtered them like animals. I HATE THEM!). After which time, using the dryer-starting talents of my wife, I deduced that the vent was blocked since no air was coming out of it when she turned it on.
I paced a bit and determined that since we were going to get a new dryer anyway, we should just go and get one that afternoon for delivery the next day. I cannot even dramatically recreate my thinking for you; I was not utterly convinced that the vent was the cause. So we dropped $600 as though we were still DINKs (I even bought the extended warranty given how well our last washer did).
The next morning, the appliance guys came along, put the new one in, and loaded the old one in their truck. I realize I have enough land these days to expose plenty of appliances and derelict automobiles to the elements, but I’m starting slowly to easily acclimate my suburban and sophisticated spouse to the practice. After the appliance guys hooked it up (yeah, I let them do it. One fewer man point for me), I started it and let it run for a couple minutes. The appliance guys left, and I started in on the drifts of laundry that had accumulated in the two days.
When a load finished and was wetted for the drying, I turned on the new dryer and…. it stopped.
Dammit, I thought, it is the vent.
So I checked the vent from the interior. It looked like standard ducting and wasn’t really coated with much lint even though it was a couple of ninety degree turns coming out of the laundry alcove. I went to the utility room in the basement and tried to find the duct that carried the venting from the dryer alcove to the exterior and didn’t see it. What I did see, on the other hand, is that the built-in vacuum was right where the dryer duct should come out and…. Oh. That would explain it.
So I didn’t know where the dryer vent came out and I was at a loss for action. After some thoughtful pacing, I called a company that could clean out dryer vents. That should fix it for me.
Fortunately, the dryer vent company spokesman worked me into his schedule at the same time as my wife was loading the children up to go meet her mother for lunch for my wife’s birthday. The dryer vent guy located the vent in the sill board immediately underneath my deck. So it’s been blowing hot, wet air on the underside of my deck for the entirety of the deck’s existence. Awesome.
My wife finished her child loading and left. The dryer vent guy tapped on the back door with a mournful look on his face. “I can’t clean your vent,” he announced. “It’s not metal ducting, it’s plastic that’s deteriorated. I can show you if you want.”
I looked. It was plastic venting hose stretched under the finished ceiling in my den. Breaking down.
Swell. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen plastic where metal should be on really important functions in the dream home.
The dryer vent guy, who works for an HVAC company, said they could probably tear out 20′ of my ceiling and replace the ducting for $300-500. Of course, they’re not carpenters, so they wouldn’t replace the ceiling or match its paint, natch.
I said, you know, I can just get an interior vent.
You know, those have drawbacks. Humidity and it’s very dirty, he said.
We lived with one of those in Old Trees for three years since that particular rehabber didn’t bother to vent it at all, much like he didn’t bother to install any phone jacks or even hook the telephone line onto the correct interior set of plugs at the exterior phone box ($125 for AT&T to come, diagnose, unplug, and plug in correctly in a manner of 10 minutes). He also charged me $50 for coming out, climbing a ladder, and pointing a flashlight into my dryer vent.
And took fifteen minutes to write up the invoice. I’d thought I could make it to the restaurant to eat with the family, so I called and discovered they weren’t there yet. I was planning to join them, I told the restaurant, could my party call me when they arrived? So I changed clothes and whatnot and realized that I could only get to the restaurant 30 minutes after they sat down, probably, and they hadn’t called, so I assumed they didn’t get the message after all.
So I raced into Republic to buy an interior vent and raced home to beat them back. I did, and I beat the rain, which is good because the old pick-up’s windshield wipers manage to miss the portion of the windshield directly in line of sight for the driver. I put the interior vent on easily–lots of experience with them, you know–and turned the dryer on. I wandered off and….
The dryer stopped, of course.
I was through pacing at this point. I was onto gibbering.
And then my wife called from the restaurant. Of course they’d gotten the first part of the message but not the second. Still, an hour later, they had ordered and had eaten. My beautiful wife ordered something for me, too, and brought it home. Which is good, because at that point I could not have verbally communicated to a server that I needed a glass of water.
The next stop: calling an electrician. The next morning, one arrived and examined the outlet. Then he examined the outlet more closely. Apparently, a loose connection within it was causing it to lose power when it warmed up or when the dryer vibrated it apart. Either way, $100 and a new outlet later, and the dryer works.
Actually, that makes it sound so simple. The actual arithmetic is: One wasp sting and swollen finger, $600 for a new dryer, $50 for a $500 dryer vent replacement, $14 for an interior vent, 20 minutes cleaning up after the interior vent blew lint all over for a couple minutes, $100 and a new outlet, 1500 words on the blog and lots of long retellings with hand gestures, and new innumerable fears about what other dangerous and hidden shortcuts were taken in the course of building this house later, and I can dry laundry now.
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Yesterday, I went to the dentist to have a cavity filled and a crown replaced. I haven’t gone under the drill in a little over 9 years. About that time, I got caught up with all the work I’d lacked in my 20s, so I had cavities filled, roots drilled, and crowns attached.
It wasn’t a bad visit as far as it goes. I was a bit apprehensive, just a tad. Back in the olden days, the aforementioned series of trips a decade ago, I was in the dentist chair every month for a couple hours, so I got used to it. This time, my apprehensiveness melted pretty quickly. I even quipped to the doctor as his drill smoked cutting through porcelain and tooth material that it reminded me that I had an etching bit for my rotary tool that I haven’t tried out yet. I said I was going to go home and try it on a random ceramic tile. He laughed so hard he pierced my cheek for me. Well, not quite. I’m not that funny, although with only half a mouth working, I sure sounded funny.
But the most interesting part of the visit was getting the new crown. In the olden days of 2002, the doctor took an impression of the crown to replace and shipped it off to a lab for milling. I got a temporary cap and, three weeks later, I came back to have the cap cemented on with the special UV penlight.
Fewer than 10 years later, the dentist wheeled in a computer on a cart with some elaborate CAD software on it. He stuck a funny camera in my mouth and snapped a couple digital images. The software plotted my ha’tooth next to the adjacent teeth, and the doctor moused some lines in. He compared the shape of the tooth he was fixing to the bite pattern and smoothed some where the tooth would impact the top tooth. Then he sent it wirelessly to the tooth printer.
It’s not really a printer, but close enough. In a little cubby at the back of the office, he has a computer-assisted milling machine. You plug in a block of ceramic, and two diamond-tipped drill bits carve the crown out of it in about 7 minutes. During the process, one of the bits became dull, so the technician opened the machine and swapped it out just like she was changing the toner. A couple minutes later, the tooth dropped from the remainder of the block, and after some cleanup and firing, they affixed it into my mouth.
In 10 years, we’ve gone from precision lab millwork to an in-office computer peripheral. Frankly, I am amazed and pleased.
And sad that the pace of change is probably going to change once the commissars handle medicine and dentistry for us poor little helpless children in the citizenry.
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I received an IMPORTANT post card from Laclede Gas in St. Louis. Laclede Gas is the gas utility that powers the water heater and a furnace in my old house in St. Louis (a house THAT COULD BE YOURS!).
Apparently, the automated data mining software hooked up to the new smart meters has determined that the vacant house is not using as much gas as an occupied house did. So the gas company sent me a card telling me that I had to schedule an inspection of the meter–to make sure I did not tamper with it, no doubt–within five days. OR ELSE something. As you can imagine, this is an inconvenience to me that I tried to explain on the phone with them. But there are procedures! My glib excuse that no one is showering there is irrelevant!
Now, with their first attempt to install the smart meters, they were not too quick to schedule an inspection if they determined I was using more gas than normal as their botched installation pumped extra gas into my basement store room–gas that I was paying for in addition to was threatened with an explosion by.
No, the errors that add to their bottom line are assumed to be okay.
Were this Facebook, my Doctor of Rhetoric friend would pop up to insinuate that this is a free market problem and that if only the Federal government would nationalize the industry, I would not be threatened with explosion or investigation. However, we in the real world know that’s not true. This little rant is not about corporations being EVIL!. It’s about annoyance with this particular corporate practice.
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Two articles of note in the May/June 2010 Saturday Evening Post:
“We had a clean slate, so why not do things right?” says former City Council President John Janssen. City officials envisioned a model for other communities.
So you get the normal central bureau building it all green and following the latest dictational fads instead of letting the citizens build the city according to how they would use it. You know, the old fashioned way, before city councils got addicted to playing SimCity with their personal ambulatory Sims.
Oh, I’m inspired, all right. Inspired to hit SurvivalBlog for more tips on what to do when society collapses under the weight of these prigs’ self-absorbed, self-righteous busybodiness.
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Frank W. James on the waiting:
The soybeans, however, remain a question mark. Stuff I planted over a week ago has yet to emerge. I’ve had soybeans take as long as 3 weeks to emerge, but I don’t like it. It makes me nervous as all git out.
Every spring that I do planting, I get very concerned that I’ve killed the live plants I put in or that I’ve put seeds in too deep. Then, when they emerge or bloom, I receive a very pleasant surprise.
Of course, I don’t do it for a living, but I bet his senses are akin to when I get a new client, do the work, and send an invoice and have to wait sometimes 30 or 60 days for a check to come. When it does, whoa! It worked! Every time.
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You know, I’m a small government conservative type, but I have a deep, dark secret that shatters my credibility and totally dismisses any argument that I might have against a Federal mandates for purchasing Obama-approved health insurance: I watch some PBS programming.
It all started, as it often does, with Sesame Street, which I started recording for my children. Because I needed them to see a number of puppets praising Jessica Alba, Jenny McCarthy, and Michelle Obama. Then we started with the Dragon Tales so they would learn to embrace the cognitive dissonance of having a dragon, which can fly, in a wheelchair. That program started catching the beginning of the noon program, which was an adult program. So I started recording those programs for Daddy, which happen to be programs that Daddy can watch while the children are present.
So I watch the following on PBS regularly, even though I don’t think that the Federal government should replicate criminal laws that states already have just so its prosecutors can dip their beaks into headlines when crimes occur:
Now that I have unburdened my guilty soul to you, I ask of you: Why are these shows on public television?
Because they’re produced by public television stations!
But why are they produced by public television stations? Look at the content of these shows. Maybe in the 1960s and 1970s, you would not see these programs on the big three networks and might have needed someone to spend tax money to put them on the air, but in the 21st century, cable channels and nowadays the Internet pump these sorts of programs out all over the place. There are entire travel channels, entire crafting channels (well, DIY and HGTV run those sorts of shows), and so on. There are so many profit-seeking channels that quality shows like these are frequent and available. So why is public television still pumping them out?
Because there’s still a public television budget.
Until there isn’t, public television stations will continue to spend tax money to provide duplicate programming that other sources are providing on their own dime. Maybe you won’t get Victory Garden running for 60 years; my favorite programs Creative Juice and Small Space Big Style ran for 3 years and 1 year (IMDB indicates, but I think there were more episodes than that) respectively.
But you do get free market flexibility, and tax money savings the government could put to infrastructure projects or something else. Ha! Who am I kidding? In the 21st century, the government doesn’t spend money on public benefits. It spends money on private wealth transfers and government employees.
UPDATE: I just watched an episode of Victory Garden that included a segment, apparently forthcoming regular feature on the program, whose experts actually have their own program on DIY. You see how this sort of proves my point?
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So I managed to make it up to Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield last week, and as I alluded elsewhere, I bought myself a hat with a Confederate flag on it:
I bought it to show my support for the park and because I wear hats to keep my balding head from burning when I pretend to work the land.
However, I’m sort of stricken with the notion that it might be distasteful or odd, to say the least, to purchase a hat commemorating a battle. Men fought and died for honor, state, and country on that battlefield, and I got a hat about it.
Trivializing or commemorating? You decide.
Also, two things I learned at the battlefield:
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If I got to choose my lycanthropy curse, I would choose to be a weretyrannosaurus.
Silver bullets are relatively common relative to silver 120mm shells. I’m just saying.
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Today’s trip to Lowe’s saw me purchase a porch swing, ten sacks of manure, a watering can, a flower pot, and some seeds. When the clerk asked if I wanted to pay $10 to have the swing assembled for me, I told her no. It would fit better in my truck in the box, and I know how to use a socket wrench.
When I got home, you betcha, I was charged $10 for the assembly. I called, and I can go in and get that amount refunded easily, but really.
Lowe’s Point of Sale systems feature a monitor facing the cashier, and that’s it. The customer either has to stand behind the cashier when he or she is scanning the goods to see what’s getting added to the bill or check the receipt immediately, I guess, but damn. Lowe’s is one more bank error in their favor from driving me to Ace Hardware forever.
(First edition of this sad series here.)
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Ladies and Gentlemen, now that I am an industrial lawnmower kind of guy, I need hearing protection. So I bought (and exchanged a defective unit as aforementioned or aaftmentioned depending on whether you read daily or not) hearing protection.
Sort of.
Here’s the unit I bought:
They even come preset to the Dana Show (look at the photo of the LCD radio setting, it’s 97.1 FM, which is the talk radio station in St. Louis, he explained parenthetically).
Why do I say it defeats its own purpose?
Because it’s designed to protect your hearing from the lawnmower’s decibels. However, if you’re listening to a rock station, you’re likely, if you’re like me, to substitute the lawnmower’s decibels for Metallica’s decibels. Which ultimately doesn’t protect your hearing at all.
Maybe its purpose is to not to protect your hearing, but to destroy your hearing in a more enjoyable fashion.
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So yesterday, I went to Lowes to exchange a defective piece of equipment (the aaftmentioned noise cancelling headphones and radio). I went into the special exchange room off of the main entrance, and the woman took my defective product and offered to refund the money to my credit card or give me store credit. Since I just wanted to exchange the product, I got a special store card credited with $53.83.
I grabbed a new instance of the headphones and went to the checkout line, wherein the total rang up at $53.84, and the checker told me I owed a penny. On a direct exchange.
I told him it was a direct exchange and prepared my outraged demand that he call the customer service desk right now, but he looked to see if he had a spare penny on the register. He didn’t, but I later noticed on my receipt that he’d rung it as though I’d given him a penny. He took a hit on his drawer’s accuracy at the end of the day in the name of good customer service. I sort of feel bad about that.
However, not too bad. If I had bought other things, as I’d considered, that extra penny would have been lost in the total and I would have donated some portion of a penny to either Lowes’ bottom line or the state of Missouri and the city of Republic.
A rounding error, no doubt. But the rounding errors are always against the consumer and the citizen, aren’t they?
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You know, living in the country and driving down these old Farm Roads has really encouraged me to keep both hands on the wheel at all times.
So, the other day, I’m heading down Farm Road 182 towards Republic. I glance in my rear view mirror as I near the bridge over Wilson Creek and see a car pretty tight on me. I don’t like it, but as I skim the S curve surrounding the bridge, crossing the center line to straighten the curve slightly. Skimming the curve allows me to take the curve at a speed I won’t reveal since my wife reads this blog and trusts me to drive our children safely, and she would disagree whether that speed was safe. As I come down the large hill west of Wilson Creek, I see I have put distance between me and the car behind me. I’m pleased as I crest the next hill and head into the trough and then….
I slam on the brakes. The bird, just off my front left headlight, dekes one step back toward the battlefield and takes flight. Now, the bird is eye level, windshield level, and I duck to the left as it barely clears the roof.
By this time, the truck is mostly stopped, and I mash onto the gas to avoid the turkey landing on the roof and to make sure that the cars behind me don’t rear end me. The turkey, which I recognized as a turkey belatedly given its actual height did not exceed the hood of the truck and that it freaking flew, survived. We survived.
I call it a draw.
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This piece excerpts a book that echoes something I tell myself for solace:
Even on their own terms the politics and business of the world were absurdly evanescent. One week politicians, people who worked in the City, and people whose job it was to report their doings would all be kept out of their beds by a financial crisis which, six months later, would be little talked of. By that time perhaps there would be . . . a corruption scandal in local government, which would then be followed by a flurry of public concern over crimes of violence, which in its turn would be pushed out of people’s minds by their fury over some proposed new tax; and so it would go on. Each of these things would seem important for a time, then each would pass away and scarcely matter again except to historians. In fact, the truth is that most of them made little or no difference even to the daily lives of most of the population living through them. People immersed in this stream of ever-changing events were filling their minds with . . . ephemera and trivia, what people in electronics mean by “noise.” (254)
…
It is not as if were no alternatives. Time spent listening to great music, or seeing great plays, or thinking about issues of lasting importance, was not in this category. In those cases the object of one’s activities retained its interest and importance for the rest of one’s life. If I spent an evening listening to Mahler’s Third Symphony, that symphony was still going to matter to me in six months’ time, or ten years, or thirty: it was part of my life, for always. In fact such things more often than not increased in interest and value with the passage of time. If I spent two or three months saturating myself in, let us say, recordings of Mozart’s piano concertos, and then did not return to them like that for another four years or so, I would find when I came back to them that I engaged with them on a deeper level than before. And the same was true of most great art. . . .
There were times when I felt, after all, that I was living to the full in face of death. Many men of action who are also writers have described the bliss induced in them by the sound of bullets smacking past their ears, and said that it intensified their awareness of being alive to an intoxicating level. The things that came closest to doing this for me when I fully realized I was facing death were my love affairs and friendships, philosophy and the arts.
I’m pretty steeped in politics these days from the sidelines, and I get pretty agitated when I muse on the direction of the country and the inevitable and possibly in-our-lifetimes collapse of the Republic.
But spring is coming. The days are warmer, and when I spend time outside plotting and planting, I can hear the neighbors’ horses nickering, the cattle lowing, and the occasional punctuation of an ass. My children smile, I can wrap my arms around my wife (after washing up), and I can spend the evenings with a book and a glass of wine.
Throughout the sweep of history, people have lived their lives. History books tell of the ascents, descents, and failures of nation-states or city-states, but that narrative is only clear to the individual when read in a history book. One person’s influence, unless one becomes a ruler, is minimal. One should participate, but remember what is important to the individual person and to enjoy the joys of life more than one suffers from the disappointments and heartbreak of trying to turn the march of history.
(Link seen on Instapundit.)
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Calves come from seed, not from sexual reproduction.
The things a city boy learns living out in the country.
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I agree with the overheated NBC commentators. Truly, I never will forget where I was when I saw on tape delay when that one guy, or maybe girl, overcame a tremendous obstacle in the personal life or maybe it was an injury to skate, ski, or otherwise compete against all odds and won a medal or maybe just won by competing and coming in 11th. It’s a moment etched into my short term memory until….
Hey, what’s the weather forecast for this week?
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The online/print organica from Price Cutter Stores is entitled Liv Organically:
Sure, I know it’s harder to trademark something spelled correctly, but I hate to see expensive print publications spelled like they were created by 12-year-olds on a cell phone. Especially when they first bring to mind not produce but a slightly overweight woman in a frock with long, tangled hair.
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A killer whale kills a trainer in Orlando, and all the quotes in the article are supportive of whales:
Killer whale expert Nancy Black said the whale could have been playing and the incident could have been an accident.
“They are very intelligent creatures. They have emotions, and feelings. Maybe it was unhappy in the situation, maybe it was bored,” Black said.
But this particular Orca has killed before:
Tilikum, the whale believed to be involved in Wednesday’s incident, was also involved in the death of a part-time trainer in Canada in 1991.
In 1999, a 27-year-old South Carolina man somehow entered a whale tank at SeaWorld Orlando after park hours and drowned. Daniel Dukes, who was carrying false identification, was found dead with a bite below his waist, according to autopsy results. He was bitten by Tilikum.
If we were a civilization on the upswing, Tilikum would be lighting lamps in Florida tomorrow night. But we’re not, so this beast will get passed along to another park and will lie low for a couple years before it snaps up another extra from the human race.
(Link seen on Althouse.)
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