Category Archives: true life 2005

today's pop quiz: how many species of snakes are there in florida?

There are 45 indigenous species of snakes in Florida, although only 6 are venomous. We learned this last night when we were trying to name the 5 venomous species that exist in this area. We were thinking pygmy and timber rattlers were the same, that those were just regional nicknames for the same species (they aren’t). Plus, I kept trying to count cobras. I think they should count, since there’s no getting rid of them at this point. It was, I would like to add, a mistake to review the 41 species of snakes right before bedtime.

Don't you wish you too could live in a delicious cloud of musical comedy?

I watched Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. I’ve been looking for my lost IQ points ever since.

Reading the incredibly vapid Sunday Source section of the Post shaved off a few more points this morning. Husband had opened the paper and was surprised to see one of his Mantis cohorts pictured on the front in an article about beards, so I felt like I ought to read it. I still don’t understand why it’s necessary to have a Sunday Style section and a Sunday Source section. It’s not the insipidness of either individual section, it’s the fact that there’s two of them. As though this inspidiness is somehow hipper than that insipidness.

On the other hand, if this is the most annoying thing I encounter all day I’m in pretty good shape.

And now, here are some images of a praying mantis eating a hummingbird. (note to self: find this image and relink it!)

That's the way it is in bear country

Anyone who doubts the popularity of the Berenstain Bears amongst the toddler-crowd hasnt been hanging with the toddler crowd. Wildy, rock-star popular, those bears are. Right up there with Dr. Seuss and Curious George in the category of books I spend the most time de-drooling and recovering and reshelving.

Childrens librarianship is just like academic librarianship – the only difference being the specific titles one has to clean the saliva and peanut-butter encrusted fingerprints from. Additionally, toddlers wear diapers and don’t pee in the library. Academic and law school librarians only wish their patrons wouldn’t pee in the stacks. But I digress.

I always liked the Berenstain Bears, but even more so after learning of Charles Krauthammer’s dislike of them:

(link dead or missing)I hate the Berenstain Bears, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer fumed in 1989. The raging offense of the Berenstains is the post-feminist Papa Bear, the Alan Alda of grizzlies, a wimp so passive and fumbling he makes Dagwood Bumstead look like Batman.

In 1996, Mr. Berenstain told The Post: ve gotten unkind letters complaining that we are emasculating the men in the family. The absolute truth is that Papa Bear is based on me.â

One of the Berenstains’ early editors complained that the bear family’s clothing, language and general mores were several decades out of date: s just not that way in the real world.

But that’s the way it is in Bear Country, the Berenstains replied.

I’m just genetically predisposed to like almost anything that man dislikes. I can’t help it.

Today’s Post, in a column that is, oddly enough, titled appreciation, levels quite a lot of criticism at the Bears, especially in it’s conclusion:

The larger questions about the popularity of the Berenstain Bears are more troubling: Is this what we really want from children’s books in the first place, a world filled with scares and neuroses and problems to be toughed out and solved? And if it is, aren’t the Berenstain Bears simply teaching to the test, providing a lesson to be spit back, rather than one lived and understood and embraced?

Where is the warmth, the spirit of discovery and imagination in Bear Country? Stan Berenstain taught a million lessons to children, but subtlety and plain old joy weren’t among them.

Now, even when you account for the repetition factor, which I’ll return to in a moment, it’s probably rare for any child to be raised on a strict diet of Bears books. Sure, Bear Country is a kind of freaky place, but all children’s book environments are a bit off-kilter, the enduring ones, anyway. So kids get variety, and I doubt very much that many of them are scarred from the lessons they learn from the Berenstains.

Kids love repetition. I doubt there’s anyone on the planet who doesn’t know that. But even when a kid is hooked on a specific story, you put multiple kids in the story area at the same time and they run the mommys, daddys or nannys ragged – insisting on hearing as many different stories as possible, often read as fast as possible.

It’s like watching toddler speed-dating.

sharks in government buildings, sounds redundant

Poor Husband thought I’d finally gone completely mad when I, in the course of random conversation in the car, mentioned the daily shark and alligator feedings at the aquarium downtown.

“We don’t have an aquarium downtown!”

He was laughing at me.

“Sure we do,” I replied. “It’s in the Treasury Building.”

Now, as soon as the words came out of my mouth even I realized it was one of the most ridiculous thing I’d ever said. As Husband is a native Washingtonian, if he didn’t know about this secret aquarium, it must not exist. But I was sure I’d been there. I could see the location vividly in my mind. Had I imagined it? Was that possible?

As it turns out, I had my building names confused, but not the physical location. I want that on the record, please. There is so a National Aquarium in Washington, DC and it’s every bit as loony as it sounds.

And they do have public shark and alligator feedings. Piranhas, too, if you’re so inclined.

norwegians, the yellow bellied sapsucker, and, of course, a deer

A couple of days ago I had plans to attend an early evening meeting and then stop by the Hirshhorn for cocktails and a gander at the Gyroscope show. I took the Metro, so you already know that I’m about to tell you that wackiness ensued.

I ended up playing tourguide to a Norwegian soccer team. I think they were a soccer team. Their English was only slightly better than my Norwegian (read: nonexistent) so it’s entirely possible they were just telling me they like to kick small dogs. They kept saying the word soccer a lot, so I’m going to go with my original assumption – my friends in highschool were Norwegian and used the term soccer instead of football so I think it’s a safe guess. But I digress…

To make a long story short, I took them to Natural History to see the Spirit of Ancient Colombian Gold exhibit (splendid), the hall of mammals (we took a group picture with the taxidermied deer), and, of course, the yellow-bellied sapsucker (to prove there really was such a thing).

As an aside, may I just say that the new(ish) Hall of Mammals resembles the interior of an REI store. It’s really rather, well, wrong.

There’s an exhibit of photos of Norway in the hallway leading to Baird Auditorium. It looks very cold in Norway. My new friends were very keen on the idea of migrating to La Florida until they saw the bizarre little display case just representing the Everglades. The case is just before the entrance to the insect zoo and it shows a small gator and 4 snakes in a space that is maybe 15 square feet. I tried explaining that snakes are not herd animals like reindeer, but that seemed only to frighten them further as for a while they thought I was explaining that we eat the snakes just like they eat reindeer.

I left my new friends at the Museum and went to my Artomatic meeting, expecting to never see them again since I was fairly certain my explanation of the Hirshhorn’s evening programs was lost in the (lack of) translation.

Amazingly, we were reunited at the Hirshhorn to consume lovely rum drinks and view the Gyroscope exhibit, which was also quite good. You have to watch out for the combination of intoxicants and works by Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, and Willem de Kooning as that way lies really strange dreams. If you have even the slightest interest in Contemporary and Modern art and you haven’t seen this show you should scurry down there and check it out. And if you don’t have any interest, you should go anyway. It’ll be good for you.