cblj_backup | Entries tagged with coyotes

Good morning all, and welcome to Radio Free Monday! Short one this week :) I imagine LJ outages may be to blame.

Ways To Give:

Anon shared a link to TEN Moves, a coalition of government and private agencies raising money to build ten thousand classrooms in the Philippines in the next two years. You can read more about the project here, and donation information is here.

stasia linked me to

yumemisama, who is in need of cash help, housing assistance, and suggestions or assistance finding jobs in the Boston area. She's in a pretty desperate situation and could use any help the cafe can offer.

Give For Free:

grey_damaskena needs your help with a survey! She's currently a graduate student in publsihing, and is writing her dissertation on the relationship between Manga fans and the publishing industry. Her survey is gathering information on the habits of manga readers, and she'd love to have you participate! She adds "I would be happy to discuss anything people would like concerning my research, or answer any questions or concern anyone has (regarding the survey or anything else). The survey is for academic purposes only, and the results are entirely anonymous and will not be publicized outside of my dissertation itself."

dreamwaffles made a lot of mint jelly recently and, as she does not eat lamb, needs some suggestions regarding what one does with a metric ton of mint jelly.

News To Know:

Last October,

mysid asked me to help promote organ donation on behalf of her daughter, who was desperately waiting for a liver transplant. This week she wrote to say: "I'm very, very happy to report that my daughter has received her new liver. She's doing very well, and we're looking forward to her having a long and healthy life." HAPPY ENDING YAY \o/

bodlon sent me this and while it was, of course, a terrible ordeal for the coyote, I couldn't help laughing. Cautionary tale about throwing out litter in unsafe ways, happy ending, totally hilarious photo of ASTRONAUT COYOTE.

And this has been Radio Free Monday! Thank you for your time. You can always post items for my attention in comments here (or on any post) or email me at copperbadge at gmail dot com. If you're not sure how to proceed, here is a little more about what I do and how you can help. Remember, non-embedded links are love.

Holy shit, Chicago's been invaded by RANSACKING RACCOONS. This explains why they found a coyote in a Metra station recently. She was trying to get the hell out of Dodge. (The Sun-Times cracks me up. Sad-looking coyote. You'd look sad too if you were trapped in a Metra station without opposable thumbs or higher reasoning functions.)

BossBoss and I have a running joke whenever our mutual boss, The Idiot, sends us an especially stupid missive. It started when there was a whole afternoon of stupid and I looked up at my boss at one point and said, "Do you hear circus music whenever they email?" Now whenever someone does something stupid to us we just say "circus music" and both bust up laughing.

I'm applying for a new job with my company this week. I contacted the person in charge of the search, and we have had the most circus music dialogue that I've yet encountered. On the one hand it's mostly harmless; on the other it frightens me for my future.

BossBoss and I, meanwhile, both read The 99%, which had an article this week on sorting out what you should stop doing, start doing, and continue doing. Which led to the following discussion via email:

BossBoss: I lost track of time this morning and I'm running late.
Sam: You're totally fired when you get here.
BossBoss: I have a lovely response prepared for that.
Sam: Are you going to tell me what I can stop, start, and continue to do?
BossBoss: Not specifically, but it will answer that question too...

I'm feeling antsy this afternoon -- a combination of it being Monday, it being the last day in February, and tomorrow being my interview -- so I am CLEANING THINGS OUT.

Have some links.

Holly, the Chicago coyote who was rescued from a drifting ice floe in December, has been rehabbed and set free. And is very happy to be loose.

Apparently pickpocketing in the US is a dying art. And I in no way made a "to watch" movie list from that article.

I updated the stupid babyfic, I hope you're happy.

Happy Sunday morning everyone! Or Sunday afternoon, depending on timezone. Attempt #1 at making oatmeal in the slow cooker has failed. I guess you really can't use Old Fashioned oats. (I thought maybe the recipe's writer just had a thing against Quaker.) It's okay though, I know how to make oatmeal the Old Fashioned way, breakfast is saved.

Last night I dreamed I was commissioned to build a better duck. It's one of those utterly surreal dreams that in the moment is serious effing business, building a duck. I don't even know what my criteria were for how to "improve" duckhood, but by god I was going to give it the old college try.

The Wall Street Journal ran an article on coyotes in Chicago yesterday, proving they know what's what, and they appeared to be the first to make an actual narrative out of it, complete with the anti-coyote Mr. Fath, who believes they should be removed from suburban areas.

*ominous chord*

Opposite Fath stands Stan Gehrt, who is basically the rock star of midwestern Coyote research -- read any article on urban coyotes in Illinois and there he is, ready to kick ass and take coyote names. If you're unconvinced, check out this slideshow which includes coyotes chillin' in dog parks, Gehrt's awesome jury-rigged truck-top swivel antenna, and The Hunt For Coyote 498. Unlike ducks, coyotes actually are serious business. I am sorry to have dragged you all into coyote fandom, but I personally am rooting for the coyotes.

When Holly gets released in the spring we're gonna have a party on this journal. I'm warning you now.

I can't deny that this hourglass thing I've got going is making me more efficient. And I think it's making me more focused too, because if the last week or so is anything to go by I have a six-minute attention span. It's a miracle I finish blog posts, let alone novels.

I've been doing more reading than usual, because fifteen minutes of every hour is now "drywork" where I'm off the computer (except for status checks on work email, which are a necessary part of the job). So I printed out an article from the Financial Times on Mark Landis, the forger who gives paintings away. The first half is semi-tedious but the second half, an actual interview with Landis, more than makes up for it. His actions are deceptively complicated given they stem from a simple motivation: he just wants his parents to be remembered. It seems to be his way of coping with grief, mutated from using art to cope with boredom. It's very Arthur Miller, really. And quite the interesting read, thank you Helen for tipping me off.

Changeling on Dreamwidth also linked me the Demon Barbers account of this year's Straw Bear ceremony in Whittlesea. While they're not directly correlative, the Nameless straw-bear ritual is based on the Whittlesea one, drawing from a bunch of nordic traditions as well. It's informative reading, especially for those interested in British traditional ritual.

And my Coyotes Chicago google alert continues to provide entertainment -- this morning it was a link to an article about Flint Creek Wildlife Rehabilitation, the folks taking care of Holly Coyote, who also deal in birds (you can check out the director's blog here). On the one hand it is not at all funny how many birds die from flying into buildings (I have personal experience with this, but I can't find the link to the entry about being attacked by a dead bird). On the other:

During migration seasons hundreds of volunteers scour downtown streets looking for injured birds.

It's just so goddamned Chicago, I had to laugh.

This is getting out of hand.

After reading about the wild coyote colony living cheek-by-jowl with us here in Chicago, I decided I wanted to know more about coyotes. So I set up a google alert, which was clearly a mistake. I have fallen too far down the rabbit hole, and I know this because I get unreasonably angry about negative media coverage of our Second City Coyotes.

Lately, a nearby county has offered a bounty on coyote ears. While I know that sometimes hunting thins out overpopulation and is good for the local ecosystem, it still annoys me; coyotes are territorial and tend not to overpopulate the way, say, deer do. A bunch of "save the quails/turkeys/ducks" organisations are behind it, and while I'm a big fan of ducks I'm not sure you can trust people who care that much about turkeys.

Also, some of these people are morons. The coyotes are not invading your housing subdivision, asshole, you're building houses on their hunting ground. And I'm fine with people building out into coyote territory, because coyotes are super-adaptible pest-control machines, but don't blame the coyotes when you invade their home and they refuse to leave.

I also happen to know that mating season for coyotes is starting. Keep your cats inside and your dog on a leash! (That sounds wrong, but what they mean is that coyotes are more aggressive during mating season and especially in the suburbs may go after cats as prey and dogs as competitors.)

Seriously. I know too much about coyotes for someone not doing a degree in coyotes. On the other hand, I learned it all from people doing degrees in coyotes. Did you know you can get a degree in coyotes?

It does have its advantages. Remember Holly, the badass coyote who was rescued from the ice floe in Lake Michigan? She's recovering nicely from a case of frostbitten paws, living on rats and the occasional quail, and will probably be released this spring. Happy ending!

In short: Fuck Yeah Coyotes.