You kids get off my lawn!

It may be time to tell my vegan forum community goodbye, before I become intolerable to them through having a meltdown.

I love them... they are moral people (though we may differ in the specifics on many points), they are sensitive people, generally speaking, and they share a food aesthetic with me that goes pretty deeply into my everyday preferences.

They have gone from thrilling me by loving animals and each other, to boring me bugnuts by blathering about their pets, to driving me out of my skull by their stupid decisions about animal protection. Not everyone in it, mind you, but as a community. The forest, not the trees.

Listen to me.

If you rescue animals, good. If they are WILD animals, even better.

Cats and dogs and such are very nice, yes. Spay or neuter the little bastards and keep them inside. This is what they do outside: They make more predators. They murder the wildlife. They cause property damage. They devour toxins and die. They get hit by cars. They are a nuisance, they are a drain (and when Animal Control rounds them up on my dime and with my heartfelt and sad blessing, if you turn them loose, you are the enemy of my pocketbook), and they are living shorter and sicker lives than they would indoors.

All this talking head blather about "rescuing" animals by freeing them from Animal Control live traps, or cramming your backyard with still-half-feral crap machines creating a noise nuisance and a stink that can be tasted for blocks, or any of that kind of misdirected moral smugness...

Go. Find out what they do to wild animals with nowhere else to go, whose fragile ecosystems have already been crushed beyond survival threshold by the same idiots (us) that imported the cats and dogs you are "saving."

Grrrrrr....

Yes, I know most of them are like 13-17 years old and are probably surviving anorexia or suicide because having other hammerheads to snuggle with is cushioning their fragile, eggshell sensitive egos, so brutalized by the mean horrible world.

Nature is red in tooth and claw. Put Fifi outside and she will either feed on, or feed, someone else--if only roadside crows. She will not go purchase her own gourmet vegan dog food. Put Felix outside and he will kill hundreds of animals before succumbing to some form of organ disease (or vehicle) that he would never have encountered inside. At least he won't go blind from being denied taurine by a "well-meaning" vegan owner.

I'm all for morality, all for it! But shouldn't we have a requirement alongside to be oh, say, at least marginally smart about our endeavors?

Le sigh. It's largely my own fault and the fault of people like me, for nodding my head and making polite noises when people tell me they did something morally sterling but totally incorrect... such as, say, "rescuing" a baby bird because you believe its parents won't take it back once it's been handled (such birds almost always die, and the parents do take them back... most birds lack a sense of smell and if you don't fuss around giving them a nervous breakdown, they will come right back for baby if you put him in the nest or on the branch.)

I should tell people on the spot: "nice thought, but your cat will probably live a much shorter time since you let him outside, and he will kill hundreds of animals. Cat spit and claws are toxic: even "barely scratched" animals will die. Also, his many kittens will glut the shelters."

How do I become this person? And will it help?

In my own backyard

The last couple days have been the days for weird surprises in the backyard.

Night before last, we were coming home and saw a SOMETHING. It wasn't a cat, it wasn't a fox, and it looked (to me) a lot like a marten. It had a pointy face and rounded triangle ears back and high on its head, long legs (this is where marten breaks down a bit), long tail, relatively uniform color with more variation (pale buff chin?) on the face, and ran front-back-front-back, not deedly-deedly-deedly like a cat. Don't know what it was. I do know a whole list of what it was not.

Last night, a mantis lunged up out of my carrots and beets when I watered them (and it). It watched me quizzically, no doubt wondering if I was danger or food, while I talked to it. Lovely, pale brown thing. So very welcome in my yard... eat pest bugs, little mantis. I'll be careful of you when I pick beets.

I didn't get a picture because we have 1 MIA camera and 1 broken camera (due to be repaired free of charge by Canon, because it is a known error). We searched high and low for the missing one, but it never has worked too well and who knows where we put it when we moved?

(I am also missing a Very Important Cable, but that is neither here nor there. Obviously. Or I wouldn't be missing it. Last move, it was, somewhat bizarrely, a huge box of baking trays (cookie sheets, muffin tins, cooling racks, etc.), my salad spinner, a few utinsils, and suchlike that went over the wall.)

Then, near twilight, Pat called me into the kitchen to look out at the feeder. A pretty little rat was sitting on it, nibbling. Not greedily like the accursed squirrels, but very daintily.

Bizarrely, I had found woodrats online earlier in the very same day when googling for California wildlife. Otherwise I would never have remembered them. They have sleek hairy tails, not scaly icky tails like a Norwegian ratty-rat.

We have a woodrat.

He is exquisite, soft brown with curled-forward dark whiskers, bright eyes, and plush tail. Pretty. Gentle looking. Polite. Not entirely unwelcome at my feeders.

Nonetheless, he is not welcome in the house... he must stay Out There.

What's new for you?

Be careful what you wish for.

1. We have a Red-Shouldered Hawk who sits on our trees or the back fence, stalking the wily ground squirrels. Evidently ground-dwelling rodent is a gourmet feast for her kind, and she is less interested in both the amphibians who inhabit the creek-lake-cum-pond behind the house (ribbit) and the little birds whose feeders she hunkers amidst.

2. The splinted sunflower looks pitiful. All its petals dropped off and fled. It would give me no joy, except that the birds like it now better than ever. About a third of its seeds have been eaten-- neatly, as humans would harvest an ear of corn with their teeth!- and its leaves are tattered lace. I love the disfigured thing better than ever I did its more beauteous aspect. Not content with that, the tiny finches have discovered the seed heads forming on my dill plants (we decided to let them go to seed). Watching them naively and determinedly try to perch on a spinning seed head while devouring it is one of life's chiefer charms.

3. Pat has two jobs opening up -- one next week, one in mid-August. Famine to feast, scraping by to planning for alternate futures.

Blundered onto a delightful blog post...

...on one of my favorite perfume-related blogs. Oh, my. How evocative, how captivating this topic is for me. And I have so much to say about it... and I thought you'd all like to share.

Now Smell This featured a post on one's earliest fragrances, and the memories associated with them. It invites readers to write about their own earliest experiences with perfume. Me, I remember several episodes... the pretty scent my Grandma Rose wore, which was almost certainly by Avon, and the very pretty folk bug repellent Skin-So-Soft she swore by. Grandma Red let me play with a little scent bottle that once held something sweet and powdery-smelling, which was empty in my childhood... I filled it with water and wore the faintly scented water over and over and can still smell the fragrance in the empty bottle now that I have inherited it. The neighbor girl, Katrina, had a "perfume factory" play kit of some kind with various fragrance notes and small funnels and droppers... we created what we thought were very rare, costly, and unique scents that were naturally rather well circumscribed by the creators of the kit. I think it was probably Avon, too, looking back; her mom sold Avon products. My mom and I discovered Love's Vanilla together and were devastated when it was discontinued. It seemed to us to be quite the perfect single-note vanilla scent, and we wanted more. Mom's Babe, which her chemistry made just divine: spicy, etherial, and fresh all at once. My mom's racy best friend Betsy's Youth Dew and Estee Lauder and other powdery sweet nectars. Auntie Avanell's boudoir dresser, bejewelled with numerous glorious bottles of middle-cost-to-first-rate perfumes: she wore L'Air du Temps and it was heavenly. The sweet peas, Cecil Brunner mini-roses, irises, and orange blossoms in Grandma Red's yard; the oh-so-edible honeysuckle in my playmate Jeffy's side yard.

Nice memories of my grandfathers by their scents and the feel of their whole-body-envelopingly-huge hands (hey, both passed on before I was 2 1/2). Smoke, iron, sweat, rain, pipe tobacco, musk, leather, tomato leaves, man.

And other scented memories. The time my dad left bait squid in a raincoat pocket tucked into an inaccessible cupboard of the camper for ...I remember this as 2 weeks, but it can't have been. The stink of a skunk that let go in Sharon's back yard-- her much older, glamorous, never-deigned-to-utter-a-word-to-me-before sister Trina came out and said with a wink, "If you open your mouth, you can taste it."

What was the first perfume you wore, and why did you wear it? Or what smells come to mind when you think about scent and early memories?

Uh oh.

So, Pat -- ahem, MC TV's Frank -- has gotten us back into making electronic music.

...If you want to call it "music." I love it -- but undoubtedly some of you will have reservations about applying the term to such a set of mad creations.\

We are Deep Hurting.

Much of our stuff is up at AcidPlanet, stinkin' up the Internets. Not all of it and it's not always the most refined version, as we have had several computer changes, moves, software upgrades and downgrades, etc., blah dee blah blah. Mercifully, atrocities such as "Alpha Complex" (sung by yours truly to the tune of "New York, New York" -- "they're such pro-duc-tive cit-izens, Al-phaaaah Com-pleeeeeeex") have been lost to time and not yet unearthed.

We are currently re-emerging and noodling with various styles/songs. Our older stuff fell into a few phases, which Pat charmingly describes here.

One thing is for sure. There is more to come.

--DJ Darth Continent

Evil fashion I found through a hotlink somewhere

Combining all the evils of rent-to-own properties and fashionista must-have-it:

Bag, Borrow, or Steal.

Holy cow.

You join a membership thing and can rent designer handbags, jewelry, etc. by the week or month.

Did I mention it's evil?

Greedy Ducks

Ducks are greedy.

They just are.

Remember feeding them stale bread at the park or pond when you were a kid and watching them squabble over every morsel? Yes, greedy.

Since my Blogger name is "Ducks" I can admit to being just that-- a greedy duck.

I troll every once in a while through perfumery blogs. It started with an interest in the fragrances themselves but, as with everything I look at, the interest transformed itself into something more social. The language people use when they describe scents (which are themselves metaphors... more in a moment on this), when they describe the luxuries they crave and marry their self-concepts to, when they converse in a flashy, online fashionista civility that many of them may not inhabit in their day-to-day lives.

Moreover, the culture of "I want this! It will transform me!" that exists in fashion reviews. And there is something richer to the perfume fashionistas' dialogue (in my opinion) than in that of other fashion addicts (handbags, shoes, etc.) because of two factors:

1) Socially, a perfume is thought to be a part of oneself, expressive of the very essence of a person, rather than a trapping for the exterior. It is a cosmetic for the soul.

2) There is a depth of knowledge and a premium on the sensorium that is only matched in the evaluation of other luxury consumables, such as wine or caviar. The perfumers are "noses," and we develop a "taste" for certain fragrance notes.

Still, as in other fashion movements, if someone likes a given element in composition (or in some shallower cases, a fashion house), they will collect that item greedily. "This oudh," or "the newest amber fragrance," will call to them and they "must" have it.

I think most people have one or two bottles of fragrance, which they replace when it runs out or becomes intolerably rancid. These people have twenty, fifty, seventy, more. And they do not toss it out-- because they store it out of dangerous light and warmth, and they conserve it so that they have the "old version" when it is revised. This is not just snob appeal; it is also connossieurship. And they budget for it... they will live on ramen to buy a full bottle of something that they adore the sample of.

I have to confess, I am not one of these folks. I'm an intermediate creature, with three or four fragrances... and LOTS of samples (although I am aware this might be how it starts). I love to smell things, to change my scent "outfit" with my moods, to see what the twitter is all about.

Anyhoo. I happened upon an offer to celebrate Andy Tauer's two years as a blogger, in which he is giving away samples of his latest unreleased creation. He is a very renowned independent Swiss perfumer with a taste for scent notes I love, although I have not smelled any of his perfumes (they sound too floral and romantic for me, but as I am learning to like florals on my skin, we shall see) and seems to be a buoyant soul in the online world.

I jumped on it. I shall have one of 70 samples he is giving away.

I feel a bit like an intruder -- half excited, half guilty. Greedy Ducks.

This isn't even fully my world, and I loathe shopping and (traditionally) all things fashionable. But it sounds delicious and I am very curious, and pretty delighted to have the opportunity to smell this avant-garde secret before the official release.

I will tell you how it is when it arrives.

About fragrances being metaphors... perfumes are crafted to capture different scents. The smell of jasmine is composed of several chemical elements (including the infamous indole, which smells fecal as all get out on its own, but when combined with others... gorgeous jasmine.) The smell of gardenia is an artificially composed approximate, because it does not extract well through any traditional means. The smell of musk is a fake -- because moral outrage and dwindling animal populations have made the real stuff prohibitive.

So we trick our noses with many dissimilar and partial chemical fragrances, added up to become something resemblent of something that evokes our memories, our emotions, our pleasure. (Think about your senses for a minute: what you smell --like the smell of gardenia-- is something your brain is composing of chemical signals in combination --or olfactory phantoms as in the case of the smell of burning cigarettes that still haunts me for most of the day. What you see is a series of still images processed in such a way that you think you can see movement. And things like color, which we traditionally think of as empirical, are culturally determined: one man's blue may be another man's black. Or even more radically, in the case of the colorblind, the brain itself can choose some categories: one man's red may be another man's gray.)

Then, the resultant odor of "raspberries" or "gardenia" or "musk" is mingled with one or two other scents to become an accord. An accord is a mixture in which the notes are present but intermingled together to transform into (supposedly) a single harmonious note.

Fragrance notes and accords are mixed to form perfumes. In these perfumes, there are top notes (the bright ephemeral aromas that catch your attention at first, then fade as your nose stuns or they evaporate), heart or middle notes (which you smell during the first half hour to two hours or so in which you are wearing the fragrance), and base notes (or dry down) -- the deep ones that linger in your skin hours and hours later.

So there are several features to a perfume: the "single" notes themselves may be composed; the accords are certainly blended compositions; the evolution of a perfume over time on the skin is also composed of the foregoing.

And all of it is a trick of how your neural cells interpret a whiff of chemical. Metaphor. Alchemy. Wizardry.