So, the exciting thing I promised on Friday (for certain values of "exciting") was that on Friday evening, I attended a saw-whet owl banding demonstration at Drumlin Farm Audubon Sanctuary. I really didn't quite know what to expect from this, but it sounded kind of interesting. I ended up at the "family night" session, so it was me, some parents with kids, and the Young Birders group.

Well, let me tell you, it was totally cool.



( More insanely cute pictures and explanation below the cut... )

... But leaf-blowers are not conducive to listening for hawks. Also, I have just discovered that it has gotten a wee bit too chilly to rush outside to try to spot hawks, without a coat on. Brrr.

Anyway -- little hawk news, but a couple of pics.

From Monday the 19th, one of the redtail adults on the flagpole on top of the Harvard Coop; sadly, a somewhat fuzzy picture:




And from yesterday, the two adults showed up circling over the Faculty Club and Barker Center, and I got this shot:




That's it for now. It's nice that they're still coming around within ear-shot, though.

( Under the cut, some other fall nature pictures... )

The lack of posting kind of relates to the lack of much hawk news, but it seems only fair to do a wrap-up post on that, at least for now.

After about Sept. 8th, I really wasn't able to find any sign of the two juvenile redtails around campus. Presumably, they finally left, to go off and establish territories of their own. *sniff*! I miss them. Also sad is the fact that once they change into their adult plumage, I'd never recognize them again anyway. (I barely figured out how to recognize them as individuals as it is.)

Interestingly, the adults have been around -- mostly either circling overhead, often hunting together and calling to each other as they do so; or, a few times, one or the other of them sitting on the good ol' First Church weathervane, not affording very good pictures. Below is the best pic I've gotten recently -- when they show up circling and calling over my building, and I can sometimes run out and get a shot before they circle away out of the patch of sky that I can see.



There is a nice large-size copy of this, if you click through.

Also interesting, but somewhat confusing, is the fact that I am now, for the first time (?) hearing the adults use the same kreeeeeet-kreet-kreeet cry that the juveniles used all the time, in addition to the adult kreeeeeeeaaaar! call. I put a question mark, of course, because now I can't be sure whether I did sometimes hear the adults give that first cry in the past; although mostly, the evidence was that when I heard the call, it was from a verifiable juvenile. These past few times, I have heard the adults using it as they hunt together.

Finally, on a completely different note, I thought I would share a couple of pics of an interesting meteorological phenomenon that I witnessed on Sept. 8th and 9th, both times in the late afternoon as the sun was setting. The phenomenon is Parhelion, commonly called "sun-dogs".

The top pic was taken in Watertown, MA; I would estimate, betwen 5:45pm and 6pm. The bottom pic was taken on Harvard campus, in front of the Science Center, probably around the same time on the following day. (I was up there taking some pics of a pair of hawks flying around; they sounded like juveniles but later examination of the not-terribly-good pictures suggested it was more likely the adults.)

Watertown:



Harvard:





So it seems that the story of this year's baby hawks at Harvard is over. But if I get any more interesting shots, I'll be sure to share them here! And we'll cross our fingers for next year.

Short report this time, with a lack of particularly spectacular pictures, but here we go...



Like that weathervane? Get used to it...

( More behind the cut... )

Unaccountably, the juvenile hawks are not yet gone. It really should be right around NOW that they go off, but they are still here, crying their little heads off from various perches and in flight. I guess we'll see if they are around next week at all. But in the meantime...



( More pics behind the cut... )

Today, we have some pictures taken over the past week, and a hawk video! So, let's get started...

It's official: one of the mockingbirds has definitely learned the juvenile hawk cry (kreeeeet-kreet-kreet). We managed to spot one while it was doing it. I guess that explains that incident a week or so ago, when a "hawk" was in a tree near Mem Church and I just could not see it. Yesterday, though, I received proof that while the mockingbird's is a good imitation, it's not quite as loud or resonant as the real thing. But, I'm getting ahead of myself...

It's been hot and humid this week, which has made it less appealing to go on hour-long circuits through campus, looking for the hawks at lunchtime. I kept doing it, although I'm sure that the birds were intelligently hunkered somewhere in the shade where I couldn't spot them. On Monday, I did hear a single cry, and managed to spot one of the hawks far above, circling on thermals; and then followed him until he landed on the top of one of the Memorial Hall weathervanes:



( More pics and video below the cut... )

So, clearly, the juveniles haven't completely left the area, although I suspect they are right on the edge of doing so.

Thanks to a tip from Margo, I found that the Harvard Recycling Newsletter has a "Campus Wildlife" section, and they've been reporting on the hawks each month. That tipped me off that the folks in the MCZ's Ornithology dept. have been informally monitoring the nest (which is across the street from them). I was able to call them up, and get a rough idea of when the hawks hatched (~ May 8), and when they started flying (~ June 20).

Some more digging around on the web turned up the rough estimates that after they start flying, fledglings will spend 6-7 weeks still being fed by the parents before they're really catching food on their own. Around 10 weeks, they should be independent of the parents. This means that, if they began to fly around June 20, then I first started seeing them around the 4-week mark. The 10-week mark would roughly be the end of next week.

It's nice to know that the parents would have kept feeding them through this period (not left them to sink or swim in the learning-to-hunt dept., as I originally feared). And at least I know that in the next couple of weeks, I shouldn't be surprised if sightings of them drop off completely. (The quiet adults are going to be much harder to spot. For example, I'd NEVER have seen the one in the tree above, if the juvenile hadn't been with it and drawing attention.)

*headdesk* One of the local mockingbirds appears to have learned to mimic the juvenile hawk cries. I'm screwed. (On the bright side, that explains why sometimes I hear that cry, and CANNOT find the hawk in the tree, even though it should be relatively easy to do since the hawks are enormous.)

Since this may be the same mockingbird that I noticed, this past spring, had learned with great precision to imitate the chirp-chirp of a car alarm being activated... yeah. Seems likely. #@&^%@ mockingbird.

(I feel that the joke is slightly on the mockingbird. If I'm not mistaken, one of the reasons mockingbirds imitate other birdcalls is that most songbird calls are territorial advertisements? So in effect, the mockingbird is trying to warn ALL types of other birds away from its territory? But the juvenile hawk call isn't a warning; it wants to attract other hawks, which you would think would be the last thing a mockingbird would want to do.)


I also meant to note earlier that it's amazing how, once you start looking for hawks, you see them. I know there are red-tails out Waltham way. (There was one in the big oak tree behind my house once this past spring, in fact, being mobbed by a combination of jays, crows, and mockingbirds.) Well, last weekend, when I was out kayaking, I heard a juvenile's cry from a golf course in Newton, along the river. And this past week, I saw one flying over Moody St. on two successive days. Couldn't tell if they were adults or juveniles. jenlev will cackle: I nearly caused a traffic incident with the second one, which had set a flock of pigeons in motion as I was driving by, and was circling amongst them right over the street.

Ohhhhhhh, today is going to be one of those days. I can tell already.

I was greeted this morning, as I got near my office, by the sound of one of the juvenile hawks crying somewhere nearby. I managed to follow the sound into the Yard (between Widener and Mem Church), only to have it go silent, of course. (And then, pick up as I decided to give up and go to the office; of course.)

Well, I thought, at least that means they're still around!

Just now, I heard the cry again from inside my office. Grabbed camera, rushed out... heard it faintly one more time to provide a sense of which direction it was coming from... and then, nothing. *sigh*

So that's how it's going to be. They're still around, and they are BIG TEASES.

Today is already hot and humid, and it's going to get worse. Not a great day for tramping around at noon, but I may as well try. (With my luck, the hawks will all be too smart to be active in the middle of the day, and will be sitting open-beaked in the shade somewhere, making no noise at all.)

Anyway, on the subject of this post...

I like watching nature specials as much as, or more than, the next person. And of course any nature special involving orcas is going to especially draw me in. But I watched this Wild Kingdom episode over the weekend, about a guy filming orcas, and I just want to say... look. I get that doing specials like that is all about constructing a narrative. Really, I do. But I would prefer a bit more basic honesty in them. Let me explain.

So there was this guy, who is a cinematographer, who decided to go down and study the orcas on the Crozet Islands in the extreme southern Indian Ocean. These very remote and uninhabited islands have a breeding elephant seal colony, and penguins. They're one of the places particularly known for the orcas in the area having developed a hunting strategy in which they body-surf up onto the beach to snatch seals. So this guy decides to go down there and film them, and try to swim with them, to get some underwater footage, and see how the orcas tolerate him.

The special makes a lot of the fact that this is dangerous (not a lot of people go diving with wild orca pods, I guess), even though they also have to admit that there is no record of orcas ever attacking divers. Ever. But you know, nobody wants to be the first. But that wasn't what bugged me. The show went into some detail about how this guy gets dropped off on the island for a 3-month stay (the islands are uninhabited, remember; the boat drops him off and won't come back for 3 months), with all his stuff in a wooden crate, and he's planning on staying in a tent the whole 3 months (on islands near the Antarctic), and so on. Which, fine -- yes, impressive.

But here's the thing. Somebody was filming him the entire time.

You can TELL, obviously, because there are all these shots of him tramping across the island, and shots of him from above setting up to film the orcas, and shots of him sitting amongst penguins, filming them, and then when he goes diving, there are shots following him underwater (i.e. none of these seem to be able to be accounted for by him setting up a fixed camera in order to get the shots).

And, it's like... that old comment about how Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, except backwards, and in heels.

At one point, there's a giant storm that hits the islands, with 50 mph winds and all, and he hunkers down in his little tent, and the next morning, the little tent is half-covered in dark volcanic sand. And he's all, "I was worried that my tent would blow away, and I don't have another one". And I'm thinking, "Yeah, but what about the tent that the film crew must be using? Surely they would let you share?"

And, I don't know... I was just more irritated than usual about the lack of transparency, or honesty, in the narrative, call it what you will. "Lone cinematographer camps out on remote island and swims with orcas!" sounds great, in theory, but he's hardly ALONE. The narrative made quite a bit out of the risk to him in diving with the orcas, and how they got used to him and seemed to come to accept his presence... but they really didn't, did they? Rather, the story there is, they accepted HIS presence and that of at least one other diver, who was filming him filming them, and... how does that change the equation? The question of whether wild orcas will be inclined to regard one diver as pinniped-like enough to be prey? But it's two divers and their equipment, not one. (Plus, orcas are just smart enough to know the difference. They don't mistake humans for seals.)

I guess I don't see what the problem is with setting up the narrative to admit, "We dumped this guy plus a film team on the island, so that we could film what he was doing". Instead, the narrative was just very carefully constructed so as to try to make the other cameramen invisible -- you got plenty of shots of the guy's little lonely tent, but no shots of the tent that they must have been using, etc.

I suppose it's very remotely possible that he did the entire thing himself, setting up a series of fixed cameras in order to film himself, and then walking back to set up specific shots of him tramping across the island or whatever; I suppose it's possible to trigger those by remote, and perhaps even pan with them (though I don't know how you'd focus). Don't know how to explain the underwater shots of him, though. I guess I'd have to watch it again more closely to analyze the shots. But there were like 5 other cameramen credited at the end, so... I don't think that was it. I think they were there with him. And for some reason the entire show just wanted to pretend they weren't. And I find that weird, and annoying.

Time marches onward, and as they grow, the juvenile red-tails become more elusive. Thus, I have a few days' worth of watching to report, but not very much that's spectacular.



Above is a movie that I took on Friday the 7th, when I spotted one of the juveniles high up in the big locust tree in the Barker courtyard -- thanks largely to the outraged sounds of mockingbirds and robins (the hawk itself was silent). Sorry for the poor quality -- most of it is taken at the extent of the 40x digital zoom, and as you can see, it was a windy day. It also didn't help that the hawk had his back to me the whole time, mostly resulting in a brown blob, with the occasional head popping up to keep an eye on harassing smaller birds.

This 2-min. video was edited down from about 5 mins' worth of footage, to show the "interesting" bits -- stick with it to see a mockingbird come quite close (around 0:32); grooming behavior that is interrupted by a darting squirrel (1:05 - 1:55); and a precipitous ending in which the hawk tries to nab another squirrel.

There followed several more days of only sporadic success, hawk-stalking-wise.



( More pics and another video beneath the cut... )

And that's all for now, I'm afraid. I'm braced for the fact that, any day now, the juveniles will depart, taking with them their distinctive, easier-to-find (than the adults) cries. It seems to me that they are getting a bit quieter now, and that their circles of exploration are widening. One of these days, they're just going to be gone, and I'll be sad.

But, until then, I'm watching the skies! And the trees, and the rooflines...

So! More updates, including several days' worth of watching...

It hasn't, admittedly, been the most spectacular week for it, but I do still have some interesting photos. One of the things I've noticed lately is that my ear is becoming VERY attuned to the crying sound of the juveniles. In part, this is good, because if it wasn't for that auditory cue, they'd be a lot harder to find. (Frequently, one of the two will be silent, while the other is noisy; or they'll initially be noisy, and then fall silent. The luckiest days are the ones where one of them keeps calling long enough for me to triangulate on them.) But in part, it's bad, because I start wondering if I'm REALLY hearing them or not. And there's nothing more annoying (in bird-watching terms, that is) than possibly hearing the bird-call you want, and then everything in your vicinity starts being noisy -- you really wish you had a "mute" button for everything else (traffic, lawnmowers), so you could stand and really listen to see if you actually hear the noise again.



( More pics below the cut... )

The other notable event from this week is that I located the nest! Through some judicious googling for clues, and then walking around up on Oxford St. yesterday, I finally spotted it. (It looked smaller, from the ground, than I had expected it to.) I got some pics, but they aren't terribly interesting. (It's a nest. In a tree.) The best news is that it's in a tree right next to a building, and there are windows right on level with it, and the windows belong to a library, so they are quite accessible. I went up there and spoke to the librarian, who confirmed that it was the nest the pair had used this year. (She was wistful about the fact that since the fledglings had flown, they don't seem to come back very much.) This is good, as it means that next spring, I can go up there and see if I can get some pics of the hawks on the nest, and the babies in the nest. *crosses fingers*!

There was some hawk-drama in the courtyard here this morning -- one of the juveniles in the big locust tree, being mobbed by mockingbirds and jays. Then the second one showed up, and drove me nuts because it was crying and I could hear it, but I couldn't *find* it amongst all the leaves. I got some pictures and a little video footage of the one being mobbed, including some preening, so if it turns out to be any good (and if I can edit it properly), I'll post it next week.

Finally -- anyone who has become really curious about urban hawks after reading all of this might want to check out this book: Red-Tails in Love, by Marie Winn. She wrote it in the mid-90s, about a pair of red-tails making their home in Central Park, NYC. I hear that the paperback edition has an update from 2005.

Also... Nature - Pale Male is the first documentary film about the original Central Park male hawk, from 2003 I believe. (I haven't seen it yet; I have it requested from my library.) Apparently there is a second film that isn't out on DVD yet, "The Legend of Pale Male", which I'm looking forward to as well. (Pale Male was the original male who showed up in Central Park in about 1990 or 1991, and he's still making his home there, and raising broods.)

Yeah, I'm sure y'all will get tired of the hawk-spamming eventually. But I'm still captivated; so sue me.




This post actually compresses several days' worth of hawk-stalking, because the hawks, they do not always cooperate...

( More pics below the cut... )

I also finally remembered that my camera has a video function! So I was able to get some footage of the juvenile on Friday:



The inane commentary at the beginning is courtesy of Deborah and I. *rolls eyes*

The sharp "chip-chip" noises are the local robins, protesting the hawks' presence. The second juvenile hawk is up in the top of that big locust tree between Barker and Dana Palmer. The "kreeeeee-kree-kree" sound that you hear periodically is that hawk (that's a cry asking the parents to come feed them; which the parents won't do at this point, as they're supposed to be learning to hunt for themselves). At about 1:24, you can see this one react to its sibling taking off and flying over the roof of Barker. Stick around to the end and you'll see this hawk take off.

So, I wasn't actually going to go try to stalk the hawks again the very next day. But as it happened, on Friday, as I was working a little late, I heard the very loud and distinctive cries of the juveniles from close by. So I grabbed my camera and ran outside, to find them in the big tree in the courtyard between my building and the Barker Center.



( More below the cut... )

Yeah, long time, no post. Mostly because I'm lazy. I actually have a bunch of pics I've been meaning to share, but keep not getting around to posting them. But today's batch is too exciting not to; plus I wanted to play with the pics as soon as I got home, to evaluate the performance of my new digital camera.

The first set of pics is a few I took on Monday, of a robin who industriously if precariously built her nest right outside my office windows.

I believe that if you click on any of the pics, you'll go to my Flickr page, and then, you can click on the "All Sizes" option above the photo, to see the full-size versions. All of these have a larger version uploaded, although I did reduce all of them by 1/4 of the size they came out of my camera.
( Pics below... )

But, on to the main show...



We've had red-tailed hawks living at Harvard for years now. I think they live on the north edge of the Yard, whereas my office is on the southern edge. But sometimes they do fly down to where we can see them. Occasionally one will come and sit on the roof of the big building next door to me, or in the big tree in the courtyard next to my building, and call, and I can hear them inside. I've watched them circling sometimes, too.

Last week, a juvenile showed up on a low branch of a pine tree as I was walking to the bus in the evening. I didn't have my camera on me that day -- of course, since that juvenile was then joined by a second, and both of them cried until their parents showed up circling overhead. 9_9

That made me vow to always bring my camera, in hopes of catching them again. I just got a new, better camera, and I hoped to get some good shots. Then I realized that I couldn't really wait until they decided to both come down to my part of campus, and alert me to their presence. If I wanted pics of the hawks, I would have to actively go hawk-stalking...

( More hawk pics below... )

Okay -- blogging services. About them, I know nothing. The only thing I know is LJ.

But, my bosses want me to look into being able to set up a blog for us. (I'm deeply dubious about the idea, but that's another story.)

I figured it couldn't hurt to ask folks on my flist if there are particular blog services they would recommend, as I am trying to sift through what information I can find.

One specific question, in case anyone knows the answer: it kind of sounds to me like my boss would *like* for multiple people to be able to be registered as moderators (or whatever) of the blog, so that multiple people could post, reply, and moderate others' replies. Is there a particular service in which this is possible?

What they want is to be able to set up a blog that would be an online departmental presence for us, and where they could post on occasion on subjects related to us (yes, I'm being cagey here; I don't want to lock this post, but I don't want to be super open about where I work; I think a lot of you know the answer, anyway), and where people could ask questions or participate in discussions on our subject.

I'm not above talking to them about the possible advantages of doing what they want as an LJ community, but I have a feeling that may be a little more wild-and-wooly than they would like. I think they want something with a few more barriers, a bit more professional and less casual, if you know what I mean.

(What do *I* think about this? *I* think that it's not a good idea. I think that *I* do not want to become a moderator of a blog where anyone on the internet can drop by and post questions like "please tell me all about Zeus for this paper I'm writing", and we'd feel obligated to answer it in some way. I think that my boss doesn't quite realize how much work keeping up with it and moderating it would become, even if there were several of us able to do the moderation. I think it sounds like a lovely idea in theory, but a headache in practice. I think all four of my most immediate bosses are WAY too busy to actually deal with this -- I think they're reacting to the "sexy" idea of "blogging" without realizing how much time and work bloggers put into maintaining their blog presence. But... that's just me. I have been tasked with "looking into it", so I'm trying to come up with answers, including which service to recommend, and whether we can do some of the things they're pipe-dreaming about.)

I know, I'm hell at updating. But, as you can tell from my writing this, I came through the surgery fine. (Except for the nerve block not working to actually block the pain, and except for the Percocet making me ill.) Massive, massive thanks to elishavah, and also to veejane, for all the help they've been giving me. I apologize for not being good about replying to comments, I really appreciate everyone's well wishes.

Yesterday was the 11th day after the surgery, so I went in for my postop checkup. Everything looks good! The cast finally came off (and this had been the most annoying cast, yet). I now have a very small plastic brace that goes on with Velcro straps, which I can take off to shower (!!!!!!) and to do my exercises. The incision is big, but healing well; the skin is already pretty much closed over. The whole arm and hand is a bit achey, and feels vulnerable because it isn't so well protected. The bone won't actually be healed for another four weeks, but because the plate is holding it together, I can start on rehabilitating everything.

The weirdest part is that I am supposed to now be doing all kinds of exercises to get a hand and the wrist back in shape, and it's very strange to have nothing at all on the arm, and to be trying to tell it to do things, and it's not be able to do them. I know that will come in time, as I work on it.

Below the cut, my x-rays, so you can see the plate and all the screws.

( Pictures this way! )

So! When I last updated, it was to announce in a brief way that I had broken my right wrist in a fall on the ice. It's been a while, so it's a good time for another update.

I've been coping, even though it is a gigantic pain in the ass. Many thanks to people like emilytheslayer, lynxreign, elishavah, and especially veejane, for various bits of assistance that have made the last four weeks get-throughable. Everyone at the office has been very nice; it helps that we are in a somewhat slow period. (Although, our annual symposium took place a couple of weekends ago, and that wasn't what you would want to call "slow". But I was able to line up a lot of minions and delegate to them, so we survived it.)

The office bought me a copy of MacSpeech Dictate, the Mac version of Dragon Naturally Speaking, which I have been able to install both at work and at home. This allows me to keep up with some of my e-mailing, rather than having to do all my typing one-handed. Unfortunately, it doesn't really work for me for writing fiction, and needless to say, what the right hand out of commission I can't do any artwork, which is driving me nuts. Still, thank goodness for small favors. (I am however getting really tired of having to speak everything out loud, including punctuation.)

Below, an example of how the cats have been "helping":





(i.e., Morgan has decided that the pillow that I use to prop up my arm when I'm sitting in my chair is her new favorite place to lay, and I have to shove her over when I actually want to use it for the purpose that I intended it for. Also, yes, I had undecorated the tree prior to the fall, but had not taken it down and put it away; now, it is up for the duration, and I don't see the point of having it sit there without putting the lights on.)

That is an example of the original splint. It was succeeded by a hard cast, which is what I'm wearing now. I have a compression fracture of the distal radius, and from the start, the surgeon told me that he was worried it might "fall apart", rather than "get sticky" and start to heal. Well, nearly 4 weeks later, the latest round of x-rays taken today has shown that it decided to fall apart. Or to be more accurate, it collapsed in on itself. The ends of the bone to connect up with the wrist are not quite in the right alignment, which could be a bad thing going forward. So today, I found out that I will be having surgery on Friday to put in a plate to correct this.

The bright side is that this will not set me back to the beginning in terms of recovery. It will add a few weeks, but it won't (or, it shouldn't) add six more weeks. I'm annoyed, because the arm has just been getting to the point where it is starting to hurt a little less, like its, you know, healing; and now after Friday it's going to hurt all over again while I recover from the surgery, and I have no good idea of how long that's going to take.

In summation: FEH.

I leave you with a cute picture of Emily (all 4 feet!):

Short version: fell on ice this morning. Broke wrist. Right, of course. Already irked with one-handed typing. :P

Updates later. Apologies in advance if I'm slow replying to anything.

So, this is kind of random and meandering, but I wanted to note it down...

A while back I was lamenting the fact that I couldn't find Frankie Laine songs for sale on iTunes. Laine was a popular singer of the 40s/50s, and when I was small, we inherited my grandmother's cabinet Victrola and a collection of 78s and other antique records of amusing thickness and sometimes amusing colors. (The Victrola itself was painted an unfortunate shade of pea green, and it remained that color until my brother took it and stripped it down to its original oak, and he's had it ever since.) Anyway, my point: from the time when I was very small, I can remember playing Frankie Laine records on that Victrola, and I had my favorites, and I was thinking, you know, I'd like to have copies of those songs that I haven't heard in like 30+ years.

So I guess between the last time I wondered this, and this past Xmas when I was chatting about it with my brother, iTunes *did* in fact get a whole bunch of Frankie Laine songs, so I went in there and bought the Essential Handful that I really wanted ("The Cry of the Wild Goose", "Mule Train", "The Kid's Last Fight", "Rawhide"), and then a couple more that I recognized but hadn't realized Laine had done.

Which brings me to the point of this post, which is: "Rose, Rose I love you" (1951) is an INCREDIBLY CATCHY song, and I have it earwormed now, and... it makes me want to punch the lyricist in the face.

Why? Because it's a song about a white sailor guy (probably Navy, during WWII) singing about how he's fallen in love with this Malaysian woman (a rickshaw operator, no less), and it's breaking his heart because now he has to get back on his boat and sail away and never see her again. And his paens to her beauty and grace and style are lovely and all, but -- DUDE. First: exoticism LIEK WOAH. Second: does it really never occur to you, in 1951, that you could not be an asshole, and marry the lady? I realize that interracial marriages faced issues in that time period, but also, it's not like they didn't happen. Move to Hawai'i. Stay in Malaysia. Settle in California, which had repealed anti-miscegenation laws in 1948. SOMETHING, if you love her that much! Geez!

Looking up info on the song, to find out when it was recorded, I then came across some further fascinating facts about it. The song itself was originally a Chinese pop hit, from 1940. With a bit more digging, I managed to find a page that the original lyrics in Mandarin, with a translation of them, and also with the lyrics of the actual Frankie Laine hit.

As you can see, the original song is pretty much a straight-up love song. The love is not without its ups and downs (as the "rose" metaphor is obviously chosen for the fact that roses are lovely, but roses also have thorns), but it's *not* a song about "I love you, my exotic Oriental beauty, but my ship's leaving port and I gotta go". Apparently, we have a British guy to thank for the new English lyrics (although that page doesn't actually mention that he did the lyrics; the page about the song does).

Still, damned catchy.

Also, in conclusion: "The Kid's Last Fight" is just as weirdly inappropriately bouncy as I originally thought it was, given that the story of the song (remember when songs told long, involved stories?) is about a 19th century boxer who just has to win this fight so he can get the money and buy him and his girl the bungalow of their dreams, and how he does win the fight, and then he keels over dead. The end. Even when I was, like, 5, and loved the song because it was bouncy, I had some inkling of the fact that maybe it shouldn't be quite so bouncy when it was about, y'know, DEATH.

Sometime last weekend I clued in to the fact that the big Cultural Appropriation Discussion of DOOM had come around on the ol' guitar again, but I was only catching the edges of it, and I thought, aw man. That again. Do I want to even know? No, I really don't.

And then I realized that, you know: easy for me to say. It's the usual exercise of privilege to be able to say "nah, don't feel like paying attention to the latest racism-in-fandom imbroglio". And thanks to the indefatigable rydra_wong, all the links were there. So I read. And read. And my jaw dropped on the floor. And I kept reading, and OH MY GOD.

I don't want to say a lot, because this is a thing where for me, listening is more important than talking. And Rydra has posted links to a lot of people saying very smart things; a lot of fans of color saying extraordinarily important things, and I shouldn't even attempt to co-opt their voices when it'd be better to go read them saying it.

But I did think of two things I wanted to say.

One is just to point to the lyrics of the They Might Be Giants song "Your Racist Friend". That song absolutely gobsmacked me when I first heard it in 1990. It's not just a song about racism being bad. It's about not being silent and tolerating others spewing racist crap in your hearing, and what it says about you if you do tolerate that. I believed it was a searingly brilliant song then, and I still believe it now.

The other: you know what phrase I really despise right now? "Throwing under the bus". It came up in the fallout of the CADD, very much in a "Your Racist Friend" context -- yeah, my friends might have said racist crap, but I'm not going to *throw them under the bus* by making a statement that condemns the crap (if not the person).

You know why I decided I really despise it? Because it embodies, to me, the last 8... no, maybe make that 16 or more years of American politics. The willful characterization of all criticism -- even necessary, deserved criticism; even LOVING criticism -- as the equivalent of "throwing under the bus", and NO. NO IT IS FUCKING NOT. But I guess that's how it looks to people who practice what they preach, by which I mean -- hate the sin AND hate the sinner, and don't try to tell me they don't.

I'm so fucking tired of that, macro level and micro level. I'm so fucking tired of the idea that it isn't "patriotic" to criticize things that my country does -- NO, it's the MOST PATRIOTIC thing I can do, dammit! I'm tired of the basic notion that if you love someone, you can never, ever criticize what they do, you can never tell them they're fucked up, you can never give a child anything but an A+ or a trophy. NO.

When I post the words, "I love you like a brother, but you're FULL OF SHIT" here, I know that there's a bunch of people reading this journal who are going to nod along and suddenly have a whole bunch of very vivid memories associated with that, and the thing is, YES. Criticizing someone, telling them they're full of shit, telling them that what they just said is racist crap? Or, being gentle about it if you must -- but if you don't do it, who will? That is still being loving. That's being a friend. That is NOT "throwing people under the bus".

Because it's not about making yourself look good by condemning them. It's not about saving yourself by offering them up for sacrifice. That's not why you should do it. It's about YOU knowing what's right, and what's wrong, and about saying something when *even your friends* do something or say something toweringly, gobsmackingly wrong. Doing it *because* you love them, and because they might listen to you when they won't listen to strangers. The time to defend your friends no matter what, right or wrong, is when their lives, their well-being are truly in danger, NOT when the worst that's happening to them is that people are pointing out they're being kind of an asshole.

If you won't even point at something to say "that there is wrong", then how the hell can you ever work to FIX it?

I would say something sweeping and generic about cats and their walnut-sized brains, but rather than impugn the cats of others, I'll just impugn the brains of my OWN cat, which is much safer.

( Recipe for Winter Fun with Cats: )