Thank you.
Bye.
If any of you aren’t regular readers of the City Farmer blog, in which an Oakland urban farmer chronicles the trials and tribulations of farming on a vacant lot next to her house, then you’re missing out. From today’s installment:
It’s really Edith who decides when to do the nasty. She will squat down, sort of like a chicken, but laying with her breast on the ground. Then Archie does some puffing and huffing (literally, he makes this airy gulping noise) and circles around her. Then he stands on her wings.
Yes, it’s turkey sex in the ‘hood, complete with dirty pictures. A trip through the archives is well worth the time too.
Brittney Gilbert’s new gig at the CBS5 (KPIX) website:
What you are reading is the inaugural post of a blog about blogs known as Eye on Blogs. That may sound like a lot of blogs, because it is. That’s the whole idea behind this CBS 5 blog you are currently reading. It’s a weblog about blogs in the Bay Area. There is an aggregator on the right-hand side of the site that automatically displays the latest feeds from the most recently updated blogs in the area. I’ll be acting as a human aggregator, reading local blogs and selecting posts to highlight here in the center column of the blog.
So the job desciption is “Read zillions of bay area blogs, sort wheat from chaff, add two cents as desired.” Nice work if you can get it! (Yeah, I know, almost anything gets tiresome if you have to do it all day, every day…)
A former San Franciscan named Shreve Stockton, who now lives in a log cabin in Wyoming, took in a ten-day-old orphan coyote, and she has been posting photos and updates of life with the coyote at Daily Coyote. On the basis of her reports, it sounds like the coyote pup has taken to her just like a dog takes to its human — following her around, getting excited when she returns home from being away, and even insisting on sleeping next to her.
Despite extensive research (i.e., a google search for “domesticated coyote”), I don’t know how common it is for coyotes to willingly live with people (the young coyote even cuddles with her cat), and we’ll see how the coyote feels about domestication when he is an adult, but it did make me wonder whether we’ll start seeing more coyotes as pets in coming years. Coyotes are increasingly found in American suburbs and cities (a coyote even finds its way to central park every few years, no mean feat since they have to cross bridges and navigate busy city streets to get there). One can easily imagine coyotes following the path taken several millennia ago by their dog relatives.
Dogs, of course, were once entirely wild, but as they came into contact with human beings, the dogs that hitched their wagons to human culture by becoming pets thrived, while dogs that remained aloof from humans struggled. As natural selection worked its magic down the centuries, domesticated dogs became better and better at ingratiating themselves to their human friends, while wild dog populations tended to disappear.
Coyotes have apparently played the evolutionary game well too, and unlike many species, coyotes have managed to dramatically expand their native habitat and thrive alongside human society in far corners of North and Central America. Will domesticated coyotes like the one in Wyoming become a more common occurrence as evolution selects for coyotes who can not only thrive alongside human society, but inside it as well?
We’ll see. Meanwhile, those sure are some cute pictures.
(Photo above by Flickr user Qole Pejorian)
For a smarter, lighter take on the same issues Michael Skube made a fool of himself discussing, see this Joel Achenbach column in the Washington Post.
The LATimes ran a pretty silly column by Michael Skube in Sunday’s about bloggers versus traditional reporters. While Skube was arguing (correctly) that most blogs are all opinion and no original reporting, the column itself was notable for being long on opinion, and short on reporting. For example:
One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more. The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt. Skepticism, restraint, a willingness to suspect judgment and to put oneself in the background — these would not seem to be a blogger’s trademarks.
The language itself (”uneasy sense,” “seem”) is a tip-off that the author probably hasn’t done much actual research into the matter. Indeed, Skube apparently got that “uneasy sense” without bothering to spend much time learning about blogs. His column included the following passage:
And to think most bloggers are doing all this on the side. “No man but a blockhead,” the stubbornly sensible Samuel Johnson said, “ever wrote but for money.” Yet here are people, whole brigades of them, happy to write for free. And not just write. Many of the most active bloggers — Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Joshua Micah Marshall and the contributors to the Huffington Post — are insistent partisans in political debate.
The four people named — Sullivan, Yglesias, Marshall, and Huffington — in fact do not write for free. Even worse, when Josh Marshall emailed Skube to point out that unlike most blogs, Talking Points Memo actually contains a decent amount of original reporting, Skube emailed back saying that an editor had added Marshall’s name to the piece. More damningly, he noted that, “I didn’t put your name into the piece and haven’t spent any time on your site. So to that extent I’m happy to give you benefit of the doubt.”
So in a column criticizing blogs for not doing any original reporting, the author didn’t bother to check out one of the bloggers who was being accused by name under his byline. But it’s worse than just sloppiness — Josh Marshall’s blog is one of the most prominent blogs around. The LATimes itself had a well-reported article in March about Josh Marshall and the hard work his team had done to pursue the US Attorney story when the rest of the press were ignoring it. By admitting that he “hasn’t spent any time on” Talking Points Memo, Skube is essentially admitting that he is ignorant of the very subject he opined about in print. How ironic, given the accusations against bloggers that he makes in the column.
There’s no cable service at Dogtown Commons, but we gather that Oakland blogger Zennie62 had a question in the CNN/Youtube debate, and filmed himself in front of the new (or soon-to-be-new) cathedral next to Lake Merritt.
Zennie Abraham seems to be a prolific political Youtuber. Two of his proposed debate questions were mentioned in a New York Times story on Monday previewing the upcoming debate. Unfortunately, Kit Seelye, who wrote the article, mangled things a bit, feeding various stereotypes in the process. Probably just sloppiness under a deadline on Seelye’s part, but sloppiness is still damaging when distrust of the media is so widespread. Every time a reporter gets something wrong, no matter how minor, the perceived credibility of the press is diminished a little more. So it’s important to get it right.
