Areas of Unrest

17 December 2000 - It Ain't All Happening At the Zoo

QOTD: "TV ads always show detergents getting out blood stains. I say if you have a T-shirt full of blood stains, maybe laundry isn't your problem." - Jerry Seinfeld

Reading: Colin Thubron, The Lost Heart of Asia

Listening to: the soundtrack for Genghis Blues

I got a reprieve as both this past week's meetings and this coming week's meetings in Boulder got postponed to January. I did have a meeting that I handled via a teleconference marathon as, what was supposed to take 5 hours, turned into a 9 hour session on Thursday and a 3 hour followup on Friday. It was thoroughly exhausting but better than going in person would have been.

In other work related news, I actually did everything on my "to-do" list on both Tuesday and Wednesday. The trick is to make up a very unambitious list of things to do. And I got my annual raise, which made me very happy, particularly as the amount pushed me over one of my personal psychological financial barriers.

Most of the rest of the week was dedicated to attempts to catch up at home. Which means I look at and file or discard a paper or two, then curl up with a trashy novel for a few hours. I got together with Penny early on Tuesday evening to work on stories we're going to tell at the Bards concert in Malibu in February. And Thursday night was Community Storytellers, which was particularly good this month, with a lot of holiday stories. And Sandra was there for the first time in years, though she just listened and didn't tell anything! I'd planned to go home at the break, but I had an inspiration during the first half and figured out something to do with a Chelm story I've been playing with off and on for a couple of years. The inspiration involved the decision that OPEC really stands for the Organization of Potato Exporting Countries and that they had burned the entire potato crop in Chelm after Schloime the Scientist had perfected a genetic engineering technique to cross potatoes with herring. (I should explain that Chelm is a town of fools in Jewish folklore. I tell some of the traditional Chelm stories, but have a tendency to, um, adjust them to suit my purposes. But some - like the one I told this week - are entirely original. At Community Storytellers, they're so used to these that I can get a tremendous laugh just by saying "The wise men of Chelm were faced with a terrible problem," which is the phrase I use to start all of my Chelm stories. When I mentioned to somebody that I find that the characters from Chelm seem to speak to me unbidden, he said "So, you channel Chelm?" I like that and I'm going to use it.)

Incidentally, while I mention the folk process, did you know that the original lyrics to "The 12 Days of Christmas" had the first gift being "a part of a juniper tree"? Which certainly makes more sense than a partridge in a pear tree, but begs the question of why not an entire juniper tree?

I'm not going to get into politics in any depth, but I'd really like to understand something. If differences in how recounts are conducted imply that people don't have "equal protection under the law," exactly why isn't there the same problem with using different ballots in different counties? I'll also note that the newscasters were so busy covering the Supreme Court that it took me nearly a week to learn that my congressman died. He was just re-elected, too. I gather that the governor appoints somebody in the meantime and there's a special election next year.

Just to make sure I wouldn't have to go too long without getting on an airplane, I went up to San Francisco this weekend. My actual reason for the trip was that Robert had a conference there. So I got to spend two nights with him. Most of which is not for public consumption, but we got to have our longstanding argument about the metric system. (I'd write about it here, but he reads this and I don't want to waste any brilliant debating points I can use in person. In case you wondered, he's the one who opposes the metric system.) At any rate, I definitely enjoyed seeing him, as always.

I'd hoped to get together with Monique but the communications channels broke down and it didn't work out. Next time, perhaps. I filled in the day on Saturday by venturing out to the zoo. I'd only been to the San Francisco Zoo once before and I remembered it being better. They do have some utterly adorable snow leopards. But the lions and tigers and bears (oh, my!) don't seem to have enough space, and the bears, in particular looked stressed. They're renovating, which may help, but a lot of the zoo goes back to the 1940's and is just depressing. And some of my favorite animals are off exhibit because of the renovations. No aye-ayes, for example. I was also irritated with the behavior of some of the other people there. For example, there are signs all over the gorilla area telling people to be quiet. And, still, people let their kids yell and talk on their cell phones! At one point, one of the female gorillas had obviously had enough and threw some branches at a group of people, who were idiotic enough to throw the branches back.

I know they're doing good work with conservation and breeding programs and all, but I left feeling like I never wanted to go to the zoo again. I do, though, want to see a snow leopard in the wild.