Death to All Clowns!

[rain_gryphon]

Newly-discovered photos from Lincoln's Second Inauguration. It was March 4, 1865, rainy and cold. You can see the soldiers wearing their light blue winter capes. The winter capes somehow make it real for me. Everyone stood out in the rain that day, in their wool capes and oilcloth, waiting to see the President, at the very end of the Civil War.

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There were Sparrows outside eating a cookie, gathered in a little circle around it, apparently by mated pairs. I can't think that cookies are the best food for them, but I was eating cheese curls, so I can't say much. Sparrows take what they can get. They slowly crumbled it away from the edges.

Apparently you're allowed to kill Sparrows whenever and however you want in the States. This is the work of 'environmentalists', who'd like Sparrows wiped out here because they're not a native species.

'Environmentalists' in Australia want to shoot Horses from helicopters.

Environmentalism increasingly seems to me to me a philosophy incompatible with a love of animals or the wilderness. They're after some abstract perfection, and never mind any amount of suffering and destruction they have to wreak to have it.

I'll probably build some Sparrow boxes this spring. They're bold, cheerful little birds, and I like having them around.

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Death to all Clowns! I could support chasing clowns around with helicopters and shooting them, although it'd be more fun to throw dynamite at them.

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I did a massive cleaning-out a few days ago, and tossed eight big 30-gallon sacks of stuff I'll never use. There's more I need to get rid of. I feel oddly accomplished for doing that.

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I found an old Frank Edwards volume from 1964 or so. Fur those not familiar, he's a sort of late-50s purveyor of Strange News - lots of stories about UFOs, strange coincidences, hauntings, and the like. He had a popular radio show for many years.

At any rate, I started re-reading it last night. One of the stories deals with a Howard 'Humpy' Wheeler, from Charlotte, NC, who awakened one night in 1958 with the conviction that there'd been a car crash, drove straight to the spot in his pajamas, and saved the life of a friend who'd crashed into a ravine out of sight of the road.

That's got to be the Humpy Wheeler who subsequently owned the Charlotte Motor Speedway. There can't be that many Humpy Wheelers wandering about Charlotte. I never noticed that before, but then again I haven't read it since I was about 12 or so, and Wheeler wasn't famous then. It's just kind of weird.

Comments

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

Environmentalism increasingly seems to me to me a philosophy incompatible with a love of animals or the wilderness.

I wouldn't say increasingly... It has always been the case that many so called environmentalists just want to preserve nature so they can shoot at it - ever heard of Ducks Unlimited? This plan to cull the horses is not alot different, since it will have to be repeated year after year, yet they don't want to remove the horses entirely.

Environmentalists

[whiffert.livejournal.com]

I think they would further their agendas better and become more popular of they would lose their finger-wagging, 'you naughty humans' ways. Fully half of all nature documentaries I see end with this message: The OompaLoompaSaurs (insert endangered species here) used to range over 125% of the earth's surface. But today due to human encroachment, there is only the one left living in a teacup in my mother's aunts's pantry.

[pyesetz]

incompatible with a love of animals or the wilderness. They're after some abstract perfection

Yup.  Pro-Lifers are the same way.  They don't want to save actual babies, but idealized perfect ones.  Environmentalism is too often the pursuit of the cute rather than the varied, removing the predator to "protect" the prey (which then dies from overpopulation/starvation).

Some studies purport that children who play in the woods grow up to be much more environmentally conscious, yet you don't see environmentalists encouraging everyone to let their children play there; more often the enviros say that no one should step foot in the forest-sanctuary except persons properly trained to appreciate it (i.e., the enviros themselves).

[gedrean.livejournal.com]

I didn't even realize it when I talked to you earlier this afternoon, but happy birthday in a few days.