Thursday, October 15, 2009

Everyone is selling something all the time

(Listen.  This is the honest truth.  I'm not selling anything.)

As a behavioral ecologist, I have long believed the literal truth of the title of today's post.  It benefits each individual to convince others that they are trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.  Of course, not everyone is a Boy Scout at heart, but it is to their advantage to try to get others to believe that they are.  If I trust you, then I might buy a car from you, loan you money, give you a job, let you date my daughter, invite you to my party, give you a ride downtown, or tell you an important secret; if I trust you, there are a plethora of ways I might help you materially or help you enhance your status in the community.  As we shall see in future posts, status is everything in a species as social as ours.

But being a regular participant and reader of social networks over the past year has brought home to me this lesson most vividly.  The posts on any social networking site are mostly a barrage of salesmanship, of one form or another.  On Facebook, for example, I have become "friends" with several celebrities: Joan Lunden, Billy Bush, Craig Crawford, Tom Bergeron, Peter Greenberg, Michael Wolff, Alexis Glick, and others.  Those people are on FB for only one reason--to sell their tv show, or their next interview of Kate Gosselin, or their next appearance on the Bill Maher show, or their next book.  And any of us who read what they write are their intended consumer. 

Many of these salespersons, mostly the females, take the tact of describing how they spent the weekend with their adorable kids at the beach, and then came home to cook mac and cheese for their family, and then washed the dirty dishes with their husband after they put the kids to bed.  That is, she is trying to sell the image that she is a regular working mom, just like you.  The difference, of course, is that she has a weekly tv show, which she would appreciate you watching on Wednesday night, and she makes $500,000 per year (and is hoping for a raise to $1M next season).  The men tend to be less devious in their approach: "Watch me tackle the health care reform bill on Sunday morning on Meet the Press".  It sounds like a football game, and that is what REAL men do.  They tackle things.

Those of us who are not famous or well-known are, more often than not, doing the same thing within our own milieu, in our own way.  We are trying to be humorous, clever, intelligent, sexy, provocative, useful, ludicrous, outrageous, or interesting.  We play to our strengths on or off FB to "win friends and influence people", as the famous Dale Carnegie course promised decades ago to entrepreneurs who aspired to be successful. All of this is perfectly normal human behavior, but once you view the world this way, nearly everything you hear or read seems trite and hollow.  In fact, if we were all perfectly honest all the time, society as we know it would probably collapse.  The lies we tell and the myths we believe keep us sane and moving forward.  My current favorite is the investment company that advertises on tv and tells us how much they care and worry about us, how they want our financial future to be bright, to be able to send our kids to college, and to retire in style.  Bullhonky!  They don't know any of us and they couldn't care less about us as individuals.  They simply want to sell us their product.  You all know what I mean.  For fun, watch a couple of hours of tv tonight, including the commercials, and turn on your crap detector.  You will find it more amusing than the content of the show you tuned in to watch.

All of this can take a serious turn as well.  Bernie Madoff pulled off the largest financial scam of all time by selling his friends and acquaintances on his investment scheme.  I know some people who invested with him.  He was, apparently, a hell of a nice guy and everyone thought he was perfectly honest.  Not!  He was, however, very good at playing his role.

What is the point of all this cynicism?  Not sure.  It is just that the older you get, the more practiced you become at seeing through the morass of lies and half-truths.  The most difficult to discern are those lies told that the teller truly believes.  By definition, I guess those are not really lies, just untruths.  Natural selection must have favored individuals who are good at telling these self-serving stories, and good at selecting individuals who are able to detect their merit.  Another example of an evolutionary arms race.  Human behavior is about as interesting and entertaining as it gets.  And it is free.  Now, I must get back to trying to entice FB readers to visit this blog.  I love each and every one of you!

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Car Rider: the deer who liked to ride in cars

(Would you share a ride with this deer in your Volvo?)

We have had many different kinds of pets over the years. I use the term “pet” very loosely, because many of these critters remained with us for a very short time, and they were not pets in the normal sense of that word. I will write about some of them in the future, if all of you behave yourselves.  During the past 40 years, we have had hawks, owls, foxes, rabbits, kangaroo rats, deer mice, gray squirrels, various salamanders and snakes, a red-eyed vireo, a black bear cub, and a black-tailed deer. And it is the latter animal that is the subject of this brief anecdote.

When I was studying Columbian white-tailed deer in southwestern Washington during grad school, Fred Lindzey, a fellow grad student, called me up and asked me to come over to his study area on the Washington coast. Fred was studying black bears on an island just off the coast adjacent to Willipa National Wildlife Refuge. Apparently, someone had raised a black-tailed deer fawn to yearling age, and it had become too much for them. The deer was hanging around refuge headquarters, so the personnel there thought it would be a good idea to get rid of the animal somehow. Fred immediately thought of me. I was only an hour away, I was studying a closely related species of deer on a deer refuge, we lived on the refuge, and there was plenty of space to turn the deer loose. Plus, he thought I might learn something by watching a black-tailed deer amidst a population of white-tailed deer. Sounded reasonable.

So I drove over to Willipa to pick up this deer in my Dodge truck. Now, this deer thought it was a dog or something, because it tried repeatedly to get through the front door of any house and, most curious of all, it would jump into the front seat of a car or truck if the door was left open. It actually liked to ride in moving vehicles. Thus, it was given the name “Car Rider”. In this instance, we encouraged the deer to jump into the back of the pickup truck and I drove it back to my study area on the deer refuge.

When I arrived back at the refuge, I promptly put a neck collar on the young male, similar to the one I used on my study animals. After a few hours of entertaining ourselves with this weird deer, I decided it was time to introduce Car Rider to his new home. I put him in the back of the truck and drove down the gravel road to the center of the 2,000 acre deer refuge, and released him. I began driving back to my house and after about 100 yards, I looked in the rear view mirror only to see that Car Rider was chasing after the truck and was only a few yards behind me. I couldn’t drive fast enough on this rough road to distance myself from him, so I ended up back at the house with a winded deer. Introduction of black-tailed deer to white-tailed deer population = failure!

The next morning I received a call from the refuge manager who wanted to meet with me in his office, which was about 3 miles on the other side of the refuge. I got in the truck, and drove about 45 miles per hour to his office. The road made a bend about half way there where I needed to bear right to get to his office; another small road took off to the left at the bend, and this was the only other road that intersected the route I took. About 20 minutes into our meeting, we got a phone call from Hobie's grocery store in Skamokawa, the tiny town nearby, that they had a very hot and tired deer standing in their store with a white collar around its neck. Damn! Car Rider had apparently tried to follow my truck, unbeknown to me, but I had been able to drive fast enough to put enough distance between us so that when he got to the bend in the road, he went left instead of right and ended up at the store.

Needless to say, my cohabitation with this deer had already become an untenable situation. At this point I was cursing Fred Lindzey, because I had little time for all this. In the end, I found that research biologists with the Washington Department of Game needed a trainable deer for a food habits study, and that is where Car Rider was sent. What a dear.

Monday, October 12, 2009

I promise to be more macho

(My morning ride on a dolphin.  Normally, I prefer a killer shark, but they were all busy.)

It seems that the majority of my readership is female.  That suggests one of several explanations: 1) men don't know how to read, 2) men are busy watching NFL football, and don't have the desire to read, 3) men are more technologically challenged than they will admit, and simply don't know how to find my blog, or 4) my blog topics are not manly enough for the average guy.  I will assume that #4 is closest to the truth.  And I understand, guys.  Although I have written about cutting firewood with the macho chain saw, which is potentially dangerous and makes loud noises, I have also described how I canned pears, wore Sean John underwear, and been happily married to the same woman for 41 years. 

In my defense, I have mentioned many times how I like to drink single-malt scotch and smoke cigars.  That is getting pretty male-like, although my wife does exactly the same thing. When I am in the woods with my liquor and smokes, I fart frequently and cuss for no reason whatsoever.  Sometimes I kick a squirrel that attempts to cross my path, and I was once seen spitting on the sidewalk when a meter maid passed by.  I will urinate almost anywhere.  I help women cross the street, but only if they are wearing a really short dress.  I might even make a lewd and lascivious comment (sorry guys, that means a filthy remark) as she continues to walk down the street, and I will definitely check her out from head to toe in a way I learned in Latin America.  I almost never watch Desperate Housewives.

But I need to cover topics that appeal more to men.  I need to talk about hunting and fishing, and playing poker with the guys, and drinking at Punk's until it closes, and driving above the speed limit.  Better yet, I will take up extreme sports and write about them.  I will ski down the Matterhorn......on one ski...........blindfolded.  I will go skin diving in the ocean as soon as a great white shark is reported in that exact location........naked...........with a dead bloody rabbit tied to my leg.........at night...........with no first aid kit.  I will camp out in a small tent..........on the beach in Indonesia.............at the height of tsunami season.  I will jump into the lion enclosure at the Syracuse Zoo............lie down on the ground..............and pretend I am a wounded antelope.

I fully intend to complete all these activities within the next month.  So stay tuned, guys.  Have your wife or girl friend find this blog for you, then show up at the computer wearing a wife-beater T-shirt with a beer in hand, unshaven, smelling of chicken wings and cold pizza, and prepare to live vicariously through DrTom's exploits.  I promise not to disappoint you.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

I'll bet you don't own a pair of orange chaps

(Before and after I took the chain saw safety course.)

Have you ever had a close call while riding on a bicycle or motorcycle?  You know the kind I mean.  You start to turn left and the car behind you slams on its brakes and blasts its horn, nearly skidding into your left leg.  Or, you are swimming alone offshore, the currents seem much stronger than normal, and before you know it, you are 300 meters from the beach where you started, and you make it back to shore only after an intense struggle.  Later, you learn that if you had just had a simple rear view mirror on your bike or you knew more about ocean tides, you would have been much less likely to be in peril.  A little preparation ahead of time would have saved you a possible knee surgery, or prevented you from ending up like a drowned rat on the beach in Bermuda after entering the water near Miami the week before.

About a week ago I took a 5-hour Chain Saw Safety and Productivity course taught in Candor by Jim Signs.  What an epiphany!  How I managed not to cut off my right ear or my left foot all these years is beyond me.

I thought I was being safe:

1.  I only drank beer out of a can while using the chain saw, never a bottle, which could break and cut you.
2.  I wore Crocs so that if I ever cut my foot badly with the saw, I could remove my footwear quickly.  Plus, with all the holes in the Crocs, blood would drain from my shoes rapidly.  This makes Crocs much easier to clean than leather boots after an accident.
3.  I never wore ear protection, because I wanted to hear my cell phone if it rang. Robin often calls me on that phone when I am in the woods to tell me dinner is ready.  If I missed meals, I might become light-headed, and this is dangerous when using a chain saw.
4.  I never smoked cigars while cutting.  I only lit up between cutting sessions, while I was refilling the gas tank of the saw.
5.  I never used the chain brake when walking among the trees, because I didn't want to wear out that mechanism (repairs can be expensive).
6.  As mentioned in a previous blog, I always take the landline phone from the house with me, because of its intercom feature.  If my wife is ever off the phone with her sister in Ohio, I would be able to call her for help.
7.  And finally, I always wore shorts or a bathing suit when cutting to avoid overheating (I hate sweat).  I especially like to fell trees on windy days; the wind keeps me cool.

Man, I took that safety course and now I realize how wrong I was.  One of the biggest dangers in cutting is "kickback", which is when the saw flips back toward the person holding the saw.  This is the accident where you can lose an ear, or worse.  The saw comes back in 1/10th of a second.  I always had pretty good reflexes (you know, I am an ex-tennis player and all that), so I have been dodging that damn saw for years.  But now I know that it is the upper tip of the saw that causes kickback when it hits the log. Plus, I also learned that the chain saw users' mantra is "Stay out of the kickback plane".  Whenever possible, stand slightly to the left of the plane through which the saw would pass if it kicks back.  See, that 10th grade geometry is coming in handy, finally, to save an ear or two.  Remember what a plane is?  Thank goodness we didn't have to do anything with a rhombus, or I would have stitches all over my body.

But the main lesson I learned was that you have to wear the proper clothing and protective gear.  I went back to Jim's store for three days in a row after the course to buy stuff (see photo).  Helmet with shield and ear protection.  Check.  Boots with steel toe, made from a material that protects against the moving chain.   Check.  Did you know that 22% of all chain saw accidents occur to the feet and ankles?   Proper gloves that really grip the handle of the saw.  Check.  And my favorite--wrap-around chaps that protect your legs from cuts.  Check.  Did you know that 52% of all chain saw accidents occur to your upper leg?  These chaps stop the saw dead if it hits your leg.  Plus, they are blaze orange, so if a tree falls on you in the forest, the rescue squad can find your body more rapidly.

So now I feel better informed, better protected, and I am more productive in the woods.  I also learned a few tricks on cutting and moving wood that should save me time and energy (I hate sweat).  The more free time I have, the more I can write blogs.  The more blogs I write, the more time you waste reading them.  I guess in the grand scheme of things, my increased productivity in cutting wood is a global zero-sum game. 

(If interested in taking this excellent course from Jim Signs, he can be reached at http://www.powerandpaddle.com/.)