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!

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.

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.

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/.)

When a snake bites your student on his buttocks

(Would you check the white Swiss butt of this biologist for a snake bite?)

When you do field work in places where there are venomous snakes, you think about it. Because you see these snakes only rarely, you become somewhat habituated to the fact that they exist in your location, but it is always in the back of your mind. You think about where you put your hands and feet, where you sit down to have your lunch, where you go to the bathroom, and how you pick up a backpack that has been on the ground for several hours.

We know that humans actually do get bitten by venomous snakes. I have had two colleagues receive serious bites from snakes, and it is not pleasant. You spend days or weeks in the hospital receiving doses of anti-venom and other drugs, battle pain and nausea, and often undergo reconstructive surgery to repair the muscles that experienced necrosis and atrophy near the site of the wound.

It was a tense moment when one of my graduate students appeared unexpectedly at the door of our little house in southern Costa Rica one evening and announced to me: “Tom, I think I’ve been bitten by a snake.” I was studying birds, so my schedule was that of an ornithologist. I got up at 4:30am, went to the field at 5, came home about noon, and went to bed at 9pm. Martin, who is the focus of this story, was studying frogs and lizards. He went to the field about 2pm, but never returned home before midnight. We rarely saw each other until the weekend when we took some time off. But on this day, I heard his car pull up to the house in the dark about my bedtime, saw him trudge past the window in his yellow rain gear, and watched him make his startling appearance at the back door. He was slightly hunched over, his face was pale, and he stared me straight in the face as I digested the words “…….bitten by a snake.”

He explained that he and his assistants were sampling lizards after dark in a pasture next to the forest. This technique involves crouching low to the ground and, using a flashlight, searching every square meter of your assigned area, capturing all lizards you see by hand. The individuals were then taken to a processing “station”, where they were weighed, measured, and marked, before being returned to the area where they were captured. At one point, the student felt a sharp “prick” on his buttocks and at that very moment a small snake, striped red and black like some coral snakes, crawled between his legs. The temporal proximity of the prick and the presence of the snake led him to conclude that the snake had caused the prick. Not an unreasonable conclusion, in my opinion. The snake was definitely NOT a fer-de-lance, which we feared the most. But there are many other venomous snakes in Costa Rica. He waited a few minutes, felt nothing, and assumed that either the snake was not venomous, or it had not really bitten him, or, or, or. But the student was about an hour from any medical help, so his Costa Rican assistants demanded that he return home, just in case he needed to go to the hospital in town. He would be that much closer.

So Martin returned to our house and appeared at the door as described. The next question out of his mouth was almost more shocking than the statement that he might have been bitten. “Tom, would you check my buttocks?” I explained that this might be going further than the faculty-student contract, that this was not in my job description, that I needed to go to bed to get my sleep, but, geesh, this had to be done. He dropped his trou and I put on my examination face as if I had done this a hundred times before, and not at all sure what I would find. I looked it over, carefully, but I could see absolutely nothing—no wound, no mark, no swelling, no redness. I pronounced that he would probably live, although the scientist in me was quick to point out that I had no baseline data with which to compare. I could only assume that what I was seeing was a normal-looking, very white, pasty, Swiss butt (the student was, in fact, from Switzerland). We both laughed and the incident ended.

I got a lot of mileage out of this anecdote. I repeated the story when I introduced Martin to an audience before he gave a presentation on his research. I emailed everyone I knew and told the story. My son Matt replied to the email with a sobering thought: “Dad, it is a good thing he had not been bitten. You would have had to suck out the venom.” What could have been a really serious event turned out to be nothing but fodder for an amusing anecdote. But our fascination with snakes continues, and we think about them, and we watch for them, and the stories about them are remembered for a long, long time.

Punk's Place: Did we make it home?

(I hadn't used this move on the dance floor in quite a while.  Everyone at Punk's Place was impressed.)

On Saturday, Robin, Mark and I went to our new favorite bar/club in Candor, NY--Punk's Place.  Mark had gotten there before us and reported that the 2-7 crowd had just left.  You know what I'm talkin bout--the guys who sit in a bar all afternoon on a Saturday and drink.  A few scary characters, but nothing we haven't seen in bars from Korea to Costa Rica.  I will join them some Saturday for a while; has to be some good material for a blog there. 

But by 8, an entirely different crowd appeared.  I was completely surprised that the average age of this clientelle was about 45.  Maybe I was wrong about all the senior citizens being locked up in abandoned buildings in Syracuse by younger people.  Maybe it was the other way around.  Or, the older group made the younger ones stay home and babysit.  Or, there are no longer any young people left in Candor; they all moved to Ithaca.  Maybe Candor is comprised of people under 18 and over 40.  I will explore the demographics of Candor further when we attend the Fall Festival there next weekend.  I should have pumped the lady who cut my hair last week for this information.

Almost everyone there came as a couple.  Where are all the swinging singles you are supposed to find in a place like this?  What if I had been single and I wanted to dance with someone?  Mark came stag.  What in the world was he supposed to do?  We ate our reubens, drank some beer, and listened to one set of the band, which was excellent, by the way.  I hate about 90% of the bands I hear these days, but these guys (Giant Steps) were really good musicians.  I barely had to breakdance at all, but I understand why the word "break" is included in the name of that dance form.

Robin and I left about 10:30, so maybe the youngsters came after that.  Babyboomers, the custom these days is not to even go out until 11 or so.  If you come before that, you look desperate.  You have to walk into these places like you don't really care if you are there or not.  Then, order a beer like you were asking to borrow a pencil.  No big deal.  You don't really care if you drink or not.  Look around like you don't really see anyone but, in actuality, you are scoping EVERYONE out. Very kewl.  You might leave at any minute, and they would hate to see you go.  Your leaving would be a big loss.  Everyone would follow you out the door, bar revenues would collapse for the night, and the band would take an extra long break.  In the old days, you could smoke a cigarette during this initial phase of your night and you would look very James Dean-like.  Now, you have to chew gum and you look very Goldie Hawn-like.  But these are the times in which we live.

Saturday night at Punk's Place

(Punk's Place, Candor, NY.  Where everybody knows your name.)

This will be only our second visit to Punk's Place, and our first Saturday night.  Live music.  Drinks.  Food.  I've showered for the first time in two days, and I shaved for the first time this month.  Kind of an autumnal equinox celebratory shave.  Not thinking so much about what I might drink there (they seem to be a little shy of single malts), but what I might eat.  I noticed last time that the menu had reuben sandwiches, so I have been thinking about that all day.  But you know, anticipating going out to a place like this is just not what it was 30 years ago.  It takes effort to get presentable and, besides, I normally go to bed about 10pm.  Have to feed the damn dog at 5am.

Robin and I will almost certainly be the oldest people in the joint, but we are getting used to that.  It seems it has been that way for a long time.  When we visit our sons in Denver, they take us out to tequila bars, latin dance clubs, or parties at their friends' houses; we out-age everyone in the room by at least a decade.  Did we just not do enough partying when we were younger?  Are we trying to make up for lost time and the fact that we had children when we were in our early 20s?  Did all the other baby-boomers get kidnapped by the x-generation who think our age group has a lot of money?  (We were spared, cause they know we don't have any.)  If so, where did they hide all those senior citizens, in those old abandoned brick buildings in Syracuse?

But we are meeting one of my former students there, Mark.  Mark is 21, so he can guide us through any social nuances we may have missed during our previous encounters with younger adults.  Do men still shake hands?  Does the old guy buy the younger one the first round, or is it the other way around? 

Plus, do they have any strange customs in Candor, NY that we have not seen?  I've never been there in the dark. Do you have to drink beer there or would a nice chardonnay be out of the question?  Am I expected to breakdance to any Michael Jackson music they play, or can I beg off?  I'm wearing cords; am I overdressed?  I just don't know.   Maybe Mark doesn't know either; he's from Syracuse.  We don't want to offend anyone.  In hindsight, I probably should have arranged to have the white-haired lady who cut my hair in Candor last week meet us there.  I tipped her $2, so she would help.  She would know everyone and could introduce us around.  Man, now I am really nervous.

several hours later.........

We went, we saw, we conquered.

to be continued..........

Coffee, candy bars, and Facebook

(They look really good, but DrTom has no clue what kind they are.  When he orders a coffee, he says "Give me a coffee.")

The Facebook (FB) phenomenon amazes me.  Of course, there are many aspects of it that we all marvel at and puzzle over.  It is really neat to be able to connect and reconnect with friends and family all over the world, and keep them up to date with our lives.  We would never write enough letters to do this, or even talk to them often enough on the phone to accomplish the same amount of information transfer.  My sons and I regularly insult each other in that public forum, for example, but I would never take the time to call them a "dickhead" in a hand-written letter, or call them up just to say "your mother wears combat boots". Whoa!  I guess that would be my wife.

In addition to our friendly "hellos" to one another, many FBers are obviously trying to sell something, or to inform us about a topic that is important to them---a social issue, like poverty or global climate change.  They want to tell us what is happening on these fronts and they hope to motivate us to some kind of action.  It is truly difficult to imagine a system that could alert more people in less time than a social networking site like FB, so it is tempting to use it to pass on messages, links, and photos that are near and dear to our hearts.  Alas, it is also not uncommon to read posts that are about as inane as one can get: "I'm bored", or "time to sleep", or "Guess what?", etc.  You know what I am talking about, and you know who you are.  But this just comes with the territory.



However, the most curious FB site I have found so far is Starbucks.  Many commercial enterprises have a page on FB, and the size of their fan base must be an indication of how popular that particular store or product is in the real world.  Target has 535,000 fans, Butterfinger has about 300,000, while the most popular Sears Group page I can find has only a couple of hundred fans.  (There is often more than one Group page for well-known names.)  Starbucks Group page has over 7 million fans!  Think of that.  A number that nearly equals the population of the New York City area bothered to find and join a FB site that is all about coffee.  What could all those people have to talk about, because at a site like Starbucks, no one knows anyone else?  What they have in common is that they apparently love Starbucks coffee, and they are willing to proclaim it to the world.

Please indulge me a moment as I go to the Starbucks site right now, where I will copy some of the posts there to paste here: "I love Starbucks.. BEST COFFEE EVER", "I'm a Cafe Mocha, Decaf, kind of gal!", "venti caramel frap", "Im loving it frappe mocha", "My new favorite. A grande quad skinny vanilla latte... Yum!", "caramel frappaccino w/ extra shot of caramel can get me through the worst day", "Mmmm - Peppermint mocha", "I LOVE Love Love Starbucks!! ♥", "Java Chip Frappchino Light.....YUM", etc., etc., etc.  At the Butterfinger page, posters simply tell everyone they just ate a candy bar.

Starbucks' management must absolutely love this self-perpetuating advertisement love-fest, and they must love FB for establishing this social network. (By the way, click on the title of this blog if you want to go to the Starbucks FB to which I am referring.  There are many of them, but this one is the biggie.)  Thousands of posts per day on that site, going on 24/7, telling perfect strangers either how much they love Starbucks products or which flavor is their favorite.

The question that intrigues a former student of behavioral ecology like me is why people post on a FB site like Starbucks.  My best explanation is that this is a format for being recognized, however insignificant it may be.  Facebook and other similar sites call what we do here "publishing".  When I am finished writing this post, I press a button, you can see what I wrote, and it is then considered "published", in internet jargon.  As a former academic, I think this is pretty amusing.  In academia, we work for years to collect data and analyze it, write a scientific paper based on those data, have our peers tear the paper apart, rewrite it a few times, submit it to a scholarly journal where it is torn apart some more and, if fortunate, it is eventually accepted for publication.  Good journals reject about 70% of the papers submitted to them.  If accepted, you are sent a bill for what is called "page charges".  These charges, which you pay for out of your research money, can be $125 per page of journal occupied.  That kind of publication takes a great deal of effort, and if you are lucky, maybe a few dozen other scientists will read what you wrote.  But here, anyone can be published in a millisecond, at no cost whatsoever.  And you can say anything you want, as long as it is relatively clean, even if you fabricated the idea out of thin air.  And that little publication, complete with name and photo, could be read by thousands.

Most people will go through their entire lives and never have their thoughts or written words heard by anyone outside of their immediate circle of friends and family.  The potential to have your voice heard far and wide is huge on the internet.  The fact that I may only be telling the world that I like mocha frappuccino is better than nothing and, I suppose in the case of the Starbucks example, there is a weird kind of camaraderie knowing that you are communicating with a group of 4 million people who like the same drink.

DrTom also has his motives for publishing on these FB sites.  I seek out FB sites regardless of their content that have lots of members because, to be perfectly honest, I am trolling for new readers of this blog.  A typical post of mine on the Starbucks site would be something like, "Get yourself a cup of Starbucks coffee, and then read about my black lab at http://lifeatdrtoms.blogspot.com/."  The more members the site has, the more likely I am to pick up a reader or two.  Why I want you to read my blog is the more interesting question, and I might explore that more in the future.  In the meantime, get yourself a nice hot cup of pumpkin mocha latte and reread this post.  Dig deeply, and tell me why you publish on FB.  If you don't publish there, the reason you don't could be even more interesting.

(Almost every cup of coffee that DrTom drinks is made at home with fair trade, organic French Roast beans ordered online from Cafe Britt. He makes it one cup at a time using an Italian Bialetti.  As they say on the FB Starbucks page, "Yummy".)

Zeus, King of Sleep

(Zeus chillin on the couch.)

My black labrador retriever, Zeus, does not set a very good example for a retired person like me.  I estimate that he sleeps 22.5 hours per day.  Other than his morning and evening meal and a little play time with me fetching, he is asleep or resting on some surface in the house.  Let me enumerate his options for places to sleep: a dog bed in our bedroom and one in my den, our bed, another bed upstairs, the living room couch, living room chair, two different bean bag chairs, three different chairs on the deck, several pieces of furniture in the basement, and any floor surface whatsoever, carpeted or not.  It makes me wonder as an evolutionary biologist what the ancestors of domestic dogs were selected to do--hunt, eat, and sleep, I suppose, and copulate once a year with a member of the opposite sex.  What else matters?



This dog would rather sleep with one of us, or both of us, than just about anything else in his world.  At about 10pm every night, if I haven't gone to bed yet, Zeus starts to get antsy, he whimpers, and he paws my leg.  I used to think he needed to go outside when he behaved this way, but when I said "do you want to go to bed?", he ran down the hallway and jumped in our bed.  The damn dog tells me when we have to go to sleep.  In addition, he gets fairly excited when I say "you wanna treat?", but he gets even more responsive (and even runs to the house from the woods) if I say "you wanna take a nappie in the beddie?".  (Why do we talk to animals like that.  I always hate when adults talk to babies with baby talk, so I refused to do it.  I always talk to babies like they are a freshman at Cornell.  Sometimes I had to talk to freshman at Cornell like they were babies.  I suppose each human matures at a different rate.)

The routine goes like this.  I turn in at night first with Zeus on our bed.  Later, Robin comes to bed and Zeus knows he has to get off the bed and sleep on the floor, which he does dutifully.  It is just not comfortable with two adults and a 70-pound dog sleeping together.  About 5am, he jumps back on the bed and gets all cuddly by doing the low crawl from the foot of the bed to the head of the bed, until his head is wedged between Management's and mine.  This is how he awakens me affectionately.  I think Management is also awake, but she fakes being asleep so I will take care of the dog.  He wants to go outside and be fed, so I do that every morning at this ungodly hour.  Immediately after being fed, he returns to bed to sleep with my wife.  At that point I am wide awake, so I stay up.  Zeus has managed to get fed AND to get the bed back.  I'm left to drink coffee in the dark, alone.  If dogs wrote scientific papers for canine biological journals, Zeus could pen his results as "Pavlov's dog trains Freud's human in six months".

In Greek mythology, Zeus was the king of the gods, ruler of the universe, the God of Mt. Olympus, and the ruler of sky and thunder.  But today, Zeus is the ruler of DrTom's bed and the eater of DrTom's food.  He can run as fast as the wind, and snore as loudly as a buzzsaw.  He can jump onto a 3-foot platform in a single bound, and he likes to eat pears that fall on the ground.  He protects our gardens from deer, and loves a good bonfire, and his favorite holiday is Thanksgiving.  He will never father any offspring, and I doubt that epic poems will be written about him.  And as our vet says about him, "he is a nice lab, just a little goofy."  He will be remembered for many reasons, but foremost among these, he will be remembered as the King of Sleep.

Picking up returnables for fun and profit

(Please do not crush your cans before you toss them from your moving car.)

My wife was a dutiful, frugal girl when she was young.  In primary school, she would routinely bring her dime or quarter every Tuesday on banking day, and have that money deposited in her bank account.  (You young people will not know about this, but back in the day, we actually had such a day at school.  But apparently, these programs are making a come-back.  Click on my title to learn more.)  At the end of several years of this kind of weekly deposits, she had saved several hundred dollars, which was quite an impressive sum in the 1950s.  When she went off to nursing school in 1965, her parents gave her $5 as spending money.  Months later, she still had that same 5-spot.  During three entire years at this school (she went year-round), during which her room and board were prepaid, she didn't spend more than about $25, although she used a Lazarus Department Store credit card to buy one dress for a Homecoming dance and a slip in preparation for our wedding shortly before she graduated.  That was it!



Those of you born to a later generation can not possibly believe what I am saying, but the appraisal above of what my future wife spent in college is the absolute truth.  We dated during most of that time.  We almost never went out, we never drank alcohol, we bought next to nothing.  We simply did not have the money to spend and, of course, a dollar went a lot farther than it does today. 

It should, therefore, come as little surprise that my wife collects empty soda and beer cans that she finds along the side of the road in rural New York.  Coke cans, DrPepper cans, Bud Light cans, plastic ginger ale containers.  Each one is worth a nickel.  The similarity in her mind between saving pennies each week at Dover Elementary School and picking up discarded nickels today is no accident.  As a child, she saw what that kind of regular saving could accomplish, and she never forgot that important financial lesson.

The problem is, the cost-benefit ratio is very different today than it was five decades ago.  To collect these nickels, we often stop the car in hazardous locations.  We have almost had our driver-side door taken off by a passing car, we have come close to putting the car in the drainage ditch in our attempt to move the car to a safe location off the road, and we have both twisted or sprained our ankles as we negotiated these same ditches.  Once I jumped into one of these pits to fetch a nickel or two and I ripped a hole in my $30 pants (= 600 cans).  Not a good deal.  Then, after you put the containers in the car, they invariably leak their remaining contents onto the seats or carpet and, for days, the car smells like you held a frat party in there. 

If the cans were crushed before being discarded by the side of road (data: about 5% of cans), they need to be straightened out enough so that the bar code can be read by the machine into which you feed them at the grocery store.  If they can not be straightened to the satisfaction of that contraption, you do not get your nickel.  I have fed some cans into that machine 8 or 10 times in an attempt to get it to read that code, only to have it belch out the can as if it was spitting on my torn pants.  The same thing happens if the can has been laying out in the weather for a couple of years; the bar code is so faint and unreadable that the machine gets the last laugh.

But this slow but sure strategy of accumulating wealth can pay off.  A few years ago, my wife was able to fly our two sons home from Denver without my knowing with pop can money to celebrate my 60th birthday.  And this is all with the return deposit at only a nickel.  There is discussion of raising the deposit to a dime in New York state.  If that happens, we might buy a second home in Costa Rica.  If the deposit ever went to a quarter, I would buy a fleet of used vehicles and hire a team of picker-uppers to scour Tompkins County for its booty.  Entrepreneurial opportunities abound. 

But already we have someone else picking up cans on the road in front of OUR house.  This is our territory, our grub stake, our can domain.  My wife has been hiding in our woods next to the road two days a week in hopes of ambushing the person.  She baits the shoulder of the road with 2-3 clean, Bud Light cans (I helped by emptying the cans) placed in a neat little bunch.  Irresistible.  We must stop this can poaching.

The secret to living longer, or at least thinking you are

(Times flies when you are having fun, but it is no fun trying to watch it fly.)

This month is a particularly weird month for DrTom.  (Sometimes I refer to myself in the third person.  After all, some of the greatest writers of the English language have used this technique.  It hints that the anecdote you are about to read will be a bit deep, even sinister.  Or, that I have bipolar disorder.  You be the judge.)  September has always heralded the beginning of the year for me.  January is not the first of the year, September is.  I am sure I feel this way because I commence the school year with this month, as many of you do also.  Even the Day Planners I buy begin with the month of September, not January.  January is one of those months that is just buried in the middle of the year, part way between the Xmas and the Easter holiday vacations.  For the past 56 years, September has meant the beginning of classes, either as a student or as a teacher, except for a couple of years in the army and a couple of sabbatic leaves from the university.  But September 2009 is the first September where none of that is true.

I'm not doing any of the activities that I normally do at this time of year and I am finding that I, well, I absolutely love it.  It is weird that I am not stocking up on pencils or notebooks or yellow sticky pads.  It is weird that I am not arranging field trips for my class, or writing a syllabus, or ordering books for courses I teach.  It is weird that I am not giving lectures, or making up exams, or trying to act all wise and intelligent.  It is weird that I am not trying to memorize the names of several dozen students.  This is probably a good thing, because I forgot the name of my dog yesterday, although I remembered that it rhymed with "goose".   This lack of doing "useful work" does make me feel guilty, like I am a lazy bum, or playing hooky, or just goofing off with no serious purpose in life.  What would my hard-working father say if he could witness this?  It has felt like one long episode of Ferris Bueller's Day Off .  Is it ok to feel this good and to have this much fun?

But there is a downside to having all this free time and doing exactly what I want to do every day, and enjoying every moment of it.  The time is going by too quickly.  Summer zipped by, autumn has begun, and every month seems to go faster and faster.  If someone is watching the atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado, I am convinced it has sped up over the past few months.  Please fix that thing.  Slow it down.  Even stop it.  I have more free time than I have ever had in my life, but I am getting farther behind on everything I want to do.  I didn't even have time to smoke a cigar yesterday.

They say that time flies when you are having fun.  Is that the phenomenon I am experiencing?  When I was teaching, September seemed to take forever to end, with all the planning, and worry, and attention to details required to present courses that students would find interesting and useful.  I liked that work, but it wasn't exactly what I would call fun.  So the time went slower then.  My old friend Paul Ehrlich was once quoted as saying in an interview for Playboy magazine, "Move to New Zealand.  You won't live longer, but it will surely seem like you do".  So that is one way to get through, I suppose.  Live a life that is a bit tedious, uncomfortable, or boring to give yourself the illusion that you are living a long life.  Is that the answer?  Long and boring, or shorter and fun.  Geez, what a dilemma.

Maybe the solution is for DrTom to do something one day a week that he absolutely hates.  That might slow down the clock just a bit and allow him to really appreciate the days when he is not doing that hated thing.  Every Wednesday morning, I could dust the shelves in my den.  I would remove each book and journal one by one, dust the shelf with Pledge, and return each item exactly where it had been, alphabetically by author.  I could follow this chore by raking the gravel in the driveway to make it smooth.  Then, I could watch several hours of reality tv about people I don't know who are trying to lose weight, build a house, or get a mate.  Yowsa!  That is a good formula for living to be 120, or at least feeling like you did.  But maybe you have a better approach to maximizing enjoyment while minimizing the quick passage of time.  Let me know; we could make a fortune.  If people are willing to pay $8 for a product that claims to reduce belly fat, they will certainly pay big bucks for a formula that makes you feel like you are living longer and enjoying life more.

But I think I have constructed a phrase that captures how I want to proceed: "Live long and prosper."  Isn't that great?  Very clever of me.  You just watch.  Some television series will pick that up and use it, and I won't get a lick of credit.

Should I get off my high horse?

(DrTom sometimes has trouble getting off his high horse.)

Yesterday's post was a serious one, and dealt with the plight of eastern deciduous forests.  On rare occasions, I can not help but pontificate on some environmental issue that bothers me.  But when I do that, my wife goes berserk: "don't write that kind of post for your blog, get off your high horse, quit being a professor, and just be funny".  Well, I am trying to make the transition from an environmental educator to a Dave Barry-like humorist, but I feel I need to offer some meaty ideas or perspectives along the way.  This is a real challenge. 

My recent students know that I think the global environment is "going to hell in a handbasket", to use my favorite expression.  Furthermore, I don't think there is a thing we CAN do to change the outcome.  More precisely, I don't think there is a thing we WILL do to change the outcome.  So why talk about it if it is a foregone conclusion?  Answer: because there is a slim chance that I am wrong about this.  I sincerely hope that this generation, with their passion and commitment, can turn it all around.  In the meantime, we will return to our regularly scheduled program.

Fretting about our forests

(Check out Great Smoky Mountains National Park to find some old-growth forest.)

I am a purist when it comes to thinking about habitats for plants and animals. I want it to be the way it used to be. I wish I could go back and see North America 500 years ago. I wish I could live another 300 years to see what the forest around my house will become. But there are many factors that cause a natural habitat to deviate from what it could be, or to be different from what it once was. In most of the world, we cut down whatever was there originally and planted food crops, built houses, or just abandoned the land after we harvested the original inhabitants.

I guess we are pretty lucky in the northeastern U.S., from a naturalist’s perspective. After the massive clearing of those fantastic deciduous forests, humans attempted agriculture and most of it failed economically. That process has allowed that vast area to regrow itself over the past six or seven decades in a process known as secondary plant succession. For example, the hill on which I live was a cattle pasture until 1960, so I now own a forest that is about 50 years old. This old pasture is developing as a forest mostly on its own. The trees are getting bigger and older, they flower and produce seeds, new seedlings appear and grow, develop into saplings, and so on.

So why am I on edge all the time about the biological process I am witnessing every day around me? For starters, we have a major mammalian herbivore living here—white-tailed deer. Deer eat many of these tree species, as well as various non-woody plants, and deer, therefore, influence the species composition and relative abundance of tree species in the future forest. In my forest, they seem to prefer maple, oak, magnolia, and tuliptree, and avoid ash, cherry, aspen, juneberry, and hornbeam. Given that deer densities in this region may be about 10 times their original density, they can have a significant impact on what our future forests become. Realize that I love deer; after all, I conducted my Ph.D. dissertation on Columbian white-tailed deer in the Pacific Northwest. But they have become the bane of my existence as a conservation biologist in upstate New York.



Second, there seems to be a new tree disease in the region every time I ask an expert. Chestnut blight decimated American chestnuts decades ago, Dutch elm disease pummeled American elms, and beech bark disease infected American beech; more recently we have to worry about the woolly adelgid on hemlocks and the emerald ash borer in ash trees. All of these have the potential to significantly reduce populations of these tree species and every tree disease listed above has something else in common—none of them are native to North America. The pathogens all got to this country from Europe or Asia. Introduction of non-native or exotic organisms is a major problem for the conservation of biodiversity globally (one of the so-called “Four Horsemen of the Environmental Apocalypse”).

And finally, there is the “invasion” of non-native shrubs in the forests of the U.S. In my area, the offenders are usually Tartarian honeysuckle and multiflora rose. I have both of them in abundance in my woods, or at least I did until I declared war a few years ago. I have spent many hours walking and pulling, or walking and clipping, or even walking and spraying the tough ones with the herbicide “Roundup.” And with the elimination of every individual comes that feeling of satisfaction that I am putting the system on the right track. We may not know all the species that were in this habitat centuries ago, and we may not know the relative abundances of the various native species back then, but we know that Tartarian honeysuckle and multiflora rose were not part of it.

Now that I am retired, I continue to patrol for deer with my Labrador retriever, pull up exotic shrubs, and monitor my trees for any mysterious death. I’d have to live until 2309 to see if I made any difference at all. And most of the time, I feel I am just spitting in the ocean, because the forces of degradation are enormous and the majority of the public will never know the difference. It sure is getting lonely out there.

The time we save: Charcoal vs. gas for BBQs

(The way some people used to bbq, back in the day.)

I have always loved to grill food outside on our deck in the evening.  It is an age-old ritual that must go back to the time when humans first learned to build a fire several hundred millenia ago.  This discovery allowed early humans to cook meat, which would have made it more tender and safe from dangerous bacteria.  But we humans don't think much about that when we decide to light the grill and flop on a raw slab of beef, sliced zucchini, Vidalia onion, or a Portobello mushroom.  Most Americans want to flip a switch, light the gas, get the food on the grill, and be eating 5-10 minutes later.  I find this appalling, even disgusting.

Preparing a meal should be about as enjoyable as eating it, in my opinion.  After all, the enjoyment that comes with eating must be at least 50% due to the anticipation of the experience anyway.  So what is the rush?  Slow down and savor the anticipation.  For this reason, and I suppose because I reject the never-ending status race that comes with buying bigger and more expensive propane grills, I prefer to use charcoal.  It is a simple system and it is inexpensive.  For about $100, I buy a Weber charcoal grill that lasts me 10-15 years; the new gas grills can cost $5,000 or more.  When my grill finally rusts out, I buy another one.  Also, I am convinced the food tastes better when cooked with charcoal compared to gas.  But most importantly, it takes time for the charcoal to get to the correct level of burn before you cook any food with it--about 45 minutes.  It is during that time that I sip my wine, sit on the deck, talk to Management about my working conditions, and prepare the rest of the meal.  Using charcoal forces you to slow down and smell the roses along the way.

But what if I could see my neighbor's grill from my deck, and they could see my puny charcoal grill?  Maybe peer pressure would urge me to buy that Lynx 42 Inch Propane Gas Grill On Cart With 1 ProSear Burner And Rotisserie L42PSFR-1-LP for $7,168.  Maybe I would be intimidated by that professional apron he is wearing, obviously embroidered by his wife for him on Father's Day. Maybe I would go out and find a steak that is 3 inches thick, a whole inch thicker than his.  Maybe I would buy a fancy Belgian beer instead of drinking a Bud Light like him.  Maybe my wife will just go ahead and put on a tinier bikini than his wife is wearing now.  But I don't have to worry about any of that, because I can't see him.  Thank goodness for maple trees, and the charcoal that could be produced from them.

I suppose the debate about using charcoal vs. gas for barbequeing will continue until we have a new breakthrough.  When nuclear BBQs are commonplace, someone will write a post similar to this one comparing propane to plutonium for grilling food.  The plutonium grilling will only take 3.4 seconds, and the exposure to radiation will be minimal, about like getting a half dozen dental x-rays.  Certainly that would be worth the time you would save preparing dinner.  The time saved could then be used to check our smart phones for text messages from people we contact regularly but never talk to in person.  We could watch more television sitcoms about families that sit around the kitchen table and joke with one another.  Or, we could read more articles in Popular Mechanics magazine about how much more time we will be able to save in the future with labor-saving devices around the house.  It is as though we think we can put all that time we saved in a hermetically-sealed container, and then let it out to use it later, when it is more convenient.  Oh, how I wish.

Senescence sucks: Hiatal hernia (part 3)

(This man might have a hiatal hernia.  Or, he might just be in a burping contest with co-workers.)

My regular readers must think I am just making up this medical stuff lately.  DrTom could not possibly be going to doctors as much as he says, or else he wouldn't have time to write this blog.  He wouldn't have time to cut firewood.  He wouldn't have time to take photos of shrews.  He wouldn't have time to visit the little food market in Candor.  He wouldn't have time to host Jehovah's Witnesses in his garden, something he has really come to enjoy.  (I now have a sign next to my driveway that reads, "Jehovah's Witnesses: I'll be back soon.")  Who is trading stocks for DrTom when he is sitting in the doctor's office reading the May 1997 National Geographic about the poaching of rhinos in Zimbabwe?  Well, the observant will notice that this is the first post since Saturday.

So here is the latest.  I have had some difficulty with food sticking far down my esophagus on occasion over the past couple of years.  It is like part of my ham sandwich simply does not want to take a nosedive into a stomach full of concentrated acid.  Who can blame it?  But this alarmed my wife, so she had me mention it at my annual physical exam last month.  My family doc scheduled a "barium swallow" for me, which is a type of imaging used to see the esophagus.  When I got to the appointment at the Cayuga Medical Center, I realized that they had it all wrong.  The technicians that met me kept talking about me having trouble swallowing, and they were all set to do a test that looked at my throat. I thought it was weird that I was meeting with a speech pathologist.  The problem is not there, food lodges about a foot below that area of my body.  We had a nice chat about that part of my anatomy and they agreed that they were the wrong technicians.  I went home and my doc reordered the correct exam.  (By the way, I actually call my physician "doc".  I could be formal and call him DrLloyd, but he does not call me DrTom, so I compromise.  Should a physician call a Ph.D. "doc", or the other way around?  They could both refer to the other as "doc", but that would be one wacky sounding meeting in the exam room to anyone listening at the door.)

I returned to the medical center a few days later for the proper imaging.  Realize that each of these visits require that I come to town, 10 miles away.  So I usually combine errands and pick up grub, liquor, and loose women before or after my medical appointment.  At this visit, I actually ended up swallowing the highly viscous barium stuff that is needed for the imaging to work.  This material is so thick that you can not call it "drinking".  It was a light gray, very chalky substance and, of course, barium is one of the heavy metals, like arsenic or lead.  It was like swallowing liquid dry wall, if that was possible.  Certainly, one could use it to patch a small hole in wallboard.  The specialist takes the images, and tells me there appears to be no constriction of my esophagus.  He explains that with advancing age, peristalsis of the esophagus is not as robust, so food is more likely to linger there before clearing to the stomach. Ah, "advancing age"--have I mentioned that senescence sucks?  But there is one other thing, I have some "erosion" at the bottom of my esophagus due to stomach acid, which is caused by a hiatal hernia.  Just great.  Hernia and acid.  I hate everything about my body right now, and that iceberg is looking better and better.

So today, I had this follow-up appointment with my family doc.  When I arrived there, I was taken to the exam room by the nurse.  She took my vital signs and asked the reason for my visit today.  I honestly could not remember why the doc wanted to see me so soon after my annual physical, so I told her as far as I was concerned it was just a social visit.  I simply have not seen DrLloyd in a couple of weeks, and since I was chasing loose women nearby, I would just stop in and say hi.  I talk like this to amuse myself, but I am half afraid they might order a psych consult, and I don't need another medical appointment right now.

DrLloyd entered the room.  He wanted to talk to me about this hiatal hernia thingie.  Stomach acid has no place in the esophagus because it can cause that tube to become leathery, and that ain't good.  So, I either stay on this medicine he prescribed for me a couple of weeks ago for the rest of my life, or I have the hernia fixed.  So, in a week, I meet with the specialist that can fix the hernia---the same doc who does my colonoscopy every five years. I now have so many procedures and tests to do that I might be able to get some kind of bulk discount.  You know, like a colonoscopy and hiatal hernia repair for the price of one tonsillectomy.  Holy crap.  Don't even say that.  I still have my tonsils.

How many docs can I see in one calendar month?  I don't even want to know what is mathematically possible.  Realize that I am actually in pretty good shape.  Nothing seriously wrong, just lots of "rattles", to use a car analogy.  DrLloyd did tell me today that my last cholesterol readings were an improvement over the previous year, so he is not recommending meds to lower it.  I really do watch my fat intake.  But when I left the doc's office today, I decided I would splurge, so I bought a Snickers bar.  Kind of a celebration for the better cholesterol reading.  I just hope it doesn't get stuck in my esophagus.

Grandpa meets Chucky

(It can be like meeting Chucky, when you have to put your children to bed, at night, alone.)

One of the challenges we get to face when we visit our daughter's is putting our three grandchildren to bed at night.  The girls are 7 and 5, and the boy is 1 1/2.  Tonight, our daughter and son-in-law went out to dinner, so our daughter asked us to babysit.  Funny how that works.  She actually volunteered us several days ago, when it seemed like such a benign request.  "I am having you guys babysit the kids next weekend when Mitch and I go out to dinner with friends", she states nonchalantly, trying to make it sound as though she said we should pick up the newspaper on our way up the driveway.  We reply, "Sure honey.  No problem." 

It really didn't seem like a problem 10 days ago, but now we are 20 minutes away from D-Day.  I begin to freeze up, feel a tinge of a possible leg cramp developing, and pour a slightly larger scotch than my liver would have requested.  My wife laughs nervously, snatches the scotch from my hands momentarily and swallows fast when our daughter's back is turned, and glances at the clock as if to will the time to be 8am the next morning.  My daughter and her husband leave the house and drive away.  The two older grandkids smile at us in a way that reminds me of Chucky in the Child's Play horror films.  A cold chill runs up my back and I feel a bit weak in the knees.  We both feel like one of the victims in those Jason slasher flicks, where it is so obvious who will be next.  The victim walks into a meat locker, all alone, at night, as the background music intensifies.  Can't that idiot hear that music?  Get out of there!  Ah geez.  Too late.  My wife's face is now devoid of color.

We start with the 1 1/2 year old.  We carry him into his bedroom and he immediately points to his crib in the corner and says "doh-doh", which is his word for bed.  We lay him down, and in about 90 seconds he is sound asleep.  "Did you see that?", I say to my wife.  Our own kids never did that.  I wanted to wake him up and have him do that again, but my wife dissuaded me with a phrase I can not repeat here, except "dickhead" was about the 4th word in that sentence. 

The dynamic duo then turned its attention to the older girls and headed down the hall to their room.  I swear I heard the background music intensify.  We got them to brush their teeth, go to the bathroom, and climb into bed.  On weekends, they sleep in the same bed together.  And then the 5-year old uttered the words that sends visceral fear through every babysitter who has ever heard them: "I want my blankie".  Holy crap.  We forgot to ask our daughter where the damn blankie might be.  This kid has been attached to material with a certain feel since she was 1-year old, and these days it is this cotton fabric with a chamois-like, flannel feel to it.  Nothing else will do, and she will not go to sleep until she has it.  She begins to cry.

We go through every room up and down the hallway.  We look under beds, in beds, in closets, under toys.  The crying gets more insistent.  I have trouble working under this kind of pressure, but I persist in searching with the left side of my brain while trying to console my sobbing granddaughter with the right side.  I refuse to interrupt my daughter's dinner out with a stupid question about cotton cloth. I am 62 and have a Ph.D., and my wife was an ER nurse for 20 years, and this cry-baby is 5 years old and just started kindergarten.  We have got to win this. 

But then the game turns.  The 7-year old comes to the rescue.  She pulls her grandmother aside and points out that the pillow case on the 5-year old's pillow is the exact same fabric as the "blankie".  They quickly change pillow cases, rumple up the material to make it appear like the real deal, and present it to the cry-baby.  She stops whimpering, lies down, and all is well with the world. We win.  We were not butchered like cattle.  The background sound becomes elevator music.

Senescence sucks: The urologist (part 2)

(If you are young, you should stock up on these now while they are cheap.)

Today I had my annual visit to my urologist.  I get my blood drawn and they run a PSA (you know, a "prostate-specific antigen"), to help determine whether you have prostate cancer.  If that number is low and stays low from year to year, you are generally ok.  Mine was.  Of course, this test is followed up by a urine sample and a physical exam, with the urologist doing what urologists do best---by flying into DrTom's "no-fly" zone.  My "no-fly" zone is suspended only once a year so that this important medical exam can be done.



But the questions I must answer each year are somewhat depressing, because I assume they must herald what I have to look forward to:  How often do you get up during the night to urinate? Does it burn or sting when you urinate?  Do you urinate more than four times during the day?  Does it feel like your bladder is empty when you finish urinating? Do you have any "accidents" because you could not get to the bathroom quickly enough upon having the urge to urinate?  Get the picture?  Just put me on an iceberg now and let's save a whole lot of people a whole lot of aggravation later on.  (On a positive note, I am looking into buying stock in the company that makes Depend adult diapers, so at least I got a stock tip out of the ordeal.  On the other hand, I just checked their website and found this: "Depend® incontinence forums and discussion boards; discussion board is a place to connect with others and share incontinence stories and experiences."  There are people who actually sit around and discuss this?!!  Geez, I'll take the frickin iceberg.)

So my day was a little less than pleasurable.  To cheer myself up after the exam, I went to Staples and bought a new Logitech wireless mouse for my computer.  I followed this with a trip to Rogans to pick up some body-fattening, artery-clogging, heart-stopping comfort food---a meatball parmesan sub and chicken wings dipped in blue cheese dressing.  What the hell.  I don't see the cardiologist for another three months.

Senescence sucks: Prologue

(DrTom feels sort of like this man looks, but his body doesn't know that.)

senescence: a biological term that basically means aging. It encompasses all of the biological processes of a living organism's approaching an advanced age (i.e., the combination of processes of deterioration which follow the period of development of an organism). The word senescence is derived from the Latin word senex, meaning "old man" or "old age" or "advanced in age".

Physical work is more difficult to do, takes longer, and hurts more now than it did just 10 years ago.  How is that for a lead-off to get you to read more?  Terrible.  Who wants to read about senior citizens and their aches and pains.  I have always been a very active person, but recent years have taken their toll.  I'm a biologist, so I know this is a normal process, knew it was coming, and felt it when it started, but I hate every minute of it. 

Senescence is so weird, because in your mind you still feel like you are about 30.  When I walk across campus, I still gawk at long-legged coeds wearing short skirts, and I enjoy every minute of it.  In fact, now that I am retired and I won't be having any of these girls as students, I can gawk even longer.  Who gives a damn?  It is a challenge to see if I can gawk just up to the point where they would call Campus Security, but not longer than that.  It is a little game I play.  I do keep my hands to myself, however, but I can't promise anything 10 years hence.

But the severity of the situation crystallized for me about two years ago.  Let me set the stage for the anecdote I am about to tell.  A few months prior, my wife turned her ankle in our basement.  It was a really bad sprain; she heard a loud pop when it happened, and she could barely move for weeks.  For about a year after that, the ankle would occasionally "lock up" for no apparent reason, making it almost impossible to walk.  Then, my wife severely damaged her eye, possibly from using a commercial eye product, by chemically burning the cornea so badly that she was blind in that eye for many months.  After a couple dozen visits to the optometrist, she finally had laser surgery in Syracuse to repair the damage.  In my case, I have suffered from severe leg cramps since I was a teenager.  Whenever I do physically exhausting work, like cutting firewood for six hours, or hike a long distance, I tend to get leg cramps so badly that I double over in pain, unable to move until the cramp relaxes.  In the 1960s, I played varsity tennis for Ohio State, and leg cramps were a major issue for me during long matches. 

On the day in question, Robin and I had to go to the drug store to pick up a prescription for Robin's eye problem.  In fact, Robin was wearing a patch over her right eye to protect it from the sun.  We pulled into the Rite Aid and parked very close to the front entrance.  At that very instant, her ankle locked up and I had to help her exit the passenger side of the car.  She leaned heavily on me, given that she was half-blind and lame, as we started to make our way to the entrance of the drug store.  After moving only a few feet, I got tremendous cramps in my legs, which brought me to my knees.  I literally could not move at all.  Robin was still holding on to me and I was now holding onto her, in a mutual fight-for-life embrace that must have been pitiful to witness.  We were both in pain and completely unable to progress forward.  I tried to encourage us: "Robin, we are only 15 feet from the front door of the drug store.  If we can just get inside, I know there is a registered pharmacist in there who can help us".  She looked down at me with her good eye (still on my knees), and I looked up at her (still blind and lame), and we began to laugh so hard it incapacitated us all the more.  A passer-by would certainly think we were two drunks on our way to pick up an Alka Seltzer.

We managed to get inside eventually, my cramps subsided, Robin's ankle came unlocked, and we got her eye medicine.  It was as though the Rite Aid was some kind of healing temple of the gods.  Almost as soon as we got inside the door, half of our ailments went away magically.  If someone ever initiates Sunday morning religious services from this drug store, I will be the first to attend.

This incident was hilarious in many respects, and we have laughed about it many times.  I guess we can find it humorous, in part, because it was only a temporary problem.  We are not permanently disabled the way we appeared to be on that day.  If we were, it would not be nearly as funny.  The incident helped us to appreciate those elderly people who really are that immobile all the time, kind of like putting on a blindfold to appreciate what non-sighted people have to contend with every day.  As a result, I now go out of my way to help women cross a busy street.  However, it doesn't hurt if they have long legs and wear a short skirt.

Gulliver, the red-eyed vireo

(Red-eyed vireo)

One morning in June a few years ago, I went out onto the deck to have my morning coffee. I heard a loud begging squawk of a bird, which was quite persistent and lasted all morning.  Finally, my young son and I went into the yard to investigate.  Bingo!  There on the ground was a young nestling bird, which I determined was a red-eyed vireo (Vireo olivaceus).  About 25 feet above the location of the baby vireo, I could see a nest on a limb of a red maple tree; obviously, the bird had fallen from the nest, which was too high for me to reach.  I always hate these decisions, but the choice was clear: either try to raise the baby by hand-feeding it, or let it die.  Lazy DrTom probably would have let nature take its course, but my empathetic 12-year old son would have none of that.  He was such a cry-baby.

We put the bird in an old bird cage that we had from our daughter's zebra finch days, and then the work began.  The bird was hungry even now, so we started the laborious process of collecting crickets and other insects from the yard, and feeding them to the open mouth of this insectivorous species.  Nestling birds can eat a tremendous amount.  How adult birds can locate and collect enough insects to feed 4-5 ravenous babies has always amazed me.  They eat so much and grow so fast that you can literally see the increase in their body size within a 24-hour period.

The vireo, which we named Gulliver, begged and ate, and we hunted and searched.  This was really getting old. Insects were getting more difficult to find for some reason, even when I used a sweep net.  So I did what most red-blooded Americans do to solve their problems--I went shopping.  I bought mealworms at the local pet store.  This solution was a little expensive, but mealworms are a nice, plump juicy meal, and Gulliver loved them.  So far, so good.  We even took Gulliver on a little trip with us to Hershey Park.  When we got to the park on a really hot afternoon, we left Gulliver in his cage in the car while we reconnoitered a bit.  We returned to the car only about 20 minutes later to find the bird lying on the bottom of the cage, with bird guano all over the car seats.  The poor thing had gone apoplectic before passing out from the heat.  Of course, our son was hysterical (cry baby), so we rushed to our motel room, and hustled the patient into the air-conditioned room.  After applying drops of water to his bill for several minutes, Gulliver lapped up the life-saving liquid and made a remarkable recovery.  Whew!

We returned home that day and decided that it was time for Gulliver to try his wings.  He was now about 12 days old, the time at which he would normally fledge from his nest anyway, so I banded the bird with an aluminum leg band, and set him free.  We didn't know what to expect.  Would he zoom off, never to be seen again, or what.  Quite the contrary.  Because we were his sole source for a well-balanced meal, he was not about to leave the cafeteria.  He stayed very close to the house for several weeks, mostly on the deck railing.  Whenever any of us went outside or came home from work, he immediately flew to us, landed on our shoulder, and begged incessantly.  As the summer continued, he spent more and more time in the forest next to our yard, but I could call him to the deck to feed him.  He was adult size by now and eating quite a bit, so I decided to adopt an economy of scale and order a box of 2,000 crickets from Rainbow Mealworms of California.  On the very day the crickets arrived, Gulliver apparently moved into migration mode and was gone.  Red-eyed vireos spend the winter in South America, so I figured his ancient instincts had kicked in or he had been picked off by a predator during the night, leaving us with beaucoup crickets and no mouth in which to insert them.

Throughout that winter we often discussed our experience with Gulliver, this interesting little bird that had befriended us.  Had he made it to Argentina?  Did he even know that he was a red-eyed vireo?  Had his instincts developed normally so that he could function as he should?  Our answer came the following spring.  I was standing on the deck one May morning, when a red-eyed vireo landed on the railing for only 1-2 seconds, and then returned to the woods.  Vireos are common in our woodlot, but they never land on our deck.  In addition, I saw the unmistakable glint of a shiny metal band on one leg of the bird.  Gulliver had survived his first migration and returned to the location of his birth.

We never saw Gulliver again after that brief encounter that May morning.  It was almost as if he was signaling to us that he had made it, and to say thanks, and now I'm an adult, and I'm nearby.  I usually hate that anthropomorphic stuff (i.e., making it sound like animals have human emotions), but even DrTom is allowed to slip once in a while.

The taming of the shrew

(A nest of Northern short-tailed shrews, only a few days old.)

Yesterday I found the first nest of northern short-tailed shrews (Blarina brevicauda) I have ever found.  I was transferring some straw from one pile to my compost pile, you know, the one that never reaches 170 degrees.  Beneath the straw were two nests.  One contained 4 or 5 babies, with gray fur and eyes still closed.  I did not measure them, but I estimate that they were about 40mm in length, minus the tail.  The other nest was empty and was about a foot from the babies' nest, but I am sure it was the nest for the mother.  I had no idea that she kept a separate nest from her babies, but she was close enough to detect what was going on with them.  I have captured this species in Sherman live traps many times, and I have watched the adults moving in the woods from time to time, but this was a novel event for me.


When I uncovered the nest, the babies began to scatter immediately.  I quickly gathered them up and put them back in the nest.  Shrews have a high metabolic rate, and I am sure these babies would die outside of the nest in short order, and it was a cool day.  I returned about an hour later, and they were all gone.  When I left them, they had been sleeping in the nest, all cuddled together (see photo).  I am sure the female returned, realized that the site had been compromised, and moved them.  She probably did this by picking each one up individually in her mouth, and moved them to a new location.  I was unable to locate this new site.

Whitaker and Hamilton's "Mammals of the Eastern United States" give many details about the life history of this interesting mammal.  This species feeds on numerous invertebrates, especially earthworms, slugs, and snails.  They have been known to kill mice and even small birds.  This species is one of only two shrews (and the only one in North America) with venomous saliva, and they are the only mammals in the world to have this feature, which they use to subdue their prey.  The idea is that they are able to paralyze an earthworm and then place it in a food cache for later use; the food item does not die and decompose and yet is unable to crawl away.  Young are born from early spring to late September, and a litter usually numbers 4-6.  Copulation between male and female may last 25 minutes, with the pair locked together, and with the male seemingly inactive and dragged around by the female all the while.  (No wise-crack comments, please.  We are talking real biology here.)  In addition, short-tailed shrews use echolocation (clicks in the range of 30-55 kHz) to navigate their environment, given their extremely small eyes and probable poor eyesight.

I have always maintained that there is still a great deal to learn about shrews and moles, given their relative secrecy and the difficulty observing them.  I also tell students that no matter how much you have seen in nature, I can guarantee there is much more to be seen.  I have been poking around fields and forests for 50 years, and the discovery of this nest taught me yet again that there is much I have to learn.  So get out there and make a new discovery for yourself.  And if you have children, take them with you.   If you have a spouse, you can bring them also, as long as they leave their iPod, and cell phone, and any other electronic thingamabob at home.  Cameras and binoculars are permitted, however.

Let's talk about the word "data"

(The data show a downward trend.)

A pet peeve of mine is the abuse of the word "data", and it has been bugging me for years.  Specifically, commentators on tv and radio, websites, and magazines almost never get the agreement between subject and verb correct, when the subject of the sentence is the word "data".  (From a Google webpage: "There is no data for this view").  The word "data" is plural.  So, for example, a correct sentence would be, "These data are not very interesting".  It is incorrect to say, "The data is foreboding".  I watch CNBC, the business channel, several hours per day during the week when the stock market is open, and those people happily get it wrong all day long.  I'm sick of this!

All scientists know that the word "data" is plural.  Our fear is that our research will produce only a single piece of information, which would be a "datum", the singular of the word "data".  I am sure all economists know the same.  But those who report on science or economics continue to get it wrong.

Wake up media!  Correct yourself!  Set an example!  Be the first in your profession to get this right.  And, by the way, the word is pronounced "day ta"; don't pronounce it like it was spelled "datta".  But that is another subject.  Let's just start with baby steps.

(Addendum: I now have a Cause on Facebook called "The Word "Data" is Plural".  Please join it if you want to support this important movement.  Among my FB friends are many tv commentators (Joan Lunden, Michael Wolff, Ron Insana, Amy Robach, Peggy Noonan, George Stephanopoulos, Contessa Brewer, Alexis Glick, Craig Crawford, Charlie Gasparino, etc.).  If any of them actually pick up on this Cause, maybe we can make an impact.)