You've Got To Avoid Those Predators 

Entries From my Journal 

Lorraine and I recently saw a program about Barnacle Geese. These geese nest at the top, or close to the top, of high cliffs. The reason for this choice of nesting site is to avoid predators. Keep this in mind. They lay their eggs and the goslings hatch, normal goose behavior. The only problem with this choice of nesting ground is that it is several hundred feet straight down to any kind of food supply. So once the goslings have reached the advanced age of three days, the parents leave and fly down to the bottom of the cliff. The goslings, coming from a long line of geese who have landed on their heads too many times, just step over the edge of the nest and fall down the cliff. They don’t fly, they don’t glide, they just fall, bouncing from ledge to ledge, if they’re lucky, or just one long freefall to the bottom of the cliff.

Now for the kicker. People who keep track of these kinds of things, (we might want to talk about them later), say that only fifty percent of these goslings survive the fall from the nest, where they were hatched to keep then safe from predators. Does that make sense? Not to me, but them I’m not a Barnacle Goose, at least not in this life.

One Car Looks Just Like Another

     A strange thing happened to me recently. I had stopped to pick up some drugs for Lorraine. I came out of the store, crossed the driveway, and walked up to the silver car sitting right where I had left it, or nearly so. I clicked open the locks and was just reaching for the door handle when I looked in the driver’s window and saw a woman sitting there eating an ice cream cone. I immediately withdrew my hand and walked around her big silver Cadillac and to my silver Honda, which was the next car. It’s really amazing the similarity of those two cars. As I was reaching for her door handle she was evidently going to take a bite out of her ice cream cone, but in her excitement to meet this dashing stranger who was about to open her car door, she forgot to open her month. As I was getting into my car I glanced over and she was trying to clean the ice cream off her face.

Only One More Tree 

So, what is the deal with cash register tapes? I stopped at Safeway and bought six items. The cash register tape listed the store name and the address. Then it listed my six purchases and a total. That took up about five inches of paper. Then there was nine inches of fine print explaining that the store was not responsible for anything and that if I wanted to sue someone not to come looking for them. Other stores will have blurbage explaining about the upcoming concert by the Manure Pile Deadbeats who will be playing at a local Music-in-the-Park shindig the week before Christmas. Plus that they give you a website where you can fill out a customer satisfaction survey. (Why they might think you would be in a good mood after reading all the extraneous fine print, I don’t know.)  

And for spending your valuable time on their survey they will give you a 1 in 50 million chance to win $1,000. Anyway, these receipts have verbiage that triples in length the strip of paper needed to show that you actually paid for what you’re carrying out of the store. I really can’t believe that it’s a viable bit of marketing.

You’d Better Not Have Cold Hands 

Being continually tuned into the world of cheese and what’s happening there, I came upon this bit of information: You can now buy Moose Cheese. That’s right, cheese made from the milk of moose, or mooses, or mees, no--that can’t be right. Anyway, you can buy this moose cheese, wholesale, for about $500 per pound. My first question was, “Why so expensive?” Then I guessed that it had to do with the cost of hiring people to actually milk the moose. Just think about it. How much would you charge to catch and milk a moose? I bet the turnover in milkers is ferocious. Just getting close enough to explain to a cow moose what you would like to do has got to be a challenge, let alone actually doing it. But on investigation I found that in northern Sweden there is a farm that has a few domestic moose, which they milk. So there goes all the entertainment out of the moose milking.

Death To All Microbes! Really?

     What is this deal with “hand sanitizer”? It’s in the grocery stores, in the library, at the Club, and in just about every other place a person goes. Every time you take your hands out of your pockets you’re given the opportunity to apply hand sanitizer. I mean this is all well and good but what about our friends the germs. Up until now it has been sort of a halfhearted struggle between the two species. We kill a few of them, they kill a few of us, they come up with new mutations, we come up with new chemicals, and everyone is happy with the status quo. Now however we have taken the benign cold war status of this conflict and moved it up about ten levels. The germs are going to get the idea that we don’t really like them and the more militant faction of their species may get the upper hand and push the whole clan into escalating to all out war.

And what would the result of that escalation be? It could be an ugly situation. This is why I think we need to rethink this “hand sanitizer” thing. Personally, I don’t use the stuff and I hope the germs are taking notice.