A Free Man

I’ve literally got students coming out the wazoo today, so I’ll keep things short and simple…

After ranting about premature Christmas decorations and my general disdain for the holiday, I’ve been tasked with coming up with a personalized message for my company’s Christmas cards. This is, by far, the most difficult three or four sentences I’ve ever had to churn out. Any suggestions?

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I’m pleased to be the host for Mendel’s Garden #26. Mendel’s Garden, the genetics blog carnival, is looking for the best genetics posts in the blogosphere. I’m hosting the December edition and am actively looking for submissions. Everything from transcription to evolution to genetic counseling and social implications of genetics research are welcome. I’m particularly interested in non-specialists, so if you’ve got something that you could tag with “genetics” send it my way. If you’d be interested in having a post featured, please e-mail me your latest and greatest to chris (at) afreeman (dot) org.

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Finally, when things have gotten harried this week, I’ve turned to this video for a dose of serenity. The internets are awash with cute kid videos, but I have the cutest kid (and possibly the most patient dog) around.

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Image Credit

I’d never heard of The Bouncing Souls until this track came my way, but I can’t stop listening to it. They’ve been around for ages and I’m thinking of checking out more of the New Jersey quartet’s music. Buy the self-titled record that featured “Serenity” and other records here.

 

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 The Bouncing Souls - "Serenity" [2:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Timmins demonstrates what we do to ‘Gators round these parts…

For my few remaining readers who are not football fans I would like to say thank you for bearing with this week in which my obsession with SEC football has manifested itself in its most severe form. I can offer you the hope of a return to our regularly scheduled programming next week.

Wishing you a reptile free weekend, gentle readers.

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*In the unlikely event that Florida wins on Saturday, this will be the ultimate Florida Hate Week post.

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And speaking of Damn Good Dogs, your moment of Zen…

…have a good weekend, gentle readers.

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The Be Good Tanyas’ “Blue Horse” is available from .

 

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The world’s your oyster shell
So what’s that funny smell
You eat the bivalve anyway
And you’re sick with salmonella
You get your Ph.D.
How happy you will be
When you get a job at Wendy’s
And are honored with employee of the month…

Toad, who is rapidly becoming my favorite music blogger, has been writing a lot about “Dad Rock” lately. You know the genre, the kind of music that your Dad sings along to when it came on the radio, the compilations that they sell at the gas station on Father’s Day for forgetful children, the songs that he knows only a few lines of and sings repeatedly rather than learning the whole tune. Well, what’s vaguely disturbing is that some of the music of my youth is becoming today’s Dad rock. I guess that’s appropriate since I’ve become a Dad myself. I’d like to humbly offer another band that fits squarely in the Dad Rock genre - The Barenaked Ladies.

I became a fan of the Canadian pop group with a marketer’s dream name upon the release of “Stunt” in 1998. In the autumn of that year I was in the hunt for a Ph.D. program and for reasons that are still unclear to me, I was a hot prospect. I felt like what a top shelf high school football player must feel like when it’s recruiting time for the big colleges. I had colleges phoning me, colleges flying me out to wine and dine me and colleges throwing fat stipends at me. It was a glorious time. (My eventual choice, the University of Missouri, probably regrets the expenditure now.) During one of my visits, to Iowa State, I heard this record for the first time. I remember my hosts singing along happily to “One Week” on the drive from the Des Moines airport to Ames and being instantly attracted by the Ladies’ clever penmanship and tongue-in-cheek ‘rap’.

Like Kurasawa I make mad films
Okay I don’t make films
But if I did they’d have a samurai
Gonna get a set of better clubs
Gonna find the kind with tiny nubs just so my
Irons aren’t always flying off the back-swing
Gotta get in tune with ‘Sailor Moon’
Cause that cartoon has got the boom anime babes
That make me think the wrong thing…

It was three years later when The Barenaked  Ladies really made their way into heavy and permanent rotation in the soundtrack to my life. In the late spring of that year my grandfather took ill while visiting my parents in Florida.  He and my grandmother had to fly back to Canada for medical treatment leaving their van down south. I was in the second year of my Ph.D. and a bit bored, so I offered to fly over to pick up the van, drive the van up to northern Ontario and fly back down to Missouri. Despite the obvious sad nature of the circumstances, I looked on a road trip as an opportunity that might relieve my ennui. And I just might have had an ulterior motive.

You see, I had met Dr. O’C in February and we were undertaking a very complicated** and long-distance relationship. Now, I’m nothing if not cagey (Machiavellian, some have said) and I thought maybe I could have a chance to see this woman that I had fallen so heavily for if I pitched this as a trip to an exotic part of the world. The wilds of northern Ontario, don’t you know, bears and moose and the rugged frontier of North America. Remarkably enough, it worked. I convinced Dr O’C to fly out and meet me in Toronto and accompany me the rest of the way. With this to anticipate, as I hit I-95 north from Florida, I was a man with a mission.

A few days and eleven hundred miles later, I picked Dr. O’C up from the airport and after a couple of nights in Toronto, we headed north for the eight hour drive to my grandparents’ home. I’ve never had the love of the road that a lot of my countrymen do, but I didn’t want that stretch of the trip to end. We would have listened to a lot of music on that trip - probably Gomez, Steve Earle, The Dandy Warhols, Lucinda Williams and Barenaked Ladies. I had “Stunt” on this weekend and it brought this trip back to me in a flood.

The Barenaked Ladies never sounded better than they did on that road trip. They’re not a great band, but their sharply clever lyrics were tailor made for barreling out of North Bay, through ramshackle old mining towns like Temagami, Englehart, Swastika (really) and Cochrane. The Barenaked Ladies’ irresistible pop licks sound perfect when listened to in a minivan driving through the granite strewn hills and around the azure lakes of northern Ontario with a woman that you’re falling in love with.

We didn’t see any bears on that trip and we didn’t see any moose. We did nearly get devoured alive by the most ubiquitous wildlife in that part of the world, the black fly.  We decided to stop for a picnic by a lake just outside of Tarzwell. As we opened up the back of the van and started to make sandwiches, the sky went dark and before we knew what was happening we were under attack from all around. Recognizing a losing battle, we hopped back in the van and took off, but even with windows wide open I think we still had a few of those blood thirsty bastards in the van as we pulled in to my grandparents’ driveway.

There’s a lot I will never do
Some fantastic, I know it’s true
But none as much as my want to be with you

It’s over seven years since that trip and our relationship is a lot different. For one thing, happily, it’s much less complicated.  We have a son together and three continents under our belt. We’ve been through some tough times and we’ve been through some wonderful times. But over every single day of that seven years, I’m as happy to see Dr. O’C as I was when I picked her up in Toronto in 2001 and “Stunt” will always make me smile as I remember this road trip.

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* The photo at the top of this post was taken in one of those mall photo booths in my Grandparents’ home town. It is still my favorite of the two of us.

**A story for another time, I’m afraid.

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The Barenaked Ladies’ “Stunt” is available from .

Northern Ontario photo

 

 Barenaked Ladies - "Some Fantastic" [4:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Phrase number 28 that I never thought I would have to say as a parent.

 

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Do you guys ever get the idea that you’re being ruled by a gang of not very bright, petulant children? One of the advantages of being an expatriated American is that I can typically watch the goings on back home with an air of detached bemusement. But sometimes devastatingly dumb decisions made stateside can spiral out and smack me about on the other side of the world. For example, when the Congress of Megalomaniac Brats fails to try and save the world’s biggest (not much longer) economy because one of them called some of them names. That’s why I still stay actively up to date with American politics. That’s why I sent my absentee ballot to the Volusia County Supervisor of Elections today.

Maybe now that I’ve voted I can ignore the rest of this train wreck of an election.

Yeah, probably not.

All this mess, Nathan’s comment the other day and this post by We Be Toys reminded me of the last uncontrollable force that I had to try and control. My Siberian Husky, Timmins, is now the very model of a well behaved pooch. Hold on, I’ve just got my tongue stuck here in my cheek. At any rate, he’s certainly an easier animal to deal with than when we were still living in the States. When he was a younger dog, Timmins was virtually impossible to keep contained. With a running start, the dog could clear a six foot fence with not too much trouble. He used to sit by the front door just waiting for a failure in vigilance and then bolt. Once loose, you got the dog back when he wanted to come back. No matter how accomplished a dog tackler you were, Timmins would leave you cursing in a cloud of dust.

Part of dog ownership for Dr. O’C and I was chasing our dog around the streets of Columbia, Missouri as he terrorized cats or whatever other small mammals he could find, chasing him around as he occasionally glanced back at his pursuers with a look of brazen disobedience. We never held a party in which part of the festivities didn’t involve some of the guests wandering around our neighborhood trying to catch our wayward dog. We tried everything to keep the damn dog in the yard and nothing worked.

Somewhere along the way, and I really don’t recall whose idea this was, it seemed like a good idea to try to electrify the fence around out backyard. “It seemed like a good idea at the time” was kind of a theme of the first thirty or so years of my life, so one spring afternoon I came home from work early with some contraband fencing and a few curiously willing work colleagues. We spent the remainder of the day drinking beer and wiring my backyard for electricity. For a house near the center of town, we had a remarkably big yard and so the details are pretty hazy but I do remember Nathan, who actually grew up on a farm, was particularly helpful. What I can’t remember for the life of me is who tested the fence. I do recall one of my work colleagues, who in hindsight I suspect of sadism, trying to convince me to force the dog onto the fence to show him what it was.

I couldn’t cope with watching my dog hit the fence for the first time, so I went inside and waited. I didn’t have to wait long for a shrieking yelp followed by a long, low mournful and angry cry. I hurried out the back and Timmins was in the exact center of the yard looking as if he had just come face to face with his maker. He didn’t move from the center of the yard for hours and that was only to come in to the house to go to bed.

Lest you feel too much sympathy for the dog or are inclined to judge me harshly, that fence only kept the dog in for about a month before he figured out how to avoid a shock and still escape.

I never hit that fence, so I couldn’t tell you what it felt like. Dr. O’C did, at least once, despite knowing it was there. She wasn’t the only one as various people, again at parties, would forget it was there and rub up against it to their surprise. There may have been a time or two that I neglected to tell people that we had an electric fence, just because they annoyed me.

To try and tie this meandering post together, I’d like to give you my best Sarah Palin impression:

Well Katie, to fix this economic crisis, such as, I would suggest putting all of the Congresses together in a pen with a, you know, electric fence and ok, I mean, obviously out there for God and everyone to judge. Then there will be reform, such as with mavericks and lipstick. And we’ll say thanks but no thanks to that bridge to nowhere. Katie. Obviously.  They’re not waiting to see what Barack Obama is going to do. Is he going to do this and see what way the political wind’s blowing? I’ll try to find an electric fence and I’ll bring it to you.

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The New Pornographers’ “Electric Version” is available from .

 

 The New Pornographers - "The Electric Version" [2:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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After the third attack by terrorist water fowl in a week, I decided to do something about these Anatid insurgents. I made the decision to retaliate. On Friday evening I sat down with my eager forces and designed a strategy. As Saturday morning dawned cool and cloudy and I prepared my forces for a counter attack.

Now before you call out the animal protection thugs on me, I made a decision before this post-dawn raid that no geese would be physically hurt. I was after nothing more than a proportional response. I said to myself, “Self, these bastard geese have been terrorizing me, I’ll return the favor.”

So, my hearty forces - myself, Timmins, Z and a reluctant and bemused Dr. O’C -  headed toward the very nexus of geese-dom, deep into enemy territory - the drainage repository known as Fountain Valley Pond. We marched through the streets of Happy Valley banners flying proudly, heads held high in defiance we crested a small hill giving us a view of the pond below.

It quickly became apparent that the enemy had anticipated our action. Our resolve nearly wavered when we realized that the geese that had been harassing your underwhelming narrator were merely an advance force. Because before us lay a veritable geese army. Dozens of geese, scores even, standing defiantly on the muddy pond bank. A few of them even brazenly gave us the avian version of the single fingered salute as our underwhelming force paused.

But we were not cowed by their numbers for we had “Justice” and “Freedom” on our side. Regrettably, Justice and Freedom weren’t with us in a physical form and we felt it best to leave Dr. O’C and Z as a reserve force in case we needed an ambulance or emergency veterenarian. Thus it was just Timmins and I that stood ready to take on the goose hoardes. As we prepared for the greatest direct charge into an overwhelming force since Pickett at Gettysburg or Cardigan at Balaklava.

I’ll let the video tell the bulk of the story, but just to clarify one point: Timmins may have not fully understood the brief or in the heat of the battle may have gotten a bit overzealous, but there’s a point in our charge in which he nearly grabs an enemy combatant who got bogge down in a trench while fleeing under our withering charge. In my role as supreme generallissimo of free forces, I felt it better for all concerned to rein him in a bit, resulting in the canine acrobatics that you see in the video.

It was a quick strike and successful in that no one - goose, dog or human - was injured. But more importantly, I think that the geese bastards now clearly undertsand who runs Happy Valley. We’ve made the streets safe again. This is borne out by two days of harassment free commuting. The geese terrorists, clearly cowed, float sullenly on the far side of the pond as I walk proudly past. Mission accomplished.

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Joanna Smith’s sublime version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”** was featured on a compilation called “Song of America” available from eMusic. Check out more of Smith’s music at her MySpace page.

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* I had to memorize the Tennyson poem in 6th grade and I could still do the first three stanzas from memory.

** I know that I’m mixing historical and musical metaphors here with The Crimean War and U.S. Civil War, but try and find an appropriate song about the Crimean War.

 

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 Joanna Smith - "Battle Hymn of the Republic" [5:15m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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There is a gang of thugs that are wreaking havoc on the streets of my quiet South Australian suburb. For the third time this week, I’ve been accosted on my way to the bus stop by these hooligans for doing nothing more than walking down the sidewalk with a spring in my step. They’ve come charging across the street, hissing verbal threats, limbs raised aggressively with a glint of madness in their eyes. A couple of times I’ve had to sprint away lest I come to some physical harm by these ruffians.

Well, this morning was the last straw. Next time I’m going bring the boy’s baseball bat and batter those f*cking birds. We’ll have roast goose for dinner in the Free Man household.

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What? Sorry, did I not mention we were talking about geese? Geese can be very dangerous, you know. A goose can break a man’s arm with his beak. Or is that a swan?

The thing is, I’m a bird lover. Within the first month of living in Oz, before I even had a job, I bought a bird feeder to feed all the beautiful avian wildlife we’ve got around these parts. I love the bird songs in the morning, I even walk to the bus stop without my iPod plugged in to my ears so I can hear the birds. But these geese! It must look ridiculous to see a grown man running away from water chickens, but when they’re coming at you… You’d run too.   

The ironic thing is that these bastard geese were in the middle of the road a couple of weeks ago as I was driving home. I did the ‘humane’ thing and stopped and waited for the to waddle insolently across the street. They even stopped in front of the car and gave me a brazen look. I should have mowed the damn birds down.

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I read a blog post this week about researchers who had claimed that some birds can recognize human faces. I believe this to be true. I’ll go further and say that I believe birds can warn each other about the humans that they recognize. I believe that these avian thugs are retaliating for crimes visited on them by a member of my family - Timmins. The dog has kind of a history with local fauna, but he’s always left birds alone. This is primarily because they’re difficult to catch - the whole flying thing. However, in our temporary Happy Valley home, we have a back patio which is currently partially closed off for the winter with rolls of plastic sheeting. The dog spends more time outdoors in Oz because we finally have a yard that he can’t escape from and so his food and water bowls are kept outside. Birds are stupid, but not that stupid and have discovered that Timmins’ food bowl is a good source for a snack when the dog’s otherwise occupied. And even if the dog notices they can always fly away.

Except when they can’t. Except when they fail to notice the difference between transparent plastic and the lack therof and get stuck in what is essentially an elaborate, and unintended, bird trap. The carcasses are starting to add up, but to date have only been pigeons - the modern dodo. Don’t get me wrong, I do feel bad, but they are only pigeons.

Problem is, the birds don’t seem to see it this way and through the grapevine the word has spread about me and my homicidal dog. I’m pretty sure that the geese are the hit men of the bird world. And they recognize me. And they’re angry.

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Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung” is available from .

 

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Since our arrival Down Under, one of my goals has been to run across some of the exotic wildlife for which Australia is famous in their native habitat. Until this weekend, my wildlife encounters have been limited to spotting cockatoos, rosellas and the occassional pigeon from a distance and a couple of unidentifiable furry blurs crossing the roads at night. Well, that all changed this weekend as I got up close and personal with some of the local fauna.

We headed out for a drive on Saturday with some friends. We took off south out of the Adelaide suburbs into the vineyard laden Fleurieu peninsula. For the first couple of hours, my only encounter with any local animal life was this handsome fellow at the restaurant in Yankalilla where we ate lunch. Ever the optimist, I remained to the passenger side window, eyes keenly scanning the passing fields as we headed toward Victor Harbour. I knew that you can occasionally see koalas high in the branches of eucalyptus trees, but I thought that may challenge my aging eyes. Instead I focused on the much less elusive Eastern Grey Kangaroo (Macropus giganteus). As we drove on past more and more kangaroo crossing signs with no sightings I became increasingly disheartened. When Dr. O’C misidentified a goat as a kangaroo for the second or third time, I had about lost faith in the whole search.

So, I think my skepticism was understandable when Dr. O’C spotted this mob (isn’t that a great term for a group of animals) of kangaroos several hundred meters away from our moving car just minutes later. It was nice to see the critters from a distance but I wanted more - I wanted a close encounter.

It didn’t take long for that, as we rounded a curve on the way down to Waitpinga Beach we ran across a pair of gorgeous greys. One of them was kind enough to let me get within about 15 yards of him, with suspiciously gun shaped camera in hand, before he hopped off up the hill. This was the kind of wildlife experience I was looking for here in Oz. Ironically, for the rest of the trip every time we rounded a bend there was another mob of kangaroos. By the time we got home I was pretty much bored of kangaroos.

But our closest encounter was back at the house. Timmins discovered this beauty and tried to inform Dr. O’C whilst she was on a telephone interview, an alert for which she wasn’t entirely grateful. He’s a blue-tongued lizard and I’m hoping that the garden hose as a scale bar will convince you that he’s a fairly hefty fellow. The dog was obsessed, but this particular reptrile’s defense mechanism - hissing and puffing up his body to about double it’s normal size - seemed to be an effective deterrent. Your narrator - fully whelmed.Still on the list - koala, platypus, wombat, dingo and all manner of madly toxic critters. A not-so-close encounter with the latter will be just fine with me.

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Since before Z was born, the dog’s reaction to a new member of the pack has been a source of a little bit of concern - moreso to Dr. O’C than to me. If I’m being honest, there have been a couple of dicey moments. While Timmins has accepted his demotion in status, he’s not been terribly thrilled about it and his reaction has ranged from ignoring Z entirely to mild annoyance (voiced in the form of a low growl). In the last couple of weeks, as Z is becoming more mobile, it’s been harder for the dog to ignore him - particularly when Z chases him yelling at the top of his little lungs, as he is wont to do.

But we appear to be making progress toward friendship between boy and dog. Timmins is, as most dogs are, driven almost entirely by his stomach. Z has begun to eat more food that a dog might find tasty. Z is not a tidy eater. Hence the image of love and friendship (OK, maybe tolerance and grudging acceptance) that you see above.

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