The Bad Old Days

As far as I know, the Libertarian Party has always been for the legalization of pot and against foreign wars. When I was a member, there was no real consensus about abortion. The best they could come up with was a vague statement that the government shouldn't be involved in things like that, but they said that about a lot of things. I suppose there are people who call themselves libertarians that are not card carrying party members, and they can say anything they want about anything they want.

Don't expect the Libertarians to launch a campaign like the Dems and the Reps because they don't have that kind of money. They might have a website and send out literature to people who ask for it, but you won't hear them mentioned on network TV unless something happens that makes them newsworthy. With all the cable channels that are available nowadays, you might be able to find a talk show host who will interview them, indeed I seem to remember that you already have, but the mainstream/lame stream media won't touch them with a ten foot pole. I used to believe that was some kind of conspiracy, but now I think it's just because they just aren't considered to be newsworthy on a national scale. If they could pull five or ten percent of the presidential vote this November, that would get them in the news, but by then the election would be over. I plan to vote for Gary Johnson myself, but that's just me. Last election, my one vote was responsible for getting a guy elected to the Cheboygan County Road Commission, but he died shortly after the election and never did assume office. Coincidence? I think not!

I don't think the eight hour workday ever became law on the federal level, although some states may have it on their books. The only thing the federal law says is they have to pay time and a half for anything over 40 hours a week. Most union contracts require overtime pay for anything over eight hours a day, but most employees are not union members anymore, if indeed they ever were.

We grew up on movies and TV shows about the "wild West", but a lot of people don't realize that the whole country was wild and wooly in those days. I don't think it really settled down until World War II, when everybody united against the Nazis and the Japs. There was a brief period of peace and civility after the war, until the Vietnam War blew that away, and Americans have been at each other's throats ever since.

the haymarket

I see where the libertarian party has chosen a nominee.  He appears to be a more thorough libertarian than those right wing guys who claim to be libertarians who just embrace the pro-business side.  He also favors legalizing marijuana and is pro abortion and against getting into those foreign wars.

I'll be rooting for the libertarians because I think they will take more votes from the reps than the dems.  They haven't begun begun to run any kind of campaign yet so we'll see how they do.  I believe they have to get like ten percent in a certain number of polls before they can get into the debates which would be sure.  Personally I would rather they didn't get into the debates because I think Trump would be hurt more by a mano a mano debate where he could be more easily pinned down than with a more free-wheeling three-way debate.  You'll notice that Trump backed out of the debate with Bernie.

I'm reading a book about the Haymarket riots right now.  Death in the Haymarket, James Green.  He starts his story just after the civil war tracing the growth of the, I don't know what to call them, progressives, radicals, there were a lot of different factions, liberals, socialists, communists, anarchists, various flavors of labor activists.  I think the tendency we have now is to lump them all together, but they saw themselves as independent parties and weren't above fighting with each other.
This period interests me because it was at a time in the history of America, the gilded age when there was great economic inequality like there is today.  Somehow we got to a more equal distribution of wealth from there and I wonder how that was, and if we could do that again, but a lot of things are different now.

Right now the book is at May 1st 1886 when there is a big industry-wide strike for the eight hour day.  The city is being shut down and things appear to be going well for the progressives.  There is a bit of a split though.  The better paid workers are asking for eight hours of pay for eight hours of work, but the less skilled and the less paid are asking for ten hours of pay for eight hours of work.  The eight for eight guys don't like this because they are afraid it will scuttle their movement.

I think maybe it did because my tenuous knowledge of this time is that it was only when the democrats took the issue of the eight hour day from the radicals that it became law.

And most of these guys, the more radical ones are foreigners, Irish, Czechs, Poles, and mostly Germans, they have their own militias and they are talking tough, particularly they are singing the praises of dynamite.  So far it is all talk, no bombs are thrown, no shots are fired at policemen, the only fatalities of the strikes are the strikers.  But you can see where the plutocrats are getting nervous.

The Birds and the Bees

I wonder why that's a euphemism for explaining about sex to a child. Birds and bees do it differently than people, and it's human sexuality that the parent is trying to explain. Ms. Tichy started out with single celled creatures and worked her way up through plants, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, but that was a science class, and most of us already knew how it worked with people. If a parent taught it that way, the kid would lose interest before they got to humans, and the parent would have to start all over again. Be that as it may, I seem to remember that the bees in the museum had access to the outdoors. I think the bee display was built into an exterior wall, and the bees could come and go at will.

Human females expel their unfertilized egg about once a month, but they only produce one egg a month. I don't think eggs can be made in a single day because a human female is not fertile every day of the month. Chickens typically lay one egg a day but, since they can't produce a new egg from scratch every day, they must use the "pipeline" method so that there is always a new egg in line to replace the old one that is going out. The pipeline has no way of knowing if there is a rooster hanging around, so it keeps cranking out eggs so there will always be one ready if a rooster shows up. The eggs need to be fertilized before the hard shell forms, but they can't be fertilized if they're not mature, so the only one that can be fertilized today is the next one in line after the hard shelled one is expelled.

From my experience with the broody hen, and the information that I got from the guys at work after the fact, a dozen eggs is about all a broody hen can take care of at once. Because our broody hen had about three times the optimum amount of eggs under her, she couldn't take care of them properly, and only one of them ultimately hatched. Some bird species only incubate one or two eggs at a time, but chickens, grouse, and pheasants commonly have a dozen or so eggs in their clutch. The only way they can accumulate a dozen eggs is one egg a day for a dozen days. Modern chickens seem to want to give their eggs to a designated sitter, so their wild ancestors likely had some sort of communal system of incubating their eggs, although the exact workings of it have been lost in the shuffle as people selectively bred chickens for increased egg production. Be that as it may, the nutrients that go into egg production are not wasted. If the mother bird is not getting sufficient nutrition, she will not produce eggs, so the nutrition that goes into egg production is surplus to the maintenance of the mother bird's health. I seem to remember reading that human females who have an eating disorder sometimes stop having periods, which means their egg making operation has shut down, so chickens are not the only creatures whose egg production is dependent on good nutrition.

Surplus production is a common thing in nature. Some species overproduce more than others, but they all have to make more babies, eggs, and sperms than they need because some of them will not survive. The surplus material is not wasted, it all gets recycled one way or another. When we say that something is wasted, what we really mean is that it is lost to our use. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody salvages the wood, it will eventually be reabsorbed into the ecosystem. It might take a hundred years, but trees don't care about time.

Institute Day

Surely you remember the hatching room at the Museum of Science and Industry.  Some kind of huge heat lamp and a bunch of eggs, and presto the miracle of, well I think we can call it birth, or close enough for a bunch of 1st or 2nd graders, the bird part I reckon, of the birds and the bees.  And how did bees get in there?  I think I knew that once, but I have forgotten.  It was still there maybe ten years ago the last time I was there, chiefly to see the trains, and I guess it will be there for eternity.

I guess you were satisfied with learning about what that stringy thing was called, but what I was interested in was why does the chicken lay so many eggs.  My internet search revealed that the chicken is not the only bird that lays eggs in that pipeline fashion.  Okay then, it is not an abnormal bird behavior, but the question remains why does such a bird do that when it is clearly not in their evolutionary interests to be wasting so many nutrients.  And the answer is that in the wild, where the proto chickens dwelt before we domesticated them, there is always some helpful male around to fertilize the egg, so they do not go to waste.

The institute is a peculiar institution is it not?  When I explain to people how I spend about an hour every morning writing a post to an old high school buddy who i have not seen, nor communicated with, since we graduated from high school, I see some rolling of their eyes, but then they are used to my being peculiar, so it is no big deal.

The first link is of course your sister who somehow found her way into waitressing at the House of Chin.  On learning her last name, of course I asked her about you and learned that you were living at the top of Michigan.  Well how about that, but I did not inquire further.  And then when I left the House of Chin I lost track of her, well not entirely then because her husband played on the same softball team.  But when I left Champaign in the middle eighties i lost contact with her.
 
And then in 2009 I joined fb, and all these people came out of the woodwork.  Susie and I had several Champaign friends in common so i reconnected with her.  And then one day I got to thinking about you.  Even though I wouldn't have agreed with your decision, it always stuck in my mind how you stood up to the forces that were in Gage Park and didn't go on to college like almost everybody else.

I asked Susie about you and when I learned that you were a right winger, well that was even better because, like you, I get bored with talking to people who agree with me.  I think we wrote emails to each other for about two years before you instigated The Institution, and now there are five and a half years of The Institute archived on the world wide web for anyone to read, though nobody but us, despite our urging, follow.

December 12, 2013, the first posting of The Institute, I think we should make December 12 Institute Day.

That comes to roughly 1500 hours or 62 days or two months that we have been plinky plonking on the keys, and sometimes I ask myself, as I am sure you do, why am i doing this.  And the reason is that we like to write, and you really need somebody, even if it's only one person, to read what you have written.  The timing is right too, with me writing in the morning and you in the evening.  Your posts come after I am in bed so that I don't read them until the next morning, and i think you don't read them until the end of your day.  I guess you are winding down after a hard day of maintaining the freehold, whereas I am winding my way up, draining my pot of coffee and waiting for the thunk of my newspapers outside my door.

And there it is, so I guess I will begin the second part of my day now.  I'll be leaving for St Louis tomorrow morning  and I won't be getting back till Monday afternoon, so I guess it will be Tuesday before I, in the words of Merle Haggard, am right back with the crew.

Connecting the Dots

I didn't have a problem with that Wiki article. I learned what I wanted to know, which was the name of the white stringy thing that would have been an embryo if it had been fertilized and incubated. The Latin part was unimportant, but it would have been important if one source called it the "germinal spot" and another source called it something else. If both sources used the Latin term "nucleolus", then I would know that they were both talking about the same thing, even if they called it by different names in English. That's why scientists and lawyers use Latin terms you know. Latin is a "dead language", which means that nobody speaks it anymore, so it doesn't evolve like English, French, or German. "Germinal spot" might mean something different in English a hundred years from now, but "nucleolus" will always mean "nucleolus".

This is not school. There will be no test at the end, and no grade given that will keep you out of Vietnam. We are learning this stuff because we are interested in it, or maybe it's because we like talking to each other and this is just one more thing to keep the conversation going. Do you ever wonder that we have been conversing like this for years and we never seem to run out of things to talk about? Is that because we have such eclectic interests, or is it because we just like to talk to each other? I know that I am more interested in politics now than I was before because now I have somebody with whom to discuss it who knows more about it than I do and is willing to explain it to me from another perspective. Most people only talk politics with people who agree with them. What fun is that? Similarly, if we want to increase our knowledge about chickens and eggs, we could read volumes about it and memorize all the facts like they used to make us do in school, or we could speculate from what we know to what we don't know, connect the dots if you will, and stop to look something up when we hit a snag. The latter sounds like more fun to me.

From direct observation, we have established that chickens have more than one egg in their bodies at a time, and that these eggs are lined up in sequential order from the newest to the oldest, the oldest being the one in position to come out next. It is only this oldest egg that has developed a hard shell, the rest of them have soft membranes that will harden into a shell when their time comes. Since we know that hens will lay eggs whether or not those eggs have been fertilized, we can assume that the hardening of the shell is not dependent upon prior fertilization of the egg. It seems unlikely that the sperm cells from the rooster could penetrate that hard shell, so the egg must be fertilized before the shell hardens. For this to happen, the hard shelled egg would need to be expelled, making the next egg in line, which still has a soft shell, accessible to the sperm cells that will be coming in from the same orifice that the eggs will ultimately pass through on their way out. If that hard shelled egg at the end did not get fertilized, it would still need to be expelled to make way for the next egg in line, otherwise no eggs from that chicken would ever be fertilized again. Collateral evidence is the specific call that a hen makes right after she has laid an egg, and also when she desires the rooster's presence for any other reason. What she is saying, in chicken language is, "Hurry up, Big Boy, before the shell on the next egg gets hard on you!", or words to that effect.

Domestic chickens are the only bird I know of that lay eggs all year long unless their health or comfort is sufficiently impaired to prevent it. This may be attributed to the fact that chickens have been selectively bred for centuries to maximize egg production. Now that I think of it, I think pigeons lay eggs all year too, but they only lay two eggs and then sit on them. A chicken will lay an egg a day, sometimes more, day after day after day, but not all chickens will sit on eggs. Sitting on eggs might have been lost in the selective breeding shuffle, since most hatcheries gather the eggs each day and put them into artificial incubators to attain a better survival rate. On the other hand, this "designated sitter" behavior may have come all the way from Africa, where chickens were first domesticated. In the old fashioned semi-natural state in which chickens were kept before the advent of the modern egg factory, and are still kept by hobby farmers, chickens are social animals, with a pecking order and everything. Could it be that their wild ancestors developed a collective way of hatching their eggs? I have observed that chickens like to lay their eggs right alongside eggs that have already been laid. I have also seen chickens "give" their eggs to a setting hen. They would crowd into the nest box with the setting hen, lay their egg, and leave. Then the designated sitter would pull the new egg under her with her chin, and add it to the pile she already had.

I have been told that a mother hen will turn her eggs over once a day, and go outside and get her breast feathers wet in the dewy morning grass so that, when she sits back down, the eggs will be dampened. Eggs in artificial incubators are turned and lightly misted with water each day to duplicate this behavior, which is essential for the development of the chicks. Once the chicks hatch out, they follow their mother around and learn how to be chickens from her, although she doesn't feed them directly like some other birds do. Day old chicks from the hatchery are capable of eating and drinking on their own, although it is recommended that you watch them for awhile to make sure, and give a little encouragement to the slow learners. Another service the mother hen provides is keeping her chicks warm by "taking them under her wing". When you raise birds from the hatchery, you must provide a heat lamp or artificial brooder that does pretty much the same thing.

gpa's and egg quotas

I guess that specific excerpt from wikipedia is a lot like college, or more specifically The Adventure of Learning in College (which is the name of a book they made us read (they hinted strongly that there would be a test, which there never was, which was a learning experience itself) before we went down to college in the fall of 1963).

It's a bunch of latin words connected to words without really that much meaning, and after the whole thing is read what have you learned that you didn't know before?  Not that much and now you are bored and sleepy but there is that test tomorrow so the best thing to do is just memorize the definitions of those latin words because that is probably what is going to be on the test because it's easy to write a test that way.

Ooplasm, nice word, sounds like something out of Dr Seuss, the other words not so much, but you don't want to fail this quiz because that would put your C in jeopardy and a D could drop your average below 3.0 and that could flunk you out of school and the next thing you know you are dressed in olive drab on a plane on the way to meet Uncle Ho.

Ho ho Ho Chi Minh/The NLF is gonna win.

I kept getting NLF mixed up with NFL which for sports unenthusiasts like yourself is the National Football League.

Ah those were the days.  Get nucleus confused with the nucleolus, and the next thing you know you are drinking your beer for free only it's warm and in a can from an airlifted pallet in the middle of some jungle and there are no hot babes anywhere.  Ah that's the adventure of learning in college my son.

And we still don't know why chickens lay unfertilized eggs, or if other birds do the same or the why of any of it.  And parthenogenesis I haven't looked that up either and a long weekend is upon us.

Why did the chicken lay the egg?  She thought it would impress that new kind of great ape without fur which even way back then everybody in the animal world could see was going places with his ingenious use of rocks and sticks, and how about those opposable thumbs, huh? 



It would be nice to have a warm place with food and without the risk of being eaten to sit around and explore her thoughts, maybe have a fling with that handsome strutting rooster, raise a little family (Do hens tend to their chicks once they are hatched?).  Except it turned out that the food was kind of crappy, and the apes would rather save money than keep Henny Penny warm, and that part about not being eaten, well making a deal with the hairless ape was like making a deal with the devil.  If you thought letting your GPA drop below a C was bad for your health, try letting your egg production dip beneath the profit line.

Eureka !

That's Greek for "I have found it!", but you probably already knew that, unless you have forgotten it, which can happen when you're our age. Yesterday I looked up "egg" and, while it told me lots of information about eggs, it didn't tell me the name of that white stringy whatchamacallit, which is what I wanted to know. I seemed to remember that all eggs, including whole bird eggs, are composed of a single cell, so tonight I looked up "egg cell", and here's what I found: It's called the "nucleolus" or "germinal spot", and it's part of the yolk, which is essentially the nucleus of an egg cell, and it's made of "ooplasm", which is a type of cytoplasm, which is what cells are made of.

Ooplasm[edit]
Ooplasm (also: oöplasm) is the yolk of the ovum, a cell substance at its center, which contains its nucleus, named the germinal vesicle, and the nucleolus, called the germinal spot.^[3]
The ooplasm consists of the cytoplasm of the ordinary animal cell with its spongioplasm and hyaloplasm, often called the formative yolk; and the nutritive yolk or deutoplasm, made of rounded granules of fatty and albuminoid substances imbedded in the cytoplasm.^[3]
Mammalian ova contain only a tiny amount of the nutritive yolk, for nourishing the embryo in the early stages of its development only. In contrast, bird eggs contain enough to supply the chick with nutriment throughout the whole period of incubation.^[3]

Who needs college when we've got Wikipedia? Kids nowadays don't appreciate what they have, they think all the internet is for is to chat with their friends about mox nix social crap when they could be learning all kinds of interesting things like this. Come to think of it, that's what most of them thought school was for, and probably still do.

We still don't know for sure why chickens lay eggs whether they're fertilized or not, but we should be able to figure that out on our own. We know that egg production drops off during times of stress, and wild birds generally experience more stress than domestic fowl. People complain about how chickens are kept nowadays in tight little cages where all they do is eat, drink, poop, and lay eggs, but chickens lay more eggs under those conditions than they would living in the wild. It would appear, then, that those caged hens must be relatively stress free. Of course none of us would be happy living like that, but we're not chickens. Chickens probably don't experience happiness and sadness like we do. All it takes to make a chicken happy is food, water, shelter, and a comfortable ambient temperature. The first thing they do when deprived of any of those things is shut down the egg factory. Chickens certainly like to scratch in the dirt and catch bugs, and those that do are probably happier than the ones living out their lives in cages, but the caged birds are unaware of the free range option, and they can't miss what they don't know exists, so they are happy enough to do their jobs without complaint, which is more than be said for a lot of people I have known.

The Adventure of Learning in College

It's like I'm right back in Ms (Was it Miss or Mrs?  One really good thing about women's lib is 'Ms,' though as I recall, we used it all the time back then when we didn't know a woman teacher's marriage status. And who the hell ever wanted to think about a woman teacher's marriage status? That meant you had to picture her husband, and then of course you saw the two of them going at it like rabbits, and that would certainly bring your breakfast back up) Tichy's class.  There were gametes and there were those zygote things and there was something called a blastula, and I'm pretty sure there were more.  There were the diagrams where the one cell became two, then four, then eight, then it got complicated and boring again.

We had to dissect things, a worm i am sure, and possibly a frog, though thank god I don't remember the latter.  We got to look through microscopes but mostly at dried up old crap that looked like, well, dried up old crap.  I owned my own microscope at some point.  I had tropical fish and I could look at the water from the tank under the microscope and pretty damn cool, even cooler when you shook a few crystals of salt on it and all the little beasties went kablooie.  Tropical fish, a whole other story there, but one that i suspect is not very interesting to someone who didn't have them.

College Zoology was a big disappointment to me.  How animals work is a potentially fascinating topic, but it seems like mostly we just looked at more dried up old crap through microscopes.

College as a whole was a big disappointment.  I didn't like high school because of all the authority the teachers had over us, and I didn't like that whole busywork thing that was always going on.  I somehow thought in college that we would be lounging around neoclassical buildings, if not wearing actual togas, then metaphorical ones, exchanging ideas inquiring freely into the nature of the universe.

It was nothing like that.  Nobody wanted to talk about the mysteries of the universe.  I was in a dorm with a bunch of guys who were only interested in peering into the windows of the girls' dorm across the lawn, and I have to admit I was among them.  My fancy Bausch and Lomb  binoculars which I had bought to augment my telescope in scanning the heavens was pressed into use to glimpse a girl in her underwear.  And the busywork there was just more of it. 

Still, it was a nice place to be when the sixties arrived.

That White Stringy Whatchamacallit

Okay, you're right, it's not an embryo until it's fertilized, but that white stringy thing attached to the yolk is what would become an embryo if it was fertilized. I seem to remember learning that in Ms. Tichy's biology class, but maybe it was somewhere else. There is another word for it, but I'm not sure what it is. I was thinking "zygote", but that's just another word for "embryo". The closest word I can find is "gamete", but that seems to be a single cell. You've got your male gamete, which is a sperm cell, and you've got your female gamete, which is an egg cell. When those two gametes come together, they form a zygote, which develops into an embryo. It would seem that an unfertilized egg would still have a gamete inside it, but it would remain a gamete and never develop into an embryo.
You know, now that I think of it, I seem to remember that any unfertilized egg is composed of a single cell. That's counterintuitive, but it might explain why a chicken can lay an unfertilized egg. Unfertilized mammalian eggs are composed of a single cell. They are much smaller than a bird's egg, but that might be because they need to develop inside the mother's body.

My father used to raise pigeons, and I seem to remember him telling me that he could tell if a pigeon's egg had an embryo inside it. I suppose he held it up to a light, but I also remember seeing him shake an egg next to his ear and say, "That one's clear." and throw it out. Pigeons usually lay two eggs and then sit on them till they hatch. If the eggs didn't hatch in the prescribed time period, my dad would check them to see if they were viable, and discard them if they weren't. Otherwise the mother pigeon might waste her time sitting on those bad eggs instead of going to see the daddy pigeon so she could lay two more eggs.

Anyway, Our fertilized eggs didn't look any different inside than store bought eggs, except that the yolks were a darker yellow, but that was because we fed our chickens so well. Yesterday I told you that the white stringy thing would get bloody looking if the embryo started to develop but, now that I think of it, I don't remember ever seeing that happen. I have seen eggs with blood in them, but I think that was due to a different cause. On rare occasions we have found supermarket eggs with blood in them, and those eggs were almost certainly not fertilized. When the commercial operators candle their eggs, they are probably looking for blood not embryos, and I suppose they miss one now and then.

That's all I've got for now. Maybe I will find out more stuff this weekend.

leggo my eggo

That male cat I had, BC, he came home one day with half his tail. The vet stitched it up, but he did recommend that I get him fixed, but he added it probably wouldn't help much, like you said, he would still go catting around.   I was going to have him fixed the next day, but that night a song by the Who came on the radio:

The song is over
It's all behind me

In the end I didn't do it.

I don't know how it went on the farm, but I am sure those eggs you buy at the store don't have an embryo.  Those chickens have never even seen a rooster, and without sperm there can't be an embryo.  But now that i think about it there is something called - excuse me while i slip off to the wiki - parthenogenesis.  I believe i learned this from Ms Tichy in the hallowed halls of Gage Park High.  The way i remember it is that there is some way of stimulating the egg into making an embryo but there is no sperm and hence the offspring is a clone.  Hmm, reading further it only goes up the evolutionary ladder as far as amphibians and reptiles, wait, it adds, and very rarely birds. 

This is something that clearly is worth looking into, but for right now i have a post to write.

I think you are right about there being nothing wrong with eating fertilized eggs, but most people, like your hypothetical, find it icky.  Doesn't make much sense since those people don't mind eating an adult chicken which surely had plenty of blood coursing through its veins before it met its maker.  I'm sure you point out little things like this to your hypothetical, and i am sure she appreciates it.

I guess after you put on that display for the hens the rooster had to grow a beard and put on one of those Elmer Fudd hats before the hens would give him any satisfaction.

I have a lot of books.  My bookshelves are full and even if I had another bookshelf I have no more walls to put it against.  I was just now looking over at them and there is that bible.  I think you tired to get me to read some book of it, but I couldn't get past the first few pages.  I keep thinking that i should at least read one of the gospels, or maybe genesis.  When i meet my maker He is likely to be pretty disappointed in me. 

I have probably said this before, but after I meet my disappointed maker, the next inhabitant of the apartment will set their kindle or their pad down on some little coffee table and that will contain what five or six times as many words as were in all of my books. 

I used to see a lot of people on the el reading kindles but anymore hardly ever, mostly they are just plinky plonking on their sooper dooper phones.  I don't think they are reading any books on those tiny things.  My guess is they are keeping up with the Kardashians, or maybe they are texting to somebody that they are sitting on the train plinky plonking on the keys.

More About Cats and Birds

I looked up feral cats on Wiki yesterday, but it didn't say anything about their breeding habits. I think you're right, though, about them not killing their male kittens. Adult feral cats might live in all girl colonies but, if they killed their male kittens, where would all the tomcats come from? What you said makes more sense, they chase their male kittens away as soon as they are sexually mature.

I don't know about lady cats, but our vet told us when we had Scamp that, if we didn't get him fixed when he was six months old, we might as well forget it. The reason most owners of tomcats get them fixed is to prevent them from carousing around at night and coming home all scratched up. The vet said that, if you get them fixed too late in life, they will still go carousing and get into fights because they think they are still males. I understand that's true of farm animals too. There is an optimum age to castrate the males that you don't want to breed so they will put on more weight and not get into fights with the fertile males. A steer who gets fixed too late will think he's still a bull and will act like one for the rest of his life, except for the breeding part.

Now that you mention it, I don't remember ever finding eggs in any of the game birds I have cleaned. I have never cleaned any domestic ducks or geese, but my hypothetical wife thinks that their egg laying is a seasonal thing too. With fish it's different. You can always tell if a fish you are cleaning is a male or a female because the males have this white sperm thing and the females always have eggs inside, no matter what time of year. Fish spawning is a seasonal thing, but they must start growing new eggs or sperm for next year as soon as they are done depositing this year's batch. The females get quite big around just before they spawn, I believe the technical term for female fish in that condition it "gravid", but next year's eggs are not noticeable until you eviscerate the fish. The males seem to look the same on the outside no matter what stage of development their sperm is in.

There is nothing wrong with eating fertilized chicken eggs, we did it for years with no ill effects, unless a hen has started incubating them, or maybe if they have been out in the sun too long. When you crack open an egg, that stringy white thing attached to the yolk is the embryo, and they all have it. If you collect your eggs once a day and keep them refrigerated, the embryos will not begin to develop. If you crack open an egg and the embryo seems to have blood in it, that means it has started to develop. I think that's what they are checking for when they candle eggs. I don't know if those bloody eggs are eatable or not. Whenever my hypothetical wife finds one she says "Oh gross!" and throws it away. I don't remember finding a lot of those when we had our chickens, or when we bought farm eggs from people afterwards, certainly no more often that we find them in supermarket eggs even unto this day.

Hens are always fussing and squabbling with each other, but it seldom gets very violent. Anytime I witnessed something like that, and the rooster broke it up, he just got between the litigants and stared them down. Roosters are more aggressive than hens, ours even challenged me once. He flapped his wings and crowed at me, so I responded in kind, and he backed down. The only thing was, when the hens saw me coming after that, they would shuffle their feet and squat down just like they did for the rooster, which was kind of embarrassing. The rooster we had before that one used to strut up and down along the dog pen fence just to aggravate the dogs, until he got a little too close and lost his head one evening. Roosters crow all day long, not just at sunrise. They don't crow at night though, which is why that first crow in the morning is so noticeable.

We've got tons of books in the house, but we seldom buy them anymore because there is no place to put them. Anyway, I have found it's easier to look things up on Wiki than it is to rummage through the book collection trying to find something I read decades ago.

chickens and eggs, and roosters singing I Can't Get No Satisfaction

Dang, 71 years old and I still don't know everything about the birds and bees.  I didn't know women couldn't get pregnant when they were nursing.  That cat I had that had all the kittens, I did want to get her fixed but the vets wouldn't do the job while she was nursing or pregnant and it seemed like she went into heat almost as soon as she stopped nursing, so I just didn't have much of a window. 

Humans of course don't go into heat, probably not those hippie chimp bonobos either since they have sex all the time, I don't know how far up the great ape line that goes.  I tell my cats proudly that I am a great ape, but they insist on calling me a big ape.  Means the same thing but doesn't come out the same.

There is the thing I don't understand about chickens, that egg pipeline that you referred to.  I don't think like robins have that, I don't think they start to make an egg until they are fertilized.  Doesn't the robin way seem to make more sense?  If you keep wasting your nutrients by laying all those eggs aren't you going to be unable to compete with other birds that are less wasteful?  Are there any wild birds that lay eggs whether they are fertilized or not?  What about ducks and geese, they are a little like chickens and i have heard of their eggs.  Are there some of them who are raised to lay eggs?  And I thought that nobody wanted to eat fertilized eggs.  Aren't their guys, quaintly called candlers, who inspect eggs for embryos?  I guess I don't know beans about eggs.

I also didn't know that the rooster would mediate between the chickens.  Just not my image of the rooster which is more like, well, Mick Jagger.  Chickens have disputes?  Do they have warring cliques, political parties, commies and libertarians?  What does the rooster do, peck at the misbehaving hens and tell them if they don't cut it out they aren't getting any?  What about that cockle doodle do at sunrise, fact or myth?  I guess I don't know beans about roosters either.


You didn't have any favorite reading material in your youth?  I was an avid reader of comic books.  I didn't touch a real book until I was about twelve i think.  One Christmas my parents gave me a science fiction book, The Ant Men, and that was the first book I ever read.  There was a whole series of young adult science fiction books, Winston Books they were called.  I signed up for their book club.  i subscribed to various science fiction magazines in my teens.  It was so exciting to see a new one with its lurid cover in the mailbox.  That is how I got turned on to Isaac Asimov.  I wouldn't read anything but science fiction until i got to college.

They kind of crammed literature down your throat in college, but I liked a lot of it.  When I was a college dropout with a low paying job i used to haunt the used bookstores.  What they did was charge you half the cover price.  Since the classics were around a lot longer than the bestseller types, and prices were continually rising, the classics were always cheaper, so I read most of them.

I used to read a lot of science and math, but anymore it is mostly history.  It doesn't seem to stick with me, so I can read book after book on the same subject.  The Roman Empire, especially the fall is probably my favorite time period.  Anymore I am also reading up on the 1890s radicals.  I have a flight to St Louis coming up this weekend and i may well be in line for hours, they have in the past rushed us seniors right through in the pre check, but i can't count on that, so I am going to pick up a book about the Haymarket riots. 

We have a Barnes and Nobles, down State Street, the last remaining book store.  I like to go there of a morning, and pick out maybe four or five books from the new books shelf and buy one of those fancy razzle dazzle Starbucks things in the bottle and just browse through one after another.  You can't do that at Amazon.com.

Mother Nature's Birth Control

Most wild animals have a specific breeding season, while most domestic animals will breed all the time if you let them. I think the breeding season of wild animals is keyed to the weather and the availability of food. Deer breed in the fall, gestate for six months, and have their fawns in the spring. Our spring comes about a month later than yours, and fawns are being born in Northern Michigan as we speak. Our trees are just starting to leaf out now, our grass has been green for some time, but it has just lately started to grow taller. The mother deer need to have good nutrition in order produce milk for their fawns, and the fawns need some time to grow up before they have to wade through the deep winter snow, so May is the optimum month for fawns to be born in this region. Most or our deer breed in November, but not all at the same time. Does may come into heat as early as October or as late as December, causing their fawns to be born either earlier or later than the majority. Early and late fawns have a survival disadvantage but, if the climate were to change, this survival disadvantage might turn into an advantage. I understand that deer in Florida breed all year, but I don't think their does breed while they are still nursing their last fawn. Humans breed all the time, but the females will not get pregnant while they are nursing, which is why nursing a baby used to be called "Mother Nature's birth control". I think it's the same for all the primates, like monkeys and apes.

Chickens originated in Africa, where there is no winter, so that might explain why they lay eggs all year, although I'm sure they have been selectively bred to maximize egg production as well. Keeping a rooster or two with your hens will not cause them to lay more eggs, but eggs laid without a rooster's input will never hatch a chick. Commercial egg producers don't care whether or not their eggs are fertile, so they don't need to keep roosters. They buy their  pullets ( adolescent hens) about six months old from a hatchery, and they usually send them off to the soup factory within a year or so. We kept our laying hens for two and a half years, and they were still laying, but we were tired of taking care of them, and winter was coming on, so we liquidated our stock. Egg production generally slows down in the winter, but you can mitigate that by putting a light in your coop, fooling the hens into thinking that it's still summer, or so I've been told.

When I butchered our chickens, I found multiple eggs inside them, all lined up in a single file, with the largest one at the end, and each successive egg being a little smaller than the previous one. The only egg with a hard shell was the largest one, the rest had soft shells. This leads me to believe that the eggs get fertilized one at a time, just before their shells harden. Shortly after laying an egg, a hen will issue a distinctive call that my hypothetical wife said meant she was bragging about the egg she just laid. I had noticed, however, that they made the same call at other times, usually when they were upset about something, and that the call, whenever issued, caused the rooster to come running. Although roosters are not needed to produce eggs, they are useful for mediating disputes among the hens, and for defending the flock against real or imagined threats. Since we free ranged our chickens in the daytime, we liked having a rooster around. Anyway, my theory is that the hen calls the rooster after she has laid her hard shelled egg so that he can come fertilize the next one before the shell starts to harden.

Like I said, egg production slows down in the winter, but it will also slow down or stop altogether whenever the hens are experiencing some kind of stress like poor nutrition, overcrowding, or inadequate shelter from the elements. Chickens can tolerate a certain amount of cold if they are protected from drafts, but they do better if you can keep their coop above freezing. Often they can do that with their own body heat but, if I was going into the chicken business again, I would have some kind of permanent heat source in the coop. I ran an extension cord to our coop for a heat lamp when our chicks were little, but I took it down when they got bigger. I talked to a guy years later who told me that he left his heat lamp up permanently, but only turned it on when his chickens needed it. He said that, if their drinking water freezes, the coop is too cold. Modern egg factories have computer controlled climate regulation that maintains the optimum temperature and humidity for egg production.

When I was young, I mostly read whatever I found lying around. I don't remember being a fan of any particular genre for very long. My parents subscribed to two newspapers and I don't know how many magazines. I read a lot in the army, everything from Playboy to scientific texts. There were a lot of times when we couldn't go anywhere but didn't have a lot to do. Everybody read something, and then passed it on to somebody else when they were finished with it.

I have only bought a few things online in the 15 or so years I have had my computer, mostly when I couldn't find something I wanted locally. We used to buy most of our clothes from Sears and Penny's when they used to send catalogs in the mail. Once you knew your size, you could buy the same item years later and be reasonably certain that it would fit. Nowadays you have to try everything on at the store, even when you buy two or more identical items at the same time, so we don't like to buy clothing on line.

kittens and eggs

I think i had my first computer with internet in the early nineties.  What a wild and crazy place the internet was then.  Anymore it's just a shopping center.  It's worse than a shopping center because you don't even leave your own house.  Well that was back in the day before super phones.  Oh let's keep the morning young and not get me started on that subject. 


I suppose getting out of the house is not so much fun if you have to get into a car which is practically like being indoors with the added hassles of traffic and finding a parking space and having to get gas and all that crap.  But walking outdoors, weather permitting, is nice.  You see people, you see things, it's always interesting.  And if i have to take a train that's even more interesting because things and people move by even faster, and even though i am indoors sort of, and I don't have to worry about traffic or parking spaces or getting gas for the damn thing.

Stores are nice too, because once again you have people and things only now you have both more close up.  You can have a conversation about the weather too if you please.  The internet will tell you what the temp is but it will not pretend to be interested in how you feel about that.  And it's always better to see the purchase in person rather than some jpg, and nicer still when the transaction is done you leave, size permitting, with the object in your pocket and not in some distant future from fedex amid a slew of packaging garbage that makes a mess of your frontroom and eventually of the world.


My mother, who grew up in Berwyn, told me that the male cat will kill the kittens.  We had a couple cats that had kittens in our basement and we kids were horrified at the thought of some homicidal tom prowling in the gangway and backyard at night trying to figure some way into the house to do his dastardly deed. 


I have heard since then that the tom does destroy a lady cat's kittens by another father, but i think that is when he first adds her to his harem.  I have a mental picture of some guy going to his girlfriend's house with a box of chocolates and a gun and while she is trying to figure out which one is the chocolate covered cherry, he says excuse me, and goes up the stairs to shoot the kids.  That's kind of funny, except for the shooting of the kids part.

Frankly i think my tuxedo cat, BC, was just too much of a gentleman to kill kittens.  But even if he had been, he would still have remembered those days of wine and roses.  I think it's just when a cat takes over a lady cat from another tom that the kittencide takes place.

I've read that when those lady cats nurse another cats kittens they will nurse the kittens of their sisters first, and then maybe their cousins and so on, before kittens that aren't family, but they will do unrelated kittens too, i guess when they still have some milk left.
 

Now I am curious about that pbs show.  Maybe over the weekend I will do some internet research, but you know how grueling that can be.

You know my grandfather was a chicken farmer and my dad grew up on a chicken farm, but now I have to wonder about those unfertilized eggs.  I guess the chicken farmer keeps the hens away from the rooster unless he wants more chickens, but why does the chicken lay unfertilized eggs anyway?  Does any other bird do that?  Well I'm sure it has been bred into them, like those milk cows that have to be milked daily, but how did it even get started?  Were they just these birds that the first people to move beyond hunting and gathering noticed would occasionally drop the infertile egg and then bred them for it.  But again, why would it even ever lay an infertile egg?


More internet research?  My plate is already pretty full.  Maybe my northern pal will know the answer.  Maybe he saw it on some tv show or read a book.  Were you ever a fan of Kurt Vonnegut?  In one of his novels he uses the gimmick where some guy keeps saying that he read something in a science fiction book sometime.  Were you ever a science fiction fan?  What sort of books did you read as a teenager and a young man?


I notice on fb thing are getting het up between the Bernie Babies and the big girl followers.  Here is a thing that I think happens a lot.  It's only a small percentage of the Bernie Babies that dis the big girl, and only a small percentage of the big girl people who dis Bernie.  But the Bernie Baby troublemakers pretend it's all of the big girl people who are dissing Bernie and the big girl troublemakers pretend it's all all Bernie Babies who are dissing the big girl.  I think this is the way a lot of conflicts are fueled.  I think it has a lot to do with the rift between blacks and whites.


Maybe I'll get into that on Monday.  in the meantime I have a lot of beer to drink and a lot of internet research to do.

The Family Lives of Various Animals

That PBS show about cats that we saw must have been in the 80s or 90s because were still living at the old place. Did they even  have the internet then? Anyway, I just checked with my hypothetical wife and she doesn't remember the show. She also doesn't remember that all our semi-feral cats were girls, so maybe I got this story mixed up with some other cat stories I have come across over the years. I seem to remember that it was a commonly held myth that any tomcat would kill any male kittens he could, but my hypothetical wife doesn't remember that either, and she grew up on a farm, so she ought to know. According to a National Geographic article that I read in this century, adult male lions will kill any lion cubs, male or female, that are around when they take over a new territory. It said that they do this so that the adult females will come into heat sooner.

Since cats are not monogamous, I don't know how a male cat could tell if a kitten was his or not. I mean, it's not like they have access to DNA testing or anything like that. They say that any mammal mother can tell her own offspring because her milk is in their system, and they can smell the difference between their own milk and somebody else's milk. We lived next to a sheep farm at the old place, and the farmer told me that a new mother sheep occasionally won't "own" her newborn lamb. When this happened, he would pen them both up together in close quarters and try to get the mother to nurse the lamb. Once that happened, the mother would "own" the lamb and he could release them both into the common pasture. Those cats we had would readily nurse each other's kitten's, and I have heard tell of dogs and cats "adopting" babies of different species, but dogs and cats have litters, while sheep commonly have only one or two lambs at a time. I have heard that mother alligators recognize their own offspring too, and they don't even produce milk. Maybe the mother alligator remembers where she laid her eggs and assumes that any baby alligators that hatch out of that clutch are hers.

Chickens, on the other hand, commonly set on eggs that have been laid by other chickens. We kept chickens for a few years at the old place, and those hens would lay their eggs just anywhere. They would routinely crowd in with another hen that had just laid an egg and lay theirs right next to her. Then they would walk away like they could care less what happened to their egg. I have been told that most chickens make no attempt to hatch the eggs that they lay but, once in awhile, an individual hen might become "broody". We had one like that who ended up trying to hatch over 30 eggs, but she only had one survivor who lasted a couple of days till it wandered into the dog pen and got eaten. Somebody at the paper mill told me that, if we wanted her to raise chicks, we should have only let her keep the first dozen eggs, and then penned her up so the other hens couldn't give her any more.

Then there's the ruffed grouse, known locally as the partridge. They must be closely related to chickens but, of course, they're wild. The daddy partridge sits on a log and beats his wings, which make a sound like somebody trying to start an old single cylinder tractor that keeps dying out. This practice is called "drumming", and it attracts females who want to make baby partridges. They visit their boyfriends once a day, then go home and lay a single egg. When they have a dozen or so eggs accumulated, they stay home and sit on them, and they will all hatch on the same day. I have personally seen partridges in the woods with an entourage of two or three dozen chicks, and I have been told that it is not unusual, when two partridge families meet, for all the chicks from one mother to leave her an follow the other mother, usually the older one. Partridge families, of whatever size, will stay together until the following spring, when they disperse to start families of their own. Most of them don't live that long, however. Under ideal conditions, about 25% of the partridge babies live long enough to make babies of their own.

Our current presidential primaries are kind of like that. We started out with a couple dozen candidates, and now we're down to three, only one of which will survive the campaign and become president. Partridge hunters are advised that they can safely take about half of the partridges on their property in the fall because half of them won't make it through the winter anyway. We are not allowed to harvest surplus politicians like that, even though they are certainly not an endangered  species. Just as well, though, I imagine they must be really hard to clean.

sex life of cats

I don't know what to say about this tv show about a house full of feral female cats.  I tried googling 'pbs show house of female feral cats' and came up with nada.  I don't believe that the female cats would kill their male kittens.  I have never heard of any other cats killing male offspring, and as a matter of fact i have never heard of any animal killing off its male offspring.  Certainly any animal with such proclivities could never survive.

I suppose you could claim that this was just an isolated incident, but it just seems too strange and the evidence for it, a show you once saw on PBS, is too thin, and I am dismissing the whole thing out of hand.

I can go along with all female cats in the house, it is their tendency to live without mates in their own little territories, and it's possible that these cats found the house so habitable that they put up with being crammed close together.  The normal habit is for the male cat to visit his harem to procreate, but he doesn't live there, and probably mama would leave the immediate proximity to protect any kittens she might have, and maybe this conglomerate of lady cats (Google suggests queens as the equivalent of tomcat for the distaff.  It sounds a little odd to me, but the only other word it supplies, dams, sounds worse, and worse still, vaguely French, and I rather like the ring of lady cats) had several tomcats sharing them. 

It makes rough sense that the males would be ousted from the pack, much as with elephants, and perhaps not the females, but this tomicide, I am not buying it.

The tale of scamp sounds reasonable enough, but i do wonder about the all female part.  How would you know if they were too wild to pet. and maybe by the time you had them checked out (by the trappers perhaps) they were of an age when the males would have wandered/been driven off.

I had a male and a female cat living with me in the late sixties.  Being a hippie type i never had her fixed, and in the time I finally did she had had seven litters for about thirty five kittens all of whom I found homes for so it wasn't a problem.  I had her first, and then I got him (a tuxedo cat), and for some reason I thought that living together they would be like brother and sister and not have sex, indeed when she writhed in hear he just looked at her confused.

But out popped several tuxedo kittens.  He never attacked them, or any of her later litters.  Perhaps he knew that he was the poppa of some of them and couldn't tell which.




I am appalled by the latest poll that shows Trump ahead of the big girl.  My ilk was always confident that once he faced the general electorate he would sink like a stone.  What to make of this?  I think at this point, we are just considering that poll a small one and an outlier, and things will get back to the real world once the campaign gets underway.

The polls show that Bernie would do better, but he's a new guy and nobody has dug up dirt on him so far, so we don't know, and in any case there is no way the big girl is giving up so we are pushing on, and it would be nice if Bernie stepped down or at least toned it down, but we don't want to say anything because we don't want to offend his tetchy fans and he appears to be having the time of his life so whaddaya gonna do?

Cats Don't Care About Genes

I saw a show about feral cats on PBS once. They found this abandoned farm house that had been taken over by dozens of cats, all of them females. It had been previously believed that tomcats would kill male kittens if they had the chance, but this colony didn't have any tomcats around, and all of the kittens they checked were females as well as the adults. After watching the place for awhile, it was determined that, when a lady cat wanted to get bred, she would leave the premises for a few days and come back pregnant. As near as they could tell, the lady cats wouldn't allow their boyfriends anywhere the place, which led them to believe that the females were the ones that were killing off all the male kittens.

Some time previous to watching that show, we had a tomcat ourselves. We never got him fixed because, right about the time we should have, my hypothetical wife accidently ran him over with her car. His hindquarters were paralyzed, and the vet told us that the cat would either get better or he wouldn't, but there was nothing the vet could do for him. The cat eventually made a full recovery, but we were reluctant to cause him any more trauma, so we never did get him fixed. Scamp was an indoor/outdoor cat. I built him his own cathouse and we used to feed him outside, but he would come in and hang out with us most of the day. He was real good about asking to go out when he had to go potty, so we didn't provide him with an indoor litter box. Once in awhile he would go away for a day or two and come back all scratched up, but not often. He mostly stayed on the property and minded his own business.

Then one day this lady cat started hanging around. Scamp shared his cathouse and his food with her, but we started seeing less and less of him and more of the lady cat. Then the lady cat had kittens, all of them girls, and Scamp moved into the ruins of an old burned out barn across the road. Then the kittens grew up and had kittens of their own, all of them girls. We never let any of the females into our house, they just stayed outside and got wilder and wilder. The only one that would allow us to pet her was the original momma cat. After awhile it started smelling really bad around the house, so we decided that we had too many cats. We tried not feeding them, hoping they would just wander away, but that didn't happen. Finally we called the Humane Society, and this guy came out and loaned us a live trap, which we baited with ham. He took the momma cat the first day because she was the only one who could be caught by hand. We would call him whenever the trap had another cat in it, and he eventually took all the cats away.

He told us that we shouldn't feed our cats outside, because that's what happens when you do. We hadn't seen Scamp for awhile, so we thought we were all done with cats anyway but, as soon as the man took the last cat away, Scamp came back and re-occupied his cat house like nothing had ever happened. We fed him in our house after that, but he still went out to his cat house when we went to sleep or when nobody was going to be home. We had him for some years, until he got old and sick and we had him put down, but no more lady cats ever came around and drove him from his home again. Years later, when we saw that cat show on PBS, we concluded that was probably the reason all our semi-feral cats had been females. I wonder, though, if that's true, then where do male cats come from?

I saw on the TV news tonight that your man Bernie is still in the race. Some people think he should quit, but he refuses to do so. They said that Hillary appears to be the winner, but there are all those "super delegates" that can vote for anybody they want, so Bernie still has a fighting chance. I think the Republicans have super delegates too, but not as many of them, so they are not likely to turn the tables on Trump at their convention. I read something in the paper that quoted a poll which concluded that Trump and Hillary are the two least popular presidential candidates in a century or so. You know, this just might be the Year of the Libertarians. Anything can happen in this goofy election.

tainting the dem gene pool

I don't believe we have discussed monogamy, as opposed to polygamy.  Well not just polygamy, there is also catch as catch can.  I believe the latter is the rule for domestic cats where the father is whoever is first in line when the female goes into heat.  I hear that the forebears of domestic cats had some kind of arrangement like tigers, where a male has a territory which includes the territory of several females whom he services like a good Mormon, when a new guy takes over his territory the females come with it and i don't think they mind.


I don't know how it goes with feral cats, i think they live too close to each other to have their own territories.  I don't know how it goes with other beasts of the wild, but I reckon my THOTOTHOTOM, comrade will soon be telling me.
 

And of course there is some cheating within monogamy.  The selfish gene says that is because the male will spill his seed wherever he can because the more offspring he has, the greater the spread of his genes and the female will avail herself to the seed of a male she perceives to be made of better stuff than hubby in order to wed her genes to stronger genes.  And then of course, there is liquor, but that's just kind of a random thing.

The big money guys have always given money to both parties because they want the winner to be indebted to them.  Traditionally republicans have been more open about this and have received the lion's share of this because they are, after all, the party of big business.  The democrats are more shy about this, but who doesn't need money?

That was the old republican party.  Anymore we have the establishment, the hard right, and the Trumpettes.  I think the tea party is split between the latter two and does not exist anymore as an independent entity.  The establishment, being a bunch of big money guys, is of course for themselves.  The hard right generally wants no fetters on business, so the big money guys like them, but i think they fear their fiery rhetoric a bit.  Trump could be the big money guys' best friend, or he could be their worst enemy, and big business, like Wall Street, does not like uncertainty.

I wonder about the future of the republican establishment.  Right now they are sitting in their lounge with their brandy and cigars and watching powerlessly as the republican party goes wherever.  They may just drift to the dems, back guys who are liberal on social issues, but pro business on others.
I have also read that the establishment foreign policy guys are cut adrift because the hard right is generally isolationist, and Trump is, well who knows.

Not that I am welcoming the big money guys, of whom I do not approve, into the democratic party, I am just speculating.

They All Look Alike To Me

I didn't know there were so many variations among Canada geese. I had read about the lesser variety, but not the others. All the geese that hang around Cheboygan appear to be of the same variety, which I assume is the greater Canada goose, also known as the giant Canada goose. Some years ago there were six or eight gray farm geese hanging around the boat launching ramp that I use. There was an article in the paper that said the DNR planned to round them up and relocate them because they didn't want them to corrupt the gene pool of our local wild geese. They also asked that people not release any more strange geese into the river for the same reason. Somebody should have told the DNR that ship had already sailed. When I first moved up here there were all kinds of semi domestic ducks and geese up and down the river. People used to fed them, and they all intermingled freely with each other and with the wild waterfowl. Now all I see are mallard ducks and Canada geese on the river, and I assume they have assimilated the other breeds. Mallards are notoriously promiscuous, and Canada geese are supposed to be monogamous, but you know how that goes.

According to my book, Missouri and Illinois were going through the statehood process around the same time. Missouri was expected to come in as a slave state, which some people opposed, but they eventually did it anyway. Illinois had to come in as a free state because of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. There was hope in some circles that the two new states would balance each other off, forestalling the growing conflict between the North and the South for at least a few more years. Perhaps that had nothing to do with the canal building plans of Illinois, the book isn't really clear about that. It does say that the river systems had previously been more commercially important than the Great Lakes, but that was expected to change with the completion of the Erie Canal.

I don't follow this stuff like you do, but I have seen a number of posts on Face Book that accuse Hillary of being in league with Wall Street. How can that be when she's a Democrat? I don't know if Trump is in league with anybody, I think he expects everybody else to get in league with him.

Apparently I was wrong when I said that you can't run as an Independent in Michigan. According to our paper, there is a guy who has filed as an Independent for some position in a nearby township. He was quoted as saying that the reason is he doesn't identify himself with either the Democrats or the Republicans. Too bad he's not running in my township, I would vote for him.

making a deal

I think wiki said there are like five variations on the Canadian goose.  I don't think we can call them species because they surely can breed with each other.  I'm rather fond of them, moving across the greensward they are reminiscent of the late lamented buffalo.  I like their take no shit attitude, but they will get out of the way of the larger great apes, but with a truculent air and a dirty look.  And even though they are as common as pigeons and seagulls in the city, they have all the romance of the northwoods when they take to flight.  They make you want to grab for a Hamm's beer.

I still don't see what Missouri (which was also not a state at the time) had to do with Illinois claiming Chicago, but it was indeed the portage, that little swamp of big muddy lake between the Chicago and Des Plaines, between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico that they wanted.
 

I've heard that the beer and wine of olden days was considerably weaker than what we drink today, and it was drunk mainly to slake thirst without getting the thirster infected with something or getting loaded.  Whiskey doesn't have all that much water, despite phrases like wetting one's whistle, nobody drank whiskey because they were thirsty.

The Lewis and Clarke expedition carried 120 gallons of whiskey.  Imagine the Apollo mission carrying several cases of beer.  Maybe Old Milwaukee to cut costs.

Each state got two senators as a way to get the small states to feel they weren't losing that much independence throwing their lot in with that motley crew.  That's why they did that three fifths thing that is so reviled today, just to get a deal done.
 

Ah, but we are just reciting what we read in our history books to each other.  I guess when Trump falls silent we have nothing to say,

Oh, speaking of Trump, have you caught onto his latest caper where he used to phone into the press under an alias to sing his own praises?  He denies it of course, but when they replay it's clearly him.  His Trumpettes say, oh that doesn't sound anything like him, but to everybody else in the room it sounds exactly like him.

I haven't yet heard the newspapers thump outside my door so I don't know what the news is.  Well the radio has been on all this time, but I only listen with half an ear and a lot of it is local.  My Yahoo news is all Trump and Mideast bombing.  There is some Bernie news, i don't know why, he is going to lose and frankly he is rather a Johnny one-note.


Does it even make any sense to rail against the big money guys who run everything (sort of like your Them, only less mysterious)?  When have the rich and powerful ever been overthrown?  You know traditionally the rich and powerful have thrown in their lot with the reps, but do they dare trust Trump?  It seems like some of them are coming around, but there is also some talk of some of them going with the big girl.  They may not get such a good deal with her, but at least they know she will keep her part of the deal, whereas Trump, every day is a new deal.

Bloody English!

It's like you said before, the English language is not always logical. Here's something else I'll bet you didn't know: The Canada goose with which we are so familiar is actually the greater Canada goose. There is also a lesser Canada goose that looks exactly like the greater Canada goose, except that it's smaller. I don't believe I've ever seen one in real life, but I've seen pictures and read about them. I don't know where they live, but they must be pretty rare compared to the greater Canada goose.

St. Louis did indeed have a lock on the Mississippi river, which is why Illinois wanted to have access to the Great Lakes in case Missouri ever wanted to get pricky about it. They also wanted to have access to the river, in case Missouri didn't get pricky about it, and they said they needed the extra 60 miles to build a system of canals connecting the Great Lakes to the rivers that flowed into the Mississippi. I agree that they didn't need a 60 mile wide right of way to dig a ditch but, like you said, some arms must have been twisted. Wisconsin wasn't a state yet, so nobody cared what they thought about it.

I don't think that Michigan played a part in the American Revolution, but a significant battle in the War of 1812 was fought over Mackinac Island. The fort on Mackinac Island was built facing the Straits, I suppose to protect the fur trade, and the builders didn't seem to notice that its back door was vulnerable. The Americans took over the fort when the British turned over the Northwest Territories after the revolution, and the British took it back during the War of 1812. They landed on the far side of the island and dragged their cannons to the top of a hill that overlooked the fort from the rear. All the fort's artillery was facing the other way and couldn't be turned around, so it wasn't a very long battle. The British then built a small log fort on top of the hill so the Americans couldn't pull the same trick on them, and the fort remained in British hands for the duration of the war.

I don't know if the Founding Fathers smoked pot, but I understand that they used to drink a lot. People in those days were not so aware of the health hazards of alcohol consumption as they are today, but they knew that a lot of people got sick drinking water, so alcohol was believed to be the safer bet. Benjamin Franklin has been quoted as saying that God must really love the human race, otherwise He wouldn't have invented beer, or words to that effect.

Maybe the advantage the structure of the Electoral College gives to the smaller states was done on purpose, like the way the Senate was set up. Don't forget that these were 13 independent sovereign states, and getting them to form a federal union was not an easy sell. If the smaller states had not been given some kind of favorable considerations, they might not have joined, the British might have won the War of 1812, and we might all be speaking English today.

France fries

I've never heard them called Canada goose.  I thought maybe it was like that thing where technically only a subset of insects are bugs, but outside of guys in lab coats we all call all insects bugs, if we are being especially careless we might include spiders even though we all know that they have an extra pair of legs.  Sometimes, if we are feeling especially wild we might even call a dolphin a fish.

I googled Canadian geese, and all my responses were for Canada geese.  Who are all these people?  Are they normal people who are just trying to impress google about how erudite they are, you know like those guys who are always saying, well, you know, the tomato is not a vegetable, it is a fruit?  Actually it is both, but I'm pretty sure we have had this discussion before.  But I guess my question is, We don't call them France fries, so why do we call them Canadian geese?

I realize that you have a book.  Remember when everybody used to say "I read it in a book," as opposed to "I saw it on the internet."?  But anyway I have read a couple other books and come across the story about how some Illinois guys twisted some arms to get that choice upper sixty miles for Illinois.  Just think, if things went differently, Wisconsin could have had both the yoop and Chicago.  We would be living in the shadow of Wisconsin.  No wait, I would be living in Wisconsin, but when you told people, if you ever left Michigan, which I think has happened rarely, and people asked where that was, you would have to tell them it was over in the shadow of Wisconsin.

I don't see how having Illinois's northern border sixty miles north had any effect on Missouri disrupting any trade routes.  There wasn't much trade going on west of the Mississippi at that time, and didn't St Louis have a lock on the river?  In any event, when Missouri did secede St Louis was easily subdued, though a low level war raged in western Missouri even after the war. 


Speaking of wars, did THOTOTHOTOM, have a role in the revolutionary war. or it's little brother of 1812?  Seems like you have a strategic position.

You know your ilk is always going on about the founding fathers and how they were like demigods and wise beyond measure, but doesn't that whole awkward structure of the electoral college which we are saddled with to this very day, prove that they were capable of some pretty big blunders?  And this whole thing about how they didn't envision political parties makes them look pretty stupid.  I mean, what, it only took like four to eight years.  A lot of those guys were growing hemp on their plantations, which is pretty weak stuff compared to Colorado gold, but I imagine if you smoked it long enough you could get some kind of buzz.

Not that it makes all that much difference, though it occurs to me that without it we wouldn't have had W, and almost surely would not have attacked Iraq.  Maybe the middle east would have imploded anyway, but at least we could have kept our armies out of it. 



The inherent flaw to me was that small states got proportionately more votes because they get those two senatorial voices, and smaller states generally vote republican, but lately I have heard that the electoral college tends to favor dems.  I think that's because republicans win their states by higher margins.

Get It Right, Uncle Ken

I know that everybody calls them "Canadian geese", but the correct name is "Canada geese". I don't know why I know that, I just do. Canada geese were saved from extinction by the invention of the mechanical corn picker because it scatters a lot of the corn on the ground, which makes it easy pickings for geese and other wildlife. Geese also eat a lot of grass, and you're right that they prefer it mowed, fertilized, and well watered. Although geese are plentiful around here, they are difficult to hunt because they have learned that nobody will shoot at them if they stay in the city limits and on the golf course. They also seem to know which farmers do not allow hunting on their property. You might catch a few of them off the reservation on opening day but, by the second day of the season, they are all back in their sanctuaries.

It's not "Down Under", which is what they call Australia, it's "Down Below", which refers to the cities of Southern Michigan and Northern Ohio. Some Yoopers call all of the Lower Peninsula "Down Below", but they don't know what they're talking about. You're right when you say that's where most of our winter visitors come from, and many of our summer visitors too. Deer hunters mostly come from Michigan cities because a nonresident license is more expensive and Ohio has lots of good deer hunting in its own state.

I have a book, "How the States Got Their Shapes" by Mark Stein. It agrees that, when the original borders were laid out in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Great Lakes were not deemed to be as important to Illinois and Indiana as the rivers of the Mississippi Watershed. By 1817, the year Illinois applied for statehood, and also the year that construction commenced on the Erie Canal, people were aware of the future importance of the lakes. "For this reason, Illinois sought to have its northern border adjusted to provide the state with a window on Lake Michigan." Indiana had already adjusted its northern border for the same reason, but Illinois wanted to move its border almost 60 miles north of that. The reason being that they wanted to link the Mississippi Watershed with the Great Lakes with a series of canals, which they eventually did. There was also a strategic concern about linking Illinois to New York to provide an alternate trade route in the event that Missouri, a slave state, would ever secede from the Union, which they eventually did. That's the closest thing I could find to your assertion that "The more northern residents looked down on the southerners as lazy and not progressive, and they didn't want their state to be a backwater like, oh Indiana, so they got the border moved up."

The St. Lawrence River does not reverse itself, it always flows from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. It's the current in the Straits of Mackinac that reverses itself, because of wind and atmospheric pressure differentials between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, the surface elevations of which are approximately the same.

We do so have multiple political parties in the United States, it's just that the vast majority of people vote for either the Democrats or the Republicans, making them the two major parties and relegating the others to "third party" status. There is no law telling them to do that, they do it of their own free will. If the electorate ever changes its mind, one or both of the major parties could become a third party, and one of the third parties could become a major party.

When the Electoral College was put into the Constitution, they did not take political parties into account. I don't know whether or not they believed that political parties would ever be formed, but the Constitution makes no mention of them. Party politics and television have rendered the Electoral College obsolete, but nobody seems to want to change the system. I think its because it makes the states feel important, but that's just my theory.

snowmobilers, motorcyclists, and waverunners

One wonders about the D in Michiganders.  Other people are New Yorkers or Vermonters.  States that end in a vowel are generally AN states, Iowans, Missourians, and of course Illinoisans.  You could have been Wisconsinites like those Dairlylanders, but I don't know ITES, just doesn't sound serious.  And it just feels funny in the mouth to say Michiganers, your mouth is just not ready for an ER after that G I guess, it needs something to chomp down on to give it a push, like a flat rock before jumping a stream, MichiganDers, feels right.

We have tons of Canadian geese here.  They were still exotic when I first moved back here thirty years ago, but now they are everywhere, well not everywhere, mostly in the parks and I hear the golf courses, they like places with close cropped lawns, so no enemy can sneak up on them I'm told.  They have no enemies here.  I imagine it would take a pretty big mammal.  They see right through dogs on leashes, and they will make way for us great apes, but slowly and with kind of a dirty look.

I first came across the term snowbirds in Texas, technically it was, as you say, the term for retired northerners heading south tugging their airstreams behind them, but it was generalized to include me.  Generally they didn't like yankees, but nobody ever said anything bad to me, though when it snowed, and when the Texas Chili Parlor started serving beans in their chili those were blamed on all the damn yankees coming down there.

I wonder what you Michiganders mean by down under, I reckon Ohio and anything alongside or under it.  I don't believe southerners come up north to play in the snow.  I never saw their eyes grow wide with wonder at the thought of the white stuff.  My guess is it is people from big northern cities who are coming there mostly for the open space.

Snowmobilers, when they get drunk and crash and burn I think that is one time when I applaud the survival of the fittest.  Snowmobilers. motorcyclists, wave runnerites, all people who think the faster you are going and the more noise you are making, the more fun you are having.  Fie on all of them.  There was something on tv yesterday about some trail in the woods where motorcyclists liked to run their machines.  Oh, they said, they love it, because they like to get close to nature.  If they wanted to get close to nature they could fucking walk.  Idiots.

I've read up on that Illinois border thing. and the thing was most of action in Illinois before 1818 was along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers and most of the people doing it were southerners.  The more northern residents looked down on the southerners as lazy and not progressive, and they didn't want their state to be a backwater like, oh Indiana, so they got the border moved up.


I never knew that the Saint Lawrence river could reverse itself and water could go from the great lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.  I know, I'm pretty sure, I certainly would have heard of it if Niagara Falls reversed itself, maybe it is just a spillway in a greater river movement?


Those places with multiple parties, which is I think, everyplace besides the United States, and dictatorships, have that thing where the parties get so much bargaining power from their percentage of the vote and then they can put together an agreement with some other party and then they get to chose their president.  I think the electoral college makes that impossible here.  I don't know that we do any better or worse than other countries in picking our leaders.

Michiganders, Snowbirds, and Tunneling Crayfish

I don't think many Michigan residents call themselves "wolverines" anymore, except for that college football team I told you about. The name I hear most often is "Michiganders", I suppose because a gander is a male goose, and we have lots of wild geese around here. We call the people who go south for the winter "snowbirds", and they are mostly retired people who split their year between Michigan and Florida. The correct name for a real snowbird is "snow bunting", a sparrow like bird with white wings. They don't live around here, but we see them passing through on their spring and fall migrations.

Our winter snow is actually a big tourist draw. We have skiing, both downhill and cross country, and lots of snowmobile activity. The downhill skiing is not nearly as good as it is out West, but it's closer to home for people from Down Below. We have lots of public forest land that is crisscrossed with trails that can be used for snowmobiling and cross country skiing, which they don't have Down Below. When we get a mild winter like the last one, the shopkeepers cry about it because they count on the winter visitors to fill the gap between deer season and summer.

I think the Illinois and Indiana borders were adjusted to give both states a bit of lake frontage. Michigan and Wisconsin never missed it because we still have plenty. At the time, the U.P was considered a poor trade for Toledo, but most Michiganders today will tell you that we got the better part of that deal.

Lake Superior is the highest of the Great Lakes, Lakes Michigan and Huron are close to being equal in elevation, and it's all down hill from there. Saint Mary's River connects Superior to Huron at Sault Ste. Marie, which means "Saint Mary's Falls" in French. It's not really a waterfall, more like a rapids. The Sault Locks gets ships past it, with enough flow left over to generate electricity for the whole city. There are also some floodgates that can be opened and closed to regulate the levels of both Superior and Huron. When we are in a low lake level cycle, like we just came out of, the people on Huron accuse the people on Superior of hogging more than their share of the water and, during a high cycle, just the opposite. There are no control structures between Lakes Michigan and Huron, but there is a stiff current running under the Mackinac Bridge that is prone to reversing itself, sometimes in a matter of hours. The water from all three lakes flows down through Lakes Erie and Ontario to the St. Lawrence River, and thence to the Atlantic Ocean. Niagara Falls is in there somewhere, I think between Lakes Erie and Ontario.

Crayfish sometimes live in underground water when it's close to the surface, and they dig holes in the ground to get to it. You have probably seen crayfish holes in your life, but didn't know what you were looking at. The old timers certainly knew about them, for it was a sure sign that there was water to be found by digging a shallow hole yourself or, if you were in a hurry, sticking a hollow reed down a crayfish hole for a quick drink. I don't know what kind of diseases you could get that way, but those old timers were a tough and fearless breed indeed.

"Http" stands for "hyper text transfer protocol", and "www" stands for "world wide web". I don't know what the "://" strands for, but I'm sure it means something to the computers. You only need the "http://" if you know the URL and want to go directly to a site without searching for it. The "www" has absolutely no function anymore. If you type it in, your computer has been trained to disregard it.

I don't know why Americans aren't more interested in third parties. I think we are the only country in the world with a two party system. Actually it's not really a system, it's just a social custom. People will tell you that you're wasting your vote because your third party can't win. They can't win because nobody votes for them, and nobody votes for them because they can't win. Isn't that what they call "circular logic"?

agreement in beaglesonia

Well there must have been something about the wolverine that appealed to you Michiganders because you kept right on calling yourselves that.  Of course that was before your time in THOTOTHOTOM.  Seems like a pretty good deal to give up Toledo to get that whole big Yoop.  The cheese heads have to be a little pissed about that.  There probably weren't that many of them then, just a bunch of cows probably and they were wondering what they were going to do with all this Goddamn milk. They lost the bottom eighty miles of their state about this time.  The line from Indiana was going to go straight west between Illinois and Wisconsin, but the future Illinoisans didn't want the state to be run by hillbillies so they moved the border up.

Then there was that movie, Wolverines, about  the red army taking over the USA except for a bunch of plucky high school kids who freed Michigan.  I don't know what happened to the rest of the USA because I didn't see the movie, but at least the freehold was free.

Water Winter Wonderland, who thought that up?  Most people see that and think snow.  And though people like to see snow in their movies and on their holiday cards, not that many are eager to experience it in person.  Well there are skiers, but they want mountains like Colorado where they have those fancy lodges with snow bunnies, they don't want to hang out in some frozen swamp with some crotchety old windbag watching him fall asleep in his deer blind.  People want to go south, not north, in the winter.  Naturally Air Conditioned, that might have been a better thing to put on your plates.

When I went to computer school they taught us about that http://www thing.  I used to know what http stood for.  I don't think they ever taught us what the :// was for, and in fact I had to look it up every time i was going to type it into the address bar.  I didn't even know that you didn't need it anymore until just now.  I have always just typed it into google and then clicked on the result.  URL, you hardly ever hear that term anymore. 

I don't understand that about sucking crayfish holes.  If there were crayfish wouldn't there be a stream?  And it's not like we were in a desert sucking on a cactus, we have water everywhere.  Did you know that Lake Michigan, after years of historic lows, is now as high as it has ever been?  Our beaches are shortened and our walkways are lapped at.  Probably the same thing is going on with you.  The lakes are all connected but I think that some are higher than others, like those itty bitty eastern ones must be higher because the water flows inland.  Is that right?

I guess anymore the candidates borrow current songs.  I remember Clinton I had Yesterday's Gone, I think Bush II had that awful Lee Greenwood song, I'm Proud to be an American, Obama doesn't have a song, but he has been known to sing from the lectern.  You'd think that Clinton II would have one, Big Girls Don't Cry, Bernie could have the Internationale.  Republicans are always stealing rock songs until the rock bands cry foul and take them away.

The reason you hardly ever see third party candidates on tv or in the newspapers is because nobody cares about them.  Period.

Trump meets Ryan today.  It was expected to be a big confrontation, but both sides have backed down to the point where it looks like it'll be a wary handshake, but then you never know about the Donald.

You know I have been looking for a bone of contention for us over the election, but we both seem to agree that Trump is nuts and the big girl is a sleazebag.

Wolverines

The way I heard it was that the Ohio guys gave the Michigan guys the name "Wolverines" during the Toledo War. One version is that it was because they fought so fiercely, but that's not likely because their wasn't a lot of actual fighting during the Toledo War, it was mostly bluff and bluster. The other version, which is more likely, is because the Wolverine is an obnoxious animal. When a Wolverine makes a kill or scavenges any food source, it will eat till it pukes and then eat some more. When it finally gets to the point that it just can't eat any more, it will piss on the remaining food with a skunky musk, which ruins it so that nobody can eat it, not even the wolverine itself. I don't think that Michiganders and Ohioans still hate each other, except once a year when one of our universities plays one of their universities in a grudge football game. I don't think that Michiganders and Wisconsinites ever hated each other, but I could be wrong about that.

I haven't heard Michigan called "Winter Wonderland" in a long time. I seem to remember that it used to say "Water-Winter Wonderland" on our license plates, but now all it says is "wwwMichigan.gov". Why do people still put that "www" in their URL when the internet stopped using it about 15 years ago? I guess it doesn't hurt anything if you type it in, but it's unnecessary. What is necessary is the "http://", but few people put that in their URL. Now many of the sites use "https://", which has something to do with security, but I don't think it matters if you leave the "s" out when you type the URL in your address bar.

I read somewhere once that Illinois got its "Sucker" nickname because early settlers used to stick  hollow reeds down crayfish holes and suck out the water when they needed a drink out in the prairie. I remember when "Land of Lincoln" used to be on Illinois license plates, but I don't know if it still is. Lincoln was actually born in Kentucky, but he lived part of his life in both Indiana and Illinois.
"We'll vote for the son of Kentucky, the hero of Hoosier come true,
The pride of the Sucker so lucky, for Lincoln and liberty too." - from the campaign song "Lincoln and Liberty". Why don't the candidates have campaign songs anymore, did somebody decide that it wasn't cool? That sucks!

I remember voting for those Illinois judges once, the first time I voted on an absentee ballot while I was still in the army. As I remember it, there were a whole lot of them, maybe a hundred. It wasn't an "either or" proposition, those guys were already judges and you voted to either retain them or dump them. We only vote on a dozen or two judges in Michigan, and not all of them in the same year. There might be five or six of them listed, and the instructions tell you to only vote for one,  two or three of them. They tell you which ones are incumbents, but they don't tell you which party they are.

Michigan passed term limits for their state legislators some time ago. I voted against it, but they passed it anyway. We don't have term limits for congressmen, I suppose because that's federal, and it would take a constitutional amendment to change it. Dr. Dan just said that he would limit himself to two terms, but he didn't.

I'm surprised that you get to see third party candidates on TV, but then you watch more of it than I do. The Libertarians used to cry about their "news blackout", but I think it's just because they don't get enough votes to be considered newsworthy, or maybe it's because they aren't goofy enough. I seem to remember that Ross Perot got all kinds of coverage when he ran third party.