Redux: 30 Seconds in the UAE

By: | March 17, 2020
shutterstock falcon

On November 6, 2015, when this was originally published, I had just arrived back from the most bizarre trip my work has ever taken me on–and I’ve been on some pretty weird reporting expeditions. It was my first (and probably last) experience of being a royal guest in a place where royalty really runs the show. It was a week of berobed body guards with the hard stare of special forces, and hypermodern Beduin chic. But in the midst of it all were the 30 seconds described here:

I let the children have a go first and then reach out a recently hennaed hand, palm up, to accept the flannel armband from Mounir. The whole thing suddenly seems a little flimsy. Are birds supposed to wobble?

I’m a lot taller than those children, and my arm is accordingly further from the ground than the distance one would want a bird to fall. Do birds fall? Not generally, except as chicks from the nest, but this one is blindfolded, did I mention?

Because otherwise it would peck at my approaching hand with that beak I’ve just watched tearing through a plucked but still boned pigeon. Would a blindfolded falcon flap its wings if it lost its footing at dusk in the desert outside Abu Dhabi if there were a leather thingy covering its eyes?

Hang on, this isn’t a wobble, this is a lean. Those birdy legs are at an 80° angle to my arm, and the beak is correspondingly nearer to my shoulder, slash, head. Now it’s more like 75°. What’s happening, Mounir? This didn’t happen to the children. Get it off, I feel, but no, I think, I’ve been looking forward to this.

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A Merry Heart

By: | March 16, 2020
COVID-19 Pandemic World Map as of March 13th, 2020 (Wikimedia Commons)

 A merry heart goes all the day,

Your sad tires in a mile.

-Shakespeare, The Winters Tale

I still am learning how to behave during a pandemic. Some things are simple: I know that I should wash my hands frequently with soap for at least 20 seconds. I know that I should cancel my social engagements for the foreseeable future. In hindsight, I now realize that it was wrong — badly done, indeed! — to go see Emma with my mom earlier this month, even though the costumes were gorgeous.

Other lessons are more painful. Last week, I’m afraid I had to be reminded that knowing all of the very latest COVID-19 news isn’t the same as doing good. Blindingly obvious as this is, it took two uncomfortable interactions to remind me that the ability to gather and transmit accurate information is not the only skill that’s needed right now.

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Pandemic Time

By: | March 13, 2020
Embroidery of a woman hugging the ground

On March 1st, I got concerned enough to start asking a few beloved elders if they had two weeks of supplies. (They did.) The next day, I stopped touching my face. Last week, I stopped going to restaurants. Monday, when I left the office for my two regular work-from-home days, I thought I might not be back for a while.

I was a little ahead of most of the United States, and, over the last 48 hours, much of the rest of the country seems to have caught up with me. It is, oddly, a relief: Finally, people with authority are taking this virus seriously. Kids are being sent home. Museums are closing.

I don’t know what this next phase of the pandemic will be like. I don’t think anyone does. I know I’ll be working from home, doing a lot of embroidery, watching a lot of Netflix, and calculating and recalculating the contents of my cupboards. I know a lot of people will have it a lot harder than me, so I’ve sent money to the Capital Area Food Bank and So Others Might Eat, and I hope, if you can, you’ll donate to them or to organizations near you doing similar work.

This new virus is already a tragedy. Thousands of people have died. But I deeply hope that what many of us here in the U.S. are doing now, all of this hunkering-down that is the responsibility of the regular person, will prevent thousands and thousands of other deaths.

Here goes, everybody.

Embroidery and photo: Helen Fields

Alligator Awesome

By: | March 12, 2020

I know it’s not Friday, and we don’t really do a lot of penis posts any more. But I felt like with all the uncertainty in the world, I really wanted to revisit this post about alligator penises. It first ran in 2013.

The alligator harvest at Louisiana’s Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge happened every September, so in the fall of 2007, Diane Kelly packed her bags. She wasn’t hunting, but she still had to put her scalpels and knife blades and the rest of her dissection kit in her checked bags. Explaining to TSA that she was going to figure out how the alligator penis worked wouldn’t fly.

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Fear the Deer: A Comprehensive Ranking of Cinematic Roadkill

By: | March 11, 2020

By the time you finish reading this paragraph, somewhere in America, someone — a long-haul trucker cruising a lonely highway in Iowa, a soccer dad piloting his Subaru through the Virginia suburbs, a lawyer commuting to her office in Atlanta or Bismarck or Madison — will have hit a white-tailed deer. Since the mid-20th century, a period of exponential growth for both Odocoileus virginianus and Homo automobilis, the Deer-Vehicle Collision has been a staple of modernity. Drivers hit more than a million white-tails every year, accidents that cost the public billions in hospital bills and vehicle repairs. In the wolfless East, cars are practically the only predators deer have.

No wonder, then, that the deerkill has become an enduring pop-cultural trope, as ubiquitous onscreen as in real life. Ryan Reynolds kills a white-tail in gratuitous fashion in The Voices; Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain do the deed in A Most Violent Year. Deer crashes have been played for horror, as in The Ring 2, and for comedy, as on The Simpsons. Some representations defy the laws of physics; some are pointlessly cruel; some feature Tom Green. Nearly all involve the weaponization of a buck’s antlers, even though hunting pressure tends to skew sex ratios toward does. Cars and animals fly into the air as easily as kite surfers. 

Despite the many duds, the annals of entertainment history contain the occasional roadkill masterpiece. In recognition of these gems, I’ve developed a precise, novel, and extremely science-based cinematic DVC ranking system. After some intensive YouTube perusal, I scored DVC scenes from film and television in four categories, each of which was worth ten points, for a total of forty possible points. Why forty? Why not? 

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Bad homonyms, or, things not to say to a British person

By: | March 10, 2020

Several years ago the Economist published a chart for American expats in the UK. It disambiguated what British people say from what Americans hear them say. For example, “you’re very brave” does not mean “I think you are brave” when a Brit says it. It is more likely to mean “you are insane.”

I had been living on this small island for a year before I saw that article, and it took another year for me to digest that it was an entirely serious public service announcement, not the Economist uncharacteristically swerving into surrealist humour. Suddenly I was haunted by the number of the times I had been told I was “very brave”.

But these misunderstanding go both ways. How often I, an American, would say words that seemed completely uncontroversial, and bring conversations to a screeching, echoing halt.

Today I’d like to share a decade of hard-won knowledge with any desperate expats now suffering through that same confusion. Think of it as the obscure sequel to the above guide. I hope that the following selection of “bad homonyms” helps you understand why the words you’re using to speak to British people so often elicit twitching and grimaces.

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Redux: A Baffling Curio

By: | March 9, 2020
quodlibet1 cropped

Very occasionally, a post we write here is, unbeknownst to us, incomplete. It will only be concluded by our readers, who finish the job in the comments section. On August 28, 2015, I posed a mystery in the form of a very old document, and I thought I had more or less solved that riddle in the article, until I read the startling and charming comment by Becky below it. All this to say, read on to find the answer in the comments!

Here is the original article, A Baffling Curio.

Speaking of the Trees

By: | March 6, 2020

For the love of trees and their leafy kin, and with Australia’s horrendous fires on my mind, here’s a piece I wrote a few years ago about the surprising capabilities of plants that make their burning especially sad. Meanwhile, researchers continue to uncover remarkable details about plants’ lives, as in this report about their (almost human?) physiological/chemical responses to attack and injury, and this about the botanical version of a cry of distress. Plus, everyone is raving about this book--I haven’t read it yet but it’s on my list!

As for the fires here in the U.S.? Unfortunately, they’ll be back soon.

The fires, the fires. When I started writing this some weeks back there were 137 of them torching forests across the American West. There are many fewer now—thank firefighters and weather—but so far they’ve consumed some 8.5 million acres of trees, some of them old growth, many of them on parkland filled with wildlife. British Columbia, too, has seen more fire destruction in recent months than anyone alive can recall. While massive hurricanes and flood waters and devastating earthquakes have steered our collective empathy to the south, parts of the Northwest smolder on.

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