Damselfly in Distress

This afternoon, I encountered an ebony jewelwing damselfly in the building in which I work. The poor thing was floundering by one of the large floor-to-ceiling windows near the front entrance, so I decided to give it a helping hand. My co-worker **REDACTED** took a couple of pictures:

The absence of white wingspots indicates that this is a male damselfly... with the indoor lighting, it is impossible to see the bluish, iridescent sides of the abdomen, but they were plainly visible in the light of day, when I released this little guy in the great outdoors. As his diet consists largely of mosquitoes, he'll repay the favor many times over, unless he gets eaten by some critter.

Ahhh... Suburbia!

From the "WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?" files, we have a story of a gun hoarder killing himself in Putnam County, about fifty miles north of New York City. The guy, described as a survivalist (weird, I thought survivalism was about, you know, surviving). The guy had so much ordnance that a crew from Fort Drum, up by the Canadian border, had to travel downstate to remove the explosives in as safe a manner as possible.

Thankfully, this guy had the good taste to kill himself in private, rather than going on a murderous rampage. Just the thought of what the guy could have done on a crowded New York City street with all of those explosives is making my toenails curl. One odd little detail in the story is that d00d had a non-functional Saladin armored reconnaissance vehicle in his yard.

Oddly enough, the last time an incident similar to this occurred in that neck of the woods, it involved the son (from a former marriage) of the late husband of a woman I had been working with for about two weeks. Seems the kid broke into her house to steal some guns that he knew his father had left behind. When the police investigated the incident, they found a huge arsenal that my co-worker was unaware of. It was odd, having the name of the nice lady in the cubicle across from mine, a woman I'd only met a couple of weeks before, appear in the paper.

It's odd what sort of horrors can lurk behind innocent-seeming suburban walls.

CliMEHt Action

I finally got around to listening to President Obama's speech on climate change, a most appropriate activity when there's a tornado watch in one's neighboring state. All-in-all, it was an okay speech, but, like a lot of Obama's proposals, my reaction to it is one big "MEH". There is some evidence that the president's position, like his position on same-sex marriage, has evolved- he's no longer talking about clean coal, except in rare cases:


Today, I'm calling for an end of public financing for new coal plants overseas -- unless they deploy carbon-capture technologies, or there's no other viable way for the poorest countries to generate electricity. And I urge other countries to join this effort.


My big problem with the speech is that the president lends too much credence to the notion that natural gas is a viable "medium term" solution to our energy needs:


Now, even as we’re producing more domestic oil, we’re also producing more cleaner-burning natural gas than any other country on Earth. And, again, sometimes there are disputes about natural gas, but let me say this: We should strengthen our position as the top natural gas producer because, in the medium term at least, it not only can provide safe, cheap power, but it can also help reduce our carbon emissions.
Federally supported technology has helped our businesses drill more effectively and extract more gas. And now, we'll keep working with the industry to make drilling safer and cleaner, to make sure that we're not seeing methane emissions, and to put people to work modernizing our natural gas infrastructure so that we can power more homes and businesses with cleaner energy.


Of course, natural gas extraction is extremely hazardous to groundwater supplies, a fact that even the mainstream press is beginning to report. At least the president merely views natural gas as a "transition" fuel, though my opinion is that it is a dangerous distraction from the development of real alternatives such as wind and solar power:


The bottom line is natural gas is creating jobs. It's lowering many families' heat and power bills. And it's the transition fuel that can power our economy with less carbon pollution even as our businesses work to develop and then deploy more of the technology required for the even cleaner energy economy of the future.


At least the president's stated devotion to wind and solar power is admirable:


And that brings me to the second way that we're going to reduce carbon pollution -- by using more clean energy. Over the past four years, we've doubled the electricity that we generate from zero-carbon wind and solar power. And that means jobs -- jobs manufacturing the wind turbines that now generate enough electricity to power nearly 15 million homes; jobs installing the solar panels that now generate more than four times the power at less cost than just a few years ago.
I know some Republicans in Washington dismiss these jobs, but those who do need to call home -- because 75 percent of all wind energy in this country is generated in Republican districts. And that may explain why last year, Republican governors in Kansas and Oklahoma and Iowa -- Iowa, by the way, a state that harnesses almost 25 percent of its electricity from the wind -- helped us in the fight to extend tax credits for wind energy manufacturers and producers. Tens of thousands good jobs were on the line, and those jobs were worth the fight.


As is his commitment to providing clean energy solutions to developing nations:


Though all America's carbon pollution fell last year, global carbon pollution rose to a record high. That’s a problem. Developing countries are using more and more energy, and tens of millions of people entering a global middle class naturally want to buy cars and air-conditioners of their own, just like us. Can't blame them for that. And when you have conversations with poor countries, they'll say, well, you went through these stages of development -- why can't we?
But what we also have to recognize is these same countries are also more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than we are. They don’t just have as much to lose, they probably have more to lose.
Developing nations with some of the fastest-rising levels of carbon pollution are going to have to take action to meet this challenge alongside us. They're watching what we do, but we've got to make sure that they're stepping up to the plate as well. We compete for business with them, but we also share a planet. And we have to all shoulder the responsibility for keeping the planet habitable, or we're going to suffer the consequences -- together.
So to help more countries transitioning to cleaner sources of energy and to help them do it faster, we're going to partner with our private sector to apply private sector technological know-how in countries that transition to natural gas. We’ve mobilized billions of dollars in private capital for clean energy projects around the world.


Of course, the president's proposal to use executive orders to reduce carbon emissions is a good thing, and it pisses off Republicans. All-in-all, it was a pretty good speech, but I just can't get overly excited by it- the president's approval of natural gas as a stop-gap solution rankles, and I'm not the only one to be less-than-satisfied. The president's plan, like his healthcare plan, seems just a little too close to a plan proposed by a right-winger who stands to gain millions from its implementation. Just once, I'd love to see President Obama play the socialist firebrand his opponents portray him to be.

Oh, well, I knew power plants fueled by sparkly unicorn poop were too good to be true.

Cross-posted at Rumproast.

Purple Right Hand

Today, I went on a long mulberry walk in the vicinity of Muskrat Cove (PDF link) and filled up four sizable containers, and mah belly, with the delectable fruits. By the time I got home, my right hand was as purple as the robe of a monarch:

It took a bit of scrubbing to get the anthocyanins off, but in the end I had more luck than Lady MacBeth (who was framed). It's funny, I imagine I looked like some kind of weirdo walking through the neighborhood with my hand looking like that, but I would've looked a hundred times scarier if my right hand had been red. Hmmm... sounds like a song or something:





Off topic, but a few days ago, Monsieur McGravitas posted a biography of Rowland S. Howard of The Birthday Party... I've been listening to a lot of Nick Cave's stuff lately. Thanks, SMcG!

Still Fantastic Decades Later

I've put up a couple of posts which mentioned the Irish band In Tua Nua, whose 1988 album The Long Acre is a Bastard favorite. Recently, I found that the band had reformed and had performed at last year's Electric Picnic festival. Here's a version of my personal favorite song by the band, Don't Fear Me Now:





I've always thought that lead singer Leslie Dowdall has one of the finest voices I've ever heard, and she still looks absolutely gorgeous. The band looks like they're having a blast.

Here's the video for a live performance of Seven Into the Sea:





A quick trip in the time machine to watch the band's performance of the Seven Into the Sea for the 1986 Self Aid benefit concert reveals that the band has lost none of their intensity in the intervening decades:





For the record, the band wrote one of the most powerful musical critiques of the religious based war on women (a song which, tragically, still resonates today), the closest thing to an agnostic's hymn... here's the sublime The Innocent and the Honest Ones:





It's good to see the band has reformed, and is performing as spectacularly as ever... here's hoping they decide to tour and hit the NY metro area. I've got to tell my great and good friend J-Co that the band is back together... he'll be even more ecstatic than I am.

And So It Begins...

As I do every year, I have eagerly welcomed this year's mulberry season. As a matter of fact, I spent a good deal of time this morning scarfing mulberries between tasks on the job. Ginger sat at my feet the entire time, disgusted at the frugivorous frivolities of her hairless primate co-worker. Silly ape, there are juicy birds in the trees! Tragically, the site lost one gorgeous mulberry tree a month ago, when a storm hit. Oddly enough, I don't believe that the wind took the tree down, I think the ground was so saturated that the tree keeled over. One of the most prolific mulberry trees on site produces white mulberries, which fooled even the mighty Steve Brill into thinking they were unripe (one can gauge the ripeness of the white berries by how plump and shiny they look- fat, shiny berries are ripe, though the taste is milder than that of the red or black berries).

Last night, I did something I almost never do, I went shopping for something other than food, booze, or books. I actually spent about twenty bucks on a small blender/travel cup combo. Now, I'm not the sort of guy who drinks "smoothies", but I figure I will start... I live near a failed silkworm ranch, so the vicinity is loaded with mulberry trees. I figure I can freeze a shitton of mulberries and blend them into nutritious beverages (a lot of the nutrition information comes from quackish sites, but there's quite a bit about the berries on the web. Now, anybody out there do the smoothie thing and could provide some pointers? I want to be able to sing this song by the end of the month:

Who Are You and What Have You Done with the Bastard?

In a comment to my last post, the redoubtable Smut Clyde inquired:

I see no allusion to the sexiness of robots and I call Shenanigans. What have you done with the real BBBB?

Indeed, Monsieur Clyde (if that is his real name) knows that one of the Bastard trademarks is posting a link to the song S.E.X.Y.R.O.B.O.T. by Barcelona's Pinker Tones whenever robots are mentioned. Rest assured, I did not outsource my last blog post to a cadre of orphans working in a letter mill, nor did I have Fred or Ginger write it. To tell the truth, I was totally going to post a link to S.E.X.Y.R.O.B.O.T. in the post, but it was a bit of a rush job (besides getting home after 3AM on Wednesday, work's been pretty hectic these days with a slew of summer fundraisers in the pipeline, so posting has been more difficult than is typical). In order to redeem myself, I figure I need to post a couple of videos for S.E.X.Y.R.O.B.O.T..

Here's a hilarious video for the song:





Here's the performance video for the song:





For a departure, here's a version of S.E.X.Y.R.O.B.O.T. mashed up with their song 24:





For all of you lounge music aficianados, here's the version of S.E.X.Y.R.O.B.O.T. featuring the lovely and talented Virginia Maestro:





The Pinker Tones have extolled the "sexy robot" aesthetic since day one, as the video for their first single stars a francophone Betty Boopbot:





So, how the hell did some dude from Yonkers become such a big fan of Barcelona's most hilarious electronica band? It all started back in the days when I still had cable TV... I was switching channels and came across a gleefully subversive animated video being played on one of the Spanish language networks:





I've been a fan ever since. Now, as for the sexiness of the robots in Dr John Long's lab at Vassar, I will let you make your own determination... Rule 34 is VERY subjective.

NOTE: My co-worker **REDACTED** recently bought a pair of kickass omnidirectional USB-port speakers on e-bay, and magnanimously left them here for me to use. The best thing about working alone on the graveyard shift is being able to blast a song called S.E.X.Y.R.O.B.O.T. at full volume while dancing like a maniac in one's office. The cats are hiding somewhere, but they'll crawl out of the woodwork as soon as their primate co-worker cuts out the nonsense.