I had the pleasure of lending my hand to editing some pieces and submitting my own story to an anthology.
All proceeds go to St Judes. Here’s an interview I did https://sandraeaster.wordpress.com/2016/06/02/stardust-always-authors-ashley/
and links to buy the ebook or paperback!
I had the pleasure of lending my hand to editing some pieces and submitting my own story to an anthology.
All proceeds go to St Judes. Here’s an interview I did https://sandraeaster.wordpress.com/2016/06/02/stardust-always-authors-ashley/
and links to buy the ebook or paperback!
At 16, not living with my dad anymore, I found a 6ish month old puppy at the SPCA. I made her mine by way of my mom. My mom says she is her dog, but she isn’t. We are her humans. We had a feisty Queensland with a gorgeous grin and two cats we found. Imogen, Fuglee, and Bartleby. And an aunt Lori.
May 27, 2010 my mom had to say goodbye to her bottle fed Fuglee kitty due to a severe poisoning (she was partly an outdoor cat and got into something.) it happened so fast.
April 27, 2011 Bartleby, my boy. My precious and perfect kitty was put to sleep after a 9 month battle with pancreatic issues. He was 11. I prolonged his life selfishly because I could not lose him. I wasn’t ready for him to be a shadow. A memory. I was tired of pieces of my heart fragmenting in gut wrenching explosions. And Vampi (my other cat) dying so tragically only a couple years prior, Fuglee still a fresh wound, and a loss of a very important person in my life still not healed. I regret the time I took to give him what he needed; to be selfless and logical.
The first dog after 8 years–since our family dog Mindy died–is slipping away right in front of me and there’s nothing I can do. For 13 years, she (and Bart,11years, and Vampi, 7years) saw me through so much pain, so much joy.
So much.
With Bart it felt like I was watching my heart leave my chest–logically I know that’s not accurate, but logic doesn’t have hold in a time like this. With Imogen it is no easier. It is like the closing of a book. The closing of so much.
So much.
I watch her and can only wait. September 11th, 2013 at 10:15 AM. 13 hours. 13. My aunt Lori died September 13th. Lori helped name Fuglee. She lived with us when we had her. Bart. Imogen. Vampi. Imogen is the last. It hurts.
So much.
I know she doesn’t know what I mean when I tell her I love her and I’m sorry she is swimming in ammonia and that I wish I could help her. I know she doesn’t understand why I cannot stop touching her. Why I watch her. Breath. Breath. . . . . Breath. And I sigh a relief but also a lost hope. But I do it. I can’t not. There’s so much left to give her and not enough time. So much I wish she could understand. So much I wish Bart could have understood. Lori understood.
So much “I wish”. So much “I’m sorry”.
Whether she or any of my children loved me doesn’t matter. I love(d) them. I love(d) them until it literally hurt.
I worry about Grissom. In 13 hours she won’t be coming home. For about 11 years she’s been his sister. He can’t even stand being left in the house without her. Another room without her. I don’t even think he realizes she hurts.
She won’t eat. She gets fluids under her skin to help with some of the discomfort.
I should have–
She’s a crotchety old lady around other dogs. She’s protective of her humans, her dog Grissom. She was smart and selective with how smart she wanted to act. She is still laying in front of me and I already refer to her as if she is gone.
Breath. Breath. . . Breath.
She is.
She IS my dog. I AM her human.
I miss her already. I miss her and she is here and she is mine and she is breathing. I wish she would stop breathing.
13 years. In 13 hours all she will be is 13 years.
She won’t lick my proverbial wounds. She won’t boop my nose with hers during our staring contests. She won’t grin. Her gorgeous grin. She won’t follow me outside and lay there while I write things no one else will read–even when she can hardly stand, hardly walk, she follows me.
I wish I believed in an afterlife. I wish I believed that she would be joining Vampi, Fuglee, and Bart. That she would meet Mindy and they could keep the cats in line. I wish I believed they’d all be waiting for me.
I wish.
She likes graham crackers and pokes her head around the wall to see what I’m doing. Im trying to find something she will eat. Graham crackers. I’d give her the whole box if I knew she wouldn’t throw it up. I don’t want her to go through the stress of that anymore. Graham crackers. Her ears are forward and she looks at me like she has always looked at me. Like she won’t look at me again in 13 hours.
I hope she was happy and I hope she knows how much she means to me. It will never be the same. I know from experience. Never the same.
12 and a half hours.
At 10:30, September 11, 2013 the book closed. I laid on the floor, her paws and head on my arm. Before the sedative she booped my nose and licked my tears. Then she just laid there. She went fast. She was ready to go. Now I have a collar that says “rescued” with her human information and her name on a pink bone. It will sleep on a hook, no more neck to go around.
I remember things in a non-linear fashion. Time is, as The Doctor says, “wibbly wobbly”.
I remember staying with her when she lived in Sacramento before she was diagnosed with cancer. I remember going to Santa Cruz and her shoving calamari in my face after driving in her jeep wrangler listening to top 40 music–Avril Lavigne was a favorite of hers for road trips.
I remember going up for a Snow patrol show that ended up being cancelled due to Gary having laryngitis (I still haven’t seen them live) so we just wandered and hung out.
I rode the train to see her often. I went with her to her doctor appointments. My mom took her Me & Ed’s pizza on the train once.
We drank a lot of coffee and smoked. Sometime we drank Bailey’s with a splash of coffee.
She lived with my mom and I when I was in high school prior to moving to Sacramento. Her and my mom went drinking one night and my mom got so drunk on tequila (out drinking some guy) that she threw up in Lori’s car. I held a mirror to my mom’s nose the next morning to make sure she was alive when my jumping on her bed didn’t wake her. We found a 3 day old kitten and named her Fuglee, ignoring mom’s disdain for the name. Fuglee became mom’s 4th kid. When we had to put her to sleep, I felt like I lost the last piece to Lori.
I remember seeing the Backstreet Boys with her, mom, and Donna and Jen at the Arco arena. We ate at the Hard Rock cafe and got condoms from the vending machine in the bathroom–we’d never seen that before.
I remember her flirting with male waiters much younger than her. She’d leave her number on the receipts for them.
We watched Charmed a lot. She wanted “the thing from the show”. When I figured out she meant a triquetra, I got her one. I wish I’d have got it back after she died.
I remember her always being on my side and knowing she’d always love and support me. How proud she was of me, even when she didn’t say it aloud. I was who I was, even when I wasn’t sure who that was, and she respected me and never tried to change me.
I remember when she’d try to hotbox me in the car while I drove. Blowing pot smoke into my face when we were at “home” and getting a contact high from her medicinal marijuana. I remember the first time I actually smoked pot, many years later. It was the first time I was able to listen to Run by Snow Patrol and Never Gone by the Backstreet Boys without crying. After listening to them for an hour, I walked to the beach and listened to them as the day gave way to night and the waves washed over the sand. Sober they still make me cry.
I remember the tears–how I had so many, I’ll never understand. They still greet me unexpectedly. The feel of the cold aggregate floor as I sobbed, knowing she’d not wake up from the coma. Reading with hitched breath all the crappy poems and prose I’d written that no one has heard (except her if she was able to in her unconscious state). I remember wishing my mom had been there. I remember being grateful that my dad came and gave me the hug I didn’t know I needed–our tumultuous relationship paused then.
I remember when she wasn’t there anymore.
I remember when I graduated from college (first community, then state) and how shattered I was that she wasn’t there for my milestones.
Every September 13th is a day of reflection, a reliving of loss, a day of mourning, a day a memories, a day of smiles and tears. Though it is easier as years pass, there is little that makes this day any easier or better. I focus on the better times we had as much as I can, but it’s hard to keep the good and bad separate.
I lost a lot 7 years ago. I had to say goodbye to a best friend, a sister, a mom, a guide, a hero. I lost my Faery Lori and it still hurts and I miss her constantly.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – On a misty mountaintop on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, scientists for the first time in more than eight decades have observed a living pygmy tarsier, one of the planet’s smallest and rarest primates.
Over a two-month period, the scientists used nets to trap three furry, mouse-sized pygmy tarsiers — two males and one female — on Mt. Rore Katimbo in Lore Lindu National Park in central Sulawesi, the researchers said on Tuesday.
They spotted a fourth one that got away.
The tarsiers, which some scientists believed were extinct, may not have been overly thrilled to be found. One of them chomped Sharon Gursky-Doyen, a Texas A&M University professor of anthropology who took part in the expedition.
“I’m the only person in the world to ever be bitten by a pygmy tarsier,” Gursky-Doyen said in a telephone interview.
“My assistant was trying to hold him still while I was attaching a radio collar around its neck. It’s very hard to hold them because they can turn their heads around 180 degrees. As I’m trying to close the radio collar, he turned his head and nipped my finger. And I yanked it and I was bleeding.”
The collars were being attached so the tarsiers’ movements could be tracked.
Tarsiers are unusual primates — the mammalian group that includes lemurs, monkeys, apes and people. The handful of tarsier species live on various Asian islands.
As their name indicates, pygmy tarsiers are small — weighing about 2 ounces (50 grammes). They have large eyes and large ears, and they have been described as looking a bit like one of the creatures in the 1984 Hollywood movie “Gremlins.”
They are nocturnal insectivores and are unusual among primates in that they have claws rather than finger nails.
They had not been seen alive by scientists since 1921. In 2000, Indonesian scientists who were trapping rats in the Sulawesi highlands accidentally trapped and killed a pygmy tarsier.
“Until that time, everyone really didn’t believe that they existed because people had been going out looking for them for decades and nobody had seen them or heard them,” Gursky-Doyen said.
Her group observed the first live pygmy tarsier in August at an elevation of about 6,900 feet.
“Everything was covered in moss and the clouds are right at the top of that mountain. It’s always very, very foggy, very, very dense. It’s cold up there. When you’re one degree from the equator, you expect to be hot. You don’t expect to be shivering most of the time. That’s what we were doing,” she said.
(Editing by Sandra Maler)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081118/sc_nm/us_primate_indonesia
the Arctic mammal at greatest risk due to global warming is the narwhal. The medium-sized whale has evolved specifically to live in small cracks in parts of the Arctic where it’s 99 percent heavy ice, said study lead author Kristin Laidre of the University of Washington.
Sometimes known as the corpse whale, the narwhal has a long spiral tusk. Laidre acknowledged they are “not that cute,” which makes it harder to interest the public in their plight. Stanford University biologist Terry Root said she is afraid the narwhal “is going to be one of the first to go extinct” from global warming.
FORT-DE-FRANCE, Martinique (AP) — Aimé Césaire, an anticolonialist poet and politician who was honored throughout the French-speaking world and who was an early proponent of black pride, died here on Thursday. He was 94.
A government spokeswoman, Marie Michèle Darsières, said he died at a hospital where he was being treated for heart problems and other ailments.
Mr. Césaire was one of the Caribbean’s most celebrated cultural figures. He was especially revered in his native Martinique, which sent him to the French parliament for nearly half a century and where he was repeatedly elected mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital city.
In Paris in the 1930s he helped found the journal Black Student, which gave birth to the idea of “negritude,” a call to blacks to cultivate pride in their heritage. His 1950 book “Discourse on Colonialism” was considered a classic of French political literature.
Mr. Césaire’s ideas were honored and his death mourned in Africa and France as well as the Caribbean. The office of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said Mr. Sarkozy would attend Mr. Césaire’s funeral, scheduled for Sunday in Fort-de-France. Students at Lycée Scoelcher, a Martinique high school where Mr. Césaire once taught, honored him in a spontaneous ceremony Thursday.
Mr. Césaire’s best-known works included the essay “Negro I Am, Negro I Will Remain” and the poem “Notes From a Return to the Native Land.”
Born on June 26, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, Mr. Césaire attended high school and college in France. In 1937 he married another student from Martinique, Suzanne Roussi, with whom he eventually had four sons and two daughters.
He returned to Martinique during World War II and was mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to 2001, except for a break from 1983 to 1984.
Mr. Césaire helped Martinique shed its colonial status in 1946 to become an overseas department of France.
He was affiliated with the French Communist Party early in his career but became disillusioned in the 1950s and founded the Martinique Progressive Party in 1958. He later allied with the Socialist Party in France’s National Assembly, where he served from 1946 to 1956 and from 1958 to 1993.
As the years passed, he remained firm in his views. In 2005 he refused to meet with Mr. Sarkozy, who was then minister of the interior, because of Mr. Sarkozy’s endorsement of a bill citing the “positive role” of colonialism.
“I remain faithful to my beliefs and remain inflexibly anticolonialist,” Mr. Césaire said at the time. The offending language was struck from the bill.
Despite the snub, Mr. Sarkozy last year successfully led a campaign to rename Martinique’s airport in honor of Mr. Césaire. Mr. Césaire eventually met with Mr. Sarkozy in March 2006 but endorsed his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, in the 2007 French elections.
Article from NY Times
I stumbled upon this site and it has been a wonderful diversion–I should be sleeping. I quite like the option of making people I know look like a chimp 😀
DNA from fossilized human feces found in an Oregon cave is 14,300 years old, at least 1,200 years older than previous evidence for humans in North America, researchers said Thursday.
The find provides the strongest evidence in an archaeological controversy about whether people of the Clovis culture, which manufactured distinctive stone tools and weapons, were the first to populate the Americas. The new evidence, reported online in the journal Science, indicates they were not.
The fossilized DNA “represents, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest human DNA obtained from the Americas,” said geneticist Eske Willerslev of Denmark’s University of Copenhagen, a co-author of the paper.
“If you are looking for the first people in North America, you are going to have to step back more than 1,000 years beyond Clovis to find them,” added archaeologist Dennis L. Jenkins of the University of Oregon, the lead author of the report.
The find is “a smoking gun” for the pre-Clovis colonization of the Americas, said anthropologist Ripan Malhi of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who was not involved in the research.
In addition to changing ideas about when humans arrived here, the new research will also change ideas about how.
Archaeologists theorize that humans from Siberia and eastern Asia migrated to North America across the Bering land bridge when a global warming episode melted the glaciers that had blocked their progress and stranded them for thousands of years in the area known as Beringia.
If humans were on this continent 14,300 years ago — at least 1,000 years before that melting episode — they had to have come before the glacier blocked the route or by a different pathway, Willerslev said.
He argues that a strip of land along the western coast of North America was exposed during the Ice Age, allowing migration along the coast rather than by the favored inland route. Archaeological artifacts from that trek are now submerged under the Pacific Ocean, he said.
The feces fossils, technically called coprolites, were discovered by Jenkins in the summers of 2002 and 2003 in the Paisley Caves in the Summer Lake basin, about 220 miles southeast of Eugene. The eight caves are wave-cut shelters on the shoreline of Lake Chewaucan, whose levels rose and fell with changes in precipitation in the region.
In addition to the coprolites, Jenkins also found manufactured threads of sinew and plant fibers, hides, basketry, cordage, rope, wooden pegs, animal bones and a couple of projectile point fragments — but not enough to link the cave’s inhabitants to the Clovis people or any others.
The small number of artifacts in the cave suggests that whoever occupied it did so only for a short period, rather than using it as a long-term residence, Jenkins said.
Organic material from the coprolites was radiocarbon dated, and the oldest ones were found to be 14,300 years old.
Willerslev’s lab analyzed mitochondrial DNA from the coprolites and concluded that it was similar to DNA from both Native Americans and the populations of Siberia and East Asia.
Fearing contamination of the samples, Willerslev also analyzed samples from all 55 people who visited the cave during the excavations, as well as from all 12 members of his laboratory and showed that none of them had similar DNA.
The coprolites also contained DNA similar to that of the red fox, coyote or wolf. Jenkins said the added DNA could have come from human ingestion of the animals or from the animals urinating on the feces.
Critics, such as anthropologist Gary Haynes of the University of Nevada, Reno, argued that the coprolites could be animal feces and that the human DNA was deposited when humans urinated on them much later.
But Jenkins said that the coprolites also contained human proteins in concentrations too high to have come from urine, as well as human hair.
“Whether the coprolites are human or canine is irrelevant, since for a canine to swallow human hair people had to be present in that environment,” he told Science. “Anyway you cut the poop, people and dogs would have had to be at the site within days of each other 14,000 years ago.”
*Disclaimer: this is a stream of consciousness, not an analysis.
I say he would.
As a fan of Shakespeare and someone who enjoys literature analysis I am always intrigued as to how people interpret The Bard. However, I have come to the realization that people are far too obsessed with homosexual undertones (or overtones) and/or homo-eroticism in every single play!
I recently had to read Twelfth Night–which is a great play– twice (once in the fall semester and once this spring) and both times I heard people go on about a scene involving Antonio and Sebastian and how it was “quite obviously” that Antonio had a love that far surpassed “friendly” with Sebastian. Here is a link to the part I am referring to; (http://nfs.sparknotes.com/twelfthnight/page_60.epl).I have to argue that I adamantly believe this interpretation is vague at best and I say this because of the fact that much of the language used, though flamboyant or excessive is characteristic of most characters in Shakespeare’s plays, not just the ones who are “in love” with each other.
My opinion is that the bond shared by the two is one of a brotherly, comrade-in-arms sort of affection. To jump to a conclusion of; “Oh, they are gay!” is so rash and unsupported by the text. Especially because it is such a short interaction and there is little to no character development of either of them. I would have to say that if anyone in the play is displaying any sort of homosexuality it is Orsino and his relationship with Cesario (for those who don’t know the play; Cesario is actually a woman, Viola, who has disguised herself as a man because she is all alone in a strange land and in mourning of her brother Sebastian because she thinks he died in the shipwreck. Of course no one knows that Cesario is a woman.)
Back to my point. I heard from one of my Professors that in England they protray the supposedly gay scene between Antonio and Sebastian as a neutral or simply that the two have become good friends. I think that the varying opinions on the matter reveal something about the ambiguity of the scene as well as, forgive my over generalization her, the mentality of the American reader. Cultural relativism at it’s best. We in the 21st century interact with people differently than in the 1500-1600s. We are imposing different cultural values, morals, and experiences (consciously and unconsciously ) on work that was a voice of life in another time.
Could it be that not only is the artist in his/her art, but also that the analyst is in his/her analysis? I whole heartedly think so. I am by no means saying that if “you” see their relationship as being homosexual that “you” are gay, but rather that there is something in the back of you mind, or something insinuated by your Prof. that Shakespeare was gay, wrote about homosexuality a lot, or whatever the case may be that one will expect to see it.
I’d also like to say that the amount of time spent discussing sexual innuendos, undertones, or double meanings in my English class has led me to wonder how many authors are turning over in their graves at some of the parallels people, myself included, draw.
The Artistic Scientist 
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