Yesterday I was digging a tunnel, so I pretended to be a badger. I also pretended to be a worm and a backhoe, but I found that being a badger was by far the most fun. Badgers are rather creepy looking animals, but extremely cool nonetheless.
I'm not sure if I would call this guy cute, but he's definitely interesting to look at.
On the other hand, check out this one:
Rather a nasty looking fellow, if I do say so myself. On the completely opposite hand, or my third hand, if you will, check out this video:
Those are much cuter badgers than the real ones. Anyway, pretending to be a badger was fun. I got be nocturnal, I got to hunt with coyotes, I got to eat grubs and small amphibians, and I got to run 16 miles per hour! It is also interesting to note that it is illegal to badger badgers in the UK.
The only thing I don't really like about badgers is that they eat bees. I happen to be rather fond of bees in general, as they are cute and mostly harmless insects (well, honey and bumblebees at any rate). Badgers have a tendency to dig up bees nests in the ground, or climb into trees to root around in a hive for the honey. They don't just like honey, though, they also like to eat bees. I hope the badgers stay away from Dad's beeyard. Or else the badger will see the same unfortunate demise as the bear did, that is, it will get a nice electrical shock from the fence protecting the bees.
That said, if you have any tunnels that need to be dug, I would love to help.
Next time, maybe I'll pretend to be a centipede. Or a mole--then I could be blind! Or a gopher! Or a meercat! Or a weasel... or a wild guinea pig!
...or a rabbit... or a groundhog... or a vole... or a chipmunk... or a skunk... or a raccoon... or a squirrel... or a woodchuck... or a shrew... or a rat... or a fox! ... or a mud bee!
The other day, I was thinking about Scotland. It's full of castles and sheep. I wish I could take Rutherford there--maybe then he could find himself a girlfriend.
While in Scotland, Leslie and I rode on trains. I was inordinately excited about this, because I had never been on a train before (except for that time in third grade which I don't remember) and because trains are a rather weird form of transportation. Basically, somebody takes a bunch of boxes, hooks them together, and drags them across the countryside on really, really long metal rods. And people sit in them and eat and read and play bridge. I spent a lot of time looking out the window. I saw castles and sheep and a few beehives.
I fully believe that humans will go to space, one day, and build colonies and eat weird tasting potatoes grown in an artificial environment or eat weird tasting potatoes that aren't actually potatoes because they are native to Caprica, not Earth. All the common theories of space travel tend to lean towards space ships: big ones, small ones, ones with sails and nuclear engines and jump drives that allow them to skip over massive chunks of space or fly faster than the speed of light (a very useful trick, considering the size of the universe).
But what I want is a space train--a number of boxes run together in a chain and dragged from here to there by a massive engine harnessing the power of a star.
It makes sense: each car would explode away from Earth separately, and they would then be assembled while in orbit. Once assembled, the engine would leave orbit dragging a number of boxes and people behind it. Then, if one car exploded while taking off, only a few people would die, but the whole train wouldn't be ruined. If it were a big enough train, entire colonies could start out, ready and willing to colonize New Scotland and New China and New New England.
And when they look out the window of this train--the space train--instead of sheep and castles and beehives, they would see stars and spaceships and gravity whales, and on their way to New Scotland, they could make a stop at New New York and visit the black statue of liberty that sings when the wind whistles through her teeth, or visit the Big Apple which is actually the original, red spaceship that brought everyone to this planet.
New Scotland would be a planet of rolling hills and sparkling crags, with boiling water in Equatorial Ocean, and massive spheres of ice in the North, home to a particularly ornery species of furry dinosaurs. They would keep their royal crown, scepter, and stone in a sacred box hidden in a secret spot on the highest mountain in the world, and Great Britain would not rule over her any more. Then children would learn how their ancestors escaped from the rule of the Queen of England by traversing a billion miles across the universe and settling here, on the beautiful blue-green planet of New Scotland.
So if we could maybe hurry our technological advancement up a bit, then maybe someday, instead of backpacking across Scotland, I could backpack across the universe.
And for your entertainment, I have included this video about the Scottish boy in the Scottish McDonalds.
Administrative Note: posting schedule will be changing, but I don't yet know to what. Thanks.
In honor of my father's birthday, I am writing a blog post about everything my dad likes.
#1. Mom is great! She's super good at sewing and cooking and editing and being a mom.
#1.5 Us kids! I think we're pretty great, too. That's me, in the front there, then Evan, then Gary.
#2. Bees! Bees are insects that fly around and make honey and sting people. Specifically, my dad likes honey bees (not wasps or hornets or anything), so here are some interesting facts about honey bees you probably didn't know.
After mating with the queen bee, the male bees, or drones, die.
Skunks eat bees, and bears are just as likely to eat the larvae as the honey.
To learn more about bees, you can check out my brother's website!
#3. Lumber! My dad sells lumber. I promise: the last thing you want to do on a Saturday afternoon is stack a thousand board feet, but that doesn't stop him. In fact, not only can he tell you what type of wood he's holding in his hands by looking at it, he can tell you by smelling the board, and is correct at least 20% of the time! If you're looking for North American hardwoods, check out Garreson Lumber.
#4. Literature! Dad is pretty smart and he'll read anything from bad novels by me to Ana Karenina to Tarzan of the Apes to the diaries of William Ryder, itinerant Methodist preacher. He's read a bunch of my college required reading, just because I thought it was interesting (and handed him a copy). :)
#5. Science-y stuff! Dad and I like to discuss aliens (see guest blog by dad about aliens here) and evolution and insects and the expanding universe and all sorts of things. He and I went to a honey bee convention (see point #2) together, too, and learned all about different types of bees.
#6. Animals! Over my life we've had four dogs, three kids, a bajillion cats, turtles, peacocks, snakes, rabbits, pigeons, pheasants, a goose, and who knows what all else. In fact, once, Turtline, a turtle we found wandering down the road, disappeared somewhere in the house. She reappeared a few months later, having hibernated in the back of one of our closets. Now they're down to a few peacocks, three cats, and a dog.
Anyway, Dad, I think you're pretty great, and I hope you get your birthday card today because I put a lot of effort into getting it mailed on time. Either way, I have a special message for you--it came from an alien.
"Hey Peter, it's your birthday! I'm in charge of the stars and I'm here to say, hey Peter! You're the big star! Today! My name is Zoom and I live on the moon! And I came down to Earth just to sing you this tune! Hey, Peter, it's your birthday, today! A present for you I wanted to find, an outer space creature, a one of a kind! A wild whop or a kucklechoo, an appledrop or a buzzardstew! Or maybe a three eyed tickleshay for your birthday. ...but those aren't special. So how about a song just from me? And so tonight, while you're in bed, I'll be singing to you as I ZOOM overhead, hey Peter, happy birthday, to you!"
I like to think about the universe. It's big and dark and full of mysteries. Lots of people think there can't be aliens because we haven't heard from them by now. But what if we are the oldest species in the universe? Somebody had to be first, and they say that our universe isn't very old. And who knows how old universes have to be to have babies? Or maybe we're not babies: maybe we're fleas. Either way we have to expand outwards. If we're babies, we have to grow up. If we're fleas, we have to hop to the next planet over--because that's what fleas do.
Here is a picture of an alien that I drew. It might be smart, it might not be. But I like the horn:
Whether or not aliens are real, there are some very alien-like things right next to you. For example, NASA found an arsenic-based life form out in California. Now we all know some crazy life forms live in California, but up until recently, they were all thought to be carbon-based. This has forced NASA "to redefine the quest for other life in the universe." Or how about this: they recently found a rare mineral, previously thought only to exist in moon rocks, in Australia. Other alien things include bees, dead spiders, coffee, the British, teenager's bedrooms, Obama, and pickled watermelon rinds.
As the oldest species in the universe, we should constantly be on the alert for life, intelligence, and the pursuit of alien beings. In the Milky Way alone there is the possibility of 100 billion Earth-like worlds. Imagine the possibilities--recently, a black hole shot two "cosmic bullets" from it's terrifying depths. No one knows what these are. My guess? Spaceships. Intelligent life from somewhere else in the universe: they've found a way to travel via black holes.
