Category Archives: Other Stuff

Terror at the seaside: we all get hysterical about gulls

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Let’s talk about wild beasts. Specifically, let’s talk about gulls, since they’ve been in the news here lately. They’re vicious creatures who dive bomb innocent civilians and steal their ice cream cones. Visit to the coast and you’re gambling with your life and your sanity. I’m exaggerating, but at least I admit it.

Yes, friends, the British press is getting hysterical again, so let’s settle for just one link. Enough is plenty.

A rare relevant photo, although it's from Belgium, not Cornwall. From Wikimedia, by Loki11.

A rare relevant photo, although it’s from Belgium, not Cornwall. From Wikimedia, by Loki11.

Before I tell you the terrible tales, I should let you know what I’ve learned about gulls:

They’re not really called seagulls. They’re gulls, and since we’ve already irresponsibly established that they’re vicious we don’t want to make ‘em mad, so we’ll call them what they want to be called. If you don’t believe me that they don’t like being called seagulls, just ask one.

If you dare.

According to Wikipedia, they’re “of the family Laridae in the sub-order Lari. . . . An older name for gulls is mew . . . This term can still be found in certain regional dialects.”  That, irrelevantly, explains a song that mentions seamews. I always wondered what they were. Play nice or I’ll sing it to you.

But back to gulls. (Nice birdy. I’m leaving part of my sandwich right here for you. Leave the finger. I need that.) There have been some incidents, and as usual if they happened to me I wouldn’t be happy about them, but I don’t know how new, or newsworthy, any of this is.

In the most serious incidents, a small dog—a yorkie, a breed that can get so small they’re not really big enough to be dogs—was killed by gulls and a tortoise was ditto. With those two things at the top of the page to draw our eye, column inches have been devoted to cafes and take-away joints trying to protect their customers (and their food) from birds and to children and adults being frightened, and occasionally hurt, by the birds.

Ever since I moved here, I’ve been reading about problems with gulls, or seeing segments on the local news. Or protecting my scones from them. Cornwall’s full of seaside towns and villages, and seaside towns and villages are full of summer visitors, and with the visitors come picnics and ice creams and chips (those are french fries if you’re on the left-hand side of the Atlantic) and so on. And gulls are nothing if not scavengers. If food’s around, they want to know about it. As a result, in some places they now nest on roofs instead of (or more likely, in addition to) the rocky offshore islands they used to like. I seem to remember hearing about a street where the letter carrier refused to deliver mail after getting swooped on once too often. That was a few years ago, then the story disappeared and we never found out what, if anything, got done.

Oddly enough, although gulls sit around on our roof and our neighbors, they don’t do anything more right here than yell and get into the garbage if a fox has already torn the bag open. As far as I know, they don’t even tear the bags themselves, although I can’t swear to that.

In response to this latest flap, the prime minister, David Cameron, has pontificated—sorry, announced that we need to have a big discussion on the subject. He’s counting on the subject disappearing with the summer leaves before he has to figure out needs to be said in the discussion, never mind what has to be done–or worse, have to spend money on it. Should we kill all the gulls? Shut down the seaside? Issue visitors with plastic bubbles?

Saint Ives used to cull gulls and use birds of prey to keep them from nesting. They also had a van driving around town playing loud noises to scare them off. What the van did to the tourists, I don’t know. I wouldn’t think they’d be crazy about loud noises themselves. It probably kept them from nesting on the roofs too.

The thing is, all of that is expensive. A cull costs £10,000. We’re in an age of austerity. That it’s artificially induced (in my not particularly popular opinion) is beside the point. Local governments are having to choose between libraries and leisure centers and then realizing  that they can’t afford either. So St. Ives is trying flapping colored flags. I don’t know how well that’ll work on gulls, but I tried flapping computer disks to keep the birds (blackbirds, I think) off my raspberries. After the first day or two, they were onto my tricks. They not only ate the berries, they set up their laptops on the outside table.

Truro is trying paint that reflects the sun’s UV rays. My guess is that we’ll be seeing gulls with sunglasses in the center of town.

When this first came out, I heard a scientist interviewed on the BBC’s Radio 4. He’d designed a study of urban gulls with an eye toward finding a solution to the problems they present. Embarrassingly enough–not for him but the the government–it was first funded but then defunded before it ever got going. It’s an age of austerity. We can’t afford that sort of frippery until everyone gets hysterical and starts yelling that someone had better do something. Even if it’s random and ineffective.

An update on political absurdity

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This British American Life has a funnier example of American political absurdity than the one I sent out a little while ago. Follow the link to learn about the paperwork you have to submit if you want to be reimbursed for going to the moon. Because you can never tell when you might need to know that.

And while we’re talking about absurdity, don’t you just love that I provided a link back to my own post, even though I said wasn’t as funny? Anybody want to place bets on how many people will follow it?

Crime in Britain, part 3: emergency calls

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Ever wonder what it’s like handling emergency calls? You know, the pressure, the life-and-death situations, the idiot who calls because a parking meter ate his change?

Okay, I made up the parking meter, but the real stories are better. The Avon and Somerset Police took to Twitter in the hope that it would educate us about what the word emergency means. I’m not convinced it will, but it’s been fun.

For all I know, they weren’t hoping to change things but just wanted to keep themselves amused.

Anyway, since I’ve been writing about the serious side of crime lately, I thought I’d let you know what emergency calls are like before I move on to some other topic.

Let’s start with the man who reported being chased by a vicious badger. He dangled his keys at it and scared it away, he said, and he wasn’t sure where it had gone but he thought maybe someone ought to know about it. Just to put it on record, I guess, so in case it attacked again it would have a prior—well, not conviction exactly. Convictions are only possible if you’re human, so let’s just say something vaguely related to a prior conviction.

Relevant photo. I couldn't help myself. I had no idea what a badger looked like before I moved here, so I thought I ought to toss one in. This is from Wikimedia, taken by Prosthetic Head, and don't ask me what that means. I'm only repeating what the data says. It's scarier than the badger if you ask me.

Relevant photo. I couldn’t help myself. I had no idea what a badger looked like before I moved here, so I thought I ought to toss one in. This is from Wikimedia, taken by Prosthetic Head, and don’t ask me what that means. I’m only repeating what the data says. It’s scarier than the badger if you ask me.

He and the call handler agreed that he should maybe call animal control, and that got him out of her hair. Then the story was tweeted (and probably press released), and both the BBC and the Western Morning News picked it up, and even though I’m adding my miniature noise to the uproar I do kind of feel sorry for the guy.

Okay, moment of conscience over. What are the other calls like?

A man called because a gull stole his sandwich, and a woman called because a guest house owner refused to cook her a breakfast.

Let’s assume she was a guest there.

A caller asked to speak to the queen. Someone reported being splashed by a puddle. That makes it sound like the puddle was the active agent, which means I could safely insert vicious, as in splashed by a vicious puddle. Someone else complained that a taxi seat belt was too tight. A man found a melon on his doorstep, cut into slices. That’s the melon, not the doorstep. A woman reported that Mary Berry kidnapped her. Mary Berry, for those of you who don’t live in the U.K., is a TV presenter. She bakes, and she’s neither young nor threatening looking. If she kidnapped you, you could expect cake and a nice cup of tea. You might, however, have to wear an apron and learn to use a whisk. But I’m getting sidetracked. A drunk asked for a ride home.  A woman reported a wisp in her house. A man reported that his mobile phone provider was robbing him because he had no service.

It’s a dangerous world out there.

The police tweeted this kind of stuff for twenty-four hours at #ASP24, where you can still find it—or could last time I checked; I’m not sure how long these things hang around. There’s also some lovely insanity mixed into the general self-promotion if you go to @ASPoliceLIVE. I can’t put those in as links because Twitter links don’t work. Who knew that? Raise your hands please.

Even before I knew that, though, I knew they’d wreck the sentence.

And with that, I’ll wish you all a safe and happy weekend. Try not to call cops, the fire department, or an ambulance, no matter how vicious the puddles are where you live.

Are American politics absurd enough?

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No one’s complained yet, but it’s been weighing on my conscience that I make fun of British politics more often and more joyfully than I make fun of American politics. I have several excuses, all of them true but none of them good enough:

  1. I grew up in the U.S. and spent most of my life there, so its absurdities are less visible to me. Mostly. If you want to see what’s right in front of you, it helps to be an outsider.
  2. Britain wraps its political absurdities in such glorious traditional craziness that it invites satire, from the little loops in the parliamentary cloak room where you can hang your sword, assuming you weren’t in such a hurry that you rushed out without it this morning, to the prayer cards MPs leave on a seat because it’s the only way to reserve one and there aren’t enough to go around. It’s like saying dibs, but infinitely more grown up and bizarre.
  3. U.S. politics (like most—or maybe that’s all—countries’ politics) can be despicable, but most of the time they fail the absurdity test. If I could recommend a change to my fellow Amurr’cans, as Lyndon Johnson used to say, it would be that we cultivate a bit more absurdity in our political lives. It’d be good for us. Both sides of the political spectrum could unite in an effort to eliminate it. And in the midst of fulminating or being depressed about the problems we face, we could share a good laugh at ourselves.

But T. sent me an email a while ago that allows me to even the balance a little. According to Reuters News, the Pentagon has been—and here I’m going to abandon the balanced language of Reuters for a minute—throwing money in the air without bothering to count it.

Speaking of absurdity: From the pose, this could be Washington crossing the Delaware and threatening to tip over the rowboat, but it's a picture of someone in a House of Lords robe. I'm not sure what period it's from. The hairstyles and the poses have changed but the robes are pretty much the same. From Wikimedia.

Speaking of absurdity: From the pose, this could be Washington crossing the Delaware and threatening to tip over the rowboat, but it’s a picture of someone in a House of Lords robe. I’m not sure what period it’s from. The hairstyles and the poses have changed but the robes? Not much. From Wikimedia.

How much money are we talking about? Oh, $8.5 trillion or so. Not enough to worry about. And that goes back to 1996, so, you know, per year and all it’s not that much. Just a few hundred billion or something. You can’t trust me with numbers, especially when we’re dealing in amounts I can’t even imagine, never mind count. Let’s just say a number with a whole bunch of zeros following it. Per year. I do understand years.

Apparently, the problem is that the Pentagon uses “a tangle” of accounting programs that can’t talk to each other. “ ‘It’s like if every electrical socket in the Pentagon had a different shape and voltage,’ says a former defense official who until recently led efforts to modernize defense accounting.” (The quotes here are from a series of three Reuters articles. I won’t include separate links. Follow the link above and you’ll find them all.)

Record keeping, as Reuters puts it, is “rife with made-up numbers to cover lost or missing information.”

That leaves the military storing physical object that are out of date and buying new ones it doesn’t need because it has no idea what it needs. It has “a backlog of more than half a trillion dollars in unaudited contracts with outside vendors; how much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known.”

When it comes to veterans and serving personnel, in some cases they aren’t being paid what they’re owed. In others, they’re overpaid and then the overpayment is clawed back all at once. Or an amount they haven’t been overpaid is clawed back because some computer system somewhere thinks it was overpaid, so poof, the income a vet had every reason to rely on stops coming. In a case Reuters followed (a mistaken claw-back), no explanation was offered until Reuters got involved, at which point—surely this wasn’t connected—the mistake was corrected.

In fairness, the Pentagon has tried to fix the problems but ended up making them worse.

“In 2000, the Navy began work on four separate projects to handle finances, supplies, maintenance of equipment and contracting. Instead, the systems took on overlapping duties that each performed in different ways, using different formats for the same data. Five years later, the GAO said, ‘These efforts were failures. . . . $1 billion was largely wasted.’ ”

But, y’know, $1 billion? What the hell.

The Pentagon is the only federal agency that’s never been audited. So how much of that $8.5 trillion has been paid out legitimately, how much wasted, and how much stolen? We don’t know. And more to the point, they don’t know either.

But it’s only money, as my father used to say whenever an inappropriate situation came his way. You can’t buy happiness with it.

You can, however, buy a lot of other stuff. And no doubt someone has. We just don’t know who or what.

So there we go. Absurdity in American politics. But you’ll have to admit, it needs a few swords and a wig to make it funny.

British wildflowers and British roadsides

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I don’t want to romanticize the British countryside—enough people will do that without my help—but British wildflowers are enough to tempt me. They grow along the roads, in the hedges, in the stone walls, in the fields if they can, in the garden if you’ll let them, anyplace a teaspoonful of soil gives them a place to sink their roots. When I first moved here from Minnesota, never mind their beauty, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of them.

Trying to keep track of things you have no name for, it turns out, is next to impossible, and I’ve gradually learned to name the most common ones. I’ve written about that elsewhere, so I won’t repeat the tale here except to say that I settle for the broadest categories. I can’t tell the one speedwell from the next and forget about all those yellow things that look like dandelions but aren’t (hawkweed, hawkbit, cat’s-ear…).

Thrift growing by the coast. The church in the background is St. Materiana.

Thrift growing by the coast. The church in the background is St. Materiana.

In late June, the “Plantwatch” column in the Guardian wrote about the roadside verges— if you’re not British, those are the stretches of land that run beside the roads—as wildflower refuges. It was one of those things I’d known but hadn’t known, since the thought didn’t come in any form I could use. I hadn’t put words to it. I’d seen the flowers growing there, I’d been struck by their richness, but thinking of the verges as refuges changed the way I see them.

So every day I walk the dog past wildflower refuges.

It turns out that almost half the native plants in Britain—700 species—grow on the verges. It’s perfect habitat: unplowed, unfertilized, unweed-killered, and for long stretches of time, unmowed. Basically, the plants are left along to do what they know how to do.

Before modern medicine, the verges and hedges, as well as being beautiful, were as drugstores. Hedge woundwort is a mild antiseptic. St. John’s wort—now sold as an herbal antidepressant—was used for treating wounds, and modern research shows that it is, in fact, an antibacterial. Valerian was used as a mild sedative, and you can still buy it in health food stores. Scurvywort is full of vitamin C and was used to treat (predictably) scurvy. It’s become more widespread since they started salting roads after a snow, which creates perfect conditions for it. Dyer’s greenweed was used to treat gout. I don’t know how well it worked. Some of the herbal medicines worked reasonably well. Others—let’s just say they gave patients something to think about while they were sick. Maybe it took their minds off their problems for a while.

I have no idea who measures these things, but if you put the verges all together they’d cover the Isle of Wight. How big is the Isle of Wight? Interesting you should ask, since I just happened to google it: 380 square kilometers. What’s that in miles? You don’t want someone like me pretending to answer a question like that.

But forget the numbers. The roadside verges are a treasure chest—one that’s easy to overlook because they’re just, you know, sitting there beside the roads, with no signs, no warnings, and no admission fees.

A government decides to promote British values

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The British government worries that Britain may not be British enough. It worries so much that the Department for Education has instructed schools to promote British values.

Part of this is meant to counter the lure ISIS has on a (let’s be realistic, limited but highly publicized) number of young people, but I seem to remember that they started talking about British values back when Scotland was voting on whether to leave the U.K. So I’m guessing that some more general unease lies behind the decision.

Let me be clear: I take ISIS seriously. Hell, I take Scotland seriously. What I don’t take seriously are people who think “promoting British values” is a response to either of those very distinct entities. Especially since the British values campaign forces everyone to confront the awkward question of what those values are. I mean, they’re not , say, the flag or apple pie. They’re hard to define.

Irrelevant photo: an old shed at Trebarwith Strand.

Irrelevant photo: an old shed at Trebarwith Strand. The pink flowers are red campion. I don’t make this stuff up. Really I don’t.

As prime minister, David Cameron defined them as freedom, tolerance, respect for the rule of law, belief in personal and social responsibility, and respect for British institutions. Nick Clegg, when he was deputy prime minister, added gender equality and equality before the law. Then his party tanked in the elections and no one’s consulted him since. Michael Gove, when he was secretary of education, defined them as democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs. Awkwardly enough, in 2007 he said trying to define Britishness was “rather un-British.”

Oops.

Since Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, which should really be OSECSS) will have the joy of assessing the schools’ efforts, it’s published the official set of British values. They’re democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect, and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.

Can we tolerate people with different, non-British values? Sorry, the question’s too complicated. Ofsted lives in a true/false culture.

Do other countries hold to these same values and if they do are the values still specifically British? Sorry, that’s not on the test and we can’t discuss it now.

Can we tolerate politicians offering three sets of non-identical British values plus one opinion trashing the whole idea of codifying them? Of course we can, because by now everyone’s swung their weight behind the official version and has forgotten that they didn’t always agree. Except possibly Nick Clegg and, see above, no one consults him anymore.

In joyful response to this attempt at unifying the nation’s beliefs, a whole lot of people cut loose on Twitter under the hashtag #BritishValues. According to The Independent, some of the early tweets summarizing the aforesaid values included:

  • Being wary of foreigners while having a Belgian beer with an Indian curry in your Spanish villa wearing Indonesian clothes.
  • Queuing; dressing inappropriately when the sun comes out; warm beer; winning World Wars; immigration & Pot Noodles.
  • Wearing socks with sandals
  • complaining about immigration

The Independent article online was open for comments, and they included a few more suggestions:

  • Seeing a rogue traffic cone and immediately working out the nearest sculpture in need of a hat.
  • Denouncing immigrants, while we have a royal family made up of immigrants.
  • Loving fish and chips even though the potato migrated here from abroad.

The comment thread quickly degenerated into arguments, name calling, and “This comment has been deleted,” so I stopped reading. Instead, I went to Twitter to check out the more recent comments. Not all of them are funny. Some are bitter-edged comments about homelessness and not rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean.  Others are about trash in the hedges and dog-poo bags left by the side of the road. But, hey, we try to keep laughing here, even when the world’s going to hell in a handbasket.  The lighter tweets included:

  • The bloke in front of me just put his entire body weight on my foot & I said sorry.
  • Forming an orderly queue.
  • Pie and chips done properly!
  • Get an exclusive 15% off any order from @TwiningsTea

None of these answers the question (and I do understand that it wasn’t posed as a question) of what British values are, but it does point us in the right direction: Whatever they are, they include an ad for tea and a sense of humor. So brew yourself a nice cup and tell me something silly about British values, would you?

Or American values. Or any other nation’s values. I can’t wait to see where this goes.

Publishing on Medium.com

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Apologies for the extra post (what do you all do with your week when you’re not hearing from me?), but I just published a piece through The Coffeelicious, a magazine on Medium.com, and since both of them are new for me, I’m going to shamelessly promote it. And introduce Medium to anyone who hasn’t explored it yet.

“I Pledge Allegiance to the–Queen?” is about taking U.K. citizenship, which turned out to be a surprisingly emotional issue for me. If you like the essay, it would be great if you’d hit the Recommend button at the end. If you don’t like it, you won’t reach the end, so don’t worry about it. (Seriously, I wouldn’t ask you to recommend anything you don’t like. It’s almost like–am I really going to say this?–faking an orgasm. Yes, apparently I am going to say that. I’m not sure what I think about it, never mind how I feel.)

mixed flag

Shockingly relevant graphic. Not mine. I found it on Wikimedia.

And with that out of the way, the rest of this is for those of you who either write more than blog fodder–and I know that’s a good number of you–or read more than blogs. Because not everything belongs in a blog, and I’ve been looking for outlets beyond mine. I’m hoping this will move me in that direction.

Medium describes itself as a place “where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends.” In theory, at least, it helps you find your audience. We’ll see. Technically, Medium makes it fairly easy to publish, although I obsessed about the mechanics for weeks before submitting anything, and only did it after investing something like $10 (it seems to be $12; never trust me with numbers) in a probably unnecessary but still helpful manual.

From what I’ve read, the good thing about Medium is that stories have a chance to build slowly–it’s not all about the first few hours, or days, or even weeks. Stories recommended by a lot of people become more visible. And we all like to believe that those are the best ones. They may be. It would be nice to think so. It also explains why I was asking people to hit that Recommend button. (I should mention that you have to sign up to recommend anything. It’s not a big deal, says the person who closes down her computer and hides under a chair when asked to sign up for anything. You can do it with Facebook or Twitter–and if you plan to publish on Medium, you should eventually add both connections.)

Medium also sets it up so that as a reader you can follow writers you like and get a notification when they publish something new (which, of course, lets writers, with luck, build a following) or follow magazines that filter and gather the work that’s most relevant to you. I’ve found some good writing there. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a browse.