Category: Uncategorized

Spring was blossoming all around us, it looked like the number of vaccinated people was reaching a local maximum, and Kathleen and I got the urge to go out and see something!, like the old days. We felt like those people in the City of Ember [ref] who had spent two hundred years underground to avoid a plague that ravaged the surface world: in a word, antsy.

The Washington Post said that the Smithsonian was reopening its buildings and facilities, and further said that dogs were welcome in most of their outdoor places, so we thought, Let’s take Louis to see the National Zoo!

Although the zoo was open, entry was controlled by access passes that you had to get online. They were free, but were quickly claimed up weeks in advance, when they were offered. If you wanted a parking pass to go with that, you were talking more than a month in the future. And if on top of that you wanted a “Panda Pass”, the wait was almost two months if you could get it at all. The pass requirement was a hassle, but at least when we got there, the crowds would be lighter than back when they let just anyone in.

I haven’t been following zoo goings-on this year, but I reasoned that if these Pandas needed their own passes to go see, they must be something really special. Maybe like Fiona the baby hippo at the the Cincinnati Zoo, who is so adorable that it makes us want to go visit that zoo also, despite the ten-hour drive to get there.

Flash forward a month or two, when the passes we had ordered finally became valid. Kathleen, Louis and I drove into DC (which was in itself an adventure—we hadn’t been into DC in well over a year. Had it changed much? What’s this new bridge going up over the Anacostia River? Am I even going to be able to find the zoo from memory?)

My first impression on arriving at the Connecticut Avenue National Zoo entrance was the hordes of people going in! Couples, families with all their survival supplies balanced precariously on strollers, school or other groups with matching t-shirts in various stages of dishevelment (and this was just as they were arriving at the zoo–I shudder to think what they’ll look like by the time they’re leaving!). The place seemed as crowded as I’d ever seen it before the plague year. That’s a good sign that things are returning to normal, I guess.

We parked (it’s lucky they required advance parking passes; at least we knew we’d find a spot), and strolled in.

Louis was an immediate hit! It makes sense since the zoo audience was animal lovers, and Louis is an undeniably photogenic labradoodle puppy. “Best looking animal here!” one bystander told us.

(This is no exaggeration. Every time we’re out walking anywhere, I estimate about 90% of the people we meet feel obliged to say, “Aw, what a cute puppy!”. They all use the same word, cute, and of the 10% of the population that don’t exclaim how cute he is, I bet 90% of them are thinking it. I sometimes forget when I’m up late with puppy diarrhea or cleaning up yet another TV remote that’s been chewed to bits, but Louis is undeniably one cute animal. He’s got a puppy bouncy enthusiasm, a winning personality, and long, soft chocolate dreadlocks. He’s like a little grizzly bear cub, only even cuter.)

Everyone at the zoo wanted to come admire Louis, and many, especially the kids (of which there were many), wanted to pet him. Louis was having a great time despite the heat, and he hardly noticed that he was surrounded by animals he had never before seen or smelled.

We found the “Asia Walk”, which led to the Panda House. A couple of young zoo interns were taking a break at the entrance, so I asked if dogs were allowed on this Walk. “Well, yes, if they’re service dogs. Otherwise they aren’t allowed in the zoo at all.”

Uh oh! I guess I should have done a little research on whether the zoo fell into the category of “most Smithsonian outdoor places” that allowed dogs!

Louis was in plain sight next to me, at the other end of the leash, but I calculated that these interns were too comfortable sitting in the shade drinking their big gulps to pose a threat to our day out. “Well, thank you, forget I asked,” I mumbled, and we hot-footed it away from the Asia Walk.

It may have been coincidence, or I may have underestimated the interns’ dedication to law and order, but soon after we ran into a uniformed zoo guard. Like everyone else there, he was instantly enraptured by Louis’s cuteness, and before talking to us he had to give him a good rubdown and tell him several times what a good boy he was. Then he spoke to us.

Kathleen was more prepared than I had been with the interns.

Great answer, Kathleen, not least because it was true—we do have him in training (leash walking, and coming), and we do hope he will provide us emotional support. How could he not, he’s so cute!

I was grateful that we had left on Louis’s seat belt halter, because it looked a little like a service dog harness. But we were starting to get nervous. We tried to stay on the less-frequented paths of the park, but there didn’t seem to be any. People were everywhere, and they all wanted to ooh and ahh at Louis!

We passed the elephant yard, and Louis finally noticed the animals. Several elephants were ambling lazily outside, and one big bull also saw us—and Louis! He didn’t make any obvious behavioral changes, he was too cool and had been around too long for that, but he kept his eye on the little brown pup at our side. Louis saw him too, and just stood and gawked as the bull elephant casually sauntered over to the hay tree, which just so happened to be near where we were standing.

The air was charged with mano-a-mano nonverbal messages zipping back and forth between Louis and the elephant, even across the stretch of barrier that divided us. That old bull kept his cool, and never batted a huge rheumy eye. But the conversation was too intense for Louis. His resolved snapped, and he dissolved into a spate of nervous barking.

Busted! We quickly turned up our collars to prevent us from being recognized, and skulked off. I was intently watching the animals, Kathleen was engaging with the interested people we met, and we both were trying to project the auras of two service trainers disguised as ordinary tourists taking our student for a field trip. I didn’t feel very convincing.

Louis, meantime, was happy just scouring the grounds for other dogs to sniff and people to pet him and tell him how cute he was. His search for other dogs was unsuccessful, because as I’m sure you already knew, dogs aren’t allowed in the National Zoo.

Finally the stress of living a lie got too much for us, and we lammed it for home. We had missed a lot, hadn’t made even one complete circuit of the campus, and didn’t see any indoor animals at all, but it was still a fun adventure.

The moral of this story is that when you are planning a trip, you’d be smart to do a little research on your destination, to make sure you’ll be welcome—unless you’re really, really cute, in which case you’re welcome anywhere.

Here’s a joke I stole from myself [here], adapted to this post.

A cop pulls over a car and notices that there is a grizzly bear cub riding in the back seat. "What a cute bear cub! But you know transporting grizzly bears this way is completely illegal. I'll tell you what, we're not far from the National Zoo, I won't arrest you if you immediately take him straight to the zoo with no stops on the way." The driver (in the original joke this was a Norwegian pig farmer, so let's keep that) promises to do so, and the two part company.

Several weeks later, the same cop pulls over the farmer again, and again there is a grizzly bear cub in the back seat. The cop tells the farmer, "You promised me you would take that bear to the zoo!" 

"I did!" she replies, "and he had such a good time that today I'm taking him to the Botanical Gardens!"

Thanks,
Dorn
7/20/2021

I only recently learned of the good luck properties of the four leaf May Apple (first chronicled here). Since then, I’ve been on quest to see one of these elusive bringers of good fortune for myself. My search was finally rewarded in spades on one of my countless dog-walks with Louis, through a damp, shady patch of lowland. I stumbled on a small patch of ground that sported quite a few of the lucky May Apples!

Why, after it being so hard to locate even one four leaf May Apple, did I find such a large number of them in a single spot? Surely that’s not just coincidence!

Lucky real estate

I can think of a couple of possible reasons why so many lucky May Apples would be clustered so close together. One possibility is that all of the four leaf May Apples there are related, descending from a particularly lucky bloodline (sap-line?). I call this my “Skywalker” hypothesis. The second possibility is that the patch of ground itself is somehow lucky enough to spawn a whole flock of these quadri-foiled lucky charms. This is my “Shangri-La” hypothesis. (On a side note, did you ever notice that “Shangri-La” is an anagram for “Sri Lanka”? Especially in Sanskrit.^[1] Kind of makes you think, doesn’t it?)

I tried to think of a way I could experimentally determine if either of my hypotheses were correct. I reasoned that if the luckiness of these May Apples was due to the location itself, then I might be able to find some other manifestation of luck there.

Not being a trained botanist, the only other lucky plant I knew of was a four leaf clover, so I scoured the area for that. Never having found a four leaf clover in this neighborhood, I reasoned that if I actually found one in my four leaf May Apple patch, it would lend strong credence to my “Shangri-La” hypothesis. But I couldn’t find any, which didn’t really support or contradict either of my hypotheses in my genetics-vs-environment mystery. So for now, I can’t say why all these four leaf May Apples are living so close together.

It might have been fun to harvest some of the lucky May Apples and measure how my good fortune improved, but I decided I would leave them as they were, and see what developed. I visited the same spot a few weeks later, and found something strange and fascinating had occurred: some of them seemed to be trying to morph into five leaf May Apples!

One looked like it had budded a small fifth leaf, starfish-style, that was starting to grow next to the other four. Another had apparently started the process of spontaneously splitting one of the leaves down the middle (“blattfurcation”), leading again ultimately to a five leaf May Apple.

What in the world was going on?! Were the May Apples trying to morph into less-lucky varieties, and if so, why?

I developed two theories to explain this.

(1) Karmodynamics tells us that luck can’t be created from nothing—the plant must expend effort to produce the luck that might some day benefit the creature that harvests it, be it fieldmouse, caterpillar, person or leprechaun. It’s less clear to me how (or even if) this luck benefits the plant itself, so maybe it is just expending effort in an activity that has no real purpose. So perhaps evolutionary pressures favor the four leaf May Apple that can transform itself into something that doesn’t produce luck, so it can devote its energy into producing May Apple seeds or pollen or whatever such plants normally do with their energy. I call this my “Poison Pill” theory.

(2) My second theory is related, but it posits that the May Apple isn’t really changing its luck, perhaps it cannot change its luck. But it is changing its appearance to fool predators or harvesters that specifically target four leaf May Apples. (These harvesters are not just superstitious people or other two-legged sentient beings. Even an insect might develop such a dietary preference, if larvae who happen to prefer to munch on a four leaf May Apple are incrementally luckier in the fight to survive to become an adult, thus producing more luck-hungry larvae.) I call this my “Sad Sack” theory.

I confess I don’t know enough biology to figure out a way to distinguish which of my theories is true, or if there is a completely different explanation for these self-mutilating four leaf May Apples. Advice from any professional botanist among this blog’s readership on the subject would be gratefully accepted, and if this scientific mystery is solved, full credit will be given in a future post.

Next time: the mixed blessing of finding a four-leaf poison ivy.

Sharpen your vocabularity

It’s a truism (maxim, bromide, commonplace) that you can never have enough words, right? This week’s word-building section involves words with international antecedents.

The English of England is not exactly a foreign language, but when I used to read P. D. James mysteries, I would keep a notepad handy to write down the many unfamiliar words, like “numinous” and “importuning”. (On a side note, I love P. D. James mysteries because they are so severely unsentimental. They aren’t gritty or noir, just extremely staid and British. In one story, part of the murder plot revolved around whether tea should be brewed loose, or in tea bags. But I digress.) I’m sure you’ve experienced someone offering a boast disguised as a complaint—perhaps you’ve even tried it yourself now and then! If you have daughters, perhaps you’ve heard them complain “Oh, I just couldn’t get anything done! All the boys kept wanting to talk to me! It was very annoying.” There is a word for this structure of speech: it’s called Importooting.

Kathleen and I both struggle with hoarding issues, but we’ve been getting better. Last week we finally dumped an old rusty folding metal University of Maryland stadium chair. It only had three legs (the fourth had rusted through), was un-sittable, and in fact had never been sat on, had anything placed on it, appeared in a scenic yard tableau, or been put to any use whatsoever in all the time I knew of its existence, which must be more than 40 years.

Still, it was a tough decision—it was an antique and a survivor (until now), perhaps the sole survivor of its entire clan of chairs. And it had a rickety charm to it, at once nostalgic and sad, kind of like Eeyore’s house in Winnie the Pooh. There is an adjective that describes this shabby broken-down appeal precisely: that chair is Wobbly-Sobbly. (The word derives from “Wabi-Sabi”, the Japanese term for craft or art that is intentionally crude, rustic, or incomplete.)

A Herptile (sometimes “herpetile”) is most simply defined as a creature who is the proper study of the science of herpetology: that is, an amphibian or non-avian reptile. (Wait, what? I thought all reptiles were non-avian reptiles! Are you telling me that birds are reptiles? I mean, I know they descended from dinosaurs, I’ve seen Jurassic Park, but I thought birds were in a class of their own. Some quick in-depth research (I googled “are birds reptiles?”) quickly settled the question in definitive internet fashion. The first four entries I read had the following three answers:
 (1) Birds are in the class Aves (“birds”).
 (2) Birds are in the class Reptilia (“reptiles”)—there is no class Aves.
 (3) There is no class Reptilia, because if there were, it would have to include birds, and that’s just crazy talk. Glad that’s cleared up!)

How often have you found yourself approaching a couple pushing a baby carriage down the street? “Oh, what an adorable baby!” you gush. You don’t really know anything about the child, but it’s an easy social responsibility to fulfill—at least in English! But there are some languages where you can’t even say that sentence without guessing the sex of the baby, and woe betide you if you guess wrong! The Italian for baby is bambino—unless it’s a girl, then it’s bambina. What do you do if it’s so swaddled up that you can’t tell? Guess wrong and insult the whole family?

Fortunately, the Italians have borrowed from another Latin community to provide the solution: if you find yourself in this fix, just say “such a lovely Bambinx (pronounced ‘bambinex’)!” The parents will take your caution in addressing their scion in such a gender-neutral way as a sign of respect.

Let’s see, how about ending with something germanic? Thanks to friend-of-the-blog (and friend) Kelly Samek for teaching me the German word for the comfort food you eat to make you feel better when you’re sad. It’s Kummerspeck, which is usually translated as “grief bacon”. It’s a near-perfect word that is only marred, in my view, by the fact that bacon is not my go-to food of choice for cheering me up. I don’t need fat, I need carbs! Or better, fat and carbs! Like macaroni & cheese, for example. That’d be, uh, “Kummer-käsen-nudeln”? I’ll keep working on that.

Thanks,
Dorn
7 June 2021

Footnotes
1. There is actually no reference supporting this assertion, and I’d be grateful if you don’t fact-check it.