forthwritten

Something I'm finding increasingly weird is the US/north-west European attachment to hawks and falcons and owls and simultaneous positioning of parrots as gaudy and superficial. If you parrot something, you mimic it without any real understanding. It's an insult to be compared to a parrot, a compliment to be compared to an owl.

The appeal is that hawks and falcons are lords of the air, masters of their element. Owls are creatures of the night, silent in their approach, beloved of Athena, associated with wisdom. These species are almost always solitary apart from a (often lasting) pair-bond. Even then, they hunt separately; as far as I'm aware, Harris hawks are the only species of raptor that hunt collaboratively. Trained hawks, falcons and owls are, very generally speaking, in it for the free dinners. Humans can take a wild juvenile hawk or eagle, work with it for a season, and release it back to the wild with no problems. We romanticise the shit out of these solitary apex predators when really, humans aren't very much like them at all.

In contrast, parrot life is usually focused around small groups of a pair and their offspring which are incorporated into a larger, more fluidly organised flock. Parrots have intense, subtle negotiations about their personal space and the kind of touch they would like to receive. They are constantly communicating through posture and eye pinning and feather angle as well as voice. They are natural problem solvers - there are a whole range of foraging toys you can buy captive parrots just to keep them entertained. They are wary of new things, but this turns into intense curiosity. I am not joking when I say that everything in my living room has been licked by a parrot. They do things apparently just for fun for their whole lives - look up videos of cockatoos sliding down a roof over and over again. Some parrots will use tools. They even name each other.

They will do things just to get a response from you: being ignored is a psittacine nightmare. They contact call if they cannot see each other - or if they cannot see the humans they have accepted as flock. It's a sort of "hello! I can't see you! are you okay?" and your response is "hello! I'm okay! are you okay?" and it will happen in the forests and in the grasslands and in a house and basically anywhere a parrot is. They are intensely, intensely social. They forage together. They eat together. They preen together. They play together.

They decide who is flock. It's something to earn, and is not automatically bestowed upon you. It can take years to persuade a parrot that you're worth spending time with. They have an extraordinary memory and depth of feeling. There are rescue parrots that, years later, will say things in the voices of their abusers. They are exquisitely sensitive to their environments, both physical and emotional. Teflon fumes will kill them. Punishment will destroy them. They seek partnership, not dominance.

We are so weirdly similar to parrots: smart and social and adaptable and playful and problem-solving. The more time I spend with Leia, the more I wonder at how the cultural imagination has got these birds so wrong.

I have deleted the contents of my livejournal. I had to agree to their awful TOS in order to use LJ-Sec to mass delete entries; while turning off javascript lets you log in and read your friends page, I wasn't able to edit entries or log into LJ-Sec without agreeing to their TOS.

I respect that I am minimally affected by the new TOS, but I am uncomfortable about agreeing to a) abide by a TOS that I can't actually read (the English translation is not legally binding) and b) agreeing to abide by Russian legislation. As someone who is queer, transgender and generally supportive of political dissent against repressive regimes, I am not comfortable having material on their servers.

To my considerable joy, I have recently discovered oktavists - bass singers who can sing an octave lower than usual basses. I do love a good bass rumble; when I sang in a choir, the director once had a massive go at the basses for singing a G rather than an F, and it was only when the choir stopped singing (and the basses were gazing at him in hurt dismay) that the director realised he'd actually been hearing an aeroplane passing overhead.

Oktavists can sing a good five and a half octaves lower than me! The human voice is pretty incredible. They seem to be a largely Russian phenomenon - the operatic equivalent is a basso profoundo - but I'm not sure that European music quite writes for this voice type.

Under the cut: two songs performed by Kovcheg (Down the Mother Volga and Song of the Volga Boatmen) and St. Petersburg State Academic Capella Choir performing Monotonously Rings the Bell.

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Last night I said goodbye to lovely, sweet Fergus.

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I adopted Fergus last August as a companion for Fern. The rescue thought he was about two, but I thought he was younger - maybe by as much as a year which is pretty significant in rat terms. I don't know much about his life before he was rescued - apparently he was kept in a cage in a bathroom, with no name and barely any attention. I imagine he was bought for a child who somehow failed to be captivated by Fergus' charm and sheer force of personality. That child was an idiot.

Fergus had been a bit grumpy and a bit unsure about being picked up and handled, but he was so willing to try. By the end of his life he actually preferred getting fussed by his human friends over eating - the only time he favoured food over attention was when my mum gave him some lamb. Otherwise he'd look at the food as you scattered it in his cage, then back at you and ask for more attention. He loved nestling his head in my hand so I could scratch his ears and above his eyes and his back. His fur smelt of fresh tortillas.

When I first got him he was very unsure about climbing and I had to rescue him when he genuinely got stuck on sticks. He would also get his balls stuck when he was hauling himself into a hammock. It was about as unfortunate as you can imagine.

There were things he never quite got over - he was very wary when it came to unfamiliar foods but enjoyed everything from mango to watermelon to lamb to turkey to strawberries. He disliked carrot, and once carefully licked all the pesto off a gnocchi before rejecting the dumpling. I suspect he'd never been exposed to lots of different foods before; Fern taught him a lot about what was good to eat, but rats are notoriously neophobic.

Fergus was Fern's last companion; when the rescue tried to introduce him to other male rats, he'd screamed in terror but was fine with an old lady rat. He was occasionally a bit boisterous for her but they'd snuggle up together in the rat house. He also had an endearing habit of stashing food in the litter tray - something Fern found very convenient.

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After Fern died I was worried that Fergus wasn't getting enough mental stimulation so attempted behavioural enrichment. This did not go as planned. I made a ratty piñata by filling a toilet roll tube with dry mix and sealing both ends. My pack of super-smart girls would have got into it in minutes, if not seconds; Fergus, however, picked it up in his mouth and charged around the cage with it, alternating this with just throwing it about. The next day I had to rescue Fergus from the piñata.

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I tried to make it easier for him by hanging a chain across the width of the cage and hooking toilet rolls that were sealed at the bottom and open at the top to it. Maybe this would help him? Again, my pack of girls would have chewed the bottoms off in seconds. Fergus, however, preferred to hug the toilet rolls in a manner reminiscent of a small child attempting to wrestle a punching bag. He did manage to tip them enough for the food to fall out, but I've never seen anything quite like it.

Fergus also had a very special relationship with Penny, youngest and weirdest of the dogs. Penny loves eating rat bedding, and Fergus was very happy to push some out for her, watch her eat it with a very interested look on his face, then push some more out to see if she'd eat that too. Penny would oblige. I felt ganged up on.

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Earlier this week, Fergus got out of the cage I'd foolishly left open. H found him sitting in my slipper. No sitting very quietly and listening for the rustling of a rat who is enjoying their freedom immensely. It was like he'd found a thing that smelt of me and was waiting for someone to rescue him.

He died from a devastatingly fast respiratory infection; he'd been a bit under the weather for a couple of days and I decided to take him to the vet for a general checkup, but in the hours between me making the appointment and the appointment itself he went downhill very fast. He got antibiotics, steroids and subcutaneous fluids at the vet, but died just before midnight.

He was such a personality, so full of affection. He wasn't the brightest of rats and he was so hapless but did everything with such joy and enthusiasm - if he could talk, it would have been in capslock. My parents adored him. I'll miss his silly face greeting me ("HELLO HUMAN IS IT PLAYTIME HUMAN ARE WE HAVING SCRATCHES NOW HUMAN") and the satiny, shining fur on the top of his head that was the perfect size for my thumb to rest on.

H: Fergus was so ill-suited for the world, he was lucky to have you
Me: Imagine Fergus in the wild
H: I will not

( Read more... )

Goodbye Fergus, Fergal, Fergie, Fergilicious, Fergalus. I hope the last nine months of your life were the happiest you knew and the best I could have given you.

Closing some youtube tabs because my browser is unhappy! I've been dabbling with some folk music on the violin and just generally hearing more folk stuff due to spending more time in Scotland.

( (violin) folk stuff )

I first heard about St Kilda as a child at a folk night in Scotland. I think I heard someone play this but it was a long time ago and I'm not sure now



More recently, I read about Robin Robertson's visit to St. Kilda, which resulted in "render[ing] the strange place in song"

The last song – I knew – would be about the evacuation of 1930, when the islanders left their ancestral home, never to return: a candle burning in each window, the doors flung wide, and on each table of every house, the Bible, laid open on the first page of Exodus.

This is that song - gorgeous, troubling and haunting, evoking hard, spare lives. I find "gave them up to water's trust" particularly striking, and the final lament of loss of a shared identity, shared history and shared characteristics as the inhabitants are dispersed.

Friends, I have a confession: I have finally obtained a guilty pleasure. And that guilty pleasure is a TV show about fishing.

The entire premise of this show is that this man travels the world trying to catch really big and/or dangerous fish. There's usually some kind of legend and/or bloody mauling attached to it, so off Mr Jeremy Wade goes to try to catch it. The show is incredibly predictable - you know exactly when the false starts will be, the twist of new information, the final big showdown. It's all accompanied by Wade's laconic narration. This is a man who does not show excitement unless he's yelling "fish on! FISH ON!" when something takes his bait. Occasionally he'll do something like go swimming with some hungry piranha or stab his own thumb with a fishhook, but in the best tradition of laconic men, he'll remove the fishhook and then use his own blood as extra bait. There's an amusing tension between the format of the show - BLOODTHIRSTY KILLINGS! EXCITEMENT! CONSTANT DANGER! - and what fishing actually is, which is sitting somewhere for hours, usually very quietly, waiting for something to take your bait.

Obviously my love of weird water creatures is strong (I was fascinated by this book as a little kid) and I'm especially fascinated by the ones with bad reputations. I really, really like sharks, have been unsettlingly close to wild alligators and have a massive soft spot for stingrays. Most of these animals are horribly persecuted by humans out of revenge, fear, malice or because we did something stupid and got in the way or provoked them. They're being animals and we get in their way, and while they have teeth and stings, we have so many worse ways of systematically killing them. There's a threat here, but it's not them.

Wade is a biologist by training and a catch and release fisherman. After catching them, he (rather tenderly) holds the fish in the water and gently moves it to get water flowing over its gills to help it recover - tired fish just sink to the bottom and die. He only releases the fish once it starts moving independently. Sometimes you get genuinely interesting insights, like piranha changing their behaviour in response to invasive species. He respects the fish and the river and the ecosystem, and argues that healthy rivers should have monsters - it shows they are capable of supporting (usually) apex predators, that the ecosystem is healthy enough to support plants and bugs and little fish and bigger fish and mammals and finally the biggest fish that eat them. A river with monsters is vibrantly, gloriously alive.

However, what this show manages to do really well is interactions between Wade and the locals. It's kind of sad that a fishing programme does this better than many serious documentaries, but there's a genuine respect and willingness to listen and learn. Crucially, when people don't want to talk he backs off, and the cameras don't always accompany him when he goes to talk to someone.
He ends up talking to people and going fishing with them and hearing their stories and asking them to help him out. This isn't done in an obnoxious way that exoticises them - "see these tribesmen hunting in their ancient tribal custom". Wade's basic approach is "I'm a fisherman who doesn't know this river, you're a fisherman who does know this river, you're the expert here" and it means that he actually engages with people rather than patronises them. It's not perfect but it's a good sight better at being respectful than most TV.

This isn't intellectually taxing TV. You aren't going to be left reeling (ahaha) with new information. But as an entertaining programme with fascinating creatures, interesting stories and often intriguing environments it has a surprising amount to recommend it.

Sometimes I just want to listen to music that sound like a metal bin full of shit being kicked off a wall. I listened to a lot of industrial music as a teenager and sometimes I still want to be overwhelmed by noise. When I lived in shared housing, I would often deploy a mix of industrial noise, weird experimental music in horrible time signatures and the Vengaboys if my housemates were having sex in inappropriate areas of the house.

I mentioned my enjoyment of music that sounds like a repeatedly kicked bin on twitter, while listening to Einstürzende Neubauten, and people were kind enough to give me listening recs.

( Einstürzende Neubauten, Godflesh, Kinothek Percussion Ensemble, Death Grips, Lydia Lunch and Arseny Avraamov's Symphony Of Factory Sirens )

Usually, if I want noise, I play the KLF's It's Grim Up North. I first heard this from my co-presenter when I did student radio and adored it from first listen.



It needs to be played loud enough so you can feel the driving, thunderous beat in your chest. It conjures up the industrial heartlands, the M62, abandoned warehouses, rain, illegal raves, lorries roaring past you on a wet road; the Norse names chanted over glitches and synths and crackling, claustrophobic and tight and dense. There's a tremendous sense of movement and barely controlled power, as if at any moment everything might break free into unimaginable chaos. And then, just as you're unsure whether it will hold together, Jerusalem emerges against the beat and screeches and sirens; stately and unhurried. At first the relentless beat and chant of "it's grim up north" is juxtaposed against the music; but the the other sounds die away as the hymn swells, as expansive and dignified as I've ever heard it. And at the end, all you are left with are the birds cawing and the sound of the wind sweeping over the desolate moors.

I've been enjoying some of the stuff Autostraddle has been posting recently, so in an attempt to close some tabs...

Here are some of the trans*scribe and first person essays I've read recently, mainly trans stuff, race and queerness:

“It Was Personal”: Why I Don’t Take Part in the Trans Day of Remembrance
“And I Do Mean All My Life”: A Trans* Coming Out Letter
Of A Swamp Witch And A Rural Queer
When Do I Finally Get To Belong? On Being Both Native and Queer Enough
Fear and Loathing (as a 21-Year Old Queer) in Singapore
Homeward Bound: Searching for the Secret Island of Black Queer Mixed Femmes

My girlfriend also pointed me in the direction of their collection of 140 longform articles which I now pass on to you.

A couple of shorter news articles:
India’s Government Demands Review Of Anti-Gay Court Verdict
Queer Catholic News Recap: Five and a Half Things To Know

And finally, You Know You’re A Queer Catholic School Survivor If… The one that got me was

Attending a school where everyone knew your middle name and personal history helped prepare you for entering a community where everyone knows who you slept with and how many times you and your girlfriend have broken up.

ahahahaha so true.

I lost Bramble a few days before Christmas, but didn't have the space and time to reflect on her life. Bramble came to me with her sisters Hazel and Ash, and was the last of the trio to leave.

Bramble was the most licky rat I've ever known. I'm convinced that she thought I was a giant faily rat incapable of taking care of myself, and she was the only one standing between me and my inevitable descent into socially unacceptable poor hygiene. I've had ratty manicurists before, but Bramble took this to a new level - she cleaned under my nails, nibbled my fingers, licked my hands, licked my face (especially my nose), tried to groom my eyebrows... Once, in the midst of thesis finishing, I took them into my bathroom to free-range and fell asleep on the floor. I woke to Bramble carefully grooming my hair and scalp with her teeth. It sounds alarming but it's the gentle nibbling they do to themselves and other rats, and I was charmed and honoured that she extended that to me.

When I took her to the vet recently to see whether she should be on metacam for her old lady hips, she ended up licking both the vet nurse and the vet. It made the horrible child on the bus ("is that a rat? will it bite? I don't like rats") even worse - Bramble was the least bitey rat I can imagine, and a great deal more pleasant company than a horrible child.

She completely charmed my mother by grooming her - when my parents were ratsitting my mum once phoned me with delight to say that she'd been groomed by Bramble. Their ratsitter was besotted with her to the point where I wasn't entirely sure I'd get Bramble back.

Bramble was a champion nest builder:

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I admit to teasing her a little - she especially liked large bits of cardboard to line her nests, and when I cleaned them out I'd move the biggest bits of cardboard to a different level to their hut and hammocks so she'd have to move between them, cardboard stuffed in her mouth. It was exercise!

She was also a shoulder rat:
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She was chronically respy towards the end of her life and was increasingly thin and frail, but she didn't lose her spark until the very end. I found her dead in the morning; it looked like she'd just never woken up.

Goodbye Bramble, Bram, Brambly - you were loved.

So I can't promise posts on specific days, but is there a topic you'd like me to write about?

I was not expecting to lose Ash so soon.

Ash came to me in summer 2012 with her sisters, Hazel (whom I lost in February but was in no state to write about her) and Bramble (who feels frail and is chronically respy but bright-eyed and affectionate). They came to me because their owner had got bored of them and wanted a snake (of all things). Their breeder approved and they were introduced to Willow. They were actually a bit too boisterous for Willow and so she stayed with the babies (Fern and Meena) in my hospital/intro cage and the trio went into the main cage.

They were skinny with badly rusted coats when they came to me and I tried very hard to get them into decent condition. I think they all grew a bit - not just filled out, but actually became bigger all round. They were the first group I tried scatter feeding and I loved how it made them interact with their environment - rooting through the substrate, using their noses to plough through it, getting excited when they found something tasty. Ash was particularly fond of unshelled pumpkin seeds.

Ash was my big, beautiful, sleek girl. She was Russian Blue like Rowan, and like Ro, she became my PR rat. Because university is on the way to the vets, if I needed to take someone to the vets it was easier to take them in a carrier into the office and then go to vets rather than return home for them. I'd sometimes stick Ash on my shoulder if I needed to make myself tea or speak to someone. She rapidly acquired a fanclub to the extent that people would beckon me into their offices so they could fuss her - and, indeed, someone once stopped me in the corridor, looked disappointed when she noticed I didn't have Ash with me, asked after her then let me go on my way.

She had the biggest eyes of any rat I've kept. If I'd wanted to, I think she could have won shows. However, she also had a talent for pulling daft faces and as such, the photos I have of her all make her look a bit silly.

She liked being stroked firmly from head to tail, and would flatten herself and arch under my hand in obvious enjoyment. She and Fern squabbled but not in a serious way - if I heard squeaking and scuffling it was going to be those two.

She reached 30 months and didn't even look old until her final couple of days. It was pyometra - the only thing that could have saved her was an emergency spay and I wasn't going to put her through that. My mum looked after her in her final days and took her to the vet. She's buried in our garden.

Have been reading for much of the evening. I've tried to link to articles that use Chelsea's preferred pronouns and/or are written by trans women, but consider this a content warning for transphobia and 'ware comments.

Chelsea Manning's full statement

Really, really comprehensive summary of Chelsea Manning's past
One of the less faily news articles: 'I am Chelsea Manning,' says jailed soldier formerly known as Bradley
Language Log: Manning's pronouns
Why Is It So Hard to Call Chelsea Manning ‘She’?
New Statesman: Behind the Wikipedia wars: what happened when Bradley Manning became Chelsea
Abigail Brady: Chelsea Manning: on pressing the button

Lauran McNamara: The Humanity of Private Manning
Sylvia Rivera Law Project: Chelsea Manning and the realities for transgender and gender non-conforming people in prison, jails and detention centers
Paris Lees: What made Chelsea Manning hide her true identity? and, from last week, Manning is a trans hero – I fear for [him] in prison
Janet Mock: Chelsea Manning and the battle for trans inclusive healthcare without bias
Courthouse News: Scarce Transgender Care Options for Manning
Jane Fae: What Chelsea Manning can expect in a US prison
Sophia Banks: Chelsea Manning, media bias and cissexism
Jennie Kermode: Going inside, coming out
Alex Sharpe: As a transgender woman in prison Chelsea Manning is commencing the greatest struggle of her life

So, a friend and I decided that we needed [citation needed] stamps in our lives (he's a librarian; he likes stamping things). We asked a few friends if they'd also be interested in ordering a stamp. They were interested.

As such, we are now in a position to order over 50 stamps.

ANYWAY. If you are an irredeemable pedant, desire a time/hand/sanity saving device for marking, or the kind of person who derives childish glee from helpfully annotating advertising and/or the Daily Mail (this is probably most of you) you may register your interest at the following link and we'll email you when we're about to place our order - probably in the next week.

http://www.generalist.org.uk/stamps.html

At the moment we're looking at £7 for a stamp with P&P at £2.50 (UK) or £3.50 (US/Europe). Alternatively, if you live in the UK and likely to see one of us, we can hand-deliver them. We aren't making a profit on these stamps so any savings we make on bulk purchases will be passed onto you.

The Guardian described today as "a new world heav[ing] into view [...] with sweeping changes in the fields of welfare, justice, health and tax".

I am in a position to be most scared about the NHS. For the record, I love the NHS. I wrote about it a few years ago in the context of US debates on private/public healthcare and it fscking guts me that the NHS is being steadily dismantled. My experiences of it are somewhat less rosy now - involvement with a Gender Identity Clinic will do that to you - but I still think it's better than private healthcare and its failings are not due to it being a public, nationalised system. If anything, its problems are due to a culture of targets and commodification.

BMJ: The future of the NHS—irreversible privatisation?
Max Pemberton: NHS reforms: From today the Coalition has put the NHS up for grabs
Owen Jones: Farewell to the NHS, 1948-2013: a dear and trusted friend finally murdered by Tory ideologues
An ever-useful reminder of the 60+ MPs who have or had links to companies involved in private healthcare

However, as The Staggers notes, the really frightening thing about today's cuts is that no one knows their combined impact. Polly Toynbee summarises their cumulative impact:
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There's an e-petition calling for a Cumulative Impact Assessment of Welfare Reform, and a New Deal for sick & disabled people based on their needs, abilities and ambitions.

This Government frightens me. They have no mandate and they don't care. This is going to be brutal and people are going to die because of it, and they still don't care.

ETA:
10 lies we're told about welfare
And on IDS claiming to be able to live on £53/week: You'll never live like common people and perhaps my favourite post on the "but of COURSE you can eat on £2/week!" argument.
“The revolution starts in the ATOS smoking area” - on welfare, addiction, and dependency

So I ended up cancelling everything this week because I have flu. This is extremely annoying. Even my skin hurts, for fscks sake. I have returned to the loving bosom of my family because my mum freaked out about me being on my own and ill, and as such, I currently have two snoring, twitching dogs in stroking distance.

Please internet, entertain me.