Friday, May 25, 2007

Stray Animals, Music and an Incidental Hamster (of course!)

Have you been following the story of the whales who swam up the Sacramento-San Joaquin River here in Northern California? They don't seem to want to leave quite yet. They've tried using recordings of whale songs about feeding, scary killer whale noises and now they've resorted to water cannon of a fire-fighting boat. The whales get a 3-day weekend's rest, at least. Maybe they were hoping to get a glimpse of Arnold Schwarzenegger?

Not to be left out of the news, Southern California has it's own stray animal story. Down in Los Angeles they've got a locally famous alligator, named Reggie, who made the national wires by finally getting nabbed after taking up residence in Harbor Regional Park's Lake Machado for the last two years. According to CNN "The gator inspired a zydeco song, two children's books and innumerable T-shirts. Students at Los Angeles Harbor College next to the lake adopted Reggie as a second mascot."

Zydeco! I've mentioned it in times past, but newer folk reading here may not know of my fondness. I first heard zydeco on Seseme Street when my children were small. I have a few songs on my iPod, it's great music for lifting the spirits. Lisa Haley & the Zydecats Krewe did the Reggie Alligator (you can hear about a minute's worth of the song at the link) song mentioned above.

In hamster news (and you thought couldn't possibly be going there again, didn't you), there really isn't any but I was looking and found a cute hamster image instead at this blog. Is that not one of the most adorable hamster pictures, ever? If I didn't have three cats, I might be driving out to the pet store for a hamster right now.

Wikipedia had to lock its article on librarians due to bit on Stephen Colbert's May 25th show, The Colbert Report, where he interviewed Jimmy Wales the founder and put up a "secret" message that "librarians are hiding something" during that interview. If I wanted to get intellectual about it I could try and talk about some of the interesting points Colbert made about the "democratization of information", especially the part about for too long the "elites who study things got to say what is or isn't real" and how with Wikipedia "anybody with a computer and the patience to put in a password can change anything". However, it's all been discussed in detail by some very smart people over on Making Light. I wonder if Colbert lurks over there?


3 comments:

Dawn said...

That's one cute hamster all right. Couldn't understand a word of the post (the hamster one, not yours!) but I'm a look at the pictures kind of person.

Cookie said...

Those GD whales! They have been the lead story on our local news for almost two weeks now. This has happened before, so I'm not sure why people are getting so freaked out over it. City people, I swear.

Happy Weekend!

Crabby McSlacker said...

Cookie I'm with you on the whales. I love animals, but it's one of those stories where nothing new happens but all the news stations have to have updates every 10 minutes because they have whale footage to show.

Tell us when (a) they make it to the bay or (b) they die. I'll be sad then. In the meantime, shut the heck up about the damn whales!