ODE TO LITTLE DOG

Itty Bitty
You're so pretty


Yes, that's the whole poem. I tried to come up with more lines, but finally decided two lines were enough. Short and sweet.

My electric company sends out a magazine called Rural Missouri. The latest edition has a bunch of stuff I want to write about here. The first article is a recipe. Usually there is a page with pretty worthless recipes, like 15 ways to cook pears. This month the recipes are all about cooking different wild game. Here's a tasty dish I know you're going to want to put in your recipe files.

BBQ Raccoon

One 4 to 6 pound raccoon, cut into serving pieces
1 cup red wine
2 onions, sliced
3 bay leaves
1 tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon pepper
3 cloves garlic, sliced
2 cups of your favorite barbecue sauce
1 tablespoons paprika

Place the meat pieces in a large pan. Add wine, onions, bay leaves, salt, pepper and garlic. Add enough water to cover the meat. Bring to a boil. Cover and simmer for I hour. Place raccoon meat in a lightly greased baking dish. Mix barbecue sauce and paprika together and pour over the meat. Cook at 325 degrees for 50 to 60 minutes.

MMMM, good eating.

Another article is about cougars. There have been 8 confirmed sightings of cougars in Missouri since 1994. There was one killed in a car accident in Callaway County just last August. The conservation department studied the body, and said it didn't have any tags or tatoos, and there aren't any signs that it's been kept in captivity, so they are convinced it's a wild cougar that wandered here from somewhere out west. Personally, I think that is just the coolest thing. I knew there are foxes and coyotes around here, but not cougars. I think there are brown bears or black bears in Missouri, too, but not near where I live. A few issues ago, this magazine said armadillos were spotted in southern Missouri. I wonder if there are wolves sneaking around here, too? I remember when I was little I used to wonder if logs floating down the Mississippi were really logs, or really well disguised alligators.

The last article I want to write about is a heads up for the whole world. There is a researcher at the University of Missouri studying thundersnows, snow showers when there is lightning and thunder. They usually drop a massive amount of snow. If you ever notice thunder and lighting during a snow storm, send an e-mail telling the location, time and date of the storm to http://weather.missouri.edu/ROCS/particip.html . I don't think you win a prize or anything.

I'm having a moral dilemma. I have been trying to decide what kind of standards am I going to have on this blog. I would like to think that I could write a fine blog without any foul language or cheap shots. I don't think it would really be a problem. I don't use much bad language in general conversations, and use it even less when I'm writing. On the other hand, I already used bad language in the alien ray gun story. I'm not shocked by occasional profanity. I think my husband must have been a sailor in a previous life.

What I'm torn about is how negative I should get about other people, especially people I know. Writing that I think GW Bush is a dimwit doesn't bother me, but I wouldn't want to call one of my neighbors or co-workers a dimwit. Censering my writing would really cramp my style, because I know a real wacky bunch of people, but I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. I could write whatever I wanted if this was just a computer journal, and not broadcast all over the planet. A blog is more like computer graffiti, right there in the open for anyone to read. I don't want to write anything about somebody that I wouldn't say to their face. I think I'll have two standards, a strict set for people I know and interact with, and a looser set to use with basically everybody else in the world.

One thing that started my moral dilemma was a saying my husband uses. Instead of saying somebody is wasted or shit-faced or even fucked up, he says they are fucked up like a can of worms. I know what you're wondering. Just exactly how fucked up does a can of worms get? How can you tell when worms get fucked up, do they have trouble wriggling in a straight line? I have never understood that expression. I finally asked him where he got it from, and he said from a neighbor down the street, who could be a blog entry all his own, except he comes under the strict rules, so Mum's the word. When I was thinking about writing this, I actually thought about bleeping out those curse words. Writing sh#t-faced or someting like that. Then I decided language-wise, I'm just going to call it like I see it. If I see something that's fucked up, I'll let you know.

You might find this hard to believe, but up until a year or two ago, my every day car was so old it came with a rocking factory am-fm-8 track tape player. I got sick of hearing either: 1) the same songs over and over, or 2) the same commercials over and over. Since I think they quit making 8 tracks in about 1980, that left me in a delima. My choices were: listen to nothing on the way to work, try to find an 8 track tape at garage sales, or find something new to listen to on the radio. The first two choices just didn't work out, so I started tuning around the dial. I finally found something I liked with no comercials. No music either, but since we listened to the radio all day at work I didn't mind listening to people talk. I discovered NPR: National Public Radio. It's like PBS on the radio.

So why am I telling you all this? Because a couple of weeks ago, when I was still having the computer problem and couldn't write about it here, they had the most interesting news story. It was about a medical condition called chimerism. Some times a single embryo will split up into two identical twins. On the other side of the spectrum, sometimes two seperate embryos will fuse into one single person, called a chimera. Most of the time it isn't even noticed, unless one embryo was male and the other one was female. People generally notice hermaphrodites, when someone is half male and half female. The person featured in the story on NPR was a normal woman for 50 or 60 years, until she started having medical problems. I don't remember exactly what was wrong, a bad liver or kidney or something. Anyway, doctors tested her family and found out that her children weren't genetically hers. Her husband was their father, but she wasn't their mother, even though they weren't test tube babies and she had given birth to them. It turned out that parts of her body were all that was left of a twin sister that her body somehow sucked into itself before she was born. So actually, she was her children's aunt. Talk about creepy.

Besides just being weird, this could cause legal problems. If a chimera leaves hair at a crime scene and the police give him a blood test the DNA wouldn't match. Paternity tests that don't test semen might say someone isn't the father when he really is. Well, I guess technically he would be the uncle. If there's a plane crash or something and they have to identify the body parts by DNA they might not be able to tell what parts go to what person, or even how many people were really involved. There could be 6 or 7 people and 10 or 12 different DNA profiles.

What's really scary is there is a South Park episode about the school nurse who has a similar condition. Unfortunatly, she didn't completely absorb her twin, so she has a dead fetus sticking out of her head. Trust me, it was funnier than it sounds. Somebody tried to calm down the boys by explaining her situation, telling them that they might also have a dead fetus that was inside of them where nobody could see it. Some how that didn't comfort them very much.

RANT

There is something that really irritates me every time it happens. It's something that most people probably couldn't care less about, but I can't stand it. I wish when a movie or TV show is over they would just roll the credits. A while ago they started cutting out the sound and promoting other shows, and I could live with that. It bugged me, but I didn't really care too much about it. But that wasn't good enough. Now they scrunch the credits down to the bottom or the side of the screen and start blabbing about another show they want you to watch. I have even seen them squish up the credits just to show a commercial. What really irritated me was last week they squished the credits down to a tiny strip on the bottom of the TV, maybe 2 or 3 inches, and then immediately started the next show, so it was a little squished, too. What if you had planned on taping that show? Would you start taping then or wait until they got rid of the credits? The credits were so mashed together you couldn't read them no matter how close you got to them. What if you had a bet with somebody over who was the crabby neighbor, or the lazy boss? What if you were a struggling actor and played the crabby neighbor or lazy boss? I'm sure it's a thrill to see your name scroll down the screen, even if you just played 'Drunken Poker Player #3' or some other character that didn't even have a name. I bet the Key Grip and the Assistant to the Assistant to the Producer would like to be able to read their name, too. Personally, if they are going to mash it up so much you can't read it anyway I don't know why they bother with it at all. Shoot it and put it out of it's misery.