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Here’s another longer TV news story on the incident:
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Category Archives: Personal
Scary stuff!
Diane Blackwood, wife of my friend Wesley Elsberry, was attacked by an alligator in a park in St. Petersburg Florida while taking one of their dogs (Ritka) for a walk!
Diane & Ritka
Wesley tells the story on his blog (The Austringer):
This past Monday, Diane was out house-hunting. She checked out a listing for a house that was interesting in part because it was close to a park. After looking at the house, Diane went over to the park to have a look at it, too. This was Sawgrass Lake Park in St. Petersburg, Florida, near I-275 and Gandy Boulevard. She took Ritka, our Vizsla, walking with her. Diane and Ritka were near the water’s edge at about 4:30 PM when Diane saw the water churn. She immediately called to Ritka and started moving away from the water. Ritka’s usual behavior is to run ahead, and that’s just what Ritka did. Diane, though, slipped on the slope and fell to her hands and knees, perhaps in part due to the slip-on “Crocs”-like shoes she was wearing at the time. The churning water was, indeed, a sign of a gator making a lunge, coming out of the water. The gator didn’t connect with anything on his first lunge, but he grabbed Diane’s left calf with his second lunge.
Fortunately Diane kept her wits about her and was able to escape with relatively minor injuries (‘minor’ only when considering how bad it could have been).
Diane turned and grabbed the gator’s jaw to discourage it from ripping her calf muscle. The gator then released her calf, but when it snapped its jaws shut the second time, Diane’s left thumb was caught there by a tooth. She says that she didn’t care to play tug with a gator, not with just her thumb as the part in the middle. She reached over with her right hand and grabbed the gator’s eye ridge. Diane says that after maybe 30 seconds to a minute of this standoff, the gator opened his jaws, releasing Diane’s thumb. Diane released the gator’s eye ridge. She says that she briefly had considered trying to hold the gator’s jaws closed and using Ritka’s leash to tie it up, but that she didn’t think that she was up to any more tussling with the gator. So the gator headed back to the water and Diane on up the bank and away.
Another bit of good news is that the authorities were apparently able to apprehend the offending (6+ foot) crocodilian:
This is one of those stories you hear about on the news but don’t think about happening to people you know personally. Very scary!
My, and my wife Kathy’s, best wishes go out to Diane and we hope for her speedy recovery.
Making Halloween “sausage”
Halloween is coming on fast and I am already behind. This year we have a nice new mummy (with glowing eyes) to add to our yard haunt and I have decided to make him a Papier-mâché sarcophagus and some other props and make a whole display of it.
Here is the sarcophagus lid as it is so far, just a, hum, ‘skeleton’ if you will.
Funny thing I just noticed. In the display cabinet on the left side of the picture you can just make out a miniature souvenir Mayan sarcophagus lid that my parents brought me back from a trip they took to the Yucatán.
And here is a “little” obelisk awaiting some paint and hieroglyphics:
Have to hurry up and get these done so I can maybe work in a little sphinx to go along and then I want to try and get this ghost effect I being thinking about for a couple years working.
My metal masters
From the getting to know your blog host department:
The metal taskmasters who haunt my nightmares (and pay my mortgage…somewhat). These are the printing presses that I operate at work; an A. B. Dick 9810 (foreground) and a A. B. Dick 9870 w/T-head (background).
Stay in school kids or you could find yourself running beasts like these for twenty years instead of being a paleontologist…
[Update (2-18-2018): I no longer work in printing, rather I am now an insect trapper for the California Dept. of Food and Agriculture.]
Fun with critters
Here we have a Ten-lined June beetle (Polyphylla s.) that my uncle found at work and thought I might like to have. What is fun about these critters is that they make a defensive hissing noise when touched. And that is beetle and not “bug” as I mistakenly say in the video.
Here’s a nice close up picture of a Polyphylla by Derrick Ditchburn on a site called “Whispers in Nature” (looks like they’ve got lots of nice critter pics):
Ten-lined June beetle (Polyphylla)
Anyway, the poor little guy (actually I don’t know the sex of this individual), goes into the freezer to be dispatched. Later I will thaw it out, pin it up, and add it to my small insect collection.
Excuses, excuses…
Well, while working on the house/yard over the last couple weeks I managed to hurt my shoulder to the point where I have trouble even siting and typing at the computer or even concentrating on things (AKA Hell). I finally broke down and went to the doctor (lost my med. insurance when my work hours got cut) and was told that I am developing some arthritis in my shoulder which I apparently exacerbated by over-working it.
The Doc prescribed some pills which after a week don’t seem to have done much. Of course he also suggested that I take some time of work, however that is not an option.
So, yeah, this is basically a whine-fest, poor me post.
Apologies
No, I’m not dead, nor have I abandon blogging. I’ve simply been busy as of late with work and misc. house chores, trying to prepare another one of our extra rooms for a border. Times are tough and we need the money, what can I say.
I do have a post in process on Ernst Haeckel and his embryo drawings, please be patient.
Thanks
Small World
P. Z. Myers, who lives in Minnesota, posted a peice on his blog Pharyngula about a pro-animal testing/pro-science rally held at University California Los Angeles. In his post he included a link to a video of a local So. Cal. (where I live) TV news (KTLA) report on the rally.
But that isn’t the only thing that makes it a small world. What really does it is that at 1:06 into the video there is a shot of some of the Pro-Testers carrying a white banner that reads:
“UCLA Pro-Test
Animal Research
Saves Lives“.
I helped to make that banner, two of them actually, at the print shop where I work last week and wondered what they were going to do with them.
So P. Z. in Minnesota, writes a blog that I happen to read regularly and in one of his posts he points his readers (including me) to a video from a Southern California TV channel that has a shot of a banner I made a week ago.
Small world.
Oh, and I agree with P. Z. and the Pro-Testers on the issue of animal testing.
A (slightly embarassing) Darwin day at USC
This past Wednesday (4-15-09) I attended an interesting set of ‘Darwin Year’ lectures at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (Darwin Today: Evolution and Scientific Thought). The lectures were moderated by USC anthropologist Craig Stanford and the speakers included: Donald Johanson (paleoanthropologist and discoverer of the famous Lucy fossil), USC paleobiologist/ecologist David Bottjer, USC microbiologist Steve Finkel and last but certainly not least was my friend Eugenie Scott, director of The National Center for Science Education.
All the talks were interesting but the most entertaining was probably Dr. Finkel’s which focused on bacteria. In addition to all the fascinating stuff on evolution in prokaryotes his talk contained lots of amusing gross-out trivia about such things as how there are 300,000,000 bacteria per gram of fecal material living in the average persons colon (that’s about the same as the number of people living in the U.S.).
The talks wrapped up with an interesting round-table discussion of sorts between the speakers and the audiences (which contained several other USC faculty members), mostly revolving around the subject of Genie’s talk, which was of course on K-12 science education and the effects of antievolutionists on it.
I’ll be kicking myself for months because of Genie though (it’s not her fault though). Within the first minute of her talk she put up a slide of the NCSE’s logo and asked if anyone recognized the image. When no one spoke up she quickly said “tell’em Troy”.
Deer in the headlights.
I wasn’t expecting to be put on the spot, at least not that soon, I mean Genie has asked me questions during her talks before, which is normally fine, but this time my brain locked up. Fortunately she quickly let me off the hook and told everyone that it was based on a drawing from one of Darwin’s notebooks.
NCSE's logo
Of course this sort of thing happens to all of us, especially when we are surprised and under pressure, but in this case I have little excuse. You see just a few months ago I went to a special Darwin exhibit at the Huntington Library (San Marino, CA) and contained in that exhibit was the very notebook of Darwin’s in which appears the drawing which the NCSE’s logo is based upon. I even remember saying to myself, “oh look, there is the drawing the NCSE is using for their logo.”
The original from Darwin's notebook.
Flash forward to last Wednesday, and it’s “ah, uhm, ah, I don’t remember exactly where that’s from…”. Arrrrgh!
Ah well, as a consolation prize I was able to get a photograph of myself with Don Johanson to add to my collection.
Donald Johanson and yours truly.
[slapping self in head, “Darwin’s notebook, Darwin’s notebook…”]
It’s Playing Chess with Pigeons 1st Birthday!
It was one year ago today (March 1st 2008) that I posted my first blog entry. Thank you to all my readers who have given this blog over 67,000 views so far.
I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues who have helped me with research and all those who were kind enough to link to my offerings. I’d like to think that it hasn’t been a bad first year and I hope to do even better in the next.
Once again thanks everyone!
Playing Chess with Pigeons 