Critical Exponent

Add Turkey Slaughter to your calendar for tomorrow?

So prompted GMail in a recent e-mail thread. The occasion: a demonstration Knox and I were attending at a local farm to see how turkeys get killed.

This all started way back in the summer, when friends of ours on Capitol Hill decided that (why not!) they would raise turkeys for Thanksgiving. Knox and I were game. We bought into the co-op, and sporadically visited the turkeys as they grew. Now, with Thanksgiving around the corner, all the co-op members are getting ready for the kill—except we’ve not really done this before.

Knox, however, managed to find a post on Craigslist for a free-range farmer who allowed folks to purchase his birds and kill them on the spot. We attended one such event as mere spectators. Knox’s agenda was learning how to become our turkey butcher (I’ll be blissfully working at the time). My own purpose for going was to test my ethics in facing the source of my animal food.

And so, there we were, watching tukeys get knocked out, killed, and prepped. I’ll spare you the (slightly) gruesome details. I will note one, though: the magic step is the plucking. Take the feathers off the dead bird and it becomes instantly recognizable as a food item.

Tomorrow, Knox became the turkey-killer-in-chief. As for me, I think there ought to be better ways for animals to die. I’ll be edging a bit closer to vegetarianism once again.

There is a new addition to the Gardnovsky Gardens, and its name is Pops. Knox came back from a mysterious errand in Tacoma on Saturday with a rabbit. A giant, obese rabbit. We later found out (thanks to What Breed is my Bunny?, of course) that it is a fawn-colored Flemish giant.

Apparently, his biography looks something like this: he got his name because the kid he belonged to thought he was the color of Corn Pops. He shared his cage with a cat. The kid lost interest, the cat was given away, the rabbit was lonely. He’s been living outside, unfazed by his barking canine neighbors. The previous owner, a veterinary assistant, decided he was neglected. One Craigslist posting later, Pops came to join Galli at the Gardnovsky Resort and Spa.

Pops is awfully cute, but certainly needs to go in a diet: his jowls are all too conspicuous when he relaxes, all splayed out. We keep him in a rabbit hutch outside, which hutch will be graced with an HGTV-style addition before our own house will. We’ve been bringing him indoors every so often to look at him and pet him, and he seems to enjoy that just fine. He and the cat have been sniffing each other out (and I mean that literally; Galli is intrigued by Pop’s butt). Galli remains suspicious, staring at Pops in her focused huntress mode. Pops is laid back, knowing he has the advantage of size.

So far, our major complaint is that when he comes inside, Pops likes to poop (perfectly formed soft pellets) and pee (brownish syrup). We need to get him housebroken and using a litter box. He’s got a scat kink going, too: he’ll wallow in, sniff, and eat his own pellets, and he seems to quite enjoy stretching out in his own urine. Sigh. As much as I enjoy him, I’ve instituted a new house rule: you bring it home, you take care of its excrement.

If you’re reading my site, you’re most likely using an RSS aggregator. If you’re not, get thee to Google Reader, stat.

Google Reader has a cool feature that lets you share with others items in the feeds that you read (and you can event comment as you share!). It also has a bookmarklet to let you similarly share any page on the web. Within Google Reader, you can easily see you friends’ shared items.

In the event you don’t use Google Reader, you can still access my shared items by subscribing to my automatically-generated Shared Items blog. (The most recently shared items also show up in a gadget in my blog sidebar.)

Why care about my shared items? With shared items, I don’t have to debate whether an interesting site merits a whole entry in my blog or a mass mailing to all of my Internet friends/acquaintances/stale contacts. I can point you to articles that, for some reason or another, I found interesting: maybe I agree with them, maybe I don’t; maybe they opened my eyes, maybe they left me incredulous. At any rate, placing these items in a separate repository allows my own blog to focus on original content about my life and my thoughts—much in keeping with the Slow Blogging article I recently shared.

It cleans things up for me as a blogger, and for you as my audience. Check it out!

This weekend had us making a loooong drive to Spokane and back for a family function. The driving was tedious, but Washington State is georgeous: from the Puget Sound to Snoqualmie Pass to the Columbia River basin and on to (almost) the Idaho border, a sequence of ecosystems following each other in sometimes abrupt succession.

We got to witness first-hand a group of awfully nice, Republican-leaning, small-town folks of all ages (read: people with a socially conservative, non-peripatetic bent) dancing, nay, really getting into, the Village People’s YMCA. Knox and I shared a chuckle as we wondered whether they were aware of the subtext or were simply unconcerned….

Another highlight of the weekend was staying up way too late to watch HGTV. As new homeowners with burgeoning house pride, we were spellbound by one show after another featuring half-hour makeovers in which preternaturally cheerful design types take homes from drab to fab. The secrets to the makeovers, I suspect, are having a whole team of workers at the ready to supervise the work, and having a TV program provide the budget… The secret hook in the network’s programming is that the last segment of one show flows directly into the first segment of the next without a commercial break: once you see how one remodel turned out you are immediately presented with another seemingly hopeless case that you simply must see through resolution.

Every couple of years, now, I find myself indulging in a bit of fervor. No religious revival for me, nor the frenzied self-righteousness of the political acolyte. No, my diversion is more circumscribed than that: attending a Madonna concert!

This weekend found us in Vancouver for Madge’s Sticky and Sweet Tour. It was fun and entertaining as always. My floor seats were awesome: close enough to the stage that I could clearly see Madonna with the naked eye and actually take in her expressive facial poses with my binoculars. While she looked good in person, I found, interestingly, that the Jumbotrons were rather, uh, unflattering, at least from my angle: weird shadows and too much eyeliner.

It seemed at times as though she was trying to do a more traditional rock concert: she had a hand or stand mike throughout, rather than her Blonde Ambition headset; her costumes were nice but not shocking or over the top; she played her guitar often; and she led the audience in a sing-along. But then again, how traditional can you be when you’re Madonna? The concert also featured, oh, let’s see, a white convertible, a boxing rink, and flamenco dancers. That’s without even mentioning the virtual Britney (which I missed) and the virtual Justin (which I though was cool).[UPDATE: Though not as cool as seeing them both in person, as the lucky Los Angelinos did!]

It was a Big Deal for Madonna to come to Vancouver. Throngs converged on B.C. Place and police were on hand to divert vehicular traffic and keep order. The stadium itself was packed, as the molasses-like crowd moved in and then out of the venue. Fire trap if I ever saw one. Swag? I got a concert program, of course, but decided to hold off on the T-shirts: $25 for Obama tees, $50+ for Madonna. Silly.

I had been wondering why this concert was on a Thursday night. The answer was soon apparent: Friday was Halloween, and Vancouver’s West Enders take Halloween Very Seriously. We saw people in costume all day, there were parties till the wee hours, and yet again the police were closing off streets and keeping a watchful eye.