Day in the Life of an Idiot

I have glitter in my hair. I've decided NOT to grow old gracefully. Yesterday, I took Mason to get his haircut at Kid's Hair and they always offer to spray some color into his hair -- pink, green or purple. He got green. I bought two cans to take home: pink and glitter. Yesterday I had pink glittery hair. Today, just glitter. I mean, what looks good with gray, I ask you? Glitter, that's what!

My hair is shorter too. Actually, a bit shorter than I wanted, but the hair stylist was clipping away merrily talking about the mental illness that runs in her family and I decided NOT to complain that I'd actually wanted a few more bangs.

Hair grows. Mine, especially.

At any rate, I got a chance to write a bit yesterday. I'm not doing anything constructive, yet. I spent Wednesday at the coffeeshop with the awesome internet. I was looking for a place to send off a story I wrote several years ago now called "Bright, Bright City Lights." It was my answer to why Paul Wellstone died, and I *thought* I'd found a home for it, but that magazine, while still apparently publishing, has not printed my story or communicated with me for, well, years. I was never paid or offered a contract, so I assume that somehow I got lost in the shuffle and that piggy is free to go back to market. At any rate, I was poking around Ralan.com and, as I love to do, I scanned the anthology markets. I found three that got me kind of excited. One called something like "Last Man" looking for stories of the last... [fill in the blank] on earth. Then there was "Zero Gravity" or something similar looking for space opera. Then there was another one looking for stories about "the oldest profession." (Note: I LOVE prostitute stories for some reason. Alas, they don't take reprints or I would have contacted naomikritzer about sending along the one we sold to TOTU about a magic using hustler from a alternate history Britian that was still Roman.)

So I said to myself, why not all three? I started a short story about the last gigolo in space! Of course, I'm only about four pages into it and it's already morphing into something else entirely (this is partly why I suck at short stories. I can never keep them going in one direction terribly well.)

This morning I wanted to call into the "Stephanie Miller" show. They were talking about that killer whale at Sea World that killed his trainer. They brought up that bit about how he likely pulled the ponytail of his trainer as "play behavior." And their guest John Fugelsang said that the only animals that kill for fun are humans and cats.

People are not only wrong on the Internet, but they're wrong on the radio. LOTS of animals kill for fun. Killer whales (which, btw, are NOT whales, but dophins who kill whales,) kill for sport. There's a horrible scene caught on film by the BBC Ocean World folks of a pod of killer whales seperating a baby humpback whale from his mother and drowning him. The pod then plays with the corpse, eats only its jaw, and dumps the body. They didn't need him for food. Why they spent hours attacking him and his mother only to eat a tiny bit of him, we don't know. But they do the same thing in a later episode with a baby seal's corpse -- they toss it back and forth like a ball (for a while it's clear the baby seal is still alive, too.) In fact, I suspect the footage of the killer whale tossing his trainer's body around is eerily similar to the way the killer whales toss around the baby seal. I haven't seen the Sea World film, so I might be wrong, but I have my suspicions. This is not exactly "play" behavior. It's part of how they kill... or at least it is documented behavior in the wild.

That being said, I don't advocate putting the killer whale down. I think it behaved naturally. But like tigers and other wild animals we keep in captivity, killer whales are naturally dangerous. I like to think of dolphins as our ocean friends, but it's easy to forget they're carnivores, PREDATORS. They hunt and kill fish all the time. And killer whales, well, kill WHALES. If they can take on a protective humpback whale mother, they can easily kill us. Training them and keeping them as "pets" is somewhat irresponsible, IMHO. Or at least no one should be surprised if people get hurt. Honestly, we should be impressed by how FEW people get hurt around wild animals in captivity.

/rant

And then someone called in who was wrong about Jesus and I had to turn the radio off. Because while I might feel like, after having watched one BBC special six million times, I might be qualified to rant about dolphin behavior, I at least acknowledge that Biblical texts are obscure and that people might come away with different impressions.

:-)

Anyway, since Mason is happily playing Sonic on his DS Lite, I should probably take advantage and get some writing in. See y'all tonight at MarsCON!