Toronto jumps on another bandwagon

Twenty-five years ago, Toronto declared itself a nuclear-weapons-free zone.

A few years ago, there was a big debate in Toronto about dog breeds: pit bulls, which is a generic term covering a couple of breeds such as Staffordshire Terriers. They’re considered dangerous.  I read that in the U.S. one year, the greatest number of fatal dog attacks, 13, was from Golden Retrievers. They just don’t get no respect so people aren’t careful not to provoke them.

Similarly, people panic over one of the eight fatal cougar attacks this century, while the most dangerous animal in the woods measured by fatal attacks is the white-tailed deer with its cute, sharp little front hooves.

Unfortunately, people who want to look dangerous sometimes adopt dogs as accessories. Those people want the dog to look dangerous, too,  or to be aggressive and they don’t properly discipline them. They should lose their dogs, one way or another. (My grandfather was working as a postman once when he was attacked by two mastiffs. He killed both of them. A swift blow to the end of the nose will do it.) The local by-law in Toronto is now that pit bulls or dogs that look like pit bulls must be neutered and must be muzzled in public. Also, I think you can’t acquire a new one, though you can keep an old one.

Toronto has a bad habit of jumping on the bandwagon. There’s now a move afoot to ban handgun ownership, even though the existing laws are sufficient to deal with illegal handguns or dangerous carrying. A hobbyist storing a registered gun at a gun club or carrying it properly secured is not a problem. People with smuggled or stolen guns carrying them unsecured are the problem.

I don’t want the city wasting my tax money to make useless, grandiose, feel-good gestures.

Pigs escape from highway crash

From Toronto Star:

The eastbound lanes of Highway 401 through Mississauga are expected to remain clogged throughout the afternoon following a crash involving a tractor trailer hauling pigs, the second recent accident involving livestock on a GTA road.

Monday morning’s crash occurred near Winston Churchill Blvd. Ontario Provincial Police originally shut down all eastbound and westbound lanes, but then re-opened the westbound ones.

“About 8 a.m. this morning, Highway 401 eastbound was slowing down as it usually does in morning rush hour,” OPP Sgt. Cam Woolley told CTV.ca Toronto.

“A tractor-trailer travelling eastbound, hauling livestock, for some reason failed to slow down and slammed into slower traffic, virtually crushing a full-sized pickup and ramming a car and a large van.

“The tractor-trailer then hurtled over to the left lane and rolled onto its right side, with the cab bursting into flames,” he said.

“The driver escaped — along with about 50 to 60 pigs.”

The pickup truck driver suffered very serious injuries. The car driver was also injured, and the van and tractor trailer driver suffered minor injuries. All four were taken to hospital, Woolley said….

…most of pigs have been corralled now. A livestock truck has been commandeered to haul them away.

Good days

The last couple of days were productive. Yesterday I cleaned the kitchen, did some re-organizing, and washed the floor (including under the stove), while Andie did research for a Guiding project. I also got Marlowe checked up at the vet. She has interstitial cystitis, possibly caused by stress, and has to take anti-inflammatory medicine in her food and take some kind of mood booster. I’ll try to borrow back the feline face hormones, which make all the cats more relaxed.

Today we went swimming at 7:00 a.m. Later, I helped Andie clean up her room. She had to go back to Hamilton.

It’s slowly thawing here, which is better than a quick thawing, which tends to cause floods.

Birds at Loxahatchee

We just got back from a three-hour visit to Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge on the northeastern edge of the Florida Everglades. We were allowed to gaze from an observation deck at the real everglades. We walked happily around earthen dikes of water impoundment areas where waterfowl were plentiful. We saw great blue herons, great white herons, little blue herons, cormorants or anhingas, tri-coloured herons, some hawks, egrets, black vultures, possibly limpkins, coots, marsh hens, gallinules, possibly a green heron, turtles, a snake, and a few alligators.

In Coral Springs

We’ve arrived safely in Coral Springs, Florida, after a leisurely trip up the Florida Keys. (”Key” seems to be a corruption of a Spanish word for “island.”)

As long as we were in the Keys, we saw numbers of vulture-like objects.

We stopped at the Key Deer Refuge on Pine Key and saw four or five of the deer. They are a half-scale variety of the white-tailed deer. This must be a young one; it looks no bigger than a dog.

Elephant walk

Three elephants wandered away from a circus in Newmarket, Ontario. They went for a stroll of several hundred yards (half a kilometer?) before someone spotted them. They sampled the flowers from gardens before they were rounded up and herded back to their circus.

I suspect that this photo is a “re-enactment” because yesterday the only photos were of the elephants back in their places having a shower. But maybe someone took it at the time: it does seem to be dark out.

Friday cephalopod: glass invertebrates

Rudolph and Leopold Blaschka, a father-and-son team, are famous for creating the glass flowers at Harvard mentioned by Marianne Moore in a poem. They also created about 800 glass sculptures of marine invertebrates both large and small. The octopus above is one of the Blaschka’s glass sculptures of marine life. Their techniques have been lost and their work can not now be duplicated.

Links to more information:

• Glass animals collected and cleaned
• Blaschka glass model project
• Rudolph and Leopold Blaschka
• Dublin Blaschka Congress in 2006
• glass marine invertebrates at Harvard
• glass marine invertebrates at Cornell
• William Warmus, photographer, has photographed the Blaschka marine invertebrates
• glass flowers at Harvard Museum of Natural History–more than 3,000 glass models of plants made over fifty years

Parrots in Irvine Park

Tramping around Irvine Park in Orange County, California, I saw and heard three green parrot-like objects that were flying from one sycamore tree to another. Eventually, one of them roosted where I could see it. I took this picture with my digital camera on maxiumum digital zoom. I presume they are escapers from captivity or perhaps naturalized. But I don’t know the species.

Irvine Park

I passed along five books today to others who are interested in BookCrossing. That’s five books that I won’t have to take home. And someone else can enjoy them.

Then I went to Irvine Park where I saw quite a bit of wildlife, mostly birds: some kind of warbler, small dark catbirds, a green hummingbird with a red throat, ground squirrels, starlings (sigh), woodpeckers, huge ravens, mallards, wood ducks!!!, and some hybrid ducks. I heard peacocks and saw one, heard and saw three free-flying green parrots, mourning doves, and maybe a thrasher or two. And coots. And a lizard or two.

The park has lots of fieldstone buildings, including a nature centre, picnic shelters, washrooms, and a fieldstone bandstand. It has many large sycamore trees, some kind of black walnut, live oaks I think, and some huge trees. There’s one with a plaque that says it’s 220 years old.

On the way home I saw two red-tailed hawks, separately, sitting on lampposts over the road.

I saw a sora!

This morning I took a walk in the estuary at Newport Beach. The tide was fairly high, and coots and some ducks gathered around the fresh water pouring into Upper Newport Bay, sipping the water and bathing. Further south there were great blue herons and an inconspicuous bird near some tall grass. I wouldn’t have seen it except that it was flipping its pale tail. A trip to the bird book confirmed my guess: it was a sora.