A nice start to what might be a tolerable week* comes in the form of a message from Harvard’s rare books collection, the Houghton Library. Its collection of 114 early J.J. Audubon drawings is now online in high resolution. Among the treats, a depiction of two Ivory Billed Woodpeckers, the “lord god bird,” having their way with a tree.
According to the announcement, these early drawings are rare/of heightened interest because of Audubon’s practice of destroying sketches and alternate versions after selecting what he saw as the best of any subject. The earliest images in this collection date back to when Audubon was 18, and, says Harvard, they probably survived Audubon’s rolling erasure of his tracks in the hands of one of his patrons. In any event, the images are gorgeous, and there for the gazing.
That said, the image above is a later Audubon not from the Houghton collection, as Harvard requires permission from the curator before reusing their images. I’m asking for same; if I get it, I’ll add one from this trove.
*Hah! Who am I kidding. There are still Republicans with actual power!
Image: John James Audubon, Plate 66 of Birds of America, depiction of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker, 1838.
Villago Delenda Est
What is needed in this country are Ivory Billed Woodpeckers going after Rethuglican peckerwoods with gusto.
SiubhanDuinne
What a beautiful painting. I hope you get permission to share the earlier Audubon.
I also hope you will be able to participate in the Boston-area meetup this Saturday. Would love to meet you in person. Anne Laurie will make final decision on time/place, and post details.
SuperHrefna
This thread is seriously lacking in Sufjan Stevens’ song, The Lord God Bird: http://youtu.be/I-GDRP8eAtg
srv
Couldn’t sleep last night after Hawking declared the God Particle is the new boogeyman.
Origuy
@Villago Delenda Est: Unfortunately, the Ivory Billed Woodpecker is probably as extinct as Liberal Republicans. No confirmed sightings have been made since 1940. (The birds, that is. Liberal Republicans hung on until the 80s.)
BGinCHI
Bird on the lower right looks like Michele Bachmann.
NotMax
At one time, shared a house with a friend (now long deceased) who was veddy, veddy rich and also veddy, veddy clinically nuts*. Dated his family’s arrival in America (and his farm) back to 1640-something. House chock-a-block with antiques.
Had to go up into the attic one time and there, moldering on a shelf, was the complete 8 volume double elephant folio Audobon set. In the cedar closet in the attic was a box marked “books” which had nothing but first editions – trifles such as Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer amongst them.
*Oh, the stories one could tell!
Villago Delenda Est
@BGinCHI: It’s the eye.
Elizabelle
Or The Good Lord Bird. Terrific book about John Brown, by James McBride. Still reading, so no spoilers.
NotMax
@Elizabelle
The butler, in the solarium, with Rosebud.
gussie
“Harvard requires permission from the curator before reusing their images.”
What do we think about this?
Montysan0
@Origuy:
Probably. There were some fairly credible sightings a few years back, but nothing recent.
Roger Moore
@Montysan0:
You must be talking about the Ivory Bill, because there haven’t been any credible sightings of moderate Republicans for a while longer than that.
SuperHrefna
@Roger Moore: My stepfather tells me tales of his parents, who were moderate Republicans. But my stepfather is 83 years old. And democratic to the bone.
Villago Delenda Est
@Elizabelle: SPOILER ALERT
John Brown is hit by an iceberg, and sinks in the North Atlantic with thousands of lives lsot.
Eric U.
there were even liberal Republicans at one time. They pretty much got screwed over by the Gingrich “revolution” and are gone now.
rikyrah
here’s a hint…..
YOU CAN’T GET INSURANCE TO PAY FOR OVER THE COUNTER….
uh huh
uh huh
………………
The GOP and birth control
The Charlotte Observer
Posted: Sunday, Sep. 07, 2014
Thom Tillis, in his Wednesday night debate with U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan, joined a growing number of election-year Republicans in support of over-the-counter birth control pills without a prescription. That’s quite a turnaround for the N.C. House Speaker, who is challenging incumbent Hagan for her North Carolina U.S. Senate seat.
In the past, Tillis has been less than friendly towards N.C. women’s reproductive rights. He led efforts in the N.C. legislature to block funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides contraceptives as well as other health services. And he pushed through an unwise bill mandating that doctors show ultrasound images and describe the fetus in detail to women seeking abortions; a federal judge struck down the provision this year. He’s also said company health plans shouldn’t be required to cover birth control methods and that states should have the right to ban contraceptives. He also supports so-called “personhood amendments” that grant legal protections to fertilized human eggs, which the American College of Obstetrician and Gynecologists says could ban some forms of birth control.
Other Republican candidates now publicly favoring over-the-counter birth control pills without a prescription have expressed similar views. So, this change of heart has the pungent odor of politicking.
Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/09/07/5152701/the-gop-and-birth-control.html##storylink=cpy
Bobby B.
Let’s hear it for poultry in general, roasted or fried it’s all good.
gogol's wife
@BGinCHI:
It does! Crazy eyes!
Joel Hanes
Um, there are three woodpeckers in that painting, not two.
slag
I don’t know if anyone has mentioned this Milbank article on the minimum wage yet, but it’s actually good: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-no-calamity-yet-as-seatac-wash-adjusts-to-15-minimum-wage/2014/09/05/d12ba922-3503-11e4-9e92-0899b306bbea_story.html (via Benen).
It highlights what sociopaths business owners can be to get what they want. Lying liars and assholes who will never alter their worldview no matter the evidence. Bootstrap mythologists.
Belafon
@Villago Delenda Est: My youngest son had to make a boat this weekend because they are going to talk about buoyancy. We decided to make it out of an egg carton. After just getting it together and making sure it would float, he decided to decorate it: He called it the SS Mini Titanic, and took some white felt, cut an iceberg shape and attached it to the front corner.
slag
@Joel Hanes: The linked image is different from the FP image.
jeffreyw
@srv: The god particle is like a bull, fuck with it and it’s like this thread of existence is a china shop. Or something.
Another Holocene Human (now with new computer)
If you haven’t see Ferguson COPS by Funny or Die yet, here it is:
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/ad367f9f68/cops-ferguson
Another Holocene Human (now with new computer)
Been reading about #gamergate at Futrelle’s place. Sick stuff.
Somebody last week said of Reddit and 4chan they were wondering where all the trolls from usenet went. Ugh.
SA used to be a bigtime nest of these assholes too but it seems like Lotax went through some personal growth and there was a Great Bannination. Now the forums are what I’ve just found out 4channers derisively call a “hugbox”.
Denial and 4chan go hand in hand. My brother used to be on that site all the time and he told me that 4channers hate child porn. I said if they hate it so much, while is it being posted constantly to delete it? It’s one of the only places on the open net (not the darknet or IRC backchannels and so on) where you can just lurk and DL CP. Kind of opened my brother’s eyes. But it’s kind of like Anonymous itself, a bunch of idealistic script kiddiez who are in serious denial about everything, especially about what kind of place 4chan is.
dance around in your bones
Ok, this is vaguely related because LORD BIRD! but this video of a puppy and a magpie playing together in Australia is just awesome. My mom sent it to me :)
Watch the magpie swinging on the laundry at about 3:18.
srv
So Thursday, flustered with the unusability of modern ironing boards, I wailed “why hasn’t someone invented a home dry cleaning machine yet?”
I can’t stand it when confirmation bias and solipsism merge. Probably destablilizes that Damn God Particle.
http://www.wired.com/2014/09/heres-a-500-dry-cleaning-machine-that-fits-in-your-closet/
Another Holocene Human (now with new computer)
This is kind of funny, given that a mechanical “hugbox” is part of a proposed therapy for Asperger’s syndrome. Receiving therapy for your sensory disorder or your emotional blockages is so, so bad, you say?
All of this shit could make me feel old because I spent much of my adolescence wading in internet cesspools, but you know what? I can look back at everything I did, how much I’ve grown, how much I’ve changed, and I’m proud. And I feel bad for these adolescents look for a “grown-up” unsupervised place to hang out and all they find are borderline or actually criminal overgrown manchildren (perhaps these days some womenchildren as well, maybe not so much on ‘chan but on PHP forums and playing WoW during US daylight hours, truth is I ran up against some of these back in the day as well) and lots and lots of other teenagers and pre-teens all trying to look cool and more experienced and worldly than they really are. When you lag your peers in emotional development, and I did, then sometimes childish places are exactly what draws you in. I spent so many hours on Slashdot thinking it was the place to really rub elbows with industry greats. (I ragequit programming almost a decade ago. And I’m not exaggerating, I mean I was so frustrated at Bill Gates and his janky BASIC that I was past throwing darts at his photo and well into ripping it up, burning it, and stomping on it while offering up prayers to whatever West African god is the patron of tormenting your enemies.)
I don’t know if it’s these stupid irresponsible site owners that let bad places happen with bad stuff going on, or if it would happen anyway on IRC but if it is on IRC there’s going to be less of it because people are lazy and navigating IRC takes patience. I’m not sure why 4chan hasn’t been shut down with the criminal behavior going on there. Reddit, well, they stay online because they know that women aren’t people so what would be criminal acts against men aren’t criminal acts against women and girls so no worries.
As long as local police are sexist, bully pigs and the FBI won’t touch any cyber crime which doesn’t have a lot of dollar signs behind it, you can be as anti-social and technically criminal as you want and nothing will ever come of it.
gogol's wife
@dance around in your bones:
That is a brave bird!
Another Holocene Human (now with new computer)
@slag: That was good. Thanks for the tip.
$15 is not going to break their or anyone’s bank. You gotta wonder why they’re being such douchebags. “The principal of the thing”? That union thug did say something about disproving trickle down economics.
Another Holocene Human (now with new computer)
@gussie: Harvard doesn’t have to play as nice with other academies because they’re Harvard. Other universities and colleges engage in way more professional courtesy to scholars and institutions.
Is Harvard’s scholarship better? Is there a point to their snobbiness? Who knows. But they’re Harvard.
If you’re going to hate them, hate them for acquiring land under straw buyers, Disney style, and then yoinking that land out from the tax base. And, oh, they don’t confine themselves to Cambridge, (which has an astonishing degree of poverty, I mean truly astonishing), no, they’ve made beachheads in Brighton, they’ve made raids on the plains of Watertown. At one point they so damaged Watertown’s finances that they had the State Lege coming after them and they coughed up a “donation”, much like the French Catholic Church before the Revolution, to dispell the ill will.
Hate especially Harvard Business School. Because they suck. And because they partially exist to help wealthy asshole businesses better exploit their marks and cut the sinews of an activist government. Which hardly seems like a “non profit” mission to me. HBS’ massive structures are the Lenin statues of the Boston area. In your face pour encourager les autres.
Roger Moore
@Another Holocene Human (now with new computer):
They’re so focused on their own businesses that they don’t see the bigger picture. Their picture is that they’ll have to raise prices to pay the higher wages, that will drive everyone to their competitors, and that will cause their businesses to tank. They’re missing that all their competitors have to pay higher wages, too, which means they’ll raise prices at the same time. The net result is at most a modest drop in business from the small increase in prices.
slag
@Roger Moore: That’s what it seems like. All they know is the economics of competition. They have no insight into ecosystems.
Some of it, though, I have to chalk up to knavery. It hurts them if someone somewhere is getting something they don’t think is deserved, so they’ll do whatever they can to prevent that from happening. If they think fear will get them what they want, they’ll use fear–no matter how irrational. If it can work to start wars in the Middle East, it can work to keep wages down.
Belafon
@Roger Moore: So many of them also miss the fact that wages are not actually a big part of their costs. This increase won’t add as much as they want to think it will.
catclub
I think the image here is more useful than the linked one of two birds. Showing the heart shape of the wings of the red headed bird is particularly useful to this non-specialist.
slag
@Roger Moore: “The net result is at most a modest drop in business from the small increase in prices.”
Also, I wouldn’t count on this. There is quite a bit of evidence showing that minimum wage increases are correlated with better economies: http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/reich/article/Raising-minimum-wage-creates-jobs-boosts-economy-5298319.php. At the very least, there’s been very little evidence that economies have been harmed at all as a result of wage increases.
catclub
@Roger Moore: They are also missing that higher wages might mean more custom from people like their employees. Thank you Henry Ford.
Another Holocene Human (now with new computer)
@Roger Moore: See, if they increase wages because it’s the law, so does everyone else. Not only that, but custom should increase. Like Henry Ford figured out, everyone gets more prosperous in a virtuous cycle.
It’s mostly big franchise businesses whose business model is harmed by higher wages precisely because it levels the playing field for indies. Darden and Brinker, although Darden are the bigger assholes here, have to extract an extra product by squeezing food and labor costs while distributing risk to franchisers. But trying to wangle economies of scale in restaurant business doesn’t always work.
Small restaurants often struggle to pay their employees enough to keep them because their model depends on competent short order cooks and smart, dedicated wait staff. Darden cooks and sells on a formulary so their staff is disposable. Bring in clueless newbies and do a shift of training and you’re off. So if everyone had to raise their wages Darden would not have that advantage any longer. And customers can tell the difference between Darden’s precooked microwave shit and real food. Look at how badly Red Lobster has done during an economic downturn when all the social climbers had their credit cards cut up? The truly wealthy, the top 20% who own stocks and have had their stocks gain value on a raging bull market, are not eating at these crapshacks. These chains depended on business travel that businesses, universities, and government agencies are just very reluctant to pay for these days.
Plus, I think like @slag says, it’s partially ideological. Darden makes money when lower middle class people feel like they have cash to go to spendy places, which is Olive Garden and Red Lobster for special occasions. When those people are hurting, those restaurants lose money. Rather than trying to butter their bread by lobbying to improve the economy for everyone Darden chose to sell Red Lobster. Uh huh.
Schlemizel
@Another Holocene Human (now with new computer):
can’t watch at work but will look it up later.
Saw Second City in CHicago about 45 years ago & they did a blackout bit between scenes:
BAND! BANG! BANG! [gunshots]
“POLICE STOP OR WE’LL SHOOT!”
Eric U.
@Roger Moore: most businesses don’t even have to raise prices. A fast food restaurant is going to pay another couple of hundred per shift when they are pulling in $10k-$30k a shift. There are more marginal businesses that might be affected, for example bike shops during the off season and that sort of thing. But those aren’t the business owners you are hearing about. The example in the article was a parking company. They are raising their price a dollar a day to cover the minimum wage, I’m guessing a significant amount of that is profit
@Belafon: most small business owners are not good at math. Tell them they are going to have to double the pay of their workers, and they panic. They can’t do the math to figure out that’s really a pretty small amount of money. Same thing with the scheduling optimization that’s ruining the lives of their workers, in the end it has to be costing them money.
Gex
@Another Holocene Human (now with new computer): Reddit’s an interesting thing for me to think about, just because I was on Reddit really early while all the gamers/nerd purists/mras were still on Digg. And so for me it is those guys who came in and ruined a good thing, not this brown, gay, female who invaded their turf.
It was sad when Reddit turned that corner.
Schlemizel
I think the bigger “problem” with paying $15 for a McJob is that a lot of people who currently make $10-12 for more demanding work may decide to give up assembly & work at KFC. Of course those other jobs will have to raise wages above $15 to compete and it would be horrible if that happened! The working class might forget their place and we can’t have that. In a worst case scenario workers might actually be able to support their families on a single job instead of 2 or 3 jobs.
Eric U.
@Schlemizel: I’ve seen reports that there are skilled welders on government jobs making less than $10 an hour. Skilled machinists that don’t make a lot more than $15 an hour. It’s ridiculous. If you are wondering why Cletus thinks he “wants his country back,” that’s a big source of the anger. These are jobs that should pay a very good wage, putting the worker comfortably in the middle class. Not only that, but they can’t really be outsourced overseas economically, so that shouldn’t have an effect on the wages. If the minimum wage is restored to a reasonable rate, things will improve across the board.
IIRC, inflation adjusted minimum wage has been over $17 an hour.
Another Holocene Human (now with new computer)
@Eric U.: And here’s the kicker: you’re gonna lay people off in the off season if your custom dries up. So you either find another business line to even it out or you find a way to make seasonal employment work. A lot of small businesses do temporary and seasonal employment–bridal shops, florists shops, candy shops, ice cream shops.
Another Holocene Human (now with new computer)
@Eric U.:
Franchise owners are a special breed of asshole. They’ll never see reason b/c it doesn’t exist for them. That’s why these fast food workers are in the streets.
Another Holocene Human (now with new computer)
@Gex: Heh, yeah, I vaguely the whole reddit versus digg thing. As for reddit getting reddited, it’s not over, I mean look at what happened to r/politics in the last few years.
Kinda makes those folks that got into MeFi when the getting was good look really shrewd.
I never really did reddit and digg because I was bored by their front pages, preferring I guess “curated” content.
This has been going on with certain political and newspaper sites, too, the deliberate takeover of comments sections by determined libertarian or right wing conservative troll crews.
Another Holocene Human (now with new computer)
@Schlemizel: What is REALLY stupid are the people making $13/hr scorning the min wage workers demanding $15 because then they wouldn’t be able to look down on them.
The notion that it would shake up the labor market and allow them to demand higher wages from their employer doesn’t penetrate their thicks skulls.
People like that REALLY make me want to throw in the towel. Okay, Florida! Wallow in your 3rd world trashheap! It’s okay because you made that other guy sit in a bit with baby diapers and you can spit on him from your burned out tv’s tower. Fuckers.
slag
Thank you! I hear this argument all the time, and it makes me crazy.
In my dreamworld, higher minimum wages would put just enough pressure on the wage curve to start eating a bit out of the high end. “Spread the wealth around a bit”, as some people have been known to say. If that happens, everyone will benefit. Even the jackasses who will never ever realize as much.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
I think that depends a lot on what their business is. If they’re serving mostly a working class clientele, that’s probably true, unless they’re scraping the barrel so hard that improving the lot of their customers will drive them to higher-end establishments. Businesses that are mostly serving wealthier customers- I suspect the parking lot near the airport probably counts- probably won’t. Of course, those wealthier customers may not be quite as price sensitive as people who are just scraping by.
Villago Delenda Est
@catclub: Adam Smith had that figured out over two centuries ago.
But then again, no one actually reads Adam Smith.
JR in WV
We live in heavy forest, second growth after farming the ridges and hilltops removed the top soil. Wild Turkey, lots of all kinds of woodpeckers, Pileated Woodpeckers are common, and probably the sole living and common species anything like the Ivory Billed Woodpecker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pileated_woodpecker
They are huge, with black and white markings that as they fly away from a hiker in the woods, form semicircles of black and white, with a bright red cockade, as they scream like a dinosaur flying in your woods.
We also have Flickers, Downy, Red Headed, and others I’m not enough of a birder to remember. I once saw a dead Pileated Woodpecker on a barrel in an elderly neighbor’s barnyard. He told me he shot it with a 28 gauge shotgun, a difficult shot for anything. I think he believed that the woodpeckers damaged the trees, instead of removing insects doing real damage to the trees.
Given that he was nearly 80, and taught me a whole lot about farming and the old ways of country life, I couldn’t see my way to turning him in, which would probably not have caused him any real legal trouble, but would have ruined my relationship with my next door neighbors.
They are gorgeous wonderful deep woods birds. Just hearing them in the woods is a spine tingling event, much like hearing a flock of owls hooting it up on the ridge behind the house.
I so hope there are Ivory Billed Woodpeckers in the deepest swamps of the southern cypress woods, hiding so wisely from the people who have done them so wrong.