Bigfoot is back in the news in Tampa Bay:
From the news report:
TAMPA – Bigfoot is back on the radar at a Tampa Bay park.
If you recall over the Christmas holiday a fisherman sent us a picture of what he is calling a creature wading through a swamp near USF.
Now a second person sent us a different photo of a footprint.
The authorities (i.e., the park ranger who rides around the area in a golf cart all day to keep USF students from smoking pot and / or shagging on the park trails) are skeptical. But it’s possible an entire community of skunk apes is living right under our noses.
What’s up today? We’re kid-free for most of the day, so we may go on a Bigfoot search. Or perhaps we’ll investigate an even more elusive phenomenon by looking for a Rays win during Spring Training.
ETA: Dave Holmes at Esquire wrote an open letter to Kid Rock in which he asked Rock to stop being an obtuse prick about using the word “gay” as a pejorative. It’s awesome. You can read it here.
Bobby Thomson
They need to work on that one.
BillinGlendaleCA
So that’s what the kids are calling it these days.
Steeplejack
“Skunk apes.” Heh. I think I know a few.
satby
Passed up the chance to go to breakfast with a friend 100 miles away (we meet in the middle) because I have to wrap and label 48 soaps and bath bombs for a store. And then deliver them. Wish me luck it all sells!
Botsplainer
I remember when “The Legend of Boggy Creek” was THE movie to see.
Punchy
I’m seeing that “75F” in the corner and realizing most of us are many weeks away from those temps…
Iowa Old Lady
It’s supposed to be above freezing every day for the next week. I go outside and dance naked.
Raven
Not bad sitting outside at the bakery, 32 and rising! It’s funhouse here on the weekends when people that don’t know Bohdi come and are amazed at his ball skills. I usually tell the we found him here and show them pics of the day we found him.
OzarkHillbilly
@satby: It will.
Baud
@Raven:
You found him at a bakery?
gelfling545
Mewtant had his vet appointment yesterday, got his shots, nails clipped, flea meds & general exam. He went into the cat carrier like a gentleman & was very sweet at the vet’s office, even when they took his temperature! On our last excursion I ended up bloody & cursing (which was why this one was put off until the absolutely last minute), so this was new. Some sort of feline psychological warfare, perhaps. For an elderly cat who lives half the year on rodents & roadkill, he is amazingly healthy. I’m wondering if he will take off again in the spring or will elect to remain here given his advanced age.
At the moment Flora is annoying the crap out of him so it’s a toss-up.
Walker
How is it even possible to get a picture that blurry with a modern camera? That is the most impressive thing about that picture.
Baud
@Walker:
John Cole must have taken them.
HeartlandLiberal
Finally feel like I am getting over flu that has had me down for past nearly two weeks. Going to Indiana vs Michigan State basketball game at noon. Last home game. Gave my tickets to neighbor for the last one, I was too sick to go. Think I am well enough to make it. One last chance to watch Indiana finish its slide from promise into irrelevance over the past dozen games. Fans are calling for Crean’s head, which is not gonna happen, and should not at this point. Despite everything, we started the season expecting to be in the basement, and the team greatly exceeded those expectations. Besides, it would cost something like 10 – 12 million to buy out his contract before July 1. Which is perfect insane illustration of how broke and corrupt and out of control major revenue broadcast sports have become, but there it is. We are an entertainment society. What I do not understand is Crean’s refusal to discipline his players when they play like sand box wanna be hot shots, and blow it. He will not pull them off the floor to sit and think about their stupidity.
gogol's wife
@Iowa Old Lady:
It’s supposed to be 50 here on Wed! Huzzah! But then “1 to 3 inches of snow and ice” a couple of days later.
WereBear
@satby: Luck!
The first time I went to college a lot of my fellow students lived in a trailer park near the Green Swamp in Florida. And 3/4’s of them had a skunk ape story.
WereBear
I regard that as a far more healthful diet than the stuff that is sold in bags at the grocery store. Cats are not horses, and should not be fed as such.
Snarkworth
@gelfling545: Glad Mewtant is doing well. Spencer now has to be sedated before his exams. Two vets, armed with those shoulder-length gloves, couldn’t handle him. He roared like a lion and pooped all over the floor.
Nice kitty.
satby
Maggie dog update… she’s holding her own. She’s been having moments of ataxia but with prednisone and pain killer has gotten closer to acting more like herself. She loves to be in the “big dog” pack with Hershey and Rosie, who seem to understand Maggie is ill and are gentle with her. We’ve only bought a bit of time for her, but it’s quality time.
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: @WereBear: Thanks guys!
Mustang Bobby
Prepping for a big car show tomorrow in downtown Coral Gables in conjunction with a street carnival that takes up five blocks of Miracle Mile, the main drag through the business section. We’re on the other side of the big cross street so we should get a good crowd. 57 cars signed up so far ranging from a 1924 Buick to my 1988 Pontiac, and the weather forecast is for partly cloudy and 80.
I am sure a number of the participants will show up an hour late because of the start of DST.
debbie
@satby:
Good luck! Spring seems like the best time of year to try something new.
JPL
@satby: That is exciting and I’m sure they will sell.
I’m going to whole foods. Before I leave the house, I have to make sure the bathroom doors are closed because my mutt climbs on the counter and sleeps in the sink. I’m afraid that he is going to hurt himself because he’s not that big. He’s also the mutt that catches mice.
OzarkHillbilly
@Mustang Bobby:
Already?!???!!?
Steeplejack (phone)
@JPL:
He’s a cat trapped in a dog’s body. He needs trans-species assignment surgery.
JPL
@Steeplejack (phone): Ben Carson would probably volunteer to do the surgery. It’s actually good to have an agile dog because you never ever leave food out and you tend to make sure everything is put away.
gelfling545
@WereBear: I’ve been feeding him grain free since it became available, supplemented over the summer with, as i say, rodents & roadkill. Also chicken & fish in the winter. For a semi-feral cat, he dines well & expensively when he graces us with his presence.
MomSense
Last night the pup refused to go outside to pee because it was so cold. She ran to the bathroom and peed in the shower right over the drain.This morning she asked to go back in the bathroom and I had to drag her outside.
Is she a genius or is this a terrible new twist on housebreaking?
WereBear
@MomSense: I vote for genius.
Who among us, faced with such a choice, would not chose the same way she did?
Mustang Bobby
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah, it springs up on you.
[rimshot]
Thanks, I’ll be here all week. Don’t forget to try the veal and tip your servers.
bemused
@gelfling545:
Mewtant is a fantastic name. Do people in the vet waiting room start grinning when a staff member comes in and says the vet is ready for Mewtant now?
geg6
@MomSense:
That’s hilarious. Sorry, I know it’s a bit of a pain for you, but at least the pup aimed for the drain!
Raven
@Baud: Yep, we’ve been walking here for 15 years. Ten years ago we were getting our coffee and, sitting next to raven at the door, there he was!
OzarkHillbilly
@WereBear: Me. I pee in my front yard every chance I get. Because I can.
Raven
@HeartlandLiberal: He’s an asshole, Go Illini!
Big ole hound
@OzarkHillbilly: Peeing off the back porch is/was a requirement for every dwelling I’ve ever had. No neighbors close enough to care. Not that I did it much but….
raven
Bohdi and Raven day one.
Elizabelle
@raven: Darling pic. Puffball and patient soul.
Elizabelle
@Raven: So Bohdi chose you guys.
Elmo
@Big ole hound: I’m female, so the peeing part is more challenging, but I wouldn’t buy a house that didn’t allow me to go nekkid in the backyard.
Bathing suits in the hot tub is a waste.
OzarkHillbilly
@Big ole hound: A friend of mine had a song written about her called “Pissing for Distance: I got the Blue Ball Blues” after she shamed an entire band in a pissing contest off the roof of a Soulard bar.
MomSense
@WereBear: @geg6:
She was very pleased with herself! Gave me that “see the awesome thing I just did” look.
MomSense
@raven:
Adorable!
bemused
@raven:
I didn’t realize Bohdi was just a tiny baby when he found you. Who could just abandon a defenseless puppy like that!
I think you said Bohdi had some Samoyed in his pedigree. I can see that now in the pic, that baby face sure reminds of our Samoyed when that age.
Baud
@Raven: It was meant to be.
@raven: Always loved that pic.
Tenar Darell
@MomSense: @Steeplejack (phone): @Snarkworth: Oh you guys are making me laugh. Which is really interesting with this stupid cold i came down with yesterday to ruin my weekend. I was going to do crafts and lunch with little cousins, and then dinner with my father. /sigh
Josie
@raven: I love that picture. Raven’s face says it all. “You’ve brought me what?
bemused
@OzarkHillbilly:
You can also just blame the yellow grass spots in the lawn on the dogs or neighbors’s dogs.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: She saw you coming.
WereBear
@OzarkHillbilly: ’round here, it’s a recognized tactic to keep deer away.
Betty Cracker
@raven: I love that photo…the frolicking little fuzzball and the older doggy’s WTF expression. Classic.
ThresherK
Speaking of “In Search Of” fictitious beings, is there a single right-wing editorial cartoonist who doesn’t shit his bed full of stupid every week?
I ask because this place found a couple of non-idiots at “AmCon” which I barely believed could exist any longer, so I present you all with a greater challenge.
OzarkHillbilly
Obama is now a God: California farmers resign themselves to drought: ‘Nobody’s fault but God’s’
On the more serious side, they just aren’t paying attention. Sad and desperate people out there.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
And on the eighth day, God made hydrocarbons.
JPL
@raven: That picture is just priceless. Even though Raven is no longer with us, you should send it in for next years calendar. It’s adorable.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: It’s interesting how people seem to have forgotten that it was a desert before man came, that it wants to be a desert now, and it will be a desert again when man is forced to face the reality that there are limits to his ingenuity.
SiubhanDuinne
@raven:
You’ve posted that picture before, and it melts my heart every time.
satby
@WereBear: I agree. I had a cat that did that when I was tardy cleaning the litter box, and I actually appreciated his considerate behavior. Spritz of bleach water and a rinse and the shower’s ready for humanity.
I also had sons, and no one can convince me they didn’t pee in the shower, with worse aim.
Botsplainer
My hateful, passive-aggressive, racist, misanthropic and lazy grandmother finally passed away about 30 minutes ago, thereby ceasing her renewed excessive attack upon the financial reserves held by the Treasury Department of the United States of America. I figure that she cost a new $40,000.00 in the final two weeks of her life just in medical services. At 99 years of age, having never worked (and my grandfather has been dead for 25 years, having an extremely low contribution rate as an original entrant into Social Security and having retired at 62), she’s sucked up huge amounts of government resources for everything from hysterectomies to hip replacement, not to mention hauling money hand over fist out of SS on my granddad’s account.
She, of course, would blame all societal ills on colored folk on welfare.
I feel bad for my mom, who’s spent the last 40 years of her life in mostly daily service to my grandmother (it’s a monster time and attention hole), but otherwise, I’m going to have trouble screwing on a sad face for what few visitation/funeral attendees appear to offer condolences. It’ll be hard to avoid responding to “sorry for your loss” with an “I’m not” and doing a *boom* (mic drop).
WaterGirl
@MomSense: Genius!
I thought my pup was smart (decades ago) when it rained for 24 hours straight. She didn’t want to go out and get wet, so she scratched at the door, turned around so that her butt was (technically) outside and took a big poop on the porch while the rest of her was inside.
gogol's wife
@raven:
I never get tired of that pic.
satby
@raven: Oh, I love that picture! Calendar material for sure.
gogol's wife
@Botsplainer:
Try to behave well for your mother’s sake.
WaterGirl
@WereBear: I’m with you on that!
The professor from my criminology class said that instead of studying why people would choose to steal money we should instead be studying what keeps the rest of us from doing it.
JPL
@Botsplainer: So whats the proper response? Congrats on your loss? May your mom find some peace?
Neddy Merrill
Regarding the open letter to Kid Rock:
It’s kind of bullshit. The writer lists a number of things us gays had to overcome, dishonorable discharges etc., to get to where we are now. But somehow the slur “gay” is so devastating that Kid Rock and others should be…. Well, I don’t know what the writer really wants. Like I said, it’s kind of bullshit.
Mike in NC
@ThresherK: Glenn Foden is an extremely popular syndicated cartoonist across the Neo-Confederacy due to his racist depictions of President Obama. Probably unknown north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Mike in NC
Sorry, but asking “Kid Rock” to not be a prick is unpossible.
Baud
Feel good Booman post
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2015/3/7/10455/40272
WaterGirl
@Botsplainer: Forget your evil grandmother. At this point, it’s all about your mom, and this is likely one of the toughest things she has ever gone through.
WereBear
@Botsplainer: Well, yeah. Funerals tend to be a place where truth also goes to die.
Botsplainer
@gogol’s wife:
Oh, I will. I’ve been irritated beyond reason about this for 24 years, when I realized that my mother was so involved with my grandmother that it was going to interfere dramatically with my mom’s relationship with my kids – and my prediction was right. She so engrossed herself in coddling the laziness and misanthropy that she really didn’t have time for her grandchildren.
satby
@Botsplainer: Sometimes it’s a relief when they go, but precious little acceptance of that in polite society here. One of the reasons I’m glad for my Irish heritage, we’re allowed to call them as they are at the wake. If they were a pissy old pain, we can say so, as long as we add a ‘Bless ‘er” at the end.
OzarkHillbilly
@Botsplainer: Congratulations, but I have to say that it bothers me not in the least that some “milk the system” far beyond any reasonable contribution they may have made because the alternative means screwing people who just had bad luck.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Nominated for comment of the year.
Botsplainer
@OzarkHillbilly:
It’s not so much that she milked the system for probably close to $500,000.00, it’s that she milked it while constantly whining about “coloreds” on welfare.
I ought to get my dad a top shelf bottle of Pappy to toast with. He’s free, finally. Don’t know how he’s refraining from doing happy dances – he hated that woman.
Tenar Darell
@Botsplainer: I’m guessing this means that your kids have even less reason to care about the death of their great-grandmother. Puts more pressure on you to behave supportively for your mother. I wish you the patience to keep calm for your mom, and a drama free funeral. If you need a safe reply for all the condolences, maybe you say “She had and amazingly long life.” or “It was her time after 99 years.” It works, when you have nothing more to say.
Botsplainer
@Tenar Darell:
Last Saturday, my wife and I went to the hospital to placate my mom, who, unbeknownst to me, had gone to the nursing home to release the bed and clear personal items. We were alone, I was good to leave. My wife put me on the spot by asking me to recall some pleasant moment with her (in the thought that she might have a little function left). I honestly couldn’t – and still can’t – come up with a heartwarming tale of generosity or demonstrated affection. I remembered bunches of tirades at my grandfather, and had recalled some mildly amusing tale about her going apeshit the day he wheeled home in a Nash Metropolitan, so I told that.
scav
Thinking about it, a response along the lines of “She took more out of life than many are able.” could be interpreted in many ways.
bemused senior
Here’s a comment bleg: I am going on a road trip from CA to VA with my dog. After reading last Sunday’s nytimes mag about the Whitney Plantation I changed my planned route so I could visit it. They don’t let dogs in, so I need a dogsitter while I take the tour (approx. 2 hours). Does anyone in the Baton Rouge to NOLA area have a recommendation for a pet sitter? My boy is a beagle sized rescue, loves adult people, is scared of kids (though is fine if they don’t rush at him to pet him) but really doesn’t like other dogs. He was rescued from a hoarding situation with 100 dogs. You can reach me by commenting on the blog where I am planning my trip.
Botsplainer
@scav:
I like it! It’s vague enough, you can stage whisper “other people’s” to trusted confidants, and I can’t ruffle feathers with it.
I’m reminded of a conversation with my dad from several years back. He was whining that I never did anything to help with her during a period when I had three very extracurricular activity involved kids, one in high school and two in middle school. I asked him, point blank, “how many people does it take to care for one selfish, hateful, spoiled, lazy old woman? My plate is full.”
He shut up on that note.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Botsplainer:
Tenar and scav probably have the best responses. There’s only so much honesty you can put forward at a funeral, but there’s no need to lie and pretend to be grief-stricken if you aren’t.
Tenar Darell
@bemused senior: Only helpful suggestion I’ve got is that Cole’s opened a new Open Thread with the pups’ pic below, you should re-post this there too. Have a great trip! Sure would like to hear about the plantation during or after your trip. /hinting shamelessly
raven
Couple o’ knuckle heads!
Tenar Darell
@Botsplainer: My sympathies. My grandmother, who could be truly terrible to my father, was loving and great towards me, but also terrible towards my brother. (Seriously my brother, especially as a child, looked like a carbon copy of my dad even in photos; I’m guessing it was simply too much for her).
Going abstract and philosophical: the distance between grandparents and grandchildren etc. is only going to increase as people live longer and longer unless the greats and grands make extra efforts to stay connected. It’s going to be interesting to watch it play out, no?
trollhattan
@OzarkHillbilly:
It’s a big ol’ mess, to be sure, and the return of rain and snow are the only resolution but this year has gone too far for that to be in the cards so…Drought Year #4 here we come.
Ugh.
trollhattan
@Mike in NC:
He always struck me as a few machine guns short of becoming Ted Nugent.
Ruckus
@OzarkHillbilly:
I live in that desert and I have to remind people all the time that it was, that it is and that in any measurable human yrs it will always be one. Interesting tidbit is that the Channel Islands, miles off the coast, east of Ventura have no water source and all the plants are desert plants that need very little water, existing only on moisture in the air, fog and what little rain there is. Literally desert islands surrounded by water.
Ruckus
@Botsplainer:
I had a long screed all typed up about family funerals but I read it before hitting submit so here’s my take. A funeral is for the living, make of it what you want. But remember that not everyone may think the same way as you. For that I like the answer @scav: gave you.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Ruckus:
Technically, most of the populated parts of So Cal range between Mediterranean and semi-arid (warm steppe) climates. You have to get out past San Bernardino to get to true desert conditions.
Betty Cracker
@Neddy Merrill: It’s not bullshit, and it’s plain as fucking day what the writer wants —to anyone with elementary school-level reading skills, anyway. He wants Rock to stop using the word “gay” as a pejorative. It’s really not that hard.
Betty Cracker
@Botsplainer: I’ll just second / third those who noted that the funeral is for the living. If you can support your mom without having to pretend grief you don’t feel, that would probably mean a lot to her.