If you’ve ever wondered what bats look like one the best times to look them up is by day. Though they are mostly nocturnal they aren’t entirely inert in daylight. Fortunately a whole bunch of them roost in Sydney’s Botanical Garden. The garden was once a vegetable patch for the early colonists, but it has since been turned into a 30 acre preserve for exotic plants. If you’ve ever wanted to see what a baobab looks, there are some there. The Little Prince was forever worried that baobabs would turn his little planet to dust. It’s not going to happen any time soon.
“It is true, isn’t it, that sheep eat little bushes?”
“Yes, that is true.”
“Ah! I am glad!”
I did not understand why it was so important that sheep should eat little bushes. But the little prince added:
“Then it follows that they also eat baobabs?”
I pointed out to the little prince that baobabs were not little bushes, but, on the contrary, trees as big as castles; and that even if he took a whole herd of elephants away with him, the herd would not eat up one single baobab.
There aren’t any elephants in the Botanical Garden. But there are a fair number of weddings. Besides the baobabs there are men in tuxedos starting out their lives cheek by jowl with bohemians in flip flops who have never begun theirs. The best way to get to the bats is to take a train to Milson’s Point which lets you get off near the Harbor Bridge. Then it’s down through the old town past tunnels cut in solid rock by convicts. Some distance past the Opera House is the gate to the gardens.
In times past I’ve followed the shoreline as far as the roads would let me all the way around the south head. There on a rocky headland between Bondi Beach and Coogee there’s an cemetery where the graves look out to sea, dreaming their long slow dream of England. But I was not going so far today.
A wedding in the garden
Here’s some video of the way down to quay and the bats.
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For a year I lived in a pica-pau (wattle and daub) cabin in Brasil. The electrical wiring looped along the rooms’ ceilings and provided bats with a purchase to hang from unless we kept the shutters closed to keep them out altogether. But that was too hot, so we just put up with, and cleaned up, the little piles of bat shit under the wires. The seeds in the droppings changed over the months as different plants began fruiting.
Nice try W. but it won’t work. Today is a day that will live in infamy if Obama and the traitors in Congress get their way.
IF SO, Today will be the day that every American who is willing to protect and preserve this Republic will harken back to when he or she goes against this criminal government that we have brought down upon not only our heads but the heads of our descendants.
God Save Our Republic, but God fearing American’s (and others) are not going to just rely on divine intervention. We are going to help ourselves and our Republic and come what may, destroy those that oppose us and want to rape our Republic.
No matter how long it takes or how hard it is.
Those 16,000 additional IRS agents better come loaded for bear. There will be no mercy, no compromise and no dollars for this corrupt, government.
For fifty years we have failed our Founders and their ideals. That is over. We will now take up our responsibilities and duties that we have neglected to our shame.
Mark my words and the words of millions of other Americans.
Papa Ray
Contained in this article is just a fabulous quickly grasped quick summary of the history of the relationship beteen the rights of men, God, & the state. As well, it may represent an interesting sea change considering–that they’re talking about the 9th Circuit Court in California.
Ken Blackwell :: Townhall.com Columnist
Liberal Ninth Circuit Praises Limited Government
I just viewed your video with my 11 yr old son. We got 5 inches of snow here last night (Kansas City) and it is so delightful to see trees and leaves even bats in Australia. My son wants to know if it ever snows in Sydney? I read today that Al Gore calls spring Global Warming – I can agree with him on that!
In Austin, Texas you can see big flocks of bats at sunset. They roost under the bridge over the river and come out around then.
I think the time has come in America to study the Greeks- not the philosophy or the drama or the poetry or any of that crap, but the tax evasion. Living with a cornucopia of benefits is nice as long as somebody else is paying for it.
Name of the restaurant? Lots of small tables, white linen (or butcher block paper maybe), black metal chairs, windows on two or three sides?
Bats, like the Okapi and the Platypus, remind us that the world is a far more complex place than the human mind can immagine. God is not on incomprehensible but possibly equipped with a sense of humor.
Will the Ianians be rewarded for their nuclear efforts with offspring half human and half beast?
This has been a Spring weekend to appreciate life without politics. Still I like that Bill Clinton ridiculed Al Gore for thinking that Spring is proof of Global Warming. In New York yesterday wass a day for a stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge, with bicycle nazis yelling at people, and icecream at Fulton Landing. Both there yesterday and today in Central Park there have been Chinese girls in wedding dresses getting photographed. Life goes on.
Carlsbad Caverns in southern New Mexico is a great bat experience. They leave the cavern right at dusk, and there is a presentation area where you can watch it happen. It is a fascinating natural park, and conveniently only 40 miles south of Roswell which is fun place for seeing some people that are batty.
Quick bat swarm out of Carlsbad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSKQiMyZB-A
And this one is nice too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJwJfKRC5VE
There are moonbats on my teewee.
Karl Rove on ABC this morning, obviously taking some advice and getting animated about the health care bill and going on about double-counting. Let’s hear the word “fraud”. Let’s hear the word “incompetent”. Let’s hear the word “dishonest”.
The leftoid moonbat moans that insurance companies will no longer be able to cancel insurance for preexisting conditions while you’re on the way to the hospital (as Blue Cross has been known to do). But that is actionable in court already, and the state of California already cracked down on the company for doing this, and additional legislation (like you cannot do this retroactively, or for 30 days, or without affirmative proof of intention to defraud) would be a quick and easy bill.
I despair of this bill, the most fraudulent in American history – and that even counts the Digital whatever bill, that everyone knew was unconstitutional, but they voted for it anyway just to feel good, until the court overturned those parts a year or so later. This bill, should it pass (as seems likely), will have parts repealed and changed drastically over the next months and years, and will still cause all sorts of trouble.
It will be what it will be. And I for one will not live in fear of the future. I for one will do my best to do my duty to GOD, Family and Country. I will be a man of Honor. I will be a man of virtue. This will be the example for others to see.
” God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Bats are amazing and creepy. Which is why young boys love them I suppose. Although this attraction to bats would be less if said boys were to actually see them up close and personal. Maybe not, I have had a life long fascination with spiders precisely due to a up close and personal encounter.
In conjunction with my above comment…In another thread, toad made a very important comment.
Here is a snippet of it:
He knows of what he speaks.
Papa Ray
Moonbats.
…-
“Y2Kyoto: It’s Not Easy Getting Green
I admit to being surprised by this;
The Hagars built their 2,700-square-foot house by stacking tire bales—five-foot-wide blocks of compressed tires—to form the exterior walls. They plugged gaps between the bales with cans, bottles, plastic plates, and other junk and moved in toward the end of 2008.
“We lovingly call it the trash house,” Ms. Hagar says. The Hagars covered up all that trash with concrete, clay and stucco and installed south-facing windows to capture light, heat and views of the snowy slopes.
To pay for it, the Hagars in 2007 took out a $240,000 line of credit from Red Rocks Credit Union in suburban Denver. In the old days of easier credit, appraiser Lori Slota couldn’t find another tire-bale home that had recently sold but said the house would be valued at $500,000 when complete, citing the listing of a straw-bale home as well as other houses in the area.
Last year, with the home finally finished and interest rates at record lows, the Hagars started trying to refinance into a long-term, fixed-rate mortgage. But in February 2009, they got the bad news from loan officer Bill Schimel, who wrote in an email, “I think we have really hit a brick wall here.”
I’d always assumed such projects were self-financed.”
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/
In 1984, I had occasion to go to Taipei and I stayed at the lovely JAL Hotel. I asked the concierge about good routes for my morning run. He said after my run, I should visit “Blood Alley” nearby.
At 6 AM I noticed a pet store was open with all kinds of wierd animals, including 4-5 fruitbats hanging in the window. There were snakes and dogs and spiders of all kinds inside. It was not a pet store, it was grocery store.
Just a few shops away was a place where one could pick out a live cobra, have its blood drained into a glass, for consumption while waiting for your skinned snake to be charbroiled. It’s a cultural thing.
Baobab,Drago…
do you know the oldest tree ? it’s a drago of 1000 years in Tenerife
http://hubpages.com/hub/More-than-just-a-Dragon-Tree-in-Icod-de-los-Vinos
seems that they are dying cause of the tap water that is used to water them
Charles #3
I think it’s Papa Ray that quotes Justice Alex Kazinski of the 9th circuit regularly:
“The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed—where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.”
There is some cause for optimism.
2. Papa Ray
Great comment. I’ve been reading sentiments like that all over the internet for the past few days (and writing them, too). This really will be the last straw for a lot of people.
Back to the topic, when I was living in apartment I once got a bat inside one night. I opened the screens on a couple of windows hoping it would fly out, but it ended up roosting in a bookshelf. It was still there the next morning and I left for work, trusting that my two cats would take care of it if it came back out.
It was a busy day at work, and believe it or not, when I came back home I had forgotten all about the bat. I was sitting in the living room watching TV when I saw a dark blur out of the corner of my eye in the hallway, followed immediately by two cats in hot pursuit. It flew around for awhile with the cats running around, and eventually it came to rest on the living room floor. I had nothing against the bat and just wanted to get it out of there, but I also wanted to give the cats a chance to kill and eat it if they were so inclined. But they didn’t really do anything with it, so I eventually caught it in a jar and tossed it out the window. The cats gave me a look as if to say, “What did you do that for?”
A game we used to play to see bats was to wait until dusk, when the sky was still lighted and toss small stones up into the air. As the stones paused at the top of the trajectory bats would lock onto the objects with their radar, assume they were insects, and dart toward them. As the stones began to fall the bats would realize their mistake and break off, the motion being quite different from birds.
Here in Florida the chimney swifts seem substitute for bats. They nest in chimneys and come out all day long, but especially at dusk, and dart around consuming insects. They usually show up in March and typically leave by August but have departed as early as July and as late as September. The sound of their chirping in our chimney has become quite normal. They are very garrulous birds and I have even seen the ones in my chimney get into disagreements with the ones living next door.
My memory of bats in Sydney were the huge fruit bats that flew over the narrow harbor beach behind my flat at the bottom of Blues Point Road. Those suckers were easily as big as seagulls.
Speaking of exotic nightlife, just a few blocks up from the Botanic Gardens there’s a place called King’s Cross, I remember seeing some odd birds there.
Here in the good ol’ USA, I am taking small comfort in the historical fact that the most egregious over-reaching of FDR began to be over-turned by the Supreme Court as early as 1935.
And I’m looking forward to our spoiled brat of a President doing his Rev. Wright schtick for the last two years he’s in office with an outraged Republican majority Congress. Ooooohhh, we’re going to hear how horrible, racist, evil and dastardly America is!
More years ago than I care to think about, I was going to college in a small University in upstate Pennsylvania on the G.I. bill. Being older, and a vet, midst the usual number of young college students, the vets tended to group together. And they were a somewhat diverse group. One in particular, bought a house outside the university in the countryside with the intent of fixing it up, then reselling it when he graduated. We (the group I hung with) liked to go out to his place, help a little with the house, drink a lot, barbecue a lot, and shoot targets a lot (did I mention he was WAY out in the countryside).
One night, I got a somewhat excited call from him. It seems that as he and his wife were going to bed upstairs in their master bedroom, which by the way had magnificent vaulted ceilings (this was not a log cabin), a bat had somehow got in and was flying around the ceiling, scaring his wife. He had tried to shoo the bat out an open window to no avail. So, since I was kind of the “village elder”, he figured I would know what to do. I thought for a minute and said, “Shoot it”. He said okay and hung up. Now, understand, we all were full fledged gun freaks, and in addition to the regular hunting collection of assorted rifles, shotguns, etc.; all were fans of German target grade air rifles and pistols. We had shot many matches in his basement during the cold, snowy Pennsylvania winters. And it never occurred to me that he would use any thing other than an air pistol.
The next morning, a couple of us drove out to see how things were going in the bat wars. As we drove into the long winding driveway, we could see him on the roof patching the roof. When he saw our car, he came down from the roof and waited for us to arrive. Without saying a word, he beckoned for us to follow him into his house, past his wife, who was barely able to contain her laughter, up to his master bedroom. As we entered, he, still without saying a word pointed to the ceiling where, in the bright morning sunlight streaming through, we could see the holes neatly punched through the ceiling and roof.
I couldn’t resist. I asked him what he had chosen as his weapon of choice for bat hunting. He sort of grinned ruefully and said, “Smith and Wesson .44 magnum”. “Hmmmmm… did you get him?, I asked. “Nahh, just scared him and he flew out the window.”
Ari Tai @ 6 – is that restaurant called “The Rocks”? I think that’s the name for the whole area down there. I remember having a few drinks in that restaurant with a traveling rugby team, and they had girls with them. I asked one of the guys what positioned they played, and he of course replied “Hooker!”
As a Philly boy, my biggest shock was ordering a “steak sandwich” and getting tiny flank steak, on toast, with a bloody slice of beet! THAT’S not a steak sandwich!
Then again, you don’t get much barramundi in good old Philadelphia.
Speaking of exotic things Australian… I once met one of those giant fruit bats, somewhere up in the Silky Rain Forest near Cairns. Don’t be fooled, those things are DANGEROUS. Don’t be taken in by their the incredibly soft hair on their heads, or the way they suck you in with those big sappy sad eyes… When those things decide they have to go, THEY HAVE TO GO, and it’s best not to be standing anywhere near one… I remember vividly a particular woman getting especially cozy with the monster, cooing and ahhing and feeding it an apricot, when suddenly — oh — it’s too horrible to relate…
DO NOT TRIFLE WITH ONE OF THESE MONSTERS — !! — STEER WELL CLEAR !!!
BTW – I think I had crocodile tail for the first and last time served up on that wharf — it DIDN’T taste like chicken — more like 8 day old turkey. Now the emu was delicious! Tasted just like beef. Now those things you call “dabbies” — I didn’t have the stomach to eat one — though I hear they taste just like lobster — the thought of eating giant prehistoric sand fleas was just too much no matter how much butter and garlic you pour on the critters… Fantastic wine though everywhere I went, and GREAT people EVERYWHERE…
Hey Tony are you still in Philly? Have you seen this at night?
Strange and upsetting mobs of thousands of teens
The younger ones have new games I going to guess since you were young in Philly too, they call it “Catch and Wreck”.
Ahhh kids, don’t ya just love em.
Papa Ray
To go along with #2 Papa Ray, this thought from the previous thread THE DEAD HAND at #166 bogie wheel, who was at yesterday’s totally-ignored-by-both-the-media-and-Congress demonstration in DC:
What struck me was when several members of Congress came out on the balcony of the south side of the building to look at the goings on. There they were, way up there in the palace, and here we were, way down on the lawn.
I turned to another protestor and said, “What’s wrong with this picture? The employers are standing down here on the lawn in our jeans & shorts & tee shirts, shouting up at the employees in their thousand-dollar suits on the balcony, and the employees are doing their damndest to ignore the employers.”
The sheer upside-downness of it all, the complete inversion of the citizen-government relationship, was outrageous and sickening, in the midst of all the fun rowdiness of the occasion. How can anyone honestly say that THIS was the system the Founders wanted us to have??
To which I would add this quote attributed to James Otis. For those who do not know, James Otis was one of the early opponents of the Crown before the Revolution. For his outspoken ways, he was waylaid by a group of thugs in the pay of the British. Kind of like the contemporary equivalent of SEIU and ACORN. He was beaten, crippled, and subject to seizures for the rest of his life. The thugs, of course, never faced the law because those in power were then and are now above the law. He died during the Revolution, and was unable to take part in the fighting due to his infirmities. He is said to have said:
” It is all so much simpler than you think. We give all that we have, lives, property, safety, skills … we fight, we die, for a simple thing. Only that a man can stand up.”
bogie wheel stood up yesterday in the company of tens of thousands, and in an unbroken line with the millions who have stood up against the tyrant [for it is now quite plain that is what we are dealing with] and his minions since last year. This is not something without risk, as the forces of the government include both the coercive organs of the State, and the thugs descended from those in the service of His Britannic Majesty.
And he will not be the end of that line. We will stand up, in ways unfathomable to the arrogant fops who jeered from the Capitol balcony.
For no man is good or wise enough,
To rule another and disown,
The Right of every woman and man,
To live and let live and be left alone.
So Arise, Columbia’s Sons, Arise!
Arise that you might get ye free.
Cast off the voices that made lies,
Of Jefferson and Liberty!
Subotai Bahadur
Yo Papa Ray,
Yeah, ain’t Philly beautiful?
As a kid, I used to go swimming at the “Catch and Wreck” playground, formerly known as Finnegan’s. I feel like taking a ride down there with my nightstick.
As for the “flash mobs” on South Street, which is of course the Hippest Street in Town, looks I’ll need the Mossberg.
As my liberal friend would say, these problems are really caused by all the people who live in the suburbs and say “tsk, tsk.”
# 22 Papa Ray
Just a random thought. Flash mobs are … disconcerting to the powers that be. Imagine the reaction if say someone called a flash mob inside a building where one of our Democrat overlords was at?
Subotai Bahadur
Thanks Subotai Bahadur for re-posting what bogie wrote. It bears repeating again and again.
As do your words.
Papa Ray
Have you ever fly fished for bats? That would be I quess fly batting. I must have been eleven or twelve, and the kid up the street a couple years older. Was his idea, we were sitting on a ledge, where you could almost look down on the street light, as evening came on, and he says, we need a fly rod, and I went and got it, being raised with one in my hand, put the thinnest leader on, lot of it, with a very small fly, and we went casting for bats. Caught some too! Just a way for boys to spend some summer evenings.
Subotai Bahadur, I’m thinking that they are going to increase the numbers of Capitol Police drastically in the near future. I hear that they also have on call a company or so of troops from some nearby unit. I’m sure they will be practicing deploying to the Capital on a moments notice.
Tony, right now the kids are just a nuisance and bad for businesses that are there. But mark my words, soon enough it will turn into the type mischief seen in France and other countries in the EU. Not only in Philly but in other large urban areas.
And since they are just “kids” the police will have one hand tied behind their backs and be under the media microscope in what they do or can do.
As my Dad used to say, this country is going to hell in a hand basket. I would add that the race to get there is accelerating.
Papa Ray
do you know how we call bats ? Chauve-souris, litterally “bald-mouse”
I have an anecdote, once when we worked in central of France, we found a disused school of the year 30ies to rent, this was proxy to a slag heap, the school was ment for miners children, (generaly Czechs, Polish Sicilians immigrants were working there), though the mines had closed down in the seventies. Anyway, one day I found a baby bats that had fallen into the bath-tub, dunno how it managed to be there. The small animal was frightened when I tried to approach it, and would not let me to take it with my hands, so I thought, then, if you’re OK there, I don’t mind. I don’t know what food it was in use to eat, though I brought some milk and pieces of bread, and decided to leave it with that.
But a few hours later, the poor little bats hadn’t touched my contribution, nevermind, we’ll see later ! When I came back into the bathrom, the little bats was kinda like asleep, but not really, it was going to die, then I managed to take it into my hands, and I tried to wet its mouth with milk, no result ! it was really going bad, I left it alone. The next day it was dead. I was so sorry I couldn’t help it
The Bat
By day the bat is cousin to the mouse.
He likes the attic of an aging house.
His fingers make a hat about his head.
His pulse beat is so slow we think him dead.
He loops in crazy figures half the night
Among the trees that face the corner light.
But when he brushes up against a screen,
We are afraid of what our eyes have seen:
For something is amiss or out of place
When mice with wings can wear a human face.
Theodore Roethke
3 Charles
Thanks for the link, I might say that pigs must have flew (flown?) that day. With Reinhardt hanging from one their tails.
I need to tell my grandsons of this, they will be overjoyed.
BTW, I am watching Live Video Coverage from the House. The democrats are getting their time on the floor to tell lies supporting this monstronsity. The repubs are trying to counter them just as fast as the lies fly. I don’t know who is winning but my stomach is torn up listening to these lies and more lies issuing from the mouths of these idiot treasonous people.
Papa Ray
Re: the Philly flash mobs…. Was a bit concerned until I went and looked at the photos. This isn’t the further Degeneracy Of America Under The Hand Of The Obamassiah. (Good God, listen to you people. I had to endure eight years of screeching apocalyptic BS from the libtard crowd and now you guys show you ain’t any better).
No, what I saw was wall-to-wall mean feral stupid urbanized black trash, doing what came naturally because they could get away with it. There’s a word for people like that; it begins with an N; I’m not allowed to use it, though black folks are. Nobody is. The smothering hand of black ethnocentrism ensures that this entire article is colorblind. Only the pics tell the story. 45% of the murders in our country are committed by people like this, and a similar share of the violent crime. It’s a dysfunctional tribe that shares a lot in common with what we’re fighting in the Middle East — the whole honor-shame dynamic, backed up by close-the-ranks-around-our-criminals tribal instinct.
Our President is a black man. Bill Cosby is a black man. Malcolm X was a black man. These people, a small select minority within a minority, are ni — uh — nitwits, being nitwits. America is fine. Nitwits will go right on being nitwits at will, and so long as their chief victims are their own kind, the rest of the country will turn a blind eye as the least path of resistance.
Bats are awesome.
I think that covers pretty much everything for now.
Ref having fun with bats, it is worth remembering that they can carry rabies, and other diseases communicable to humans. In Africa, bats may be a significant vector for Ebola and Marburg’s Virus.
By way of compensation, bats also pollinate Tequila, but it is generally not a good thing to pick them up without wearing thick gloves, inhale their droppings, etc
bob @ 27:
While fly-fishing at dusk I’ve inadvertently managed to catch a bat a time or two. Does that count?
Marie Claude@29:
Women! Just like my wife and daughter. If there ever is any little live thing that needs rescued, they are the first to scoop it up and try to save it. I usually end up involved in their efforts in some way. I have spent two or three days in a row trading off with one of them feeding baby rabbits every hour with warm milk from a straw. I ended up trying mouth to mouth resuscitation with a baby lamb at 2:00 AM. Keeping little chicks in our bedroom on cold nights to keep them warm cause the mother hen seemed to be too stupid to sit on them.
Nothing gets a man moving faster than a woman he loves looking at him with tears in her eyes and asking, “Can’t you do something?”
Sure it counts, counts and counts. But Idaho Fish and Game never did have a limit on bats.
I think my poet made a mistake in line four, with the “is.”
Would have sounded better without it.
#33–yesterday I learned from a friend that, the rabies virus being carried in their saliva, you can get it from inhaling their breath.
They being nocturnal, he was hit in the face by a bat in N Dakota recently during the day and knew enough (being a surgeon) to check to see if he’d been bitten, as the face is the worst place for a rabies bite from any source.
He wasn’t bitten but was still worried, daytime exposure being so suspicious in bats, so he called an infectious disease guy he knew, thereby learning about the salivary/breath route. He got the vaccine plus the immune globulin and did well.
And, BTW, skunks and raccoons out in the day, esp if acting abnormally, are suspicious for rabies for the same reason.
Fastest way to down a bat indoors is with a squash racquet. Very small sonar profile…
A kind of hush has fallen over the news scene in the prelude to the health care vote that in itself is almost newsworthy. It suggests a wide recognition that things may change radically over the next few hours; which may constitute a kind of line forever dividing what came before from that which follows.
I don’t think anybody knows exactly what will transpire whether the vote passes or fails. It will probably be not be the end but the beginning. At the very least it will mark the first of many struggles over how to fund not just the health care “reform” bill, but all the entitlements which flow from it and or were promised to grease its passage. For some it is the start of a huge new entitlement; for those who will pay for it, it is the start of a recurring and growing bill.
It may portend more than that; the breaking of a consensus, but it will be at least that; the start of a never ending wrangle about who gets to pay for what they don’t to pay for.
Even if it fails to pass it the attempt by itself represents an opening bell. One side has now openly declared its intent to remake society in a certain manner and by any means necessary. The other side must live with that knowledge. The health care “reform” bill will never truly die. It’s a meme that will live on between the covers of old books, in meetings above bookstores, in academic seminars, in one hundred thousand other ways; a vision with many faces, always ready to return whenever it can.
But that’s the way the world is. Most of the time life is about meeting today’s crisis; about pushing the wolf away from the door for one more day. In between we might find time to watch the bats in the trees who neither visit the tattoo parlor nor the leather jacket shop yet who are perfectly suited for the night all the same. I wonder what they think of us, standing upside down on the ground, thinking of the future whether the sun shines or it does not.
When I was a child, bats often flew down the chimney of our cabin (in northern Minnesota), where they would spend the day in the rafters. This happened, of course, only in the summer when there was no fire in the fireplace.
There are many bats in the shafts of the under-ground iron ore mines that are no longer being mined. When they come out in the evening, merlins are waiting to catch them in mid-air.
A few years ago I awoke to find a bat in my hair. At first I was going to ignore the incident, because of my long familiarity with bats in the cabin as a child; but then I checked with the federal Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. They recommended getting prophylactic rabies immune globulin and vaccine, even though there was no evidence of a bite, because the bite from our small Minnesota bats may not be evident.
Jim
It should read
his pulse so slow we think him dead
FWIW:
House sitting for a friend years ago I encountered bats flying around living room bed rooms etc. I don’t remember who taught me but a tennis racket confuses their sonar(?), They would fly by me, I usually got them on the second or third pass.
onesimus
Well, Stupak caved.
White House, Bart Stupak reach abortion agreement
The video feed I was watching the house proceedings is stuck on the Stupak surrender.
I’m now watching proceedings on C-SPAN Live Stream
Papa Ray
programmer, digg into a strong man character (the one that Whiskey is mourning after), and you find a gentle teddy bear
Papa Ray @ 43 beat me to the punch. Obama agreed to an executive order against funding abortions with federal funds. This was enough for Stupak to cave in (he needed a fig leaf). Of course, Obama can later rescind that same executive order with another executive order and probably will after Obamacare becomes law. It is interesting that the liberals were forced to invoke this tactic (they didn’t have the votes for their immediate full agenda). It’s also interesting that they opted to take “Deem and Pass” off of the table. Someone must have told them that “Deem and Pass” for Obamacare would not hold up under judicial review.
Oh well, another nail in the coffin. The system was going to fold anyway under Medicare and Social Security after the Baby Boomers retire. Now it happens a couple years sooner.
Bat watching by day reminds of a fond old tune from my college days, “Gardening at Night”, and also of my college days themselves in Austin, TX, where they have some whopping bat colonies around.
The largest urban bat colony in the world is said to be in Austin, under the old bridge over the Colorado River. The largest bat colony, urban or otherwise, is said to be not far away from the city.
Either way, it’s awesome to be there near the colonies at dusk when millions of bats pour out for the night, against the setting sun in those big Texas skies. If you’re ever in town, don’t miss it.
So Stupak sold his vote for the transparent fiction of Obama’s executive order. Which, I am beginning to learn, may itself be Constitutionally defective. Why am I not surprised? (The sad part about this crisis in Congress, like the crisis in the electoral process with Bush v. Gore, is that we are all forced to learn, badly, a lot of Constitutional law; and the courts are forced to produce, badly, more of the same).
As Caesar said upon crossing the Rubicon with his troops: jacta alea est. The die is cast.
RWE, Sirius… take the small stone and wrap it in a small bit of pantyhose, the bat’s claws will entangle and it cannot bear the additional weight. Al Batross is right about diseases though… I generally borrowed my father’s welding gloves to handle and free them.
In WWII the USA tried to use bats to start firestorms in Japanese cities.
The idea was to put harnesses on each bat that held a timed incendiary device. Submarines would carry them to offshore of Japan, where they would be released, fly inland, and nest under the eves of Japanese houses. When the devices went off Japan’s cities would burn to the ground, quite mysteriously.
It appears that someone gave some thought to the spectacle of USN crewmen trying to attach little harnesses with bombs to hundreds of bats. And aboard a submarine, to boot. So when an old ghost town in the desert was chosen for a test site they instead dropped the bomb-laden bats from an bomber – and unable to take flight at a few hundred miles an hour, they all went ballistic and hit the ground. But someone left a bunsen burner going and the test site burned to the ground anyway.
The idea made a little more sense than did the idea to use cats as the seeker mechanism on smart bombs to attack enemy ships. It seems that neither cats nor bats fly well when tossed out of airplanes.
By the way, this business of calling the bill “Health Care Reform” is the biggest joke of all. This is reform like making Al Capone the police chief for Chicago. It’s like calling the 911 attacks Urban Renewal.
My wife and I enjoyed bat watching when we lived in Brisbane, Queensland. We lived right next to the Brisbane River and not too far from the main fruit bat colony on Indooropilly Island. Hundreds of bats would fly over head during the late dusk (very beautiful with them flying into the sunset). These fruit bats were big animals (four foot wingspans) and flew in large formations. Fruit bats are not rodents like ordinary bats. Supposedly fruit plants are closely related to lemurs and like lemurs are simians. In essence, fruit bats are little people with wings.
I once had the opportunity to see some fruit bats up close in cages. One of the bats had lost a wing and was being kept as a pet. I scratched the bat on its head and it reciprocated by licking me. It had a tongue much rougher than a cats. It was an affectionate animal. Too bad about its wing…
Four foot wing span–wow, that’s really a bat. Our little guys were just inches.
Congress goes batty, country gets rabies.
Rush has been raving for weeks that Stupak would cave (cave, bats, heh), so no surprise there.
I thought *something* would stop it, that enough sane dems existed so they’d WANT to stop it. Guess not. Bats, bats, bats, the boys are marching, …
Nothing funny about this, really. The numbers are the numbers, and this doesn’t come anywhere close to adding up. There will be so many people “shocked” as the numbers come in.
I’ve read somewhere that the colossal bat colonies residing in the Texas cave system eat more than 1000 tons of insects EVERY NIGHT! That’s alotta bugs… If they’d only start eating the grandees in Washington, along with their staffs and their lobbyists courtiers (which I’ve read number about 40 per congressman), most of our problems would be solved in three night’s repast, let’s say four for good measure.
Here’s the math on which my estimate is based:
There are…
12.5 tons of Senators to eat (100 Senators @250lbs each),
240 tons Senate staffers (avg 34/Senator 3400 aids @170lbs each),
54 tons Congressmen (435 Congressmen avg 250lbs each),
525 tons Congressional staff (avg 15 per or 6525 aids @ 170lbs each), and
1785 tons of lobbyists (avg 40 per each member of Congress, or 21,000).
That’s a little over 2600 tons of meat for the bats to consume, much of it tough, very fatty, and some of it nearly rancid. That’s why I’d allow an extra day for good measure. The bats might be a little off their game, being used to regular bugs and all…
One insight has risen to the surface of the sewer as the long betrayal unfolds:
All those Democrat party legislators – and not a few Republicans – have managed to avoid any formal declaration of war in several instances that should have justified it. This is at the least a craven act of gutless omission. But there seems to be a rationale.
Someone, please correct me if I am misunderstanding the law – I believe that charging and prosecuting a citizen for treason is much more difficult if the nation is not officially in a state of war with another nation.
======================
If there is not a determined legal challenge to the congeries of outrages, you can expect the Dems and Obama and his Leprous Czars to be acting more and more by edict, executive order, and simple fiat without any formal announcement.
Put that way, it’s no wonder we have problems.
12.5 tons of Senators
That’s a lot of guano.
It sounds like the lies have it in Congress.
I don’t love those bats, but I have no hard feelings
They’re just some weird rats that hang down from the ceilings
And when they get sleepy they clump nice and cozy
To me they’re just creepy, like Bela Lugosi
But I like them more than those Dems and their hell care
We’ll even the score, we care not for their welfare
They think that we’ll take it and thank them forever
They think they can fake it but they’re not that clever
We’ll wait till they’re sleepy and clump nice and cozy
And wood stake that creepy vampire Pelosi
The bats have voted
Claim your share of the guano
Obamacare passed.
A DATE WHICH WILL LIVE IN INFIRMARY
CWCD: http://drudgereport.com/
Check out Drudge right now.
The two headers right beneath the “Date Which Will Live in Infirmary” red headline on health care are:
“Bonds Show U.S. Losing AAA”
and
“Tiger: ‘It was horrific. It was disgusting behavior …’ ”
Yup.
Hear that rumbling sound?
That’s the avalanche. It is just beginning.
“While Treasuries backed by the full faith and credit of the government typically yield less than corporate debt, the relationship has flipped as Moody’s Investors Service predicts the U.S. will spend more on debt service as a percentage of revenue this year than any other top-rated country except the U.K. America will use about 7 percent of taxes for debt payments in 2010 and almost 11 percent in 2013, moving “substantially” closer to losing its AAA rating, Moody’s said last week.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aYUeBnitz7nU
And now we have yet another unfunded liability to pay for. Yippee!
Today the congress of the United States voted for the U.S. to become a second rate power. If China’s economy doesn’t crash in the next several years, they will supplant the U.S. as the preeminent power on earth. We will not be able to afford a world spanning and dominating conventional armed forces as well as widespread government paid healthcare for all U.S. baby-boomers 10 years from now.
The Democrat controlled congress chose to take the path the British house of commons selected 70 years ago in the wake of the Second World War, to abdicate their nations roll as a world leader in favor of more goodies for constituents and relinquishing responsibility for everything that happened on earth. They never really controlled that much, but enough of the thugs on the planet believed they did to make a critical difference.
At least the British had the recent experience of WWII to ensure them another nation, respectful of human rights, individual liberty, and the rule of law stood ready to carry the torch of enlightenment and western civilization into the future.
The U.S. has decided to buy butter, not bombs. The current administration has already decided to give up air superiority in any future major conflict by stopping production of the F-22. They now are looking at ways to cut funding for the F-35 and C-17, and the size of our nuclear submarine and aircraft carrier fleet. With this legislation now U.S. law, the military will undergo a substantial lessening in power and combat effectiveness, even if the number of personnel remains the same as some sad kind of jobs program.
I served for over 20 years in the U.S. military, I thought to protect my nation, our allies, and all of western civilization. I still have friends serving out their commissions to a government that obviously doesn’t respect or value our efforts, or sacrifices or all the efforts and sacrifices of the veterans who came before them. They’ve chosen to throw away our military and our place in the world.
When, inevitably, the other shoe drops, everyone is on their own. If you can produce a DD form 2, or retired ID card, or proof of honorable discharge from any western military, I’ll consider you worthy of effort and material assistance on my part. Everyone else can go pound sand. Since I have no way of knowing how someone voted, I’ll assume they voted in favor socialism and all of the shit that will happen, even if they didn’t realize the consequences when they did. Foolish actions do have consequences regardless of what Nanny Pelosi wants everyone to believe.
Dogs ,would you live forever?
Fred the Second, Emporer.
Congress votes to repeal arithmetic, film at eleven.
Not a surprise. Democrats don’t give a damn about what the public thinks. They know this will never be repealed. Next up, amnesty for illegals and a permanent majority voting block. Whiskey takes a lot of heat around here for the supposed myopic nature of his posts but it sure looks like many of his predictions are inching ever so close to reality.
I warned all of my friends who were caught up in the frenzy that was Obama mania in late 2008 what the nature of this stealth, quasi-Marxist’s character really was. They bought into the lies of his campaign and laughed at me as just being paranoid. Now many those same people have a look of near horror on their face when discussing current events.
As for me, I saw this all coming from miles away and I’m done trying to win over people. From now it’s all about my family and closest associates only. If that ultimately means “going Galt” prior to the collapse of the massive bubble of public debt that is being created in the United States, so be it. All the passage of the health care legislation does is speed up the timetable I already had in mind for getting the heck out of my Democrat dominated locale.
http://tinyurl.com/yzb594r
Don’t feed the monkeys.
Bat’s Ultrasound
Sleeping-bagged in a duplex wing,
with fleas, in rock-cleft or building
radar bats are darkness in miniature,
their whole face one tufty crinkled ear
with weak eyes, fine teeth bared to sing.
Few are vampires. None flit through the mirror.
Where they flutter at evening’s a queer
tonal hunting zone above highest C.
Insect prey at the peak of our hearing
drone re to their detailing tee:
ah, eyrie-ire; aero hour,eh?
O’er our ur-area(our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array
err, yaw, row wry- aura our orrery,
our eerie u our ray, our arrow.
A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.
Les Murray.
(There is an umlaut over the “u” in the second last line, if that helps.)
“Secret Service members, alarmed by the rash of audience members who reached for cellphones and digital cameras to photograph the First Gals, warned at intermission that they would confiscate anyone who tried to take anymore pictures.”
From New York Daily News article on Michelle and daughters’ visit to a broadway show, at the Shubert theater.
Continuing the thought begun in post number 54:
There is a pattern that has characterized governments that flagrantly ignored and violated their own laws and constitutions.
It would be consistent with their behavior so far, to see some archetypal Riechstag-Fire event – i.e., some “staged” attack on a symbolic national governmental institution that the tyrants wish to eliminate anyhow, under extremely suspicious and murky circumstances, with subsequent miraculous arrest and confession of a “perpetrator” tied to groups who have been opposing the faction in power.
This would be followed by a show trial in which opposition and resistance to the incumbent regime will be demonized as an existential threat to the nation, far more than any outside adversary. (Some have analyzed the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh as such a staged event. It’s hard for me to imagine the reasoning, and the presumed dedication of a bomber willing to go to his grave without describing assistants.)
Following that – again, in the absence of a determined resistance and challenge to the legality of Pelosi-Reid-Obama triumvirate dictates – you can expect a dreary progression of changes all meant to consolidate their power and emasculate any organized opposition. It would be self-indulgent, if not inflammatory, to list them.
There is a line of argument that suggest inflammatory is precisely what the current betrayal needs.
Out of respect of Wretchard’s bandwidth, I will not include the list, already totalling 27 items.
Come to think of it, that is still a lot smaller list than the listing of all the outrageous, illegal, and plain stupid crap this drove of degenerates has perpetrated in just a 14-month span.
It is good to recall that during WWII over 20,000 formerly respectable German citizens were executed by Hitler’s regime for acts of resistance against the NAZI government and its policies.
Lot of guillotine work.
I’ve had the opportunity to watch the spectacular areodynamics exhibited by bats feeding on flying insects on several occasions. A fascinating sight. In my experience, the best viewing opportunities have been at parking areas lit by lights on tall poles in the early evening.
Bats in flight are far more agile than birds, alternatively quick or slow, swooping in from afar or abruptly doing tight turns – very much like watching arial combat.
While birds and insects fold and rotate their wings during flight, recent research has shown that bats are capable of more options. Their flexible skin and highly articulated wings allow them to catch the air in many different ways. For example, they can make 180-degree turns in a distance of less than half a wingspan. And they can hover, like honey bees or hummingbirds.
My wife’s sign gets a lot of attention at Tea Parties: There’s free cheese in the mousetrap
This is what one party rule looks like, slamming through the stimulus (which went 2 to 1 to Dem-voting districts), cap’n'trade can’t pass the Senate they will use Obama-appointees in the EPA to bypass normal law-making by issuing regulations, this healthcare abomination which will purportedly take insurance from the 83% already happily covered to 95% covered, by ruining healthcare for 100% of us. Obama buys the votes of the weak-minded with the money of the people who work.
Weakening our military by cutting the F-22 in favor of the F-35 which is deeply in cost over-runs and delays now and was designed for a completely different mission in the first place, cut missile defense in Europe and apparently Iran read that as the Green Light of Democrat Carter-esque weakness and they are plowing ahead with missiles, nukes and open support for training and supplying the Taliban in Afghanistan.
And all this with an increasing Rev. Wright-like demeanor from President Obama.
I can’t wait for November. This will not stand.
See you at the Tea Parties.
If I heard correctly, one of the payoffs involved in passing the Hell Health Bill was immediately turning the water back on in CA, in direct opposition to all the environmental rationale that was used to turn it off to save little smelt. And the Dem Rep can claim he’s the hero.
Gov’t ability to starve out sections of the population on a whim, by fiat is worrisome, no?
Seems like the day for a bit of humor.
Speaker Pelosi was being driven back to the airport one dark Northern California night from her vineyard home. Coming around a bend, there was a terrific crash and the car skidded off the road. “What happened?” shouted the Speaker from the back seat. The driver said, “I hit something, it just appeared in the dark. Lemme see what it is.” The driver and the Speaker shortly thereafter stood over the expiring corpse of an cow. “Well, Madame Speaker,” the driver said, “I was raised on a farm, and from the look of this cow she was really, really old and wouldn’t have lived much longer anyway.” He looked up the hill to a small farmhouse. “I guess I’ll go tell those people the news, it’s probably their cow.”
The driver trudged up the hill, and was gone for several hours. Finally he comes back down the hill, inebriated and disheveled. “What happened to you?” screeched the Speaker, now several hours late for her flight. “Why were you gone so long?”
“Well,” began the driver, “I walked up to the door and explained who I was and what had happened. The family really didn’t seem that upset. They invited me in for a bottle of their own wine, which led to another bottle, and then we were hungry and they cooked us a fabulous meal, and since I had killed their cow I didn’t feel I could refuse. While we were eating, their daughter came home. She’s an Oakland Raiders cheerleader, and when they explained who I was she insisted on showing me the room she grew up in. Well, one thing led to another and she was really, really friendly, and how could I refuse?”
“That’s crazy!” shouted the Speaker. “Why would they react like that? What did you tell them?”
“Well, when they answered the door I told them I was Speaker Pelosi’s driver and I had run over the old cow and she was dead.”
——————————-
(No Speakers of the House, former or present, were harmed in the telling of this joke.)
I note from the video that people seem to be enjoying themselves, climbing bridges, riding boats, jogging, walking at a peaceful and measured pace, eating in restaurants… Of what possible utility is it to the state that people should enjoy themselves!? I guess if you’re a particular kind of bat that must seem quite upside-down and quite beside the point. But it can be remedied, that’s what power is all about.
It does seem to me that we’re in a battle now to determine which way is up. I do know that it is power that will win; but if it is to be a battle I constantly remind myself: if you’ve got to do it, you might as well enjoy it. I can’t see any point in doing something and not having fun. You seek the sunshine where you can find it.
Re: Philadelphia
And just think, Philly used to be the home of Frank Rizzo, who among other things said, “A liberal is a conservative who hasn’t been mugged yet.”
Philly flash mobs are becoming more frequent. A couple of weeks ago hundreds of truant kids marauded through the center of town in mid-day, from the dumpy underground mall called the Gallery on Market Street, through the Macy’s that used to be grand old Wanamakers and then through City Hall Courtyard just across the street.
This is what a city that has been under unbroken Democratic Party rule for 60 years looks like.
We finally have an honest good guy in office in Mayor Nutter, but he has to try to govern an unsatisfiable population who can never get enough from the government.
Probably everyone has migrated to the next momentous thread, but anyway:
“the rabies virus being carried in their saliva, you can get it from inhaling their breath“ gordon@37.
Eeeeew, I had not thought of breath! Bats being communal critters, they do a lot of mutual grooming, and so rabies can spread through a colony easily via saliva.
Foxes should also be regarded with suspicion if they seem sluggish or slow to avoid humans. Marmots/Groundhogs too, but in their case it is plague infection that is associated with approachability.
“merlins are waiting to catch them in mid-air” Jim Nicholas@40.
Interesting observation, there is also the specialist Bat Falcon (Falco rufigularis), but you would
probably have to be much closer to Mexico to see one.
“being used to regular bugs and all” Morton Doodslag@53.
I am normally bad with numbers, but I am having difficulty getting your calculations out of my head.
The Texans might need help from some of their tropical relatives who take on fish, frogs, birds and even
other bats.
“Bats in flight are far more agile than birds” ScenarioA@70.
Agreed, the first time I saw bats hunting insects on a bright Spring evening, I was amazed at their manoeuvrability.
Really impressive and entertaining to watch.
Bats are an excellent topic this day.
Here in Ohio they are revered for their bug killing capacity as well as the entertainment value of watching them swooping around in the evening going about their business.
So when one gets in the house it will not leave by usual methods. I admire the poster (16) who was able to capture one in a jar and release.
The story by (19) about the friend who went at it with his .44 is just hilarious…as if this was the appropriate weapon against a bat.
(42) got it when he talked about tennis rackets. Three times now I have been awakened by a bat unfortunate to be stuck in my house with my family gathered looking to me for the answer.
This is a problem which cannot wait for the morning so not much choice about the matter and opening the doors does not work. Tennis racket did it every time. They cant see it coming apparently as opposed to everything else. “Thwok” “boom” Sorry little friend. Clean up and everyone goes back to bed.
I dont like it because they cleaned up West Nile Virus in my community far better than any government intitiative. Bats are good.
I do not know what will happen and I am in the medical profession as a practicing physician. Bracing for what will happen. Keep my focus where it should be. I have little faith that politics will make the lives of the patients in front of me any better.
A flawed system is worse now. My co-workers from all levels are despondent fearing for their jobs which only offer more demands with no hint of pay increase and more budget cuts. Do more for less.
We will try.
May we be forever blessed.
Spindok
Bats are “protected” now, lots of races have disappeared because of modern agriculture, hunting, sulfurous legends aroud their malificentness in Europe (they were nailed to the doors of churches…)
here an interesting article about their interaction with the humans around the world:
http://www.earthlife.net/mammals/bat-man.html
Does it ever snow in Sydney? Hasn’t happened in my direct experience. But if you head west about 60 miles you’ll get to the Blue Mountains which are about 3,500 feet above sea level. It snows there on occasion. Or you could head south to the Snowy Mountains and get up to the higher peaks and find enough snow to ski in. But it’s slim pickings.
Your best bet is to head south to New Zealand’s South Islands, to the Lord of the Rings country. Personally I want to go to Dunedin on the South Island one day, because that’s where Lovecraft’s heroes set sail to find the great Cthulu.
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