The Glamorous "Life" on the Discovery Channel

There was a Fergie song a few years back called "Glamorous" in which she spells the word glamorous and the refers to it as "the flossy". Perhaps this is her Gramma's friend Flossy, a hip elderly lady who wears bangles and bedazzled pants suits? Alas, no; flossy means "flashy, showy", as the Urban Dictionary will tell anyone who asks.

So Fergie tells us that her life appears flossy, but that she still eats at Taco Bell. She's a regular person with a seemingly glamorous job.

I watched two hours of the "Life" series on the Discovery Channel last night, and it made life in the wild seem extremely flossy. It was one stunning beauty shot after another of reptiles with Stretch Armstrong tongues, a female ostrich running (unsuccessfully) for her life, tiny frogs hurtling down cliffs, and fish, basilisks and Western Grebes dancing on water (not together, though they'd make a great inter-species dance company; probably get a lot of grants with that angle).

Anyone who's ever gone camping or walked within two hundred feet of a standing body of water swarming with mosquitoes can tell you that life is not flossy. "Life" is, but life isn't. It smells. It's dirty. It eats at Taco Bell. Anywhere there have been people -- and if you are there and if camera crews are there, then there have been other people there -- there are people-remnants, plastic wrappers or bits of toilet paper or initials inked on rocks or rock cairns or (and especially) footprints. To take pictures of the wild, you might have to frame out your Aunt Flossy (she booked the Alaska trip with you, of course; she collects pictures of wildlife and flirts with the young guides).

"Life" makes everything clean and precise. It's fascinating and informative and I very much enjoyed it, but it's also a Glamour Shots version of these creatures. They're wearing too much lipstick and posing with tilted heads in front of a pastel background, which is to say that the lighting is always very bright, the shots are very sharp, and the narrative is very clear. Nothing is chaotic or frightening or dull or matter-of-fact. Animals running for their lives look picturesque. You cannot feel the terror and the bursts of cortisone and smell the dust and sense the hot breath. The animals are presented in extreme closeups and in slow-mo. Slow-mo makes everyone look cool. It's the cheapest shortcut to glamour; it makes Steve Buscemi look like Steve McQueen. The whole thing is like the Wild West as interpreted by Sergio Leone: beautiful, visually and aurally precise and striking, and utterly untrue to life.

Amidst all the Oprah-narrated HD beauty, the most striking bits of the show are the few minutes at the end of the program when you see the crew on site shooting these incredible images. This is one scene: a cluster of cameramen perched for weeks next to a dusty, muddy waterhole where a poisoned water buffalo is mercilessly harassed by a pack of taunting Komodo Dragons. The cameramen stalk both the buffalo and the dragons; they stand and move the camera when the dragons run off. They watch the water buffalo get bitten by a Komodo Dragon, and they know what the buffalo does not; that he's been fatally poisoned and will linger for weeks. They settle down next to the Komodo dragons to watch him weaken and die.

Someone egged our house. Maybe a bird? Or a Bird?

 

I was sitting on the couch watching television while a rainstorm was doing its business outside when suddenly I heard a scratching/sqooshing sound on the bay window. It sounded like a cat trying to get in out of the rain, or maybe like one of those leafless trees with finger-like branches that comes alive and doesn't like the rain and wants you to let it in so it can shuffle around your house all creepy-like, crying about photosynthesis or something equally boring to the non-foliagic.

But when I checked, all I saw was slime. Yellowish slime. About three or four streaky blobs that landed on the top slanted panes of our bay window.

Someone egged our house! At 9pm at night! What's that all about?

I tried to think of which of my enemies would take out his aggression in an ovoid manner. 

But I also had to consider that the eggs landed on the top of the window, which is behind a tree, which is higher than the sidewalk by about two feet. So in order to land such accurate egg bombs, my enemy would need a wicked good sky hook.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar egged my house!

Was he wearing goggles when he did it?

That's what I thought for a day or two. I was preparing my KAJ revenge (very complicated: involved two ladders and Larry Bird) when I realized that there was another explanation, and from a far more likely and insidious enemy.

Birds (not Larry Bird) sometimes put nests in our gutters. Any unhatched eggs would still be lying there, and the unusually long and fierce rainstorms we had could very well have flung them out of the gutter and straight down onto our window.

Especially if a bird carefully balanced them there, practical joke-style, and waited until I went out to clean the windows to dump them right on my noggin.

But the joke's on you, birds, because I NEVER clean the windows!

And I know birds hate me because they think that just because I live with cats I must take their side on every issue (which is totally not true; e.g. the cats are all wrong on health care). And just because I eat birds and eggs must mean I have some crazy animosity toward the feathered world. I don't.

So...well played, birds. You forced me to clean the window.

I feed chickens

No, not "I: Chicken Feed" or "I feed on chickens", but I feed chickens, and it was wicked fun!

These lovely ladies are part of a flock of six owned by my friend Miro, who lives in Phoenix with her husband and is the proud flockherder of six chickens. Read all about their adventures and watch Spotty Dotty and the rest grow up here.

Apparently chickens are the goats of the fowl world -- they will eat anything. Miro gave me grape halves to offer the birds, and they clucked in delight and jumped up to peck the grapes out of my hand.

Feeding chickens and watching them interact is a surprisingly enjoyable way to spend an afternoon. Jealous?

How to get a cat out of a tree

This is my good friend Duchess. Isn't she cute? She likes head scratches.




This is a clump of red cedar trees. They aren't that cute. I don't know how they feel about branch scratches.

One day, Duchess decided to climb one of these trees. They are very dense, with lots of dead leaves near the trunk that fall down if you shake the tree. There are a great deal of small branches shooting off from the trunk in all directions. With these five trees in a row, there's a lot going on in there.

So Duchess got to the top, looked down, and said, "Uh oh." She went as high as the telephone wire, which cuts through the trees and is thick enough so she could walk on it and have a path from the tree on one end all the way to the tree on the other. So she could go sideways but not down. And she was 30 feet up.

She was not happy about this. When she didn't show up for dinner, I knew something was up. Then I heard the pathetic meowing coming from our trees.

We couldn't see her in the thickness of the trees unless she found a hole and stuck her little face out. We stood on our second floor balcony and called to her. She meowed at us. Her mother cat stood on the wall at the base of the trees and meowed at her. She meowed back. So we were having lots of conversations, but no movement.

The days and nights went on. We rigged up all sorts of contraptions to get food over to her and to try to provide her with a bridge to walk over to our balcony. No dice. We worried about her starving up there and leaving a white corpse. We couldn't sleep for worry; she meowed most pathetically at 3am.

Q: Have you ever seen a cat corpse in a tree? A: No, because the corpse falls out of the tree. Or something like that -- look, I searched my old friend the internet for help, and mostly found either lame jokes about dead cats or lame advice like "wait for her to come down" or "put food at the bottom of the tree" or "get another cat".

On the third day of the kitten tree-sitting adventure, we tried calling our friendly city officials. The fire department sent a guy who looked around and said it'd be too dangerous for their truck and basket to maneuver up there. Pardon my vernacular, but HELLO? Too dangerous for the fire department? I thought their middle name was dangerous. Not when it comes to kitty cats, I guess. At least he came to visit.

Animal control said they didn't have ladders high enough. They said to get a ladder, somehow assuming we had access to higher ladders than they do. They didn't even send someone to look.

City tree trimmers were working nearby, but we couldn't get ahold of them in time.

We called private tree trimmers who either refused or didn't answer the phone or didn't call back.

Our building has a 20 foot ladder, so we tried that but couldn't coax Duchess down far enough. Alas, 20 feet is not the same as 30 feet.

We called a cat rescue lady from our neighborhood who is a true cat crusader and will do anything to help a cat. She is a god-send. She helped us trap, tame and adopt out a family of very gentle feral cats. She was alarmed about Duchess and pissed off at the city for not helping.

She contacted a cat-friendly friend of hers who had some tree trimmers at her house with a long ladder. On the fourth night, she asked (forced?) them to come over to our place. A super-nice father and son came with their ladder after a long day of work and tried to help.

We had rigged up a bucket-and-pulley system to get food up to Duchess, with the hope that she would somehow jump in the bucket and we could lower her down. Duchess ran away from the tree man, but he did secure the bucket for us so she could reach it.

He then promised to come back the next day. I couldn't believe he was being so nice when everyone else had shrugged their shoulders.

He came back the next afternoon. I asked our neighbor if we could put the ladder in his yard (the yard you can see in the picture). Our side of the trees has a driveway sloping underground, and a small side yard with little room to maneuver. Duchess was by this time near the phone lines on the left-most tree in the picture. We've lived here almost six years and had never spoken to this neighbor. He was very nice and said go ahead. He was also maybe high.

We were all a little pissed at Duchess for not just jumping on the neighbor's roof, but we figured it was too far for her.

The following happened within fifteen minutes of the tree man arriving: he set up his ladder, climbed up and reached for Duchess, she cowered away from him and screamed a bit, he came back down for his tree tools to be able to get closer, I gave him a pillowcase to put her in to get her down.

(I forgot to say: my web search did bring up one useful story, of some young men who rigged up a basket system to rescue their cat, and as they put it up, the cat panicked and simply jumped out of the tree. That gave me the idea for the basket-and-pulley, and also some hope that Duchess really would get down when she had to.)

So the tree man went back up, pushed aside some branches with his tool, and climbed closer to Duchess. She panicked, pushed her way out the side of the tree on the left, and LEAPT the 30 feet down to the sidewalk.

My neighbor, two bystanders and I GASPED.

She wobbled to her side when she landed, then straightened up and took off running away from us down the sidewalk and around the corner. She ran full tilt without limping.

I rejoiced. I ran after her but couldn't find her, but I was convinced she was fine because of the way she ran. The tree man was very worried, but I thanked him and assured him she'd be fine and would come home. He wasn't so sure.




(dramatic reenactment)

I thanked him again. He had already refused any kind of payment the night before. He packed up his ladder and left.

I searched the area for Duchess for the next few hours. I went out back by her food bowl. Maybe three or four hours after her big leap, I turned around and she was chomping at her food.

She said hello nonchalantly. She was none the worse for wear and not even particularly hungry. You couldn't even tell anything had happened. I petted her and felt around for broken bones or pain, but she was a-ok.

We thanked our two cat lady friends and got the tree man's address and sent him a Home Depot gift card and and a note assuring him that the cat was fine.

So the moral of the story is: cat rescue people are amazing and no-nonsense cat advocates who will help you in this situation. Give their organizations money if they work with one! Also, some individuals are extremely nice. Also, cats are mysterious and also cute.

If you have a cat in a tree, I'd say try the bucket thing. I know it's hard to wait, especially after the third and fourth days. Get a tree trimmer. Maybe put something on the ground to lessen the cat's jump? Don't give up on them. Keep talking to them. Contact cat rescue people (who rule).

And call the fire department, if it isn't too dangerous.