Moving the Renovations from Inside to Outside

With Spring just around the corner, Beth and I have started thinking about work on the yard around Chateau Papillon. Our home sits on around 1/3 of an acre--a pretty big lot for the near-in Washington suburbs, anyway--and is adjacent to a wooded county park, making it a much more natural setting than we might otherwise expect.

The back yard is pretty much a blank slate.  We've got several towering trees along the periphery which will give us some nice summer shade, but that's about it.  The rest of the yard is a bunch of moss and a bit of grass and little else.

We want to keep the yard mostly natural, rather than creating some kept, artificial suburban lawn, while still having a large area for the dogs to run and play.  Of course, we want some room for things like grilling out, our hammock, and such, too, as well as a vegetable garden, and some kind of pond (the latter taking advantage of the natural wetness of parts of the yard).

We began with a good survey of our lot, taking note of where the sun falls, how wet the soil is, the direction of prevailing winds, existing plants and their shade levels, etc., then moved on to several books in our library, primarily The Audubon Society Guide to Attracting Birds: Creating Natural Habitats for Properties Large and Small and Bird-by-Bird Gardening: The Ultimate Guide to Bringing in Your Favorite Birds--Year after Year, which we used to make a list of the sorts of plants we wanted to bring in.

Now, landscaping and gardening take mucho dinero, and recall that Beth was laid off (and is still job hunting, though she's also working on developing a petsitting business as backup).  That does limit some of what we can do, but given both our desires to "do it yourself" to begin with, our expenses are thus limited to materials.

We began with a trip to a Merrifield Garden Center, a good local resource with a location only three miles or so from Chateau Papillon.  After going over our lot's plot and some of our ideas, one of their garden advisers showed us several sale-priced dogwoods as suggested first plants: creating an understory to break up some of the "yardy" expanse.  We picked out five, and though we paid more than we would have at a big-box retailer even with the sale, we got much better trees and over an hour's free consultation.

So far, we've gotten several of the trees planted around out yard and are already thinking of the next steps.  Because of the bluebirds in our yard, we have to be careful to leave them an open area as well as not to plant any shrubs favored by pests like House Sparrows.  We want to terrace a side yard for vegetable gardening, but that means finding good but cheap stone to be delivered, which we're in the process of researching.

Getting out into the yard has been invigorating, and although I know getting the yard to the point we want it will take us several years (and not solely due to finances!), it's exciting to see things beginning to take shape.

In parting, here are three of the best books we've found so far in planning our yard's gardening:

Bluebirds in the Back Yard

Well back in the fall when we first bought Chateau Papillon, we noticed an Eastern Bluebird poking around in the leaves along the edges of the back yard, which was quite an exciting discovery for us.  At our rental home in Vienna, we had a good list of back yard birds, but bluebirds were not among them.  So it was with great anticipation we awaited spring.

Bluebirds aren't typical back yard feeder visitors in the eastern United States, nor are they all that common in the yards of suburbia, period.  One reason is that bluebirds are (like several other species) cavity nesters, meaning they build their nests inside hollowed-out holes, typically in dead trees.  The problem is that bluebirds can't hollow out their own nest cavities, unlike woodpeckers, and we humans typically cut down the best trees as unsightly or dangerous, near our homes.  On top of that, bluebirds face fierce competition for suitable nests from a non-native pest species, the House Sparrow.

House Sparrows will enter a bluebird nest and kill both any young and their mother if given the chance, and unlike nests with openings too small for the pests to enter (such as for House Wrens and Chickadees), bluebird nests require an entrance hole perfectly sized for House Sparrow entry.

Between (human-driven) habitat loss and nest competition from (human-introduced) pest species, bluebirds face a tough road.  That's why it's so special for us to have these beautiful birds in our yard!

We're seeing at least one pair of bluebirds in the yard several times a day now; though they do visit the feeders, they're not big fans of the black-oil sunflower seed we've put out for our other birds.  So, today, we picked up a small mealworm feeder and a hundred live mealworms for the bluebirds.

We've got a few bluebird houses to go up around the yard as well; the one pictured above, which came from Beth's former boss Joy's yard, had hardly been in the ground a day when the bluebirds started to check it out.  As yet, they haven't started moving in any nesting material, but we're hopeful they'll decide the home suits them.  My parents send us another, which we'll erect out of sight of the first (bluebirds can be territorial, after all), and we've got a third to go up as well.

So far, we don't seem to have a House Sparrow problem, either; part of that is the lack of suitable shrubs around the house, as in Vienna, the Azaleas were home to dozens of the pests.  Though we do put out one feeder with cheaper seed (including millet, a favored House Sparrow food), so far it hasn't brought any of the pests around, and given that our Dark-eyed Juncos love the cheaper seed, we're hopeful it won't.  Too, putting up multiple nest boxes can serve as a decoy for the unwanted House Sparrows, and given their non-native status, we can always take out any sparrow eggs, one at a time, and sterilize them before returning them to the nest--ensuring we don't see a bumper crop of the pests.  But this does mean we'll have to be careful going forward as we work on our yard landscaping and outdoor renovations, too.

So, we're hoping we'll get to see some baby bluebirds as spring progresses, and that Beth will get over her squeamishness and be able to handle the little mealworms the bluebirds so love.

The Little Problems of Flood Geology

Today's Washington Post ran an article about an annual "field trip" that Liberty University Biology majors take to the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum (under the auspices of a required "Creation Studies" course), along with the broader phenomenon of creationists visiting science museums.

Maybe I should cut the creationist museum-goers some slack, given I've mused before about the dubious pleasures to be had of paying a call at Orlando's "The Holy Land Experience" (getting a good chuckle with my wife and sisters as we drove past and I made some rather blasphemous suggestions for photo ops), or perhaps federal convict Kent "Dr. Dino" Hovind's Pensacola-based "theme park" (what is it with Florida and nutty creationists, by the way?)

Still, though, I find creationists on a field trip to see fossils and scientific proofs that basically ruin their entire worldview to be something of an odd happening. What really baffled (and irked, I must admit) me, though, about the article was the "paleontologist" Dr. Marcus Ross, who holds a doctorate in geosciences yet claimed that the Smithsonian's timeline of 630 million years of the dinosaur fossil record isn't true: as a young-earth creationist (YEC), he holds the view that almost all fossils were laid down in the Flood (of the Noah's Ark story) just 4,000 years ago.

This so-called "Flood geology" exposes one of, if not the most damning, flaws in creationism in that it is heavily contradicted by evidence from almost all branches of science, and the "scientific" hypotheses YECs propose in support of Flood geology are without fail easily and completely falsified. To read the Abrahamic Flood mythology as anything but allegory--and mind you, creationists must do just that or see creationism collapse like the house of cards it is--is sheer folly and worthy of every bit of scorn which can be heaped upon it.

First, there's the problem of the fossil record, which under Flood geology supposedly was laid down during the bliblical flood. Creationists avow that a principle they call "hydrologic sorting" would account for the order of fossils in the thus-deposited strata, which is problematic in several ways. It represents a typical creationist misunderstanding of evolution (to the point of it being a straw man view of evolution, in fact): creationists think evolution says things go from simple to complex over time (evolution says no such thing). Too, it shows the downright wrong thinking that because dinosaurs are prehistoric, they as huge organisms would thus be "sorted" and be at the lower levels of fossil strata, whereas more recent organisms which are smaller would, by density, end up progressively higher up in the fossil record. (To see why this is so ridiculously wrong, consider that the giganticism of the dinosaurs' eras was abnormal, and far older fossils such as those of the trilobites with which every grade schooler is familiar are both smaller and located deeper in the fossil record--so how did the largest fossils end up in the middle, so to speak?)

Second, Flood geologists invariably get tangled up in the amount of water which would have had to fall to cover all the land on Earth as described in Genesis. You see, accepting that Mt. Everest was covered by water over its peak (or else was somehow pushed up by the weight of all that water, a favored alternate argument by creationists) requires a heck of a lot of H20.

So they try to explain that problem away by claiming the weight of the waters as well as the sediments which would shortly become our fossil record pushed down the sea beds and pushed up the mountains--a concept which boggles the mind in addition to requiring the suspension of known physical laws.

Then, there are the myriad problems of where did the waters of the Flood come from, and where did they go? The favored "vapor canopy" theory and related notions of giant ice comets exploding in the atmosphere simply fail laughingly with any scrutiny whatsoever, resulting in such nonsense as pressure cooker conditions that a Venusian would envy. Literal readings of the Bible lead to notions of subterranean upwellings (again, where did all that water come from?) which defy all scientific plausibility.

I often wonder why creationists don't simply abandon the flood mythology as a literal, historical incident and instead look at it through the lens of allegory, and its likely origins in very localized but severe floods of the river plains of early civilizations? Surely for people who didn't travel more than a few miles, such floods would seem to be global, not to mention the poetic license and hyperbole employed in crafting narratives based on such events. Because, as described above in short detail, the flood mythology and its associated "geology" simply fails, contradicting both itself repeatedly and also several laws of physics and the observed geography of the Earth.

I suppose creationists feel that if any part of the Bible isn't taken literally, then their entire case for special creation is thereby weakened--ignoring the forest for the trees when you consider what a laughingstock is made of their "theories" by unbending insistence on literalism.

In Like a Lion? At Least It Feels Like Spring Today!

Everyone knows the old saw about March coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb; certainly for those of us in the Washington, D.C., area, March came in with quite a roar this year, as a storm dumped around six inches of snow on the near-in suburbs and left in its wake low-teens on the mercury for a day or two.

In a prior post, I discussed the then-apparent departure of the Dark-eyed Juncos from our yard, mentioning it as a possible sign that spring migration was underway.  Well, though spring migration is underway, and spring itself is drawing ever nearer, the season's (perhaps last) gasp of snow brought with it quite a flock of juncos.

I finally got a chance to get a decent photo of one as well.  Though I'd prefer the shadow cast by one of the tree's other branches not be present, and perhaps the snow not be hiding the junco's tail, this is actually a pretty decent junco photo otherwise.  Given how juncos tend to feed on the ground, it's rare to catch one perched like this, too.

We're less than a week later, now, and it's been in the upper 60s and low 70s.  Count me as one of those who is ready for spring and happy to see the winter head out after at last getting a good snow for the season.

Some Ironic Justice on the Housing Front

Last year when Beth and I were looking to buy a home, we had one lined up and ready to go--all we were waiting on was for my townhouse sale to close.  Due to a bad buyer and his awful mortgage broker, my sale didn't close until nearly two months after its contracted date, costing us that potential home when the seller decided to go with another offer he'd received.

As we kept searching for the right home, we noticed a month or two later that there was now a "for sale by owner" sign in that same home's yard.  Our agent found out that the sale which had bumped us to the curb had subsequently fallen through, and the seller had given his agent the boot.  We decided not to go down that route again--the seller's refusal to budge on the price despite the continuing-to-plummet market factored less in the decision than the fact we'd already lost out twice on that same home.

In the end, we waited out a short sale and bought Chateau Papillon, where we've been quite pleased and have settled in.  Here's the ironic justice in this story: Beth was out walking the dogs through the neighborhood yesterday and noticed that the home we'd tried to buy had been hit by a tree!  No major damage appeared to have been done, but nonetheless, the owner (who is currently renting the place out, I believe) who missed out on a sale to us now has to deal with repairs, too.  I guess we ended up in the right place after all.

Innumeracy, Mixed Metaphors in Anti-Stimulus Ad

There's a new ad out from conservative group "American Issues Project" criticising the recent stimulus package passed by the U.S. Congress:

The ad makes the claim that if "you" spent $1 million every day from 1 BCE until the present, "you" still wouldn't have spent as much in that 2008-year span as Congress and President Obama spent in the single instance of the stimulus bill.  (Let's ignore the dispute over Jesus' existence or the date of his birth for the sake of argument, please, as well as the inflationary effects on the value of currency spread over such a time span.)

On the one hand, the attempt to frame such a tremendous number as $787 billion in terms which may be more comprehensible to the average person is laudable.  Our populace is so innumerate that the difference between thousands, millions, billions, and trillions can be pretty vague to the average American, despite the three orders of magnitude separating each.  This innumeracy contributes to all sorts of problems, from evolution denial to retirement planning which includes winning the lottery (and far less esoteric issues as well, mind you, like fear of flying or terrorism, both of which involve astronomical odds but which terrify the average person far more so than other, much larger risks which are also more easily mitigated), so any attempt to frame a number as large as $787 billion in terms which make sense to the average American is both difficult to accomplish and something to be praised when successful.

On the other hand, though, the ad fails in its approach by mixing metaphors by personalizing the spending when it resorts to the second-person appeal.  "You" clearly refers to the audience--whether or not that was the ad's intent (and I'd argue it was)--and it's really unfathomable for the average American to imagine spending a million dollars a day for thousands of years--due again in part to that innumeracy I mentioned.  The problem is, it's not the individual average American who is performing that spending, but rather a government on behalf of three hundred million-plus Americans.  The sad fact is that our government routinely spends what would be to an individual quite huge sums of money, so the parallel is broken and the metaphor flawed--and by introducing the confusion of individual spending vs. government spending, it exploits, rather than corrects, the innumeracy of the average person, who simply can't fathom spending that much money.

Rather than looking at it in terms of "you" spending $1 million a day, consider what according to the Brookings Institution the government spent per day in Iraq in 2008: $408 million (p. 43 in the linked report, based on the $149.2 billion FY 2008 appropriation--please, let's not quibble over fiscal years vs. calendar years, now!).  Yep, you read that correctly: nearly a half a billion dollars a day.  At that pace, the timeline to spend out the stimulus funds certainly need not stretch to biblical times, or even into the 20th century; no, the stimulus would be gone in just over five years.  Makes Jesus seem something of a miser, doesn't it?  One last thought to keep in mind on the government vs. individual spending point: the Iraq appropriations are merely a part of the yearly federal budget.

There's another good way to turn the problem on its head.  Imagine it this way: suppose Politician X introduces a plan to cut taxes by $180 billion dollars a year, with the tax savings spread (for the sake of argument) evenly across all 300 million American citizens.  Imagine what a great plan that is!  Cut the waste of the federal budget by nearly $200 billion dollars (note the convenient rounding up to the tune of $20 billion, a second-level play on innumeracy there), and give back American taxpayers that massive sum.  Surely everyone supports such a plan, right?

Not so fast; Politician X, the very author of said plan, has already criticized a "stimulus bill" which would refund American citizens at the rate of $600 each for 2009, claiming that $600 just isn't enough to make a difference for most Americans.  That they need real help, that $600 will not even pay a month's rent or mortgage, and so forth.

Mind you, Politician X's "save the taxpayers $180 billion" plan is, at the bottom line, the exact same thing as what he's critical of.  Assuming for the sake of argument that $180 billion is spread out across all 300 million or so Americans evenly, that's only $600 each they'd get back or pay less in taxes.  You see the problem?

Regardless of my position on the stimulus package--and mind you, I'm rather wary of Uncle spending such a large chunk of taxpayer funds, incurring and servicing the debt required to do so, etc.--the "American Issues Project" ad simply isn't honest in presenting its message, and though it presents a novel approach to addressing the problem of the innumeracy in relating the plan's numbers to everyday people, it presents a critical logical failing in its metaphor by comparing spending by one person with spending by entire United States government.

Is "Lost" the Best Show on Television?

I'm a huge fan of the television program Lost. Let me get that out of the way up front, lest that confession drive you off never to read another line of this particular post or perhaps my blog, period.

Having just watched tonight's episode, I must immediately say several things.  Holy freakin' cow, Batman!  Kiss Buddha on that fat belly!  Give Shiva a high-five times four!  Polish the Invisible Pink Unicorn's horn and serve up another dish of His Noodliness' marinara sauce in honor of the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

Not to neglect the younger crowd: O-M-G!!!

At times, the show has had some predicable writing and dialog, and it's been tough for the writers to juggle a cast with so many disparate and distinctive characters (even given the myriad of literally red-shirt-wearing extras killed off and main characters sacrificed in the name of love and DUIs, there are quite a few more members of the cast than the average drama).  But there was a point midway through the third season when all of a sudden, it was like the J. J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, and Carlton Cuse sat down and said, "Hey, it's time to get serious, yo!"  (This point corresponds roughly with the demise of "Poochie" additions Nikki and Paulo, an event widely regarded as driven by viewer unrest and welcomed by all except perhaps actors Kiele Sanchez and Rodrigo Santoro.)

Last week's episode, though excellent in and of itself, had me wondering where the writers would take the show for the rest of the season, given we'd been only five episodes into a seventeen episode season, and the overall plot arc seemed fairly clear at that point.

Tonight, though: well, I already invoked more than my share of deities once in this post.  If I may tip my hat to Robot Chicken (and yes, I did resist adding "magic unicorn mayonnaise" once already), let me express their oft-parodied M. Night Shyamalan bit to say: "What a twist!"  Seriously, this was one jam-packed episode; my head is still spinning after having watched it twice and some parts three times now just to try to get my mind around all that went on tonight.

When the episode showed Jack waking up in the jungle (mirroring the shot from the series premier, sans dog Vincent), I immediately asked Beth, "So, is this 'real,' meaning they're back on the island now and we'll get flashbacks about how they got there again?"  And indeed, I seem to have been proven at least partially correct on that point given the Ajria Airlines flight and ensuing return to the island, which featured some of the best dialog in the series to date:

• Jack asks good natured yet icewater-veined sociopath mastermind and island dungeon master Ben, "What's going to happen to the other people on this plane?"  Now, we've been clearly led to believe they're recreating Oceanic Airlines Flight 816, which crashed on the island in the series premier to start the whole shebang.  Ben replies: "Who cares?"
• The pilot introduces himself as none other than Frank Lapidus, a.k.a. the helicopter pilot from the third season who helped rescue the "losties."  Jack asks to see him, and when Frank steps out of the cockpit, his grin at the coincidence of running into Jack fades as he notices most of the rest of the "Oceanic Six" on board, and he says, "We're not going to Guam, are we?"
• Several things Daniel Faraday's mum a.k.a. Eloise Hawking (also a.k.a. "Ellie" the Other from the 1950's island?) says are quite good, from her explanation of finding where the island will appear (not where it is mind you, but where it will be) to her interaction with Desmond, telling him the island "isn't done with [him] yet."  Remember, of course, that she previously set in motion Desmond's past involvement with the island when she refused to sell him an engagement ring, leading to his proving himself in a sailing race that ended up landing him on the island (during which time Daniel Faraday, Eloise's son, in a time-slip to the "past" told Desmond to seek out Eloise in the "present" ... my head is beginning to hurt!)
• Several of the characters take new roles on Ajira 316 corresponding to those taken by other characters on Oceanic 816: Hurley, for example, brings a guitar, much like his friend Charlie did previously; Sayid is being escorted by a U.S. Marshal, as was Kate previously; Locke's body is explicitly in the hold as a surrogate for Christian Shepphard (Jack's father); Ben boards at the last moment just as did Hurley previously; and so forth.

I'm just amazed at the level of connectedness we're seeing developed, not just between episodes and characters but between several years' worth of seasons of the program.

One example (and speculation on my part, but not unsupported): Early in the episode, after Jack has received the instructions on getting back to the island, Ben chats with him before leaving the church they're in.  Jack asks Ben where he's going, and Ben says, "Oh, I made a promise to an old friend of mine."  Recall that he promised Charles Widmore in the prior season he'd have his vengeance for Charles' role in the death of Ben's adopted daughter, Alex.  Futher recall that Desmond showed up at the church: Ben knows Penny Widmore, Charles' daughter and Desmond's love, is in Los Angeles.  And Ben later shows up for the flight beaten and bloodied... from his work in (perhaps) killing Penny?

And there's the constant barrage of allusion, to pop culture, literature, and mythology.  One of many such examples from tonight alone: Ben recounts to Jack the story of St. Thomas the Apostle, who in the Christian bible first told the other Apostles to bravely go with Jesus even to what seemed certain death, but who is better remembered as "Doubting Thomas" for the eponymous action of having to touch the risen (reincarnated?) Jesus' wounds as proof.  Jack has to lead the Losties back to an island described by Charlotte as "death." Locke's body has been in the back of a van whose company logo is an anagram for reincarnation ("Canton Ranier") and reports of whose death seems greatly exaggerated (and who will be on a flight numbered the same as a certain verse in John...), and he later leaves a "suicide note" for Jack saying that he wished Jack had "believed in him" (even more: the two characters have been set as antitheticals in episodes such as "Man of Reason, Man of Faith" previously).

Another is that the Dharma station where Eloise Hawking tells the Losties how to return to the island is called the "Lamp Post," which brings to mind the scene in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe immediately through the wardrobe; i.e. a way between the two disconnected realities.  Or given the end of the Narnia stories, that the Losties are perhaps really indeed dead and need to realize that fact and move on (as some now-departed cast members seem to have done), all protests to the contrary by the producers and writers...  Sorry if I spoiled the end of Narnia for you, but hint: they're all dead, the Chronicles were a "dream," and it's time to move on to "higher lands."  Oh, and by the way: the kids in Narnia died (and then dreamed the whole Narnia bit)... in a train crash!  (This ties in with several previous literary allusions--though the consensus would be it's a red herring to make us think they're all dead.)

The intricacies of this show and the way the details tie together (and the number of lingering questions we're begging to have answered, like the four-toed statue on the island from season one, the role of Village of the Damned-esque child Aaron and what the heck has happened to him, where ESP-blessed kid Walt is going to show up again, etc.) remind me a lot of the fantastic work of the sadly-late Robert Jordan in his Wheel of Time series, where fans had to at times resort to primers and recap summaries prior to the publication of each subsequent novel in the series to freshen themselves on all the myriad details.

If you're not a LOST viewer or a casual fan at best, I'm sure the majority of my gush above has left you either confused or wondering if I'm something of a nutter myself.  Let me assure you that you're missing out if that's the case, but let me also warn you that should you seek out the DVDs of the prior seasons of LOST to get caught up, you are in for an addictive ride which might just consume several full days of your life.