"Word of the Day" now a permanent link

I was doing a terrible job at posting my Word of the Day. Since I got my DSL installed, I have been switching my favorites list from my old service to my new browser and changing my e-mail addresses. When I fixed my address at "A Word A Day," I discovered they had a link thing where I could get the daily word updated automatically. Sweet!

You will now find the Word of the Day posted on the right side of this template, just below the "About Me" box. Every week day, a new Word of the Day will appear, and you can link back to it if you want to see a definition or use of the featured word.

Will I be able to use the daily word in my posts? We'll have to see.

ACL Update

Sunday was Grace's tenth day post-op. I took out her stitches.


Her leg is looking pretty good, and she is about 50% weight-bearing. Now comes the tough part - not letting her do too much too soon. Hard for both of us to keep the activity level to a minimum.

Word of the Day: Sequela [Latin]

A pathological condition resulting from a previous injury or illness.

"Grace's ACL repair could break down as a sequela from too much activity during her recovery."

Word of the Day: Indolent

Indolent: adjective - adverse to activity, effort, or movement; habitually lazy.

As in, "I am so indolent, I couldn't be bothered to come up with a Toxicology Tuesday post."

Check back next week.

Another Brown Bird

Here's somebody I'm missing from my yard - a Carolina Wren. Last winter, I had two regular visitors to my feeding stations. They loved the suet dough, served either on this hanging platform feeder or in bluebird feeder, enclosed with Plexiglas on the two long sides and with round entry holes on the ends. There, I kept suet dough and mealworms for the bluebirds, and the Carolina Wrens quickly caught on to the special treats to be found inside. I could always count on them to arrive the minute I stepped back inside after putting out the good stuff.

They were doing great, until a late cold snap came along, and I never saw them again. Both Eastern Bluebirds and Carolina Wrens seem to experience rises and falls in their numbers here in SW Ohio. After several mild winters, the populations rise, then we have a bad winter and they suffer a massive die off. I'm afraid last year's birds succumbed, and so far, a new pair has yet to move in. I really miss them, too. They sing most of the year, and they always liven up a winter walk in the woods.

"Calling all Carolina Wrens: KatDoc is serving up the 'dough again. If you come by, she'll even toss in some nice protein snacks, to go with the fatty ones." [I hope they hear me.]

. . .

Word of the Day - Dingle

A dingle is a deep, narrow, wooded valley, also known as a dell. Origin unknown. Not to be confused with "dingleberry," a term we used in vet school for the stuff clinging to the back end of a sheep or goat.

Can Dogs See Photos?

Julie Zickefoose’s post on Thursday, January 18, “Alpha Bird,” told the tale of an amusing incident between her dog, Chet Baker, and her macaw, Charlie. In the comments, she noted that Chet “won't look at the pictures on the computer screen, but he turns his head when I try to show them to him. Charlie, on the other hand, loves to look at pictures of himself and people he knows. It's a difference in brain organization between birds and dogs, I would guess.”

That stimulated a question from Sara: “I've wondered if dogs can see an image clearly on the computer screen; my dog won't look either. Any idea? KatDoc are you out there ?”

I punted a quick answer in Julie’s comment section, but since then, have fleshed out a more detailed response.

Over the years, my own dogs and cats have noticed rapid motion on the TV, and my cat Dixie comes running to investigate the sounds when I play DVDs with a lot of bird calls and songs, but in general, my experiences with my pets echo conventional wisdom. They won’t look at pictures, watch TV, or pay attention to their reflection in a mirror.

I was always taught that dogs couldn’t see photographs or images on TV or computer monitors, that they couldn’t grasp a two dimensional image and convert it into a recognizable object. That ability was thought to be limited to primates and birds. (Aside: My own thought is that for dogs, sense of smell is much more important than vision when it comes to object recognition. Since photos and TV pictures don’t include smell-o-vision, dogs don’t experience those images like they do the real live thing.)

A study released in November of 2007 busts that myth wide open. A research group led by Friederike Range, Dept. of Neurobiology and Cognition Research, University of Vienna, Austria, studied the ability of dogs to recognize computer images.

Here’s what they did: First, they taught four dogs to discriminate between photographs of dogs or photos of landscapes on a computer monitor, using 40 different pictures of each type. They rewarded the dogs with a food treat each time they selected a dog picture instead of a landscape. Then, they conducted a two-part experiment.

In part one, they asked the test dogs to choose between pictures of landscapes or dogs, but this time they used new photos, not the ones the dogs had been trained on. The dogs were able to correctly select the dog pictures, demonstrating that they recognized the category differences.

Next, the researchers tried to trick their subjects by showing them new dog photos superimposed over familiar landscape pictures. When asked to choose between “new dog/old landscape” versus “no dog/new landscape,” the dogs chose the pictures that contained dogs.

So, according to this study, not only can dogs see a two-dimensional image, they can learn to sort those images into categories.

Cool, huh?

. . .

Word of the Day:

argillaceous Clay-like; of, relating to, or containing clay or clay minerals. From the Latin argilla. Argil means clay, especially potter's clay.

"You might say my jeans are dirty after pottery class, but I prefer to call them argillaceous."

My Spark Bird

For those of you who might not be familiar with all the birding ins and outs, a "spark bird" is the bird that got you into birding, that sparked your interest and got you hooked into this crazy hobby/sport/avocation.

For most people, it is something big and dramatic, like a Pileated Woodpecker or a Great Blue Heron. Or, it is something rare, mysterious, or unusual. For me, it was sparrows, often disparagingly called LBBs (Little Brown Birds) or LBJs (Little Brown Jobs.)

I mark my transition from "passive" birder (keeping the bird feeders filled and watching them from my window) to active birder to the year 1994. That winter, I decided to start sorting out all the LBBs into their respective species, instead of calling them all "some kind of sparrow."

Most people curse sparrows, as they are small, brown, and tend to hide in the tall grass when you want to see them, so identifying them can be tough. With a little bit of work, I began to sort out the LBBs in my yard. As it turned out, some of those sparrows were (House) Finches and (Carolina) Wrens, and were not sparrows at all.

The bird that grabbed me and made me want more was the White-crowned Sparrow. Look at this guy:

How could you not love a bird like this? Sharp black and white striped head, crisp clean shirt-front, pink bill, doesn't he look ready to go to a formal party? You can't tell it from this photo, but Zonotrichia leucophrys is larger than your average, everyday sparrow, too: 7" long as compared to 6.25" for the common Song Sparrow or 5.5" for the teeny Chipping Sparrow. That doesn't sound like a lot of difference, but you can really see it in a group of ground feeding LBBs.

Something else I love about the White-crowneds is the way they stop feeding and stand up "on their tippy-toes," making themselves very tall and thin. I think they must be searching for predators. It is a behavior I don't see in the other birds feeding around them.

For a while, I was very confused by birds like this:


Then, I started comparing them to the LBBs I knew. Clear breast, not streaky, pink bill, striped crown (ignore the colors for now) and the clincher - the same behavior of standing erect and looking all around. I finally figured this was some sort of color variation on White-crowned Sparrows, like the tan-striped versus white-striped varieties of White-throated Sparrows.

With a little research, I learned that first winter (immature) White-crowneds have a brown and tan striped pattern. Now, I see several at my feeders every winter, and have lovingly dubbed them "Brown-crowned Sparrows."

I only get White (and Brown)-crowned sparrows in the winter, so I almost never get to hear them sing. They are one of the first birds to return in late fall and one of the last to leave in spring. Like most sparrows, they love the suet dough.

"Brown-crowned Sparrow" diggin' the suet dough

Eyes bigger than the stomach.
A field mark for many birds, not just WCSP

In the spring of 1994, I took my first "warbler walk" and the sight and sound of those tiny jewels cemented my interest in birding, but that is a story for another post.

. . .

Word of the Day:

Coypu: The Coypu, Myocastor coypus, also called the nutria, is a large, semiaquatic rodent native to South America but recently introduced to other continents for fur production


*Thanks to the three ring circus of Bill of the Birds, Rondeau Ric, and Julie "Science Chimp" Zickefoose for the inspiration for day's WOTD.

Sweet Surprise

I had a notice in my mailbox on Monday that I had a parcel waiting for pick-up. Tuesday, I left at 7am and didn't arrive back home until 7pm, which meant no trip to the post office. So, I stopped in Wednesday morning on my way to work.

Looky, looky at what I found waiting there for me:

A surprise gift from a friend, who obviously knows of my obsession with The OSU Buckeyes. Isn't it great? I took off the jacket I was wearing and put this one on immediately. Although I got grief for wearing OSU gear after the debacle Monday night, I wore it all day. (Well, not while inside, but you know what I mean.) Too bad I didn't have it on Monday, maybe it would have been lucky. We need some kind of luck to survive the National Championship jinx.

A great big "Thank you!" to you, my special friend. Your thoughtfulness touched me.

Word of the Day:

Thaumaturgy: the performance of miracles, magic. From the Greek thauma, miracle and ergon, work

"I really believe it will require an act of thaumaturgy for OSU to win national football championship."

Word of the Day: Tabor

Tabor: a small drum From the Latin

The tabor is a small drum, carried suspended from the arm and struck with only one drumstick, so that the musician is free to play a pipe with the other hand. The pipe-and-tabor combination differs from a fife and drum in several ways. The most significant difference is that the fife and drum is used for military and ceremonial purposes, while the pipe-and-tabor is used for social functions, such as weddings and dances. This is what Shakespeare was referring in Much Ado About Nothing (Act II, scene 3) when he wrote, about the change that had come over a man who had fallen in love,

"...I have known when there was no music for him but the drum and the fife; and now he had rather hear the tabor and the pipe."

For more about tabors, click here.

Somethin' yummy for the tummy

"When I'm stuck with a day that's gray and cloudy

I just stick out my chin and grin and say..."

COMFORT FOOD!

What goes best with a damp, gray, wet, cloudy, dull, blecky day? Meat loaf and scalloped potatoes, just like Momma used to make.

While I can cook, at least the basics, I rarely do. There's just me here, so why spend hours preparing food that will take me minutes to eat? Besides, I only know how to cook in proportions for a family of four, which means I eat leftovers for a week.

Still, as I was driving to the grocery store yesterday to pick up a couple of things, I thought, "Meat loaf." And, then, "scalloped potatoes." So, I picked up the ingredients for both, forgetting only onions, and set about pretending to be Mrs. Cleaver.

Meat loaf done.
Time to start the potatoes.

Hey, there's some shredded cheese in the 'fridge.
Let's make these potatoes au gratin!

Looks pretty good, doesn't it?

I'm glad to see I haven't lost my touch.

. . .

Word of the Day:

Solace

From the Middle English solas, which comes from the Latin solari, to console

Definition:
1) alleviation of grief or anxiety
2) a source of relief or consolation

"Nothing gives me more solace when I'm blue than a home-cooked meal."

Pottery News

I am starting to get some size in my pieces. No longer throwing salsa bowls, I am now making ... larger salsa bowls. I don't know what these things are or will become, but they are all about 6"x6"x4" high. I threw them last week, and they are now in the "leather hard" stage. (They are kept wrapped in plastic till I trim them, to keep them from drying any further.)


The two pots on the ends are from the end of my first 25# of white clay. Now, I am working with brown clay, which has a little more grog, or grit, in it. It handles a little differently, and I am enjoying working with it. Also, it looks more like mud, so you look dirtier, which is a plus in my book!

These are two of the three pieces I threw last night. This bowl was looking really good, but there was a sharp inclusion in the inner surface. I picked out a bit of hard plastic, then had to try to smooth over the defect. In doing so, I messed up the rim a bit.


Somehow, I thought this piece was straighter and more symmetrical when I got done with it than it looks in this photo. The funny story about this piece is that the bottom was so thin that when I undercut it with a thin wire, so as to be able to remove it from the bat later, I cut right through the bottom. So, I tried to patch it. We will see what happens when I trim and fire it next week. Perhaps it will be a planter - it will already have a drainage hole in it.

Word of the Day:

Grimalkin

A grimalkin is an elderly female cat. The word is derived from the Old English, a combination of gray and the archaic malkin, meaning demon. Scottish legend makes reference to the grimalkin as a faery cat which dwells in the highlands.


"It will be quite a while before Dixie becomes a grimalkin. After all, she is only six and a half."

Word of the Day

Something I want to try to start this year is "Word of the Day." My sources are A.Word.A.Day at wordsmith.org and FreeRice.com Free Rice is a cool site; they give you a word and a choice of 4 definitions. For every word you get right, they donate 20 grains of rice to a charity that feeds people. If you get three right in a row, they advance you to the next level, if you miss one, they drop you back down a level. There are 50 levels. I have only gotten to #48.

Today's word comes from Free Rice:

Grok

Grok comes from Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 classic science fiction book, "Stranger in a Strange Land." According to Wikipedia, "grok" is derived from the Martian word meaning "to drink." It is basically defined as "to understand," but really is more than that. It means to understand so deeply as to become one with, to merge, to meld with, to lose oneself in the experience.

Grok. To understand completely. Use it in a sentence. I dare you.