There’s a trainer named Carolyn Wilkie, who I write about in the book quite a bit, and I said to her one day, ‘If anything happened to me you’d have to shoot this dog because he could never live with anyone else.’ And she got in my face and she said, ‘Listen pal, if anything happened to you, I’d buy a pound of beef liver and in 48 hours this dog would forget that you ever walked the earth. And don’t you forget it.’
. . .
Dogs are the world’s most effective social parasites. That is, they have brilliantly injected themselves into the social system of another species, which very few species ever do. And they do this by tricking us, essentially, by showing a narrow range of humanlike emotions – affection, hostility, anxiety, neediness, play. And they trick us into thinking they have the entire range of human emotions, that they’re human. And so we therefore attach to them as if they were people.
These are from the March 5th show of Living on Earth, an NPR show I listen to frequently. I always find it to be interesting and entertaining, but I especially love their website. They put all of their shows online in .mp3 format (down with .rm!) as well as a transcript of each show. So if you never catch it on the radio, you can always catch it online. The above quotes were taken from the last segment of the March 5th show, and can be downloaded directly from here or from the March 5th show’s archived page.
Its those amazingly talented, yet acutely annoying Arkansas Hall drummers back for some more action.
Download Audio: Arkansas Hall Soundtrack – Arkansas Drummer part 2
The town I live in is growing rapidly, which is an all too common occurance in cities around America. Everyone always complains about traffic congestion, and the solution always seems to be to build more, and bigger roads. Sometimes we fail to stop and realize just how much noise pollution we make with our precious automobiles. As a matter of fact, the most prevalent noise just about anywhere in my city is traffic.
I went to two random spots the other day and recorded the general ambience of the area. The first is on Broadview St, a somewhat quiet neighborhood, and the other is a popular apartment complex. Neither is next to a major road (both on 2 lane unstriped), yet anytime a car drives by, the otherwise peaceful situation is very noisily disturbed.
Download Audio: Traffic in Conway
Loaded my “classical piano” folder into Winamp and put it on random this afternoon. Listening to some Franz Schubert, came across this audio gem and thought it worthwhile to share with others:
Download Audio: Schubert Snipit
Whenever it starts getting warmer towards spring, or colder towards winter, hoards of birds start migrating around. The big flocks of black birds, or whatever kind of birds they are, usually annoy people (especially homeowners) because of the way the kind of take over their yards. There is a little bit of wooded area behind my aparment and they love to rest in those trees, so I though I’d go capture this mild roar before it flew away for the summer.
Download Audio: The Birds