Be Bigfoot at your own risk

One summer night in 2003 Brittany and I were looking for a watch I'd lost next to Diversion Dam up Provo Canyon. A Bigfoot pounced out of the darkness at me and I bolted a quarter mile in full scream before realizing that Bigfoot doesn't wear white sneakers (or thinking of Brittany). As I walked back to collect the broken pieces of my dignity, the Bigfoot took off its head and I I recognized the guy who cleaned the popcorn machine at the Wynnsong theater. He was wearing a ghillie suit, just like this Bigfoot for whom it didn't go so well: Man killed while trying to create Bigfoot sighting.

On a different subject, my mother in law just turned 70 and Rachel's whole family was up here for the celebration.

Here are some more pics on Facebook.

Only touch dead birds with your right hand

This morning I hiked out to lake 395 and passed by a dead owl. 

Thinking an owl talon would make a pretty cool talisman, I pulled out my Leatherman and cut off one of the feet. An impossible number of plump maggots erupted from the severed limb and I dropped the rotting bird on the tundra.

Then I remembered that I had a big gouge in my hand from falling into the Copper River last week. The greasy forgotten-turkey smell on my hands made me wonder where else my open wound had been.

I'm up at Toolik with an Australian film crew shooting a documentary on tipping aspects of the climate system. Yesterday we sampled and shot the Stinking Bluffs, a 100 foot tall eroding permafrost cliff and I stuck my hands into the 50,000 year old mud. Since I lived through H1N1 I wasn't too worried about the mammoth flu or other Pleistocene plagues.

Then I looked back at the wriggling bird carcass and realized that it wasn't even an owl, it was a Northern Harrier - a cool bird in its own right, but no owl.

 After rinsing my hand off in the lake I went over to the Kuparuk River to sample some ice-wedge degradation that Mike told me about yesterday.

While I was looking for the best place to collect water, a bull caribou trotted over. He came within 20 yards (which surprised me since the Slope is crawling with bow hunters right now), sniffed my draft and ambled away towards the road. After filling my bottles I saw that the bull had stopped traffic in both directions crossing the Haul Road between two trucks of hunters.

"I guess that was the last video anyone will ever take of that one," I mourned, hoping I wasn't the cause of his arrowy death. To my surprise, the two groups of hunters just sat there, neither side knowing who should take the shot (plus you can't shoot from the road). The bull walked calmly between the bumpers and onto the tundra on the opposite side. Once he was walking away, the "it's getting away" instinct shook the hunters out of their stupor and they piled out of the pickups like maggots out of an owl's leg. They gave chase but the bull immediately and effortlessly put 100 yards between them. He tilted his head back in that caribou way and looked really please, as if he was thinking, 

"I hope some cows saw that."

Hold my hand like a North Korean

The dental office we clean gets Time Magazine, so every Monday and Wednesday I try to complete my tasks faster than Rachel so I can get a few articles in. A couple months ago the cover article was on Kim Jong Un, North Korea's new Supreme Leader.

North Korea doesn't have the internet (just a state-run intranet), they still have a Propaganda and Agitation Department, a full half the population is in the military, and ten percent of the country's 22 million starved to death in four years of famine in the late 90s (while I was worried about getting in enough Nintendo time between my four older siblings). The number of dead is unknown but varies from 800,000 to 3.5 million. More on North Korea.

Bill Powell's article talked about how Kim went to school in Switzerland, and how, since he was a distant third in line to ascend to power, he spent a lot of time playing basketball and rollerblading. Then his oldest brother got caught with a fake passport trying to go to Disneyland Tokyo and his father decided the second in line was too girly so ... enter Kim Jong Un. After seeing the picture below I wrote this song:

Hold my hand like a North Korean

The four most important news stories of the last ... this morning

While eating my Cheerios this morning the following four stories caught my eye (I love Fluent News):

The longstanding climate-change skeptic Richard Muller, a Koch brothers funded physicist, announced that after investigating the latest data it is indeed clear that humans are causing the change and it will be bad for us if we don't act:

The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic

A throwback to conversations in high school debate class, the Pentagon has an elaborate "just in case China attacks us" battle plan. The strategy, called "Air-Sea Battle" is the brainchild of a 91 year old and has gotten attention from congress now that China's defense spending almost equals a third of ours. The publication of the non-classified portion of the plan has ruffled China as well as several Asian allies:

U.S. war model fans tensions with China and inside Pentagon

Since Henry was born we've been the lucky recipients of unsolicited advice on vaccines, baby carriers, and, of course, breastfeeding. The adviser always says, "I've done a lot of research on it," which usually means "I've spent a lot of time in obscure forums collecting a biased cross section of personal opinion from people that had the same opinion as me from the beginning." It turns out the librarians were right and most medical advice on the internet is unreliable or dangerous:

Feeling Lucky? Not If You Use Google Instead of a Doctor

And most importantly, Bella and Edward broke up. This is simultaneously thrilling and sad. Thrilling because we now know that Rupert Sanders is a werewolf and sad because cheating is lame: 

Report: Kristen Stewart and Rupert Sanders won't work together again, if he wants to stay married