Monthly Archives: April 2015
Time To Smell The Leaves
When bears first wake up they are very, very hungry. They haven’t eaten since way last fall and they have to get something in their stomachs like right now. If it can be chewed they will attempt to eat it. Grass, old semi-used carcasses, any footprints in the dirt if some one walked by carrying something edible, peanut butter, nuts and/or berries, pizza, knapsacks with food in them, Chinese food either take out or eat in, gluten-free stuff, stuff with extra gluten, French food, cereal of any variety, tires that have run over roadkill, chili, chili dogs, dogs, manioc, coconut and coconut byproducts, leaves, buds, disgusting stuff that can’t even be written down, cook books, quarter pounders, quarter pounders with cheese, and lard. All of this and more is on the menu when the bear first wakes up.
So they go forth and ravenously eat anything that is remotely edible until they finally fill up that spot that says “I’m starving. Feed me.” After that happens they begin to become a little more selective in what they eat. Some even become connoisseurs and quite sophisticated gourmets, choosing only the choicest of the new offerings provided them by Mother Nature. Here we see Ms. Eula Ndego Jones, a new resident of Yellowstone National park, having come down from the famine stricken wastes of southern Saskatchewan through Montana and finally reaching the park just as the new leaves are unfurling. She carefully inhales the aroma of the young leaves before choosing the most delectable ones to eat. A few weeks ago she would have eaten the leaves, the bush and all its branches, plus about a pound and a half of the dirt around it.
But now, having regained some of the weight she lost through her long hibernation, she is being quite choosy about what she eats, taking delicate little bites from this bush and that, enjoying the moment, slowing down her intake just a little while she enjoys the warm spring sunshine. This is a time to enjoy the coming of the new season. It won’t be long before the elk start having their young and the calf selection will be at its premium, if the winter kill wasn’t too severe amongst the herds that is. But if it was then the carcasses will be plentiful and that will make living a lot easier. And there will be all those young ground squirrels that haven’t learned burrow safety yet so life is looking pretty good right now.
Spring is a time of rejuvenation and the animals here in Yellowstone have learned how to take advantage of it. I think we could all take a lesson from them about slowing down a little and savoring the moments of this time of year, after all Spring doesn’t last that long. I think we can forego the old carcasses and young ground squirrels though but those leaves might be nice in a salad with a few Fava beans and a nice Chianti.
Grace and Tranquility
Grace and Tranquility are recent graduates of Swan Training School and are back in Yellowstone National park as new members of swan society. Their job is to swim the quiet rivers of the park, displaying all the qualities of mature young adults, preening, posing gently in the smooth backwaters of the river bends, projecting an air of beauty and refinement you’ve come to expect from swans.
Those of you who are quick studies will notice that Grace is doing what she was trained to do but Tranquility, her classmate, seems to be missing. This is unfortunate because swans, although beautiful when seen alone are of course doubly beautiful when displayed in pairs and the normal procedure would be for the two of them to show up at their appointed places and work the river together.
It seems that Tranquility, always a willful child had a few problems at Swan Training school and nearly missed her graduation due to some disciplinary problems. A quick note here. Sometime, back around the first of last year, we at The Institute made a startling discovery of the existence of the Swan Training School and wrote about it after infiltrating the school to get the inside story of how young swans are made. You can read about it here http://www.bigshotsnow.com/2014/01/17/ . The training we found was harsh and rigorous. It’s a difficult road for young swans and the molding process used at the school is designed to break down individuality and force a form of collective thinking that produces a “Finished Swan”. Many make it through but some don’t. Tranquility was one that had some trouble.
. The training nuns of Our Sisters of the Immaculate Plumage, the nuns who run the school, despaired of Tranquility ever being able to graduate. They were quite firm with her and found her resistant to many of the aspects of swan training despite the measures used to get her “to get her mind right”. Finally they resorted to extreme training procedures, ones similar to those used in a large celebrity religion where there was shunning coupled with intense group crisis intervention methods, until nearly at her breaking point Tranquility agreed to be a “Good” swan. Nervous but convinced they had reached her, the nuns of the Fallen Plumage allowed her to graduate.
One of the events the recently graduated swans look forward to is Spring Break. They’re allowed to spend the two weeks prior to reporting for swan duty to attend the mass gathering of all the young swans at Padre Island and there enjoy the fellowship of their peers, laughing and singing and frolicking in the Texas sun. Being young swans they are expected to comport themselves in a manner that reflects well on swandom in general, which of course most of them do. But then there’s Tranquility.
It was a bad idea to send Tranquility on Spring Break. She fell in with some bad swans. Some really bad swans. Swans that had gone to Spring Break several years ago and never left. Once Tranquility met these kindred souls there was no looking back. Grace did her best to try and convince her to return and take up her life as a Yellowstone swan but her entreaties fell on deaf ears, Tranquility had found her place. Grace left soon after, winging her way back north until she reached the Yellowstone river, assuming her place as a resident swan in a quiet stretch of river as it flows through the Hayden valley.
Tranquility on the other hand is still down at Padre. She works part-time in an Ink shop called the Quill and Skin pushing tats on unsuspecting young swans who will probably never make it back to their places either. She is very different appearing now and her ex-classmates and the nuns who taught her would never recognize her. She has dyed her wings feathers an emerald-green on one side and fire engine red on the other. Her peers have named her Traffic Stopper. Her long neck is shaven down one side to better display the Kanji tattooed there, the symbols supposedly saying her name, Tranquility, but due to a session with a drunken tattoo artist they say Hotel Bicycle instead. This was pointed out to her, but high on several prescription pain killers she simply shook her beak rings in irritation and went on her way. To her they will always say Tranquility.
Grace on the other hand can still be found at that very wide bend in the river, the one near Mt Mary trail, arriving every spring to take up her place and display the beauty and of course the grace of swans. She thinks of Tranquility often, wondering what her life is like now, but hasn’t had any contact with her since that fateful trip graduation year. Tranquility has been invited to the 3 and 5 year reunions held at the swan school but so far has not responded to any of them. The nuns presume her lost.
OK That Wasn’t Funny
For those thousands upon thousands of loyal readers from all over the globe who noticed that BigShotsNow, the blog, has been off the air for several days we want to announce, we’re back…..
We were hacked. (*Note: For those of you on a time budget go to the end of this post for a quick summary) Yes just like a big phlegm ball we were hacked and spat out on the miserable roadside of the internet, unable to get to our site, unable to fix it, left with nothing but a screen declaring that “This website is currently unavailable. If you want to know why call this number. 1-8OO-oh crap!” which we immediately did.
Upon reaching our tech support we learned that thugs, despicable internet gangsters, lowlifes of the worst sort had some how gotten into our server and left despoiled files all over our html coding like little piles of puppy droppings. Of course our host, the folks who allow us to have BigShotsNow, the blog, on their servers, had to pull the plug on us. I mean, who wouldn’t. We’re not mad at them. But we are mad at those miserable, misbegotten, worthless pieces of humanity who defiled our home.
We’re not sure why they did it, that pond scum. It was probably some nefarious plan to attain world domination through thru the access of our loyal readers, or maybe they were just screwing around. In any event, that wasn’t funny.
When we saw the extent of the damage we had no recourse but to hire the best technicians available who went into the bowels of our site, as it were, wearing hazmat suits, carrying tools of reconstruction, and sparing no expense, clean, repair and reconstitute BigShotsNow, the blog. It took them nearly three days to complete this task before they came out weary, coated with the unmentionable residue of the their job, but they were successful. Fortunately not one of our readers was ever at risk of being effected or even infected in any way except in being denied the wit and wisdom they come here to find and that is the true evil that these slime-covered mental mutants do.
The technicians were successful, but worried. “This could easily happen again” they said in a voice weary but determined “These are bad, mean people. They are loveless, craven souls who exist only to bring misery and sorrow to others. They are so mean many of them bite themselves if they have no one else to torment. You should hire protection.”
So we did that too. We found the hardest, strongest, most morally superior jackbooted digital Stormtroopers around, who exist only to help keep this kind of evil at bay. They live to fight evil like this, gnashing their teeth, glaring, they make short work of any net trash looking for trouble. They will stand guard at the portals of our website keeping ever vigilant, and ruthlessly meet any challenge to the integrity of our home. So battered, bruised and bloody we return undeterred to keep publishing BigShotsNow, the blog, for you our loyal readers. The truth will always be available even if it is sometimes tarnished and barely discernible . We shall not be silenced.
Thank you for your patience and your support during these troubling times. The Director thanks you, The Institute thanks you, and free people everywhere thank you. Watch for a new post soon.
* We got hacked. We fixed it. We’re back. Mean people suck.
Spring Rain
Monument valley is normally a hot, dry, dusty place. A desert. You need to carry water as you trek across it lest they find your poor coyote chewed bones spread across the dunes. But in the Spring things can change dramatically as you see here. Storms come rolling in out of the Baja and dump a huge amount of water on land that is ill-equipped to hold it.
As the rain hits it begins to run off the land filling the arroyos and washes to capacity, picking up sand and small rocks, tearing along in a ferocious torrent until it begins to move the larger boulders and other debris along with it. A short distance away there is a famous slot canyon called Antelope canyon where you can see full-sized tree trunks lodged 50′ up in the crevices of the canyon walls, placed there by water from a storm just like this one raging through it.
This day the storm was one of the milder ones. There was rain but it didn’t last that long. There was runoff but it was manageable. Fog and low-lying clouds obscured the buttes and towers giving the observer a very different picture of Monument Valley. No stagecoaches tearing along the road in front of the Mittens and Mitchell butte today. And if there was you wouldn’t have been able to see it as the visibility was practically zero down at ground level.
This was a day of looking at the valley from a distance. There was no admittance into the valley as the roads inside are made up of sand and clay and turn into a quagmire as soon as water touches them. Driving on them without four-wheel drive was next to impossible and pretty close to impossible with it, as the muck sticks to your tires and will soon fill up your wheel wells with a solid granite-like mixture you have to dig out with a small spade.
This condition doesn’t last very long because as soon as the sun comes out it dries everything up and the road returns to its near concrete-like state. This is a strangely beautiful time to view the valley, one not seen all that often. The mammoth rock formations appear out of the fog like huge ships passing by in the strange muted light, soundlessly, leaving no wake. Every sound carries across great distances. You can hear the final streams of water falling down the stream beds, rocks striking each other until they come to a new resting place. There seems to be a dearth of bird calls, the ravens quiet until the fog begins to thin and drift away. Then they call out in single note if you can call a ravens call a note, it’s more like a raspy croak, checking on each other to see how they fared through the storm.
The weather is changing despite the denials of some of our leaders and it is uncertain what the future will bring. There is a drought going on out on the west coast and since many of these desert storms begin there the question is will we see rain in the desert in the spring. I believe I’m just going to go and see for myself. Come on along if you want.
Long Winter
Well it’s been a long winter here at The Institute and there was a point where some despair was settling in, but as often happens when you set your resolve and say ” Darn it, it’s been a long winter and I sure as heck am sick of it, but I know that Spring will come, because I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me” things will change and they did.
The last part of the quote we borrowed from an intern named Stuart who used to work for us and is one of the few that went on to bigger, and some say, better things. In fact he was the only one we know of that isn’t still on public assistance after leaving here. However the jury is still out on whether that is an improvement because becoming a bigwig in the government isn’t everyone’s idea of bettering themselves.
But we made it. It looks like Spring is here, our Aspen have those tiny little neon green leaves that nearly glow they’re so bright. There’s small little red buds peeking out from under last years canes on the rose bushes. Stellar Jays have arrived in flocks of indigo blue flashes as they flit from tree to tree. One day not long ago an entire herd of robins came and sat in one of our snags and completely filled every spot available for sitting. Usually you just look up and there’s a few robins but that day there were dozens and dozens. That’s pretty darn spring-like.
We wanted to show you some pictures of Spring here at The Institute but our cameras are still in storage and we can’t find the blowtorch to thaw the lock on the door so this shot of Spring in Arches National Park will have to stand in for us. It’s pretty close to what things look like here anyway so we didn’t think it would matter that much. The green on that tree is almost exactly the shade of our green, you just have to disregard the sand though as we don’t have nearly that much lying around.
Spring always causes a flurry of action here at The Institute. The snow melts away and we find the road again right where we left it last fall. That’s going to make our coming and going easier. The overflow of interns we had last fall begin to dig out of the caves they spent the winter in. We had a larger than normal number of interns for some reason, we think it was for the free food and the chance to watch HBO up at the big house once in a while. The dorms were packed and couldn’t handle even one more body. We need to pay attention to the fire code here as having over ten or more people in a single room often leads to friction and that leads to heat and that leads to fire and it’s awful. Plus we don’t need anymore adverse publicity after that fiasco with the Intern Riots, Fall of 2014 where they nearly burned The Institutes main center down. The only thing that saved us was that the main building’s first four stories are made of pre-stressed concrete and are very hard to ignite. However most of that crew is gone. But being young and cunning and thinking more about survival, the more resourceful of them, at least the ones that didn’t perish in the cold, dug substantial caves and apparently made them quite homey.
Spring is always a time of renewal and it’s always a welcome sight to see the interns emerging from the cliff side, wan and somewhat emaciated but cheerful never the less, blinking and rubbing their eyes as they see the sun for the first time in months. They seem eager for the spring routine to begin where they’re run through the communal showers, shorn and issued their new spring work clothes. It’s a wonderful start to the year. Spring brings out the best in everyone and we’re looking forward to great things as The Institute gets rolling again. We have big plans. Stay tuned for further adventures.
Note: Due to an unexpectedly high mortality rate amongst our interns we are now accepting applications for employment. If you are considering a change of pace and want an action packed, semi-dangerous occupation with the opportunity to accomplish little or nothing of value at a criminally low pay scale please send your resume to the Director@BigShotsNow.com We are an Equal Opportunity Employer.
Happy Easter
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