Tag Archives: interns

Lost Our Lease

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We lost our lease. That’s right, we woke up the other morning and there was a Cease and Desist, Immediate Evacuation of Premises, Get the Hell Out notice scotch taped to the front gate of The Institute, right where everybody could see it. We thought it was a joke at first. I mean who serves one of those on bright yellow legal pad paper written in black magic marker to an organization (**The Institute) of our stature. They didn’t even use a lot of Scotch tape. One little measly piece stuck to the flange of our *front gate padlock, the second largest in the world by the way, we’d a got the first largest but it was simply too big and the freight to have it airlifted here was out of our budget, we could have watched one full year of DIRECTV (Total package including HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, the works) for what it cost to send just the key.

A couple of our interns from the Pavlovo Arts College No. 23, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia made it for us in exchange for The Institute allowing them to work here under assumed names to escape being sent to some gulag way the hell north where the sun not only doesn’t shine, but draws heat away from the earth in a particularly commie way. Since our padlock alone weighs 916lbs. and is 56.8 in. × 41.3 in. × 10.2 in. including the key we thought we were safe from any process servers, errant bondsmen, Amway sales persons, ex’s, those who deliver religious pamphlets to your door under the guise of saying they like you, census takers, unwanted visitors, some wanted visitors that we’re not real happy with right now, lawyers except ours, rabbis, priests, clergy from unaffiliated churches with really weird names, people who just want to come in and have a glass of water, those who are not pure of heart, puppy haters and general riff-raff.

But noooo, the notice was sent by our government, that’s right, the one that we cheerfully and with full malice a forethought voted in last time. We mean you must have because we sure as hell didn’t. We had what should be an ironclad lease made with Teddy Roosevelt himself back in the days when a Presidents word meant something.

The lease said and I quote ” These guys who forthwith and in perpetuity, hereinafter known as The Institute shall have and hold for the next millennium the right to hold a huge giant p-pot of land there in the mountains with any buildings, corals, parking garages, intern camps, The Big House, helipads, farm implements of unusual design, and anything else their clever little minds can come up with for as long as the sun may shine and the grass may grow and people can walk free upon the land without interference of any cheesy government body. So help us, and I mean really, Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt, President of the United States and any other place we can get using that new Manifest Destiny thing.”

So you can see how we were confused not to mention vexed as to why we were being summarily kicked off our property. I mean we’re tax payers, sort of. We got rights. We called our attorney who unfortunately was getting his nails done and hasn’t gotten back to us yet with a frantic plea to buy us some time. That was last Tuesday and now we’re heading into the holiday and I’m sure the whole darn office down at Acme Law firm and Tractor Repair is taking the next week off, so we had to get packing and hit the steps. We mean if Teddy Roosevelt’s word isn’t good anymore, what is, we ask you. In trying to contact the present administration to perhaps get some assistance, even our Russian friends sent an email but all we got back was a tweet saying “Did you vote for us? huh? Well, Didya? Hope you like that new refrigerator box.” “the ‘Loser'” being understood. So in the meantime we are sort of thankful for that refrigerator box and the space under the North College Ave. bridge we get to set it in.

There’s more to this story and we’ll be disclosing that information as soon as we figure out how to work this Sterno stove and refrigerator box warmer and get some wholesome cat food in our stomachs. That’s not even addressing the problem of how to hook-up our Wi-Fi. We are a little worried about our staff. Make that ex-staff. The last time we saw them they were milling around the pieces of our lock that had been cut off by the Sheriffs department down at the front gate. Things were pretty chaotic what with dozens of empty acetylene bottles from torching the padlock laying around and various organizations checking ID’s and chasing after those individuals racing off into the sagebrush and hiding under vehicles and so on. Small sad lines of not only unpaid but now unemployed interns shuffling off single file in various directions where towns and villages were known to exist. That was pretty pitiful we got to say.

But we’ve been in tough spots before. It hasn’t always been Peaches and Cream for the Institute. We’ve been kicked in the Fuon Bwey Bweys before and we’ve gotten up and staggered off into the bushes and puked our guts out. So that parts not new. The one thing we’ve got going for us is that you can not keep a good Institute down. And we’re the best damn Institute you’re going to find. To paraphrase Woody Guthrie who wrote a song for the Ladies Auxiliary one time and we adopted it and changed all the words so we wouldn’t have to pay royalties on it. Here’s our semi-non-official version

Here’s our version

Oh, The Institute
It’s a good Institute.
‘Bout the best damn Institute
That you ever did see.
If you need an Institute,
See the director’s Institute.
It’s the Director’s Institute.  (Pretty good, right?)

OK, Here we presented Woody’s version to show you how much we improved it

Oh, the Ladies’ Auxiliary
It’s a good auxiliary.
‘Bout the best auxiliary
That you ever did see.
If you need an auxiliary,
See the Ladies’ Auxiliary.
It’s the Ladies’ Auxiliary (Link to Woody’s version so you can hear how great it is) https://youtu.be/cvnxdLptWZA?list=RDcvnxdLptWZA

*Our front gate padlock before it was destroyed by bad government people trying to curb our ability to be as ridiculous as we want to be .

** Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Nevermind. Return to your daily activities. Thank you for your support.

Moonset On Storm Mountain

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The Mummy range is a mountain range located within Rocky Mountain National Park and is visible from the third tier observation and weather monitoring deck here at *The Institute year round. Storm mountain is particularly visible due to its prominence on the horizon. Normally it is surrounded by other snow caps, well in fact it is always surrounded by other snow caps, and keeps its mantle of white till late into the summer. However in the summer things change. The wet storms begin and they arrive with gale force winds and driving rain. Lots of rain. The lightning and the thunderous sounds of its strikes rending and tearing its way through the sky can be heard for miles. The flashes of the lightning strikes themselves can be seen for minutes and sometimes days after the flash having burned their image indelibly onto your retinas. Which is why you want to always wear welding goggles when looking at lightning or welding too. Remember you only get one set of eyeballs. Treat them as if you’d like to see out of them for a long time. Just because lighting is fun doesn’t mean you should stare at it like a dumb person.

It is during these storms that some of our best pictures are taken of the immense power and magnitude of these storms. Capturing these moments is not for the faint-hearted. To get the full effect of the drama that occurs we have set up an open to the elements, semi-permanent photographic station out on the third tier, cantilevered deck, high up on the West Tower. We have fastened our metal tripod and waterproof cameras to the floor with non-conductive fasteners rated for two billion Joules of electricity in the unlikely event that lightning strikes the setup during one of these photographic sessions.

However lately we haven’t had that much luck in the not getting struck by lightning category. In fact the last three interns we’ve had chained to the tripod have come close to sustaining serious injury and third degree burns from hanging on to the metal railing around the deck when lighting struck the metal collars they were wearing. Some of them find this unsettling and begin screaming uncontrollably and leaping about. Luckily the doors are thick enough to cancel most of the noise. We think maybe the two billion Joules fasteners we used might be faulty.  It’s because the interns tend to run away or even jump off the deck when the lightning strikes get too close, thereby missing the better shots, that we’ve had to resort to the light chaining and padlocking the outer doors to make sure we get all the data we need.

During the last Super moon that occurred our fail-safe lightning rod system broke down in the middle of the torrential storm and let a small amount of lightning slip through to one of our interns who had unaccountably wrapped his chain around the legs of the tripod, tripped and was hanging over the metal deck railing when the lightning burned through his chain, allowing him to slip rather ungracefully over the edge. Apparently he fell down onto the tall timber next to the foot of The Institutes massive stone foundation. We say apparently because we can’t see him in any of the treetops so he must have crashed on through to a lower point. We hope to find him when we do our annual spring pruning next month.

Unfortunately he managed to break off the camera mount and the camera during his struggles losing the images we desperately needed for this post. One of our staff illustrators was able to create a facsimile of the image of the Super moon setting over Storm Mountain in the middle of that fantastic storm that you see above, so we were able to complete the post thereby saving the day. There always seems to be a bright side to these things for which we’re thankful of course. Anyway here you have it such as it is, Moonset On Storm Mountain

* Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Nevermind. Return to your daily activities. Thank you for your support.

Bring Out Your Dead

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It’s pretty much the middle of Winter here at *The Institute and you can tell that it’s going to be a tough one. This morning the sun was 15 minutes late rising and that is an omen of the worst kind. The thermometer was below zero, how much below we don’t know as one of the interns drove a nail right through the big round face of it right below the zero. When asked why he did that he replied “If the needle can’t go below zero then it can’t get any colder than that.” On the surface the logic of that makes perfect sense. Our interns have many strange beliefs and customs and as they come here from all over the country, all over the world actually, we get a lot of loony ideas.

We also get our share of mid-winter diseases. It has been a big worry for our crack medical staff who have been keeping a close eye on the conditions of the interns quarters and surrounding area. This morning for example it was noted that many of the small fires that the interns use to heat their tents and igloos had gone out. That is usually almost always bad. No fires means they didn’t wake up to stoke the fires and that means lots of dead interns. In fact you could hear the cries of the cart men making their way through the crowded paths that wend their way through the intern camp. Here’s one below.

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“Bring out your dead ! Bring out your dead!” It’s a terrible cry and is guaranteed to put you off your feed clear into the lunch hour. Like my grandpa on my mom’s side used to say “That’s enough to gag a man’s hinder.” Simple freezing to death is not the only health problems that crop up during these cold times. Below are just a few of the near fatal to real fatal diseases that can run rampant through the camp.

Bilious Fever, (this is like typhoid, malaria and other bad stuff with bile emesis) Cacogastric, (Upset stomach but really upset), Deplumation, (where your eyelashes fall out), Erysipelas, (this is a Contagious skin disease due to Streptococci with vesicular and bulbous lesions, right) , Scrivener’s palsy, (writer’s cramp, sounds minor but not if it happens to you.) Worm fits, (Just what it says), Stranguary, (Painful, interrupted urination caused by spasms of the bladder. This happens when you try and go in the cold especially below zero). Trench mouth, (This is pretty self-explanatory, you get it from living in trenches.) Phthiriasis, (this is an ugly one I don’t even want to talk about it.) And this is by no means a complete list. This is just what was recorded at sick call this morning. Unfortunately yours truly was the one with Scrivener’s palsy, which as you know is writer’s cramp. I only mention it because it really hurt bad and I couldn’t write anything for over 15 minutes. The Doc’s gave me a codeine shot in the temple so I could finish this post, but then I’m done for the day.

As we look out over the grounds of our usually bustling Institute all we see is a depressing view of the valley where the stock all seem to be lying on their sides with all four feet out straight, icicles hanging off their hooves. The jury is out on whether you can thaw out a cow or not. The wind is blowing shifting snow sideways making walking difficult and it mixes with the smoke from the funeral pyres down in meadow making visibility very poor. We’re hoping that we don’t lose more than 60% of our interns otherwise some of the main staff will actually have to do something around here. All we can do is put one day in front of the other and watch the thermometer. It has to warm up sometime.

By the way we found this image that shows brighter times and thought we’d share it with you. It has colors that indicate warm sunlit days, it brings thoughts of the sounds of insects buzzing in the background, a gentle breeze unbroken by the hacking, coughing and spitting of those afflicted or the squeaking wheels of the cart laden with the days harvest. It’s nice. We’re all looking at it a lot. Hope you’re doing ok. Remember, cover your mouth when coughing unless you don’t like the person you’re talking to. Then cough like a Mother.

* Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Nevermind. Return to your daily activities. Thank you for your support.

Bear Strips

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Like much of the mountain west we have been plagued by pesky bears. They’re everywhere. For some reason *The institute has even more bears than the average bear-plagued place, with dozens if not more undocumented bears roaming around The Institutes grounds with impunity. They’re like locusts, you go for years without seeing a single locust then suddenly you are up to your Fuon Bwey Bwey’s in them. Such as it is now with bears. There must have been a hell of a party over the winter to have so many young bears running around now.

These bear cubs reach a point where they have grown to a size that their parents, especially their moms, say “OK that’s it, you’re out of here. Go find your own way if you’re so damn smart, Mr. know it all.” and sends the little bugger packing. These are bears that are the equivalent of adolescent to teen age bears. One bear year is equal to ½ human year. That’s two bear years per human year. So if you got a bear cub for your first birthday and you’re fifty now, you bear is a hundred years old. Leave him alone. Don’t ask him to do bear tricks and run and fetch the ball. He’s not going to do it. He’s old. And Cranky. He is more likely to tear your throwing arm off and tell you to go fetch the ball yourself.

By the same token if you were given a Hamster when you were born, their age is 11¼ years to one of ours so if you’re fifty that hamster is 562½ years old. If you ask it to get in that wheel one more time, well we won’t even go there.

This bear above was caught trying to steal the red jeep of one of our senior advisers here at The Institute and had already hot-wired it and was trying to find a good station on the radio when luckily it was spotted. All we can say is this is an example of poor parenting by it’s mother and father and will eventually lead it into a larger life of crime if it isn’t stopped.

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After being hit by pine cones and yelled at from the registered and insured owner of this vehicle it nonchalantly moved away from the vehicle but took time to stop and blow raspberries and make rude gestures before retreating further up the hillside. This is a bad bear in the making.

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After it found a spot in the boulders to watch for another opportunity to do a mischief the staff and The Director held a meeting titled “What To Do About Bad Bears and Is It Ethical To Smack Them Around a Bit”. As you might imagine there were several strongly held beliefs about this. We decided that since The Institutes motto is “Do No Harm Unless You Gotta” we went to our Department of Solving Unusual Problems and asked our people there to come up with a solution to Bad Bears.

They did and it’s a doozy. Not only will it rid us of bad bears but we see a huge potential for making some money here. This is how it works, we call it “Bear Strips”, like in Fly strips you buy to put up in your milking room at the farm. These are really sticky, I mean really sticky, pieces of film-like material scented with a smell that flies like, such as Old rotting meat or Essence of Modern Politicians, so that as soon as the fly smells it, it goes right to the strip, gets snared by the sticky but smelly goo that covers the film and that’s it, they’re done.  After the strip is filled with deceased flies you take it down and put up a new one. Works like a charm and the sight of dozens of fly filled strips hanging around produces a nice ambiance while you work.

What our people did was develop a thin canvas like film that is tough enough to hold a snarling bear entrapped on its sticky surface and coat it with our new proprietary coating called “Bear Snare”. It can hold up to a dozen bears actually if both sides of the strip are used. The super strong strips are approximately 3½ feet wide and eleven feet long and are hung on tripod-like structures in places bears like to go. When the bear strip is full or before the health department and the Fish and Game folks do their inspections we simply take down the Bear Strip, roll it up and put it in the Recycling bin down at the bottom of the hill. No bears are hurt with these revolutionary new Bear Strips except maybe when they pull the strip off down at the Recycling center but that’s a problem for them to solve. We’ve done our part.

There was one small problem when one of our interns accidentally brushed up against a Bear Strip on his way to the field latrines and became entangled. They are still trying to extricate him from the strip without losing that ¼” deep skin layer that comes off along with the strip. We had classes and put up warnings that Bear Strips were in use but apparently this guy liked the smell of modern politicians, We don’t know, he’s been sedated since he started screaming. But setting that aside our new Bear Strips are working marvelously. Our bear numbers are down, we’ve had fewer vehicles stolen and all in all it’s worked out well. We’re fairly far along in manufacturing our Bear Strips. Our marketing program is ramping up and the tripods used to hang the Bear Strips are just going into production. Like my old man used to say “If you find yourself in hot water, take a bath.” that’s what we do here at The Institute. We make lemonade.

If You are interested in obtaining some of our patent applied for Bear Strips, They’re new! They’re Fun! They Work! Contact our in-house Sales Representative on our new Toll Free number 1-808- StopBadBearsNow. Ask about our extended payment plan and our pamphlet titled “Fun Things To Do With Bear Hair”.

* Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about he Institute, Nevermind.

Bear In The Saddle

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It’s Spring time here at The Institute and the land is waking up. The grass is greening, there’s fresh new leaves on all the foliage, there is warmth in the sunshine as it lights up the meadow floors, and our resident Border Patrol members are checking back in.

As we have mentioned in the past we use a highly trained specialized group of Ursus Americanus or the American Black bear to patrol our inner borders around the campus here at The Institute to discourage tourists, intruders, interns from leaving, and anyone not authorized to be on the grounds. All of the other members of the team had checked in and were patrolling their territories except for our bear that patrols the western edge of the campus.

This would be Edith Halfway Jones. Edith was supposed to have checked in back on May 5th but she was a no-show and was placed on our AWOL list and was scheduled for termination, of her job, not of herself, had she not shown up by the 15th.

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This is what the innermost border of the campus looks like from the main building of The Institute. This little saddle is a little over ¼ mile away and is the closest boundary that protects the main campus area. There are several more boundaries that extend out to the utmost edge of The Institute’s grounds many miles away. One of interns on watch yelled down from the observation tower “Bear in the saddle!” excitedly, then “It looks like Edith!”

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We quickly went to the primary optical bear recording device set up to keep watch over our Border patrol and extended it to its fullest reach of 800mm and could see that it was indeed Edith and  that she was busy stuffing her face with new grass and looking rather fatigued. Normally she would be in a focused no-nonsense pose with an attitude of “Don’t  even think about coming in here.”. But that wasn’t the case today.

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She was acting peculiar since she had been spotted and we were concerned that perhaps she was off her feed or in some sort of funk, or maybe just burned out. That happens in a high-stress job such as hers. She kept looking over to a stand of trees and we thought, OK here ‘s our first contact with a trespasser this year, and bets were already being made on the number of pieces we’d find in the morning.

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Then she went over to one of the trees next to the saddle and we were saying to each other “Hiding up there ain’t going to help that guy. Edith can climb like a Rhesus when she wants to” and sure enough up the tree she went. We were focusing our sound recorders on the tree waiting for the screams that usually followed Edith climbing into the tree, but instead we got a big surprise.

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She came back down with a little bear. A very small one in fact. “Where’d she get that ?” one of the interns asked. We sent him down to the Nurse who explained very clearly where Edith got that and he was properly mortified. Some of the young female interns were picking at the buttons on his shirt and talking quietly to him which seemed to make matters worse for the poor soul, especially when they would say something then giggle. This explained a lot of things. Why Edith looked peaked and run down. Why she didn’t act like her old self. Why she was irritable and impatient about turning in her reports. We wondered how it was going to work out with a single mother doing a full-time job and caring for little Fleabert too, but we needn’t have worried.

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Edith is a trooper and a dedicated employee. She found a place to hide Little Fleabert, stopped to test the wind and get the lay of the land, then went off to make her rounds. Everyone gave a quiet but heartfelt cheer and watched as she went over the far side of the saddle to quietly but efficiently do her job. We all slept better last night.

Chaco Canyon Redux

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As alert readers you may have noticed a decided lack of fresh new posts with their scintillating images and incredibly succinct prose lately. That’s because The Director here at The Institute said “OK, I’m taking a break. We have not been on one road trip this year and I’m tired of looking at all these Monet’s and Rembrandt’s here in The Institute’s main art gallery. I’m tired of looking at all these first editions in the Presidential library. You can only look up so many words in the Gutenberg Dictionary before it gets to be boring. I want to go out and experience life again amongst things and places that are real. That have relevance in the real world. “So fire up the Bokeh Maru. Load the stores. Find room for the interns and we leave at first light.” The Bokeh Maru as many of you know, is our smaller research vessel and is used primarily for our shorter excursions.

That was it. About a week or so ago we followed the moonlight down the mountain having rigged the Bokeh Maru for silent running so as to not disturb the neighbors and turned her bow South by Southwest. We had two main agendas to complete. First and foremost we were headed to the Gathering of Nations in Albuquerque, New Mexico to attend the largest gathering of Native American tribes in the United States and Canada for a weekend of dancing, competitions, fellowship and fun, (much more on that in future posts) and secondly, we needed to stop and revisit *Chaco Canyon Historical Park, one of the singularly magical places you can visit.

* http://www.bigshotsnow.com/life-and-other-things-of-interest/

* http://www.bigshotsnow.com/la-ventana-de-oro/

It was a brisk morning with the sun just rising and burning off the light fog that covered highway 287. The Bokeh Maru was in rare form wanting to run into the wind as she hadn’t had a real outing since last fall. It was a trial just holding her back to maintain the speed limit. It didn’t help that the interns were frisky as well and had taken to bouncing up and down in the back of the rig just aft of the head causing the Bokeh Maru to wallow and list and nearly raising the front wheels off the pavement. After several admonishments and stern warnings to cease that childish behavior we stopped, tied several of the ring leaders to the back bumper and set off down the road. The anguished cries and sweating faces pressed up against the rear window soon had the rest quieted down and our progress became smooth again.

Our first stop was Chaco. Chaco is a place every human being should visit once in their lives. Not all of you at once of course, but make sure you do it. Check with your neighbors so you don’t all cram in there at the same time. It ought to be in the top ten of your bucket list. Above is an image from Pueblo Bonito, one of the main building sites in the park, there are many more of course, but Pueblo Bonito is the largest building constructed by the ancient ones and feels like it has the most magic.

You can enter into the ruins and wander and sometimes crawl through the small openings from one room into another. Touching the cool walls deep in the recesses of the palace, calling it a palace is no exaggeration by the way, feeling the reflections of past lives pass by you, listening to the quiet that is so deep and profound until the wind finds its way through the passages, rubbing against the cool stone walls to finally brush up against your face, is an experience that cannot be duplicated. TV and movies just don’t cut it, you need to be there. Occasionally you will hear a raven call as it flies high up against the cliff face that stands behind the building it’s plaintive squawking filtering down upon you. This is a special, special place and the feeling you have is not unlike entering a cathedral, the same feeling of exhilaration and profound peace is there.

It was at Chaco that several of our interns wandered off into the desert in search of whatever was in their minds at the time. This happens. We start off with a dozen or so interns and as the trip progresses there is a certain attrition and we come back with fewer if any when the trip is over. That’s why we always take more with us than we need. One word of caution to the potential visitor to the park. You must want, really want, to get there as the last 16 miles of dirt roads will test your resolve. Anything over ten miles an hour will have a disastrous effect on your vehicle. The Bokeh Maru made it without mishap but it let its displeasure be known to us by showing everyone all the new squeaks and rattles and fallen off bits that it incurred during the trip there.

After Chaco we returned to roads that had blacktop and concrete on them and things got easy again. We arrived at the Gathering of Nations without further mishap and although we had been told it was big, we were unprepared for the enormity that greeted us. It was held in the West Pies arena in Albuquerque and the word was thousands upon thousands of visitors attended it. This was probably an understatement as it felt like a lot more. There were over 2800 registered dancers and competitors alone registered for the show. It is almost beyond words to describe the cacophony of color and sound and whirling bodies and drums and singers that assaulted your senses in a good way when you walked into the arena. This was a huge event and we’ll be posting images from it for some time trying to give you some feeling for how it felt to be there.

This is where we lost the rest of our interns. There were only seven or eight left by that point anyway. We should have known better. It was just too overwhelming an event to thrust these young minds into. Occasionally we would see one of our interns out in the middle of the arena floor dancing with abandonment, eyes rolled up into their heads, oblivious to the modern world, then they would be lost in the swirling crowds of dancers on the floor and that would be our last glimpse of them. We were sorry to lose them of course but it did improve the Bokeh Maru’s gas mileage on the trip home.

Soon, as our processing department catches up on the several thousand images taken while we were there we will begin posting them for you viewing pleasure. As always it feels good to make it back to The Institute unscathed, or perhaps just a little scathed. Everything connected to The Institute’s grounds survived our absence and we’re beginning to regroup and prepare for the next excursion. The summer is filled with exciting events to attend and we’ve scheduled many of them. Stayed tuned for details of our travels and adventures. Maybe we’ll see you out there.

Flash Frozen

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What we have here is a very strange and unusual sight. Many of you out there in reader land, not being buffalologists, do not know that there are several type’s of Buffalo in Yellowstone park. The Institute in its quest for knowledge and a new way to twist the facts for our own ends, have discovered a hither to unknown variety of buffalo which we have named bison bison congelata which loosely translated from the Latin means “one frozen ass buffalo”. We apologize for the rude language but the Latin’s were a crude people, not withstanding the fact that they could speak Latin, which now-a-days would make them really smart.

What makes these buffalo different from your run of mill buffalo that brings traffic to a stand still while they lay in the middle of the road chewing their cud like big fat lumps? Well for one, they’re cold-blooded. That’s right, just like a lizard, or a snake, which in certain light and after a quart of Everclear they have been mistaken for. We have had interns screaming “Snake, Snake!” when it’s only been one of these buffalo. But then we have had that same intern screaming “Buffalo, Buffalo!” when it has been a snake so take all that screaming with a grain of salt.

Scorpions are also cold-blooded creatures which will sting you stupid with their poisonous tail but so far our researchers have not ascertained whether this new breed of buffalo can sting with its tail or not. We know for sure that when they’re active they can flat stomp you into the ground then hook you if they see you twitching. But so far no stings.

This particular buffalo has been caught in the classic dilemma facing all cold-blooded creatures. When your blood runs cold natures’ defense is to get you somewhere warm, otherwise your blood congeals to the point of peanut butter and it can no longer flow through your body and keep you active. As the blood cools and congeals cold-blooded creatures begin to get muddled and forgetful, often misplacing things like their car keys or that Post it note telling them to get somewhere warm before it gets cold. Then they become completely immobile, literally freezing in place.

That’s what has happened here. This cold-blooded buffalo had been crossing the Gibbon river to get to the warming shed before the temperature dropped any further when he made the classic bovine mistake. He stopped to eat some of the grass there along the river bank. Stuck his big fat head right into a clump of buffalo grass. There you are, game over, the temp dropped and that was it. Dumb mistake, but remember the muddled part, which probably played a big part in its becoming Flash Frozen.

There’s no fixing it now. These guys weigh in at about 2000 lbs so you’re not going to be dragging it off somewhere. Plus you’d have to get in that water which right now is very cold and if you didn’t bring waders and a come-a-long you’re not going to get much done. However all is not lost here. Being a cold-blooded creature as soon as the sun comes out in the morning he’ll start to warm up, finish chewing that mouthful of grass and be on his way. That is if the wolves don’t find him during the night.

This is a worrisome thought for the buffalo as he is not dead, he is just temporarily frozen, he can hear, probably even see even if he can’t turn his head, so the night is long and filled with terrors if you’re a flash frozen buffalo. We had heard the pack howling earlier but it seemed a long way off. They probably won’t find him.

The Moral of this tale is, “Pay Attention. Keep an eye on the weather. Don’t lose the damn Post it. And don’t believe everything you read.”