Dean Dad at the Confessions of a Community College Dean blog gives an insider’s look at American academic titles above “professor.”
His blog is worthwhile for anyone trying to climb the academic ladder—or keep from getting knocked off.
Biologist Wants to Ban Howling at Wolves
A biologist and consultant to national parks is telling wolf-cultists in Canada not to howl at their four-legged gurus.
Alberta carnivore expert Cam McTavish says it is animal harassment.
“When we have commercial groups or individuals or even researchers that are randomly calling wolf howls, I feel it is unwarranted,” he says.
“In my opinion, it is a disturbing event in that wolves do react to these calls. If in their territory they hear another wolf howl, they have to respond to that wolf.”
At Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, mass human-wolf howling events have been held with official blessing for many years, the article reports.
A University of Alberta professor suggested that listening to wolves howl builds support for saving endangered species.
It’s an interesting question. Yes, you can harass wild animals and interfere with their feeding, breeding, and so on, even in the name of “nonconsumptive wildlife recreation.”
The issue has arisen before with birders using recorded calls to entice rare birds, thus disrupting whatever the birds were doing otherwise.
Yet when M. and I were censusing owls for the Bureau of Land Management in the early 1990s, we both learned to make passable Mexican spotted owl calls. Getting an owl to call back was the only way to locate them.
Wolves are a special case. To some people they are “power animals” who somehow bless people. Other times, they kill people, not to mention sheep, calves, dogs, etc. They are not our friends; they are wolves. And they have wolf value systems and priorities.
That said, I would want more evidence before banning howling at the wolves.
(Via Cat Urbigkit’s “Wolf Watch.”)
Avebury Pagan Remains to Remain on Display
Although some British Pagans have demanded NAGPRA-style reburial for Neolithic (and thus “Pagan” in some sense) human remains found at the famous ceremonial site of Avebury, English Heritage have decided against doing so.
These Neolithic human remains were excavated in the Avebury area by Alexander Keiller between 1929 and 1935. In 2006, Paul Davies of the Council of British Druid Orders requested their reburial. English Heritage and the National Trust followed the recently-published DCMS process in considering this request, and went out to public consultation in 2009 on a draft report which set out the evidence and different options.
English Heritage and the National Trust have now published a report on the results of this consultation, and a second report on the results of a public opinion survey. Our summary report concludes that the request should be refused for four main reasons:
- the benefit to future understanding likely to result from not reburying the remains far outweighs the harm likely to result from not reburying them;
- it does not meet the criteria set out by the DCMS for considering such requests;
- not reburying the remains is the more reversible option;
- the public generally support the retention of prehistoric human remains in museums, and their inclusion in museum displays to increase understanding.
I expect that the Pagans for Archaeology group will be pleased.
Margot Adler’s Vampire Reading List
Pagan journalist Margot Adler offers an NPR piece on “do-good vampires” along with a book list.
She tells me that she has now read eighty-nine contemporary vampire books, as of this week. I am waiting for the definitive review essay.
Cruising into the Future that Was Not
US Navy airship Macon over San Francisco, c. 1933
When I was about eleven, I went through a period of fascination with dirigibles (rigid airships). What technology could be more emblematic of futures that never were?
The photo above comes from a site devoted to photos of the US Navy’s Macon, which was based at Moffett Field on the San Francisco Peninsula in the early 1930s.
It is rare to see pictures of the interior: the bridge, the sick bay, the sailors’ bunks. (The Macon crashed off Big Sur in 1935.)
It’s still possible to tour the California coast by airship. I should do that some time.
(Via Roberta X.)
Thinking Magically about Corporations—and Plants
Writer Dale Pendell muses about the idea of a corporation as a magical creation.
Pendell is the author of the three best-ever books on psychoactive and entheogenic plants: Pharmako/Gnostis, Pharmako/Dynamis, and Pharmako/Poeia. New editions are forthcoming from North Atlantic Books.
Ten Worst Movies about Witches and Pagans
Blogger Gus diZerega polled his readers on “The Ten Worst Movies Depicting Witches and Other Pagans.”
Readers differed on The Craft:
“As a movie, I don’t think it was too bad. But their portrayal of witches as goth teenage girls with (somewhat severe) psychological problems just rubs me the wrong way.”
But another suggested, “The three “freaky” witches represented to me what happens when magic is misunderstood and misused by people who are not emotionally and spiritually prepared for it. Sarah and Lirio, on the other hand, get it right.”
I’ve still got the soundtrack CD somewhere.
800 Bags of Roman ‘Shit’
Noted Classics professor Mary Beard visits the sewers and cesspits of Herculaneum, it being one of the two Roman towns buried by the famous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.
A lot of the sieved organic remains are now being studied in Oxford, and they certainly show that the residents were consuming eggs, nuts, figs and sea-urchins.
Read more about ongoing archaeological work there at Blogging Pompeii.
Most urban dwellers in the Roman empire lived in apartment blocks called insulae, from the Latin word for island.
Watch a video-recreation of an insula in the Iberian city of Conímbriga (YouTube).
Nova Roma, a group “dedicated to the restoration of classical Roman religion, culture and virtues,” has its own YouTube channel.
Style note: My headline attempts to copy the BBC News style, wherein certain words are set off in [Am] single quotation marks/[Br] inverted commas for no discernible purpose except to express some sort of arms’-length, looking-down-the-nose Beeb-oid attitude.
Could a Young Guy be so Cynical about Social Media?
We are to believe that the author of “Six Things Social Media Can’t Do for Your Business” is only 18?
He sounds like another middle-aged cynic who has seen too many new-technology parades pass down Main Street, leaving only manure piles in their wake.
Photographer, Journalist: Is it a Career?
A New York Times media-section piece suggests that “professional photographer” is a poor career choice if you are just starting out.
Since graduation in 2008, Mr. Eich, 23, has gotten magazine assignments here and there, but “industrywide, the sentiment now, at least among my peers, is that this is not a sustainable thing,” he said. He has been supplementing magazine work with advertising and art projects, in a pastiche of ways to earn a living. “There was a path, and there isn’t anymore.”
“Reporter” is not much better, yet, having been both a reporter and a photojournalist (at small papers and magazines where the roles were combined), I don’t necessarily buy all this brave new world talk about bloggers replacing reporters.
Usually, reporters report while bloggers comment, criticize, amplifly, and fling feces.
How many bloggers will hang out at the courthouse, cover the interesting trials, get to know assistant district attorneys and local lawyers, and learn which court clerk will drop nuggets of information and which clerk is just a bureaucratic jerk?
And do that week after week for free or for a few bucks from Google Adsense?
My department head used to teach a class called “Careers for English Majors,” and once per semester he would ask me to be the guest speaker and talk about being a writer.
Speaking of my days in journalism, I would always explain that I did not go to journalism school but entered through the side door, so to speak.
Sometimes today journalism school must seem like buggy whip-maker school. An awful lot of J-school grads know (or knew) how to put out the school paper, but knew little about science, economics, history, religion, or whatever, because instead of taking classes in those fields they were taking “News Writing II” and “Principles of Public Relations.”
Maybe now everyone will come in the side door?
But people still need images and organized news. Otherwise, the powerful will still try to run us over. But how to organize, locate, and present it all?
UPDATE: Suzie Bright is thinking about the same things (we all are) but has a lot more to say than I do. (Note: her blog is probably NSFW in many environments.)