MagicThought

As Brandon noted a while back in a post on the topic, Bats are dying in large quantities. First the Bees, now the Bats. What’s a Vampire to do? Now the subject has hit the big time, earning the following article in today’s New York Times.

March 25, 2008
Bats Perish, and No One Knows Why

By TINA KELLEY
Al Hicks was standing outside an old mine in the Adirondacks, the largest bat hibernaculum, or winter resting place, in New York State.

It was broad daylight in the middle of winter, and bats flew out of the mine about one a minute. Some had fallen to the ground where they flailed around on the snow like tiny wind-broken umbrellas, using the thumbs at the top joint of their wings to gain their balance.

All would be dead by nightfall. Mr. Hicks, a mammal specialist with the state’s Environmental Conservation Department, said: “Bats don’t fly in the daytime, and bats don’t fly in the winter. Every bat you see out here is a ‘dead bat flying,’ so to speak.”

They have plenty of company. In what is one of the worst calamities to hit bat populations in the United States, on average 90 percent of the hibernating bats in four caves and mines in New York have died since last winter.

Wildlife biologists fear a significant die-off in about 15 caves and mines in New York, as well as at sites in Massachusetts and Vermont. Whatever is killing the bats leaves them unusually thin and, in some cases, dotted with a white fungus. Bat experts fear that what they call White Nose Syndrome may spell doom for several species that keep insect pests under control.

Researchers have yet to determine whether the bats are being killed by a virus, bacteria, toxin, environmental hazard, metabolic disorder or fungus. Some have been found with pneumonia, but that and the fungus are believed to be secondary symptoms.

“This is probably one of the strangest and most puzzling problems we have had with bats,” said Paul Cryan, a bat ecologist with the United States Geological Survey. “It’s really startling that we’ve not come up with a smoking gun yet.”

Merlin Tuttle, the president of Bat Conservation International, an education and research group in Austin, Tex., said: “So far as we can tell at this point, this may be the most serious threat to North American bats we’ve experienced in recorded history. “It definitely warrants immediate and careful attention.”

This month, Mr. Hicks took a team from the Environmental Conservation Department into the hibernaculum that has sheltered 200,000 bats in past years, mostly little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus) and federally endangered Indiana bats (Myotis sodalis), with the world’s second largest concentration of small-footed bats (Myotis leibii).

He asked that the mine location not be published, for fear that visitors could spread the syndrome or harm the bats or themselves.

Other visitors do not need directions. The day before, Mr. Hicks saw eight hawks circling the parking lot of another mine, waiting to kill and eat the bats that flew out.

In a dank galley of the mine, Mr. Hicks asked everyone to count how many out of 100 bats had white noses. About half the bats in one galley did. They would be dead by April, he said.

Mr. Hicks, who was the first person to begin studying the deaths, said more than 10 laboratories were trying to solve the mystery.

In January 2007, a cave explorer reported an unusual number of bats flying near the entrance of a cavern near Albany. In March and April, thousands of dead bats were found in three other mines and caves. In one case, half the dead or living bats had the fungus.

One cave had 15,584 bats in 2005, 6,735 in 2007 and an estimated 1,500 this winter. Another went from 1,329 bats in 2006 to 38 this winter. Some biologists fear that 250,000 bats could die this year.

Since September, when hibernation began, dead or dying bats have been found at 15 sites in New York. Most of them had been visited by people who had been at the original four sites last winter, leading researchers to suspect that humans could transmit the problem.

Details on the problem in neighboring states are sketchier. “In the Berkshires in Massachusetts, we are getting reports of dying/dead bats in areas where we do not have known bat hibernacula, so we may have more sites than we will ever be able to identify,” said Susi von Oettingen, an endangered species biologist with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

In Vermont, Scott Darling, a wildlife biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Department, said: “The last tally that I have is approximately 20 sites in New York, 4 in Vermont and 2 in Massachusetts. We only have estimates of the numbers of bats in the affected sites — more or less 500,000. It is impossible for us to count the dead bats, as many have flown away from the caves and died — we have over 90 reports from citizens across Vermont — as well as many are still dying.”

People are not believed to be susceptible to the affliction. But New Jersey, New York and Vermont have advised everyone to stay out of all caverns that might have bats. Visitors to affected caves and mines are asked to decontaminate all clothing, boots, ropes and other gear, as well as the car trunks that transport them.

One affected mine is the winter home to a third of the Indiana bats between Virginia and Maine. These pink-nosed bats, two inches long and weighing a quarter-ounce, are particularly social and cluster together as tightly as 300 a square foot.

“It’s ironic, until last year most of my time was spent trying to delist it,” or take it off the endangered species list, Mr. Hicks said, after the state’s Indiana bat population grew, to 52,000 from 1,500 in the 1960s.

“It’s very scary and a little overwhelming from a biologist’s perspective,” Ms. von Oettingen said. “If we can’t contain it, we’re going to see extinctions of listed species, and some of species that are not even listed.”

Neighbors of mines and caves in the region have notified state wildlife officials of many affected sites when they have noticed bats dead in the snow, latched onto houses or even flying in a recent snowstorm.

Biologists are concerned that if the bats are being killed by something contagious either in the caves or elsewhere, it could spread rapidly, because bats can migrate hundreds of miles in any direction to their summer homes, known as maternity roosts. At those sites, females usually give birth to one pup a year, an added challenge for dropping populations.

Nursing females can eat up to half their weight in insects a day, Mr. Hicks said.

Researchers from institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center, Boston University, the New York State Health Department and even Disney’s Animal World are addressing the problem. Some are considering trying to feed underweight wild bats to help them survive the remaining weeks before spring. Some are putting temperature sensors on bats to monitor how often they wake up, and others are making thermal images of hibernating bats.

Other researchers want to know whether recently introduced pesticides, including those released to stop West Nile virus, may be contributing to the problem, either through a toxin or by greatly reducing the bat’s food source.

Dr. Thomas H. Kunz, a biology professor at Boston University, said the body composition of the bats would also be studied, partly to determine the ratio of white to brown fat. Of particular interest is the brown fat between the shoulder blades, known to assist the bats in warming up when they begin to leave deep hibernation in April.

“It appears the white nose bats do not have enough fat, either brown or white, to arouse,” Dr. Kunz said. “They’re dying in situ and do not have the ability to arouse from their deep torpor.”

His researchers’ cameras have shown that bats in the caves that do wake up when disturbed take hours longer to do so, as was the case in the Adirondack mine. He also notes that if females become too emaciated, they will not have the hormonal reactions necessary to ovulate and reproduce.

In searching for a cause of the syndrome, researchers are hampered by the lack of baseline knowledge about habits like how much bats should weigh in the fall, where they hibernate and even how many bats live in the region.

“We’re going to learn an awful lot about bats in a comprehensive way that very few animal species have been looked at,” said Dr. Elizabeth Buckles, an assistant professor at Cornell who coordinates bat research efforts. “That’s good. But it’s unfortunate it has to be under these circumstances.”

The die-offs are big enough that they may have economic effects. A study of Brazilian free-tailed bats in southwestern Texas found that their presence saved cotton farmers a sixth to an eighth of the cash value of their crops by consuming insect pests.

“Logic dictates when you are potentially losing as many as a half a million bats in this region, there are going to be ramifications for insect abundance in the coming summer,” Mr. Darling, the Vermont wildlife biologist, said.

As Mr. Hicks traveled deeper in the cave, the concentrations of bats hanging from the ceiling increased. They hung like fruit, generally so still that they appeared dead. In some tightly packed groups, just individual noses or elbows peeked through. A few bats had a wing around their nearest cavemates. Their white bellies mostly faced downhill. When they awoke, they made high squeaks, like someone sucking a tooth.

The mine floors were not covered with carcasses, Mr. Hicks said, because raccoons come in and feed on them. Raccoon scat dotted the rocks along the trail left by their footprints.

In the six hours in the cave taking samples, nose counts and photographs, Mr. Hicks said that for him trying for the perfect picture was a form of therapy. “It’s just that I know I’m never going to see these guys again,” he said. “We’re the last to see this concentration of bats in our lifetime.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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Over the break, I got the chance to catch up on all of the horrible t.v. that I had been missing during school, which was made even more horrible by the fact that there were no new shows! (Hmm, writers are refusing to write? Interesting…) I wish I had remembered to write down what I saw because there were so many things that made the connection between parenting and print. Here are the few that I actually remember:

This is a Sprint commercial that came on pretty frequently. It reminded me very much of the idea of the homunculus, although in the commercial the little “mini-me’s” are supposed to represent the modern day “multi-tasker.”  

Sprint commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7c_KEVBHnM

This is a music video with Chris Brown called “Wall to Wall” where he transforms into a vampire. Interestingly, the lyrics make no mention of vampires at all, so the music video could have been completely different. However, if you actually read through what he says, I think it makes perfect sense. For example…

(Pull up, pull up) can’t believe the girls, club packed
(What up, what up?) shawty wanna lead me to the back (to the back)
Ain’t been in here 15 minutes, got a pocket full of DIGITS

And she just won’t take no
(Hold up, hold up) now little mama wanna get mad
Yeah smash on the radio, bet I penned it
Yeah smash on the radio, bet I penned it
Yeah smash on the radio, bet I penned it
Yeah smash on the radio, bet I penned it

Chris Brown:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hcd4ryjS-U

 There is also a commercial currently running for Capital One that shows two guys who appear to be creating a Frankenstein monster, but produce a new credit card instead. I can’t find the video, but it comes on pretty frequently.

And finally, I just glanced at the New York Times and here are a few of today’s headlines:

Scientists Take New Step Toward Man-Made Life

Clinton Spells Out Her Economic Stimulus Plan

Tattooed for a Day, Wild for a Night

Gail Collins: Editing Hillary’s Story

Kristin Krenz

The Cultural Unconscious knows what it needs and wants: MOMMY.

January 15, 2008
Terminator Tops Globes

By BENJAMIN TOFF
NBC’s bare-bones version of the “65th Annual Golden Globes” attracted just 5.8 million viewers on Sunday night, a small fraction of the 20 million who tuned in to the awards show a year ago, according to Nielsen’s estimates. The big hit on Sunday was Fox’s premiere of “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” which attracted 18.3 million viewers at 8 p.m. and the highest ratings by far of any new series this season. Although “Terminator” benefited from following a football game on Fox that attracted more than 35 million viewers during the 7 p.m. hour, no other scripted series debut on any broadcast network has done better in the 18-to-49 set in three years. The last scripted series debut on a broadcast network to earn higher ratings among adults 18 to 49 was CBS’s “Numb3rs” on Jan. 23, 2005. Fox easily led the night’s ratings, followed by CBS and ABC. NBC ranked fourth. Part one of CBS’s “Comanche Moon” drew 15.8 million viewers.

If Governator Ahnold, former Mr. Universe and embodiment of the patriarchal ideal, was ideally suited in 1984 (the same year that Time magazine made the personal computer the “man of the year” ) to play the Terminator, a robotic assassin sent back to the past to prevent the future, it is rather telling that at precisely the same moment that this country faces the real possibility — many would say threat — of being ruled by a female president the mother of that future is now at center stage in a new tv show called “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.” A lot of people have focused on the tear-factor in Hillary’s recent surprise win in New Hampshire, but few have commented on the fact that since the loss in Iowa, Hillary’s daughter, Chelsea, has been featured more prominently than ever at various campaign events. Having seen how little good her credentials as first lady were working for her, H.C. has been relying more and more on her credentials as a mom, and not surprisingly a large percentage of her winning vote in New Hampshire consisted of older married women with children or grandchildren. The pubic Bush is being hounded by the real thing, a mother and the wife to the man who got his pen cleaned and polished in the egg-shaped office. Barak Obama may be an inspired speaker and a visionairy idealist, but he himself admits that his wife is the pants in his family. So he’s at a real cultural unconscious advantage in a race against the Monstrous Mother. In the age of the complete takeover of the digital paternal symbolic and the demise of the analog maternal imaginary, the Matriarchy, as either Sarah or Hillary could tell you, is trying to stage a comeback. Or to borrow from Ahnold’s famous phrase from the film, “SHE’LL BE BACK.”

The name “Sarah” comes from the Biblical wife of Abraham (the first Hebrew Patriarch) and mother of Isaac, from Heb., lit. “princess,” from sarah, fem. of sar “prince,” from sarar “he ruled,” related to Akkad. sharratu “queen.”

As for, Connor, according to The Penguin Dictionary of First Names it was originally a nickname given to hunters. Thus Princess or queen of Hunters, an appropriate name for a mother whose only concern is to save her son and the future. As for Hillary, spare the Rodham, spoil the child.

Here’s a review of the show, the title of which would be perfect for an article about Hillary’s campaign for the presidency: Running and Fighting.
Dr. B.

January 12, 2008
Television Review
Running and Fighting, All to Save Her Son

By GINIA BELLAFANTE
The writers’ strike brings with it, of course, the significant potential to lower our viewing standards now that television’s midseason is under way. How amenable will most people be to rendering honest judgments on anything new and being shown and not the 923rd season of a reality venture in which people trade wives, or nannies, or plastic surgeries, or wallpaper or ferrets?

I propose circumventing the problem with the creation of two temporary critical categories: strike-good and, well, just plain good. To the second denomination I submit “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” a new Fox series that begins on Sunday. One of the more humanizing adventures in science fiction to arrive in quite a while, the series is taut, haunting, relevant and an exploration of adolescent exceptionalism rendered without the cheerleading uniforms and parody of “Heroes.”

Extending the “Terminator” franchise, built on Arnold Schwarzenegger in his liquid corporeality, the series revolves around a young woman whose commitment to maternity makes the ordinary parental obsessions we’ve come to live with seem no more serious than a game of backgammon. Sarah, played by Lena Headey, all anxious muscle, isn’t fretting about nut allergies and tennis camp and early admission to Amherst (though boy, would her son, John, qualify as out-of-the-box enough to get in); she is striving to save him from the government-sponsored nut cases of the microchip brains and titanium bones who seek to annihilate him and thus his capacity to save humankind from their apocalyptic vision.

“Certainly for a parent, the death of a child is no less than a holocaust,” Sarah says in one of the show’s spare voice-overs. “In the case of my son, these words are literally true.”

“The Sarah Connor Chronicles” is a fantasy of technophobic paranoia, but it is also a metaphor for mad, crazy blood love, for motherhood not merely as an honorable career but also as salvation. Keeping John safe has required Sarah to learn four languages, work at 23 jobs, assume nine aliases and submit to years in a mental hospital. Sensing possible danger and telling John that they must move on from their seemingly pleasant life in Nebraska, Sarah, in the pilot episode, orders him out of bed and onto the road: “Half an hour, one bag, plus the gun. I’ll make pancakes.”

John, played by Thomas Dekker, complements Sarah’s intensity with a quiet anguish. He hopes for normalcy, friendships, a long-term address, but he doesn’t throw the sort of predictable temper tantrums in which he might scream that he just wants to be like everybody else and enter a motocross competition. He likes his mother’s boyfriend and is saddened because he and his mother have to skip town just as the matter of marriage has come up. That Sarah decides they must leave and assume new identities, right after she receives the proposal, leaves the question lingering of what it is she is actually afraid of.

“The Sarah Connor Chronicles” finds its dimension in the way it refuses to shy away from the terrors of ordinary life. By time-traveling her way around what would have been an ugly past, Sarah realizes that an alternate life would have left her dying of cancer. Cells wreak havoc just as robotic maniacs do. The most unsettling moments of “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” occur when, seeking to avoid such an outcome, she visits an oncologist’s office.

Terminator

The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Fox, series premiere Sunday night at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time. Regular episodes start Monday night at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.

Josh Friedman, John Wirth, Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna, executive producers; Toni Graphia, co-executive producer; James Middleton and Natalie Chaidez, consulting producers; premeiere directed by David Nutter. Produced by C-2 Pictures and Warner Brothers Television.

WITH: Lena Headey (Sarah Connor), Thomas Dekker (John Connor), Summer Glau (Cameron) and Richard T. Jones (James Ellison).

Check out this t-shirt design: http://www.threadless.com/product/1040/Hero_Within#zoom

It’s a dragon (with teeth!), coming out of a tv/game console (digital!) with a little knight guy with his sword (penis) …ha. That’s all the symbolism I could make out of it. But it’s crazy, right?

-Kristi Thomas

I just bought Stephen Colbert’s new book to get my fill of The Colbert Report during the Writers Strike (and since the South Carolina Democratic executive council has taken him out of the news). I’ve just started, but the introduction is full of class-related stuff.

On the very first page of the introduction, Colbert talks about how he has too many opinions left over from his show, comparing them to seeds on a barren ground. Then he says he’s going to impregnate America with the seeds of his opinions (the words of his book)!

The next page has a footnote about protecting our nation’s crops from insects with what he terms “Frankenstein corn.”

The only research he needed to write this was a look in the mirror, because this is his story, he says.

His first babysitter (only on page 3 still) wore too many rings.

And page 6 yields the gem: “Back then, family members knew their roles, and nobody questioned paternal authority.”

“America used to live by the motto ‘Father Knows Best.’ Now we’re lucky if ‘Father Knows He Has Children.’” We’ve talked about the rise of paternity tests a lot.

Soon enough, he’s describing the role of the father within the family, including “a teacher,” or epistemic authority, and “a distant authority figure who can never be pleased,” or the executive authority. He continues, “At home, my word is law.” There’s that law of the father again.

I’ve only read the first 10 pages, but as our recurring images continue to appear (and so close together), it’s already clear that Stephen Colbert is incredibly plugged into the collective unconscious. And as a bonus, you will learn beyond the shadow of a doubt that Mr. Clean is gay.

–Brandon

Has anyone been following this story? For the first time in history, King Tut’s face was revealed this week. Ancient Egypt is of course one of the places where one of the earliest writing systems was invented.
Dr.B.

Brandon sent me the following e-mail:

I was just reading an interview with David Chase (the creator of the
Sopranos) and he articulated something you’ve been talking about in class about directors tapping into the collective unconscious. Specifically it’s about the final scene of the Sopranos finale, which I’m sure you’ve heard about, and if he actively was referencing The Last Supper:

“The interesting thing is that, if you’re creative, there may be things at
work that you’re not even aware of: things you learned in school, patterns you’ve internalized. I had no intention of using The Last Supper, but who knows if, subconsciously, it just came out.”

I thought that was pretty cool, both that he accepts that it wasn’t an
intentional reference yet still a valid one, and that he recognizes that it
may well have been subconscious.

Here’s my response:

Hi Brandon, that’s amazing; thank you so much for telling me about it. I saw that last episode, and most of the earlier ones as I’m a fan. The
thing that struck me when I saw it was that here you have the most famous crime family on tv who live beyond the realm of the law, the paternal symbolic, and are named for the female voice — oral/aural — the imaginary, and what do they eat for the last supper? Onion rings.

Rings are everywhere in this class, The Ring, hamlet’s father’s signet
ring, and when we get to moses and the invention of the hebrew alphabet, we’ll see how they melt down rings to make the golden calf — an image — because Moses takes too long to bring them the symbolic, written law on stone tablets.

So, Onions make you cry and rings are of course the 0 half of the digital binary of 0/1, the female/male genital binary. So, if you must know, I think that scene plugs into the subconscious in another way not unrelated to christ’s last supper: it plugs into the cultural sadness associated with the loss of the maternal/analog/imaginary and the renewed ascendancy of the paternal/digital/symbolic. Not unlike the christian context, in which the cultural sadness being played out in the last supper has also a great deal to do with the loss of the imaginary to the renewed ascendancy of the symbolic. Certainly, by da Vinci’s time the church had become the most powerful patriarchal institution in the world and the protector of the symbolic, inasmuch as the church funded all of the scribal publication centered in the monasteries, and controlled what was written and read, and how it was to be read. It was christ’s death, foregrounded in the Last Supper, that is the founding moment of the codex-symbolic. Christ has no biological father, thus no last name — Kristos in Greek means annointed one, a ritual often associated with the crowning ceremony of a new King, thus Jesus’s status as king of the Jews, and his Davidic lineage. He is not the son of Joseph and Mary Christ. As such, he cannot have gone through the Oedipus complex, as Oedipus himself did, and thus can not enter the symbolic. This may be why the Greek Bible gives him a biological mother, but refuses to give him a biological father.

Surely the authors of the Greek Biblical text knew the Greek mythological system, and thus would have wanted to sidestep associations with that system (adopted largely by the Romans), though there is a substantial body of classicist scholarship that recognizes the links between Christ’s story and that of Dionysus, a very maternal imaginary deity who was the god of wine, agriculture, and fertility of nature. In the portrait of him provided by Euripides in The Bacchae, Dionysus is beloved by the women in the city, hated and persecuted by the city’s founding fathers, especially Pentheus, who at the end of the play is killed by Dionysus’ female followers and dismembered by his own mother, Agave. The early followers of Christ were mostly woman, and Christianity remained largely matriarchal till the rise of the Church patriarchy near the beginning of the fourth Century. Interestingly, the main reason for the Council of Nicaea in 325 — in many ways the founding moment of institutionalized Christianity — was because disagreements in the Church of Alexandria (Egypt) over what was the nature of Christ’s relationship to his Father had gotten out of hand. Central to these disagreements was a debate over whether Jesus was
actually physically related to God the Father.

More importantly, Dionysus could well be the missing link between Christ and Oedipus, though when we finally read Sophocles’ version of the Oedipus myth you’ll see that he rather astonishingly invents a system of salvation that will be appropriated by early Christianity for their King and savior. First, Dionysus is the son of the god Zeus and the mortal woman, Semele (daughter of Cadmus of Thebes). Thus, like Christ, his mother is human and his father is a God. Second, given this lineage, Oedipus and Dionysus are actually related to each other. Dionysus is the son of the daughter of Cadmus, Semele. Oedipus is the great great grandson of Cadmus.

Christ can not have a paternal rivalry with Joseph over Mary, because
Joseph hasn’t slept with her, and isn’t his father. No paternal rivalry,
no rupture of the imaginary and induction into the symbolic. Thus, we
should not be surprised that Christ only speaks, leaves no writings of his own behind, and that the central message of his reformation of Judaism is that the Jewish law has become obsolete, and should be replaced by one law: Love thy neighbor as thy self. But really, that’s not a law in thetradition of the symbolic systems such as the Ten Commandments or the Jewish law in the Hebrew Bible. Those, like the paternal law, are negational: Thou shalt not.Christ’ wants to replace those negations with one affirmation — loveothers. Rather maternal, no? Mom says, “Go play nice.” If you don’t, shesays, “Wait till your father gets home!” Mom affirms; Dad negates.

Thus my sense that both last suppers, Christ’s and Tony’s, constitue actsof mourning the loss of the maternal imaginary at a moment of
technological change in which a new symbolic/paternal Reign is being
ushered in. Codex/scribal publication on the one hand; the digitization
of reality on the other.

This is the most e-mailed article on psychologytoday.com right now….

The Strange Case of Homeopathy
In 1994, NASA computer scientist Amy Lansky of Portola Valley, California, began wondering about her two-year-old son. Max knew the alphabet and could beat adults at memory games, but he barely spoke and, despite normal hearing, didn’t seem to understand language. At preschool he was a loner. His main form of communication was poking people with his finger. Eventually, school officials urged Lansky to have him evaluated. The diagnosis: autism, a neurological and behavioral disorder for which there is no known remedy.

But Lansky refused to believe Max was untreatable. Her search for an answer led her to homeopathy, an 18th-century healing art now enjoying renewed popularity because of Americans’ growing interest in alternative medicine. Homeopathy involves treating illnesses with such extreme dilutions of herbs, animal substances and chemical compounds that frequently not one molecule of the diluted substance is left in the solution. Homeopathy defies the known laws of science, not to mention common sense. But rigorous studies show it just may work. The rest of this article can be found here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20040302-000003.html

Jenna Purdy

Along the lines of what we talked about in class today, I just wanted to say that Germany had a big Spelling Reform of 1996 in order to streamline the language and figure out exact rules for special German letters like eszett (a double S) and capitalization.  At least, in German class those were the only parts of it we talked about.  Anyway, it was a big deal signed by the four predominantly German-speaking nations in Europe that even led to court rulings.  And now, Germany for the first time has a female chancellor, Angela Merkel, who was elected about ten years later.

–Brandon