"The design is such that the owner does not have to walk through 'chicken droppings and chicken bedding' to tend to the birds. The keeper can access the hens via interior shed doors. The attached run is predator-proof... and includes a solid roof, which helps prevent avian flu from spreading to the flock, as it can be 'transmitted with migratory birds flying overhead'.... The [henhouse] has led to speculation that there may be political motivations behind the flock’s appearance. It’s a theory that resonates with Danny Bowers, who keeps 19 chickens on a suburban property in Utah County, Utah. Bowers, who uses they/them pronouns, points out that some conservatives have embraced the values espoused by 'trad wife' influencers, many of whom raise chickens."
I love the sheer randomness of the pronoun preference of some guy in Utah who's got nothing to do with any of this other than that he too keeps chickens.
I'm going to assume that the reason for the chickens is to enrich the day-to-day life of the Vance's 3 — soon to be 4 — children.
It is an awfully posh henhouse. I can see why some people are envious... or trying to figure out if they should be envious:
The zoo in northern Denmark said that chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs were an important part of the diet of its predators, which need "whole prey," reminiscent of what they would hunt in the wild.
"If you have a healthy animal that has to leave here for various reasons, feel free to donate it to us. The animals are gently euthanized by trained staff and are afterwards used as fodder. That way, nothing goes to waste — and we ensure natural behavior, nutrition and well-being for our predators," Aalborg Zoo said.
The zoo said it accepts donated rabbits, guinea pigs and chickens on weekdays between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., but no more than four at a time.
They're eating the dogs! They're eating the cats! No, they are not. It doesn't say dogs and cats. It says "chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs."
Here's the notice. Is that the zoo's predator or somebody's unwanted cat?
That's easy to translate and to see that's a lynx: "Chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs form an important part of the diet of our predators – especially the European lynx, which needs whole prey that resembles what it would naturally hunt in the wild."
"... and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks. It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.... Bobby preys on the desperation of parents of sick children — vaccinating his own children while building a following by hypocritically discouraging other parents from vaccinating theirs.... Bobby continues to grandstand off my father’s assassination, and that of his own father...."
"... she said, and their 'chicken chatter' could be comforting background noise for her son, who has anophthalmia, and was born without eyes.
C-Jay is missing one-third of his brain and half of his right lung, and his heart is on the right side of his body rather than the left. He also has autism, epilepsy and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. C-Jay is a social person, his mother said, and pandemic-induced isolation took a toll on his mental health.... The process to be granted an exception to the law [against backyard chickens] was more challenging and complicated than Amy had anticipated.... [Later, Amy filed a complaint with the Maine Human Rights Commission] claiming Bangor was discriminating against her son by not giving him an exemption to the no-chicken rule.... 'He deserves to have his chickens,' Amy said. 'They help him to cope and make sense of his world.'"
"... that he finally marched into a local farm store and demanded to speak to a manager. His plea: Stop selling chicks and ducklings.... 'It’s a crisis that people are abandoning these animals,' he said.
One of the slim silver linings of the pandemic’s earliest days was the addition of animals to many families. Some people, decamping from virus-besieged cities for the countryside, stoked a craze for backyard fowl.... Socially distant and lonely, or with kids to entertain, many cleared pet store shelves of gerbils and lizards, chinchillas and snakes....Why families are holding onto cats and dogs but relinquishing smaller animals like guinea pigs may have to do with human attachment, several experts said. On Staten Island, Jade said she was able to bear parting with her guinea pig because Honey was less interactive than her dog and cats. 'They look adorable, but I think people have this misguided conception they are going to be able to provide this companionship and fill a void that the are looking for,' said Allie Taylor, the president of Voters for Animal Rights.... On Wednesday, a box containing 22 guinea pigs of all ages was found abandoned in the lobby of a Staten Island apartment building...."
The solution is, clearly, to eat these animals. You don't need a rescue sanctuary. You need meat processors. Ducks and chickens are obviously edible. Eat them, and the problem is gone.
But what about the guinea pigs? What about them?! Look it up. They're especially good. They've even — like pigs/pork and cattle/beef — got their own name when they are converted into meat: cuy (or cavy).
Freedom of speech is an artifact of the "Wild West," not the foundation of our republic!
Well, the New York Times is free to print such things, misleading though they are. The NYT is trying to induce private companies to undertake censorship.
[One] podcast is available through iHeart Media... Spotify and Apple are other major companies that provide significant audio platforms for hosts who have shared similar views with their listeners about Covid-19 and vaccination efforts, or have had guests on their shows who promoted such notions.
“There’s really no curb on it,” said Jason Loviglio, an associate professor of media and communication studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “There’s no real mechanism to push back, other than advertisers boycotting and corporate executives saying we need a culture change.”...
That would be a culture change in favor of censorship, and the NYT is doing what it can to instigate demand for that change.
“People develop really close relationships with podcasts,” said Evelyn Douek, a senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute. “It’s a parasocial medium. There’s something about voice that humans really relate to.”
There’s something about voice that humans really relate to. Yes, the spoken word feels more like a real relationship than the written word, but that makes it more dangerous, it seems. More "parasocial."
I know I like to stick with the written word. It feels more rational. It's easier to pull apart and critique, at least as long as the private company known as Google allows me to continue — continue my parasocial life — and doesn't virtual-murder me.
I was just listening — on my car radio — to the eulogy by Bill Clinton. I want to say a few things about it — my key words are "cancel" and "infect" — but I will have to wait for the transcript.
ADDED: Obama is giving a eulogy now (at 12:46 CDT). There's a third President there today: George W. Bush. He spoke first, so his is the first transcript that's available. Excerpt:
John’s story began on a tiny farm in Troy, Alabama, place so small he said you could barely find it on the map.... Every morning, he would rise before the sun to tend to the flock of chickens. He loved those chickens. Already called to be a minister who took care of others. John fed them and tended to their every need, even their spiritual ones, for John baptized them. He married them and he preached to them. When his parents claimed one from family supper, John refused to eat one of his flock. Going hungry was his first act of nonviolent protest... He always believed in preaching the gospel, in word and in deed, insisting that hate and fear had to be answered with love and hope. John Lewis believed in the Lord, he believed in humanity and he believed in America. He’s been called an American saint, a believer willing to give up everything, even life itself, to bear witness to the truth that drove him all his life, that we could build a world of peace and justice, harmony, and dignity, and love....
AND: Here it is, the Bill Clinton speech, the one where I wanted to highlight "cancel" and "infect":
I think three things happened to John Lewis... that made him who he was. First, the famous story of John at four with his cousins and siblings holding his aunt’s hand more than a dozen of them, running around a little old wooden house, as the wind threatened to blow the house off its moorings, going to the place where the house was rising and all those tiny bodies trying to weigh it down. I think he learned something about the power of working together....
[A]s a child, he learned to walk with the wind... [H]e challenged others to join him with love and dignity, to hold America’s house down and open the doors of America to all its people.... [N]o matter what, John always kept walking to reach the beloved community.... When he could have been angry and determined to cancel his adversaries, he tried to get converts instead....
Twenty years ago when I came here after the Selma March to a big dinner honoring John and Lillian and John-Miles... ... I was almost out of time and people were to be present and people were asking me, “Well, if you could do one more thing, what it would be, or what do you wish you had that you had done that you didn’t?”.... I said, “If I could just do one thing. If God came to me tonight and said, ‘Okay, your time’s up. You got to go home and I’m not a genie. I’m not giving you three wishes.’ One thing, what would it be?” I said, “I would infect every American was whatever it was that John Lewis got as a four year old kid and took through a lifetime to keep moving and keep moving in the right direction and keep bringing other people to move and to do it without hatred in his heart, with a song and be able to sing and dance.”
I thought it was interesting that Bill Clinton took those 2 words that are so conspicuous in present-day American culture — "cancel" and "infect" — and turned it to the positive. We have a cancel culture — Bill was acknowledging — but if we were like John, we'd have love and we'd keep working on winning converts. And we have the awful infection — the coronavirus — but we could come down with an infection of joy and love and dedication to living together in a better world.
"Faced with a June 30 deadline to renew the lease on their two-bedroom duplex in Brooklyn, Naomi Mersky, 44, and her husband decided to bail. 'We know we’re lucky that we have options,' she said, but they also couldn’t keep paying rent indefinitely if their kids, ages 5 and 9, didn’t feel safe. They’ve bought chickens and are looking into starting the next school year in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, where they’re living in a summer cabin they own. Krista Sudol, 42, a mother to two young children who just lost her job in fashion 'and possibly my career,' summed up the zeitgeist bluntly: 'I love New York so much I could cry, but for the first time ever, it feels all wrong.' For many artists who came to the city to make it big and wound up waiting tables, the city’s promise that hustle and paying dues leads to achieving your dreams is starting to feel like a broken contract.... Since March, Nancy Lee, 39... confirmed she’s pregnant, gotten engaged and hunkered down with her fiance — who is also out of work — and their pug, Biggie, in an East Village studio apartment. 'It’s just resonating that I think it’s my time to leave New York,' Lee said. 'The value of living here is the way of life. And if the sexiness has worn off, then why pay the expensive price tag?'"
One thing about living in NYC (which I did for 10+ years) is that your lease keeps coming up for renewal, confronting you with the question whether this is where you want to be. That happens at a specific time, and you have to say yes or no. When you have a house, you can sell at any time, but you have to initiate and do the hard work of selling, and you've probably settled in and it's complicated to clear out all your stuff.
And yet, I think people who live in NYC find it especially hard to leave, because so many of them have the feeling that NYC is utterly unique and better than everywhere else. That's how I ended up living in NYC. I married a person who felt like that about New York, and my vague notions of wanting something quite different were no competition for the overwhelming power of New York. But it was hard living there. So many simple things, like getting your laundry done, become an ordeal. But at least you never think, Step One, buychickens.
And yet... I have to Google... people who raise chickens in nyc...
I get lots of hits — like "Raising chickens in NYC: Laws, tips, and everything else you need to know" ("I think in the future, community-based urban agriculture will continue to grow because tackling food issues also allows people to tackle other social and economic issues within their communities such as racial equity, gentrification, and climate change").
People don't know how to keep it simple. It's hard living in NYC, but people make it harder for themselves. There are people who raise chickens in NYC. There are people who live in a studio apartment but get a dog — a pug named Biggie. And then there's the part where your animal-tending pastime has to be interwoven with things you're supposed to be thinking about. You've got to take care of those birds and make it feel like that's helping with climate change. And racial equity. And for God's sake put that pug on a leash.
"An agricultural expert behind the scheme says a single duck can eat more than 200 locusts a day and can be more effective than pesticides.... Lu Lizhi, a senior researcher with the Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, told Bloomberg that the ducks are 'biological weapon.' He said that while chickens could eat about 70 locusts in one day a duck could devour more than three times that number. 'Ducks like to stay in a group so they are easier to manage than chickens,' he told Chinese media.... 'Go, ducks! I hope you come back alive,' wrote one user of China's Twitter-like Weibo platform. 'Heroic ducks in harm's way!' said another, in a parody of the description commonly used for medical staff tackling the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. However, a professor from the China Agriculture University, who is part of the delegation to Pakistan, questioned whether the ducks would be suited to the mainly arid conditions where the locusts are a problem. 'Ducks rely on water, but in Pakistan's desert areas, the temperature is very high,' Zhang Long told reporters in Pakistan."
Possibly the feel-good story of the day, reported at BBC... but I'm not understanding ducks in the desert... because chickens are harder to manage?? And it's interesting to get a little taste of Chinese coronavirus humor ("Heroic ducks in harm's way!").
"They are typically steamed first to make them puffy before being stewed and simmered in abalone sauce."
From a Bloomberg News item about a container of 23.94 tons of "American chicken feet" that went through Chinese customs yesterday, "potentially heralding the start of a new trading era between the two countries just days before they sign a long-awaited trade deal."
We're told that the Chinese refer to chicken feet as "phoenix claws" and we're also shown a graph that refers to them as "chicken paws," so I'm inferring that's the official governmental term.
I looked up "paw," because it's a word I'd only use for the feet of furry mammals (or jocosely for the hands of a human being), so I'm surprised to see that the oldest use of "paw" in English (according to the OED) is, in fact, " The foot or claw of a bird; the foot or claw of a dragon."
c1450 (▸c1380) G. Chaucer House of Fame 541 This egle..with hys grymme pawes stronge..Me..he hente.
But I see from Googling that a lot of people are talking about it. For example, at Townhall, 4 days ago, somebody wrote, "'Donald Trump's House Of Wings' Belongs In The Smithsonian" ("This video has been making the rounds on Twitter after a One America News video researcher rediscovered the gem").
"Am I saying that I'm a chicken wing expert? No. But I am telling you this, the wing is hands down the best part of the chicken. Better than the head. Better than the torso. Better than the back...."
Torso... now that's funny. By the way, for decades, I've found the word "torso" funny. There's the line "and the torso, even more so" in "Lydia the Tattoed Lady," and once, when I was in Rome, visiting the Vatican Museum, there were a lot of posters showing a statue that was only a torso, with the word "torso," and, after seeing these posters all over the place, I overheard a young woman, who must have seen what I'd been seeing, and she said, "What's with the torso?" Even now, 2 decades later, I hear her inflection in my head, and I laugh out loud.
I wish I could find the old Vatican Museum poster, but I do think this is the torso in question, the most famous torso at the Vatican Museum, the "Belvedere torso":
It was once believed to be a 1st-century BC original, but is now believed to be a copy from the 1st century BC or AD of an older statue, which probably dated to the early 2nd century BC..... Legend has it that Pope Julius II requested that Michelangelo complete the statue fragment with arms, legs and a face. He respectfully declined, stating that it was too beautiful to be altered, and instead used it as the inspiration for several of the figures in the Sistine Chapel....
So that's what's with the torso!
If you don't know what that is, but you just keep seeing that, with nothing but the word "Torso," it really does make you the perfect audience for the line "What's with the torso?"
ADDED: That kind of laughing — my laughing at "What's with the torso?" — is premised on ignorance. It's like what makes "Beavis and Butt-Head" funny. They're so stupid and don't know the value of anything. They look at things and say "What's that?" Now, I don't remember what, if anything, I knew about the Belvedere torso when I went to the Vatican Museum 20 years ago, but, obviously, I knew from the museum's cues that it was an important artwork and I felt calmly assured that it was something profound and dignified. But the young women — in the manner of "Beavis and Butt-Head" — were just seeing it as a torso with the word "torso" (and, I think, a this-way-to-the-torso arrow) and reacting to it as if it was a completely random torso in no particular context. And I am still laughing out loud.
CORRECTION: The post headline originally said 2015, but it was 2004.
"Incubated Worlds, a research and breeding center in the capital Addis Ababa, will also house a permanent art installation showcasing the work of Koen Vanmechelen, including photographs, videos, and books of chickens' genetic codes. 'It's the most sexy chicken coop in the world,' said Mr. Vanmechelen, whose Cosmopolitan Chicken Project set out to create a chicken carrying the genes of all the planet's breeds. The artist told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that each successive generation of Cosmopolitan Chickens is more resilient, lives longer, and is less susceptible to diseases, proving the importance of genetic diversity.... Olivier Hanotte, a scientist with ILRI in Addis Ababa... praised Vanmechelen for doing what scientists could not – creating a unique population of chickens that gives a snapshot of the genetic diversity of birds outside Ethiopia... 'That is a fantastic resource for us... There's no way that as a scientist I would have gotten a grant for 20 years to do this sort of experiment."
"Despite his wild success, Mr. Hirst still sees himself as an outsider in what he calls a 'stuffy' scene in which people 'look their nose down' at him for breaking rules. Like many powerful men, he retains a deep desire to be accepted by the working class world he arose from — in his case, a postwar industrial Leeds of poverty and broken homes. Growing up without money, and then being known for it as much as the work, still stings.... 'He’s sober, which makes communication a lot more reliable,' [said the art dealer Larry Gagosian]. 'He’s healthy, he’s into yoga. He likes to tease people, but there’s not a mean bone in him....”
The new paintings are colorful dots, a sentimental tribute to Bonnard and to large sellable rectangles.
That's Bonnard. Click on this link to the Gagosian gallery to see the Hirsts. Ooh, I have a bit of a feeling that if I stared at them the right way a 3-D image would pop.
Good thing nobody gave Mr. Pitt the idea of "sticking a piece of chicken into the opening of his penis." Did Damien Hirst really do that and what piece of chicken? Thigh? Wing? You're lucky I looked it up for you. From The Guardian (2000):
Hirst's new self-awareness does not seem to have eroded his talent for bad behaviour. He reveals that he is facing legal action after he dropped his trousers in the restaurant of a Dublin hotel last month and inserted a chicken bone in the end of his penis.
Ah! So it was a bone! But a bone from what piece of the chicken? The drumstick? I'm just going to picture a delicate softly pointed rib, even though it makes me think of the death of America's oddest founding father, Gouveneur Morris:
After suffering from crippling gout throughout the fall of 1816, the Founding Father’s pain grew even worse when he began to experience a urinary tract blockage. From the don’t-try-this-at-home department, Morris then attempted to clear the obstruction by using a piece of whale bone as a catheter. The unsuccessful procedure led to further internal injuries and infection. Morris passed away on November 6, 1816, in the same room in which he was born 64 years earlier on his family’s estate, Morrisania, in what today is the South Bronx.
And that's all I'm going to say about Damien Hirst for now.
"... a designation for rare, nonindustrial birds with genetic lines that can be traced back generations. They are selecting for desirable personality traits (such as being affectionate and calm — the lap chickens that are gentle enough for a child to cuddle), rarity, beauty and the ability to produce highly coveted, colored eggs. All of it happens in cutting-edge coops, with exorbitant veterinarian bills and a steady diet of organic salmon, watermelon and steak.... Instead of cobbling together a plywood coop with materials from the local hardware store, the rare birds of Silicon Valley are hiring contractors to build $20,000 coops using reclaimed materials or pricey redwood that matches their human homes. Others opt for a Williams-Sonoma coop — chemical free and made from sustainable red pine — that has been called the 'Range Rover of chicken cribs.' Coops are also outfitted with solar panels, automated doors and electrical lighting — as well as video cameras that allow owners to check on their beloved birds remotely..."
Those were the 4 magazines staring me in the face at Whole Foods today. I didn't buy any of these, but I did entertain myself with the fantasy that it was a multiple choice test, and I decided: Chicken.
This exhibition represents Berman's life from 1982 to 2004, when she lived by herself in a small apartment in Greenwich Village. In her closet Berman lovingly organized her shoes, clothes, linens, beauty products, luggage, and other necessities. Although the clothing is of various tints—including cream, ivory, and ecru—it gives the impression of being all white.
With its neatly arranged stacks of starched and precisely folded clothing, the closet is presented as a small period room in dialogue with The Met's recently installed Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room from 1882, which features clothing from the 1880s of the type that Arabella Worsham, a wealthy art patroness, might have worn....
I got there via this NYT piece, "When the Gospel of Minimalism Collides With Daily Life," which is mostly about a lifestyle blogger who had a house decorated in a cluttered style, then had a minimalism epiphany, then readjusted back toward slightly cluttered.
According to the sociologist Joel Stillerman, author of “The Sociology of Consumption,” among certain educated, upper-middle-class segments of the United States and other Western societies, there is a connection between minimalist design and a quest for well-being. But minimalism is also meant to project taste, refinement and aesthetic knowledge. “These people,” he said, “are making the statement that ‘I can afford to have less. I appreciate books and travel and good meals.’”
Mr. Stillerman calls these post-materialist values; in other words, simplicity as a form of cultural capital. This concept is evident in a current exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, “Sara Berman’s Closet”....
Still, critics chide minimalists for a kind of faux self-discipline. After all, if you can afford to toss your stuff, you can probably reacquire it should you change your mind....
I got to that NYT piece through Instapundit, who reacted to the description of the blogger's minimalism phase: "She went full-on Dwell, even building a chicken coop, the de rigueur symbol of suburban simplicity, in the backyard." Glenn's comment was: "[I]f you think having a chicken coop is about 'simplicity,' it’s because you’ve never kept chickens."
It's about wanting something that "minimalism" or "simplicity" isn't really the right word for. Those words hide the real psychology going on, which I assume varies from person to person. It could be a desire for control, a fetishization of purity, a fantasy of authenticity, a need for something like religion, a solution to aimless anxiety.
"There is nothing to celebrate in the birth of this chick born alone in a museum," the organisation said in an open letter to the artist. Considered merely as a part of an 'artistic' performance, it will never meet its mother. ...."
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