Well, before we’re swarmed with out-of-staters, I think I’ll take Daughter and go bother some of them in their native habitats to the south of us. I’ll go south next week when everyone is heading north to their Maine destinations. Then, on Labor Day weekend, when they’re all heading south, I’ll come back to Maine. This gives Daughter and I something to snicker at when we’re sailing through the Gardiner tollbooths and the line on the other side is stretching back to Boston. We’re easily amused.

Of course, soon, all the people we snickered at will be laughing at the Mainers who are snowed in while they’re walking around in sweaters in October, but there’s always something.

I’ll be back when the money runs out, as my sainted father used to say when he went grocery shopping.

Peace,

Lill

Polecats, who are kind of like weasels on steroids, kill their prey with a single bite, according to “The Encyclopedia of Animals” from Amber Books. That statement led me to ponder whether - if by some mischance the first bite doesn’t kill the prey - the polecat just gives up and goes looking for another rabbit or mouse or rat to bite? Or does it look around, embarrassed, and take another chomp at it if no one is looking?

We’ll get to wildebeests later, but before we do, I need to say something to my UK readers who may be complacently reading this and thinking that this has nothing to do with them, because in England and Scotland, at least, gamekeepers eradicated polecats long ago.

Well, don’t look now, Brits and Scots, but while your backs were turned, Mustela Putorius was sneaking across the border from Wales, where it regrouped and no doubt hatched evil schemes against the gamekeepers and their descendants. I’d do some genealogy research and find out if Great-Grand-Uncle Yorick chivvied polecats off the local lord’s estate, if I lived in the United Kingdom.

As if things weren’t already as black as the feet of the rare Mustela Nigris or Black-Footed Ferret of the US, I suppose I should mention that escaped domestic ferrets (tell me that phrase isn’t an oxymoron) are apt to become rather close friends with polecats and their offspring are very often fertile. Worse yet, my polecat experts tell me that the “kittens” born from these unions, like all polecat babies, don’t have to be taught to kill. It’s instinctive to the breed even at the toddler stage.

It may be of some consolation to the UK citizen who finds polecat adults or kittens surging ’round on every side, to consider that things could be a lot worse. Instead of polecats, they could be confronted with a surprised double-wattled cassowary - considered by many to be the world’s most dangerous bird. One blow from its sharp inner toes can kill a good-sized dog! Who knew?

These bizarre (at least to humans) birds can jump into the air to the height of their head and have many strange features. They have a horn-like casque on the top of the head, possibly to impress other cassowaries or, maybe to help them force their way through dense vegetation. Then there are the wattles which hang from their necks - brightly colored tassles of bare skin that also impress other cassowaries - we think.

About the cassowaries family life, the least said the better. Males and females hang out every couple of months, then she lays eggs and takes off, leaving the male to bring up the kiddies. (Lends new meaning to the term “brooding”, don’t you think?) The Dwarf Cassowary has a darker, smaller casque and lives in the mountains of Papua, New Guinea where it is known as the Moruk, of all things.

The only good thing I can say about European Polecats and Cassowaries is that they don’t live in the same places. So, it’s very unlikely, barring a circus train derailment, that you’ll be bothered by both of them at once. And if you do run into one in its natural habitat, there is absolutely no chance that there’s a wildebeest within a hundred miles, because - as fans of PBS’s Nature know - wildebeests are found only in Africa where they exist solely as fodder for lions, tigers and every other large carnivore to feed on.

This fact leads to why I was looking up wildebeests in the first place. I wanted to know why, when they have a set of pretty good horns, these large members of the Hippotraginae subfamily of the Family Bovidae don’t turn around, put their heads down and toss their attackers with those horns. Instead, they panic and try to run away instead. Invariably, at least on Nature, one of them doesn’t make it.

Why they take this approach is still a mystery to me, because The Animal Encyclopedia simply reports it as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, although they do make mention of the Black Wildebeest’s horns being used occasionally to defend against predators. I hesitate to question why Mother Nature has given the wildebeest horns to fight with, but neglected to provide the the gene for fighting back as well. It seems rather short-sighted to me, but maybe the focus was more on getting carnivores fed than saving large bovine animals on that day in pre-history.

I had hoped to get away without dissing the wildebeest any more than I already have, but in the interest of responsible journalism I must say that the breed’s instincts do make me wonder if evolution isn’t breaking down in the Bovidae family just a bit. It seems that the migratory instinct is so strong in wildebeests that they’ll even cross very wide rivers, thereby drowning themselves in large numbers. What this accomplishes is anybody’s guess, unless this is a way of insuring the survival of the world’s crocodile population, and I am absolutely NOT going to look up crocodiles, so you’ll have to do that yourself.

Who doesn’t remember Sparta and Athens, those city states which were so easy to study because they were direct opposites. Well, at least they were the way history was taught in the early sixties when we labored over dioramas of burly athletes trouncing skinny guys in togas. I remember that we touched lightly on Aristophanes and his plays, including Lysistrata. If I recall correctly, we had an unmarried, rather prim and proper teacher that year and she was so vague about the whole thing, that I came away with the feeling that Lysistrata and the women of Athens had quit cooking supper for their husbands, thus bringing about an almost-immediate end to the Peloponnesian War. I remember thinking, “Wow, those Greek guys really liked their chow!”

Later, during a Women’s Studies course at a local college, I discovered that food wasn’t the main course of the Athenian womens’ strike, nor was the play without controversy in other areas. For instance, there was much debate in class over whether Aristophanes really meant to portray Lysistrata as the strong, organized woman that she comes through as in the play. Women were considered very weak vessels, indeed, in Greece at the time, especially when it came to controlling their appetites for drinking and sex, so Lysistrata, who keeps to her plan no matter what, isn’t your normal Greek woman as portrayed by male writers of Aristophanes’ era.

Maybe because I’ve had a fever for the last week, the story of Lysistrata has been on my mind. It could also be because I’ve been knitting socks with some particularly soft, beautifully colored yarn, which reminds me of weaving, which was an activity that permeated Athens and figured largely in the play. Whether Aristophanes meant to lampoon women or not, he makes it clear that he sees women as very different from men, as they go about weaving “the fabric of life”, both literally and figuratively. Weaving was both the center of Athenian life, and at the same time, it was seen as women’s work, humdrum and everyday, unlike the serious work of men which was war, making laws and running the Athenian corner of the world.

I’m no Lysistrata, but I’m as fed up with war as she was. Since I was born in 1951, there has been almost no time when this country hasn’t been fighting someone, somewhere. The Second World War ended in 1945 and the Korean War (or police action if you prefer) started in 1950 and lasted two years. For the next ten years, we were gradually becoming embroiled in Vietnam, although most of it was behind the scenes. How many people knew that America was paying for most of the war throughout the 50’s? Or that we’d had advisors there since 1950 and were the major arms supplier to the French and South Vietnamese? Ironically, most of the American advisors thought the French had almost no chance of success, according to documents that have since come to light, but that didn’t stop us from selling them arms and training them.

After Vietnam, there were a lot of covert actions aimed at people we didn’t like, so that we could install puppets we did like until they got uppity. I’ve lost count of how many people we’ve installed and uninstalled like software on a laptop. Then there was Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom and our little sortie into Afghanistan to find what’s his name, although we’re not so hot to find him anymore for some reason. (Maybe because we can’t and he doesn’t have any oil?)

It’s not just America either. Here’s a nifty link that can help keep you up at night counting wars instead of sheep. The History Guy knows what’s going on in the world and so will you after you visit his site. It’s depressing, but we need to know this stuff and we need to teach our kids about it, so that maybe they won’t be as naive as the average citizen who thinks that we went into Iraq to find those Weapons of Mass Destruction we heard so much about five years ago. Or to get rid of Saddam Hussein, who was only there because we put him there. (I love the photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam Hussein’s hand in 1983. He was probably grinning because of the money we were going to make for selling him weapons of mass destruction.)

Of course, if you really want to keep yourself up at night, you could go to a site like www.oilempire.us. This is one of those sites where you almost have to put on your tinfoil hat before you sign on, but the longer you read it, the more it starts to seem less like a paranoid’s screenplay for a self-published novel and more like something you read in the New York Times the other day.

(I just know I’m going to hear from Roger on this one, but I had to include the link so you can decide for yourselves whether it’s all something that snopes debunked last week or maybe a little bit of truthiness is hidden inside the twisted skeins of yarns about the “shadow government” and “peak oil”.)

So we’re back to yarn and weaving and Lysistrata and her campaign to end the war. If you’d like to get involved in some of this peace work, you can go to The Lysistrata Project and look into the myriad ways that women and men all over the world are waging peace. I love the humor section, myself. Ol’ Aristophanes had a pretty good sense of humor for an old Greek guy who lived when women were probably considered about one step up from pond scum - except when they were goddesses, which I’ve never been able to figure out.

I don’t see war ending anytime soon no matter how hard we work at it, but once in awhile, I do idly wonder what would happen if every male over the age of 10 was magically transported to another planet for a week. I love the males in my family and none of them is at war at the moment. I know that not all women are peaceful and some of them would just as soon fight as the male of the species.

However, I don’t believe that AS many of them are war-like, or as ready to put their energy, their time or their children and loved ones at risk as the average male is. We’re too busy weaving together the strands of life to support and nurture our families. War makes big holes in the fabric of our lives and no matter how we try to repair them, life just isn’t the same. We have to ask ourselves who benefits from war? Not the average person whose life is completely disrupted and sometimes lost.

Nope, it’s the people who sell the arms, the oil, the tanks and the uniforms. They’re the only people who win when they manipulate the rest of us into going to war. And it’s about time that we smartened up, realized it and made sure that our kids realize it before another generation gets sucked into endless war.