Poem for Friday and Life as Zoo

Paul Hewitt
By Mel Glenn

Please, sir, I don't mean to be disrespectful.
I did raise my hand.
I mean, who cares if Macbeth becomes a monster,
If Huck Finn rescues Jim,
If Willie Loman never finds happiness?
They're just characters in books.
What have they got to do with me?
I mean, I'm never going hunting for white whales.
I'm never going to fight in the Civil War.
And I certainly don’t live in the Dust Bowl.

Tell me instead how to
Make money, pick up girls.
Then maybe I'll listen.
You got any books that deal with real life?

--------

This will be a quickie because it's nearly midnight and I don't know where either my day or my evening went -- really all I did was get far too little writing done, contemplate running away to Stonehenge for the best possible view of the Venus-Sun conjunction, take a long walk in slightly warmer but still near-perfect weather with lots of animals in the woods, snap some photos of neighbors' Halloween decorations that I haven't even taken off the SD card yet, and have cats sit on me to try to keep warm.

Evening TV included Next Gen's "Homeward" (better than I remembered but still a terrible Picard episode), $#&% My Dad Says (lots of obnoxious gay stereotypes, not Shatner's finest moment either), and Nikita (only three of the four kick-ass women present this week but that's still an improvement over most shows I watch, and I am really loving Maggie Q though I am still missing Alberta Watson and Eugene Robert Glaser). If there's more news I'll catch it up tomorrow!


A Guam rail in the National Zoo's conservation facility in Front Royal, where the zoo is trying to save the flightless birds after they were driven to extinction in the wild by non-native snakes and cats.


Przewalski's horse, a feral Eurasian horse, was extinct in the wild until reintroduced by zoos in Mongolia and China.


The Bali mynah is critically endangered, in large part because of illegal trapping for sale on the black market.


This brown kiwi has lived at the National Zoo for about 30 years. Very few of the are permitted outside New Zealand.


The zoo in DC had a disaster several years ago in which the red pandas ingested poison meant to kill rats and died. Now the pandas are being bred in Front Royal.


The bison have a lot of space with a lovely view of the mountains. I guess bears aren't much of a threat to bison.


I'm not sure what species of spider this is but it's HUGE. (And it's not a zoo specimen; it was just crawling around near the crane enclosure!)


Here's one more photo of one of the young clouded leopards.