The Accidental Weblog

Ahem (taps podium). Class is in session. Quiet in the back, please.

Yes. Now, reviewing: yesterday’s take-home problem was: you’re arranging a conference, and there’s a perception that’s afoot here and there that this venue isn’t particularly a welcoming space for women. There’s a story going about that some hammerhead was wandering about a crowd at your event—a crowd containing persons of the female persuasion wearing skirts—and said numbnuts was carrying a camera on a pole at ankle height, and certain folk took exception. Also, the attendance of women is generally down since recent years, and there is this feeling your cause has been a bit of a male domain traditionally, that women do get hit on kinda heavily and obnoxiously in your spaces, so on… So the question is: how do you send a message that this isn’t the case?

Yes. You there with the ‘Shrek’ t-shirt?

Tell ‘em ‘This is too a safe space for women and we’ll beat up any women who disagree?’

Erm. Right. What did you say your name was, fella?

(/Well, on the bright side, I guess that achieves the ‘Get your audience’s attention’ requirement, sure…)

… oh, and, just possibly a cormorant. And no, I’m not kidding about that, either.

I twittered this one out earlier today from the phone, figured I’d add it in here, too:

There’s a Great Blue Heron who hangs around Brown’s Inlet Park, quite near here.

Brown’s Inlet is this little inlet off the Rideau Canal—technically now separated from it by Queen Elizabeth Drive. It’s a very pretty little pond—willows on the shore. And there’s a park set up around it. In the winter it’s a toboggan hill, and in the summer, our little ones like to climb the trees, and a lot of people come to sunbathe, bring their dogs to walk, play some frisbee, so on…

The heron, according to a Holmwood Avenue resident we talked to, has been coming back each summer, usually for a week or so, for some twelve years now. Normally, it’s pretty shy, as herons usually are—you come within a few tens of meters, and it’s outta there. I had seen it the previous year, too.

Today, for some reason, it wasn’t acting shy at all. Quite the contrary: it was hanging out at the busy end of the pond, wading around, close to the ducks some folk were feeding, and just doing what herons presumably do with most of their day: fishing. We saw it catch a few small ones, one larger one, while we were there. And it was doing all this regardless of the crowd of mostly hairless formerly-arboreal* apes that were gathering on shore to watch it.

And when I say it wasn’t bothered by us, I mean it really wasn’t. My little guy was impressed by the great big bird (it looked around as tall as him, seriously, standing on shore), but he also wanted to keep climbing his tree, so I hung out nearby, too, with him…

… and at one point, the heron took one of those short little flights out of the shallow water and landed maybe eight feet from me, and just stood there, on shore, next to me, a minute or two, completely unconcerned…

Dunno what gives with that. Cool as it was, I began to wonder if the guy/gal** was feeling quite right. Very odd for a heron.

(Mebbe s/he was getting to think: well, geez, these odd creatures are feeding the ducks… Mebbe if I stand here and look impressive, someone’ll spring for some sashimi?)

But I got some great pictures and video, anyway. Can’t complain about that, I guess. A few are above. I may upload/add a few more later.

Oh, and about the cormorant: we’re watching the heron, and this woman who’d been watching it with us comes along and says something like: ‘Umm… Female herons aren’t black, are they?’

I answer in the negative (I mean, they’re not, unless they’ve just been drenched by the Exxon Valdez or somethin’, anyway—they actually look a lot like the males, if a smidge smaller, and the one we were watching could have been either, really), and she explained, and there in the middle of the inlet, a bit too far for decent phone photography was something that was probably a comorant…

I mean, honestly, I just think. It was a bit far to be absolutely certain, but it was a waterfowl of about that size and shape, with that slight crook in the neck, and it was very definitely black with an orangeish bill. So, y’know… Probably.

My daughter opined since these are both among my favourite birds, perhaps they’d just come over to give me a nice treat for Father’s Day. Kind of them.

The number of stops (due to the NYPD’s ‘stop and frisk’ policy) involving young black men in 2011 (168,124) exceeds the city’s population of young black men (158,406).

(/I think the guys who are getting it more than once should just say ‘Thanks, man, but ya already got me.’)