Band of Thebes

Born June 13: Siegfried Fischbacher

A classic meet cute: Two German teens escape postwar strife by working on a cruise ship. One is a waiter who, when his bosses aren’t looking, performs magic tricks for the passengers, which proves so popular he’s given his own show. The other is an enraptured bellboy who becomes his onstage assistant and, to spice up the disappearing animal act, smuggles a cheetah on board. So began the legendary team, Siegfried & Roy. They fell in love, toured Europe, played Princess Grace’s Red Cross benefit in Monaco, then the Lido in Paris, and by 1970 it was Vegas, baby. They began to use more exotic animals in their illusionist show and, in 1989, when Steve Wynn opened the Mirage, they were so popular he guaranteed them a minimum of $57.5 million for the next five years. In 2000, they were the ninth highest-paid celebrities in the United States, just behind Steven Spielberg. Audiences adored their exotic white tigers and their camp theatrics, which featured hooded musclemen, capes, ultra tight leggings, and Roy's ludicrously oversized codpieces described as “certainly more frightening” than the tigers. Their last performance was October 3, 2003, when it was widely reported that a tiger “bit” Roy. Siegfried disputes this, saying if the tiger intended to harm Roy he would have snapped his neck and vigorously shaken him. Instead, Montecore, a seven year-old tiger who had been in the show for six years, wanted to help. Roy fell, possibly attempting to intercept a woman in the front row who may have been reaching out to touch Montecore, and the tiger was trying to rescue him, carrying him in his mouth as a mother tiger would her cubs. Roy suffered severe blood loss and critical injuries that kept him in rehabilitation for years. In April 2010, they gave a final benefit performance, with Montecore, lasting ten minutes. Siegfried and Roy continue to share a west Las Vegas eight-acre estate called the Jungle Palace, though they maintain separate living quarters.

Siegfried is 75 today. It is the younger Roy, 69 until October, who was hit with a sexual harassment lawsuit from three male caretakers who have videotape of the incidents.

Karen Joy Fowler Wins PEN Faulkner Award

Three judges -- Manuel Muñoz, Madison Smart Bell, Achy Obejas -- have named Karen Joy Fowler's audacious novel of family and animals, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves [Kindle], the 2014 PEN Faulkner Award winner. Twelve years ago Fowler was a PEN Faulkner finalist for her third novel, Sister Noon, about a friendship between two women in San Francisco in the 1890s.

The other 2014 finalists are: 

• Daniel Alarcon, At Night We Walk in Circles
• Percival Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell: A Novel
• Joan Silber, Fools: Stories
• Valerie Trueblood, Search Party: Stories of Rescue.

Born November 4: J.R. Ackerley

At prep school in the 1910's Joe Ackerley was so extremely good looking he was nicknamed Girlie, and decades later he named the love of his life, his Alsatian, Queenie. So why is his classic book called My Dog Tulip [Kindle]? Because the magazine editors who bought first-serial rights worried Queenie would inspire jokes about Ackerley's homosexuality. Other books' revisions went the right way. In 1952 (after his parents' deaths) he rewrote and expanded his 1932 memoir Hindoo Holiday [Kindle] to be more open about his six months as secretary to a gay maharaja in Chhatarpur.

Earlier he had served in two tours of duty in WWI, with two serious injuries, nearly two years as a prisoner of war, and surviving the death of his older brother who had been their father's favorite. Later, he became editor of the BBC magazine The Listener, where he could promote the works of many nascent gay writers including Auden, Isherwood, Larkin, King, and Spender. 

More out in his homosexuality than many after him, Ackerley openly pined for a longterm relationship with what he called an Ideal Friend. Failing that, he paid for sexual encounters with young guardsmen, laborers, and sailors. E.M. Forster, who had gotten Acklerley his job in India, told him, "Joe, you must give up looking for gold in coal mines," but it was through one of these rough trade lovers, Freddie Doyle, that Acklerley at 49 inherited Queenie, as Doyle was being sent to prison for burglary. Ackerley tells their story in his only novel, We Think the World of You [Kindle]. The recent animated movie of My Dog Tulip is a quiet charmer, voiced by Christopher Plummer and Lynn Redgrave.

A bit of a perfectionist, Ackerley spent 34 years working on his final book about his father [Kindle], who was a closet bigamist (having three children by his other wife) and secretly was a gay hustler during his years in the Guards. When, late in life, Ackerley tried to come out to him, his father interrupted with, “It’s all right, old boy. I prefer not to know. So long as you enjoyed yourself, that’s the main thing.”

In his writing, Ackerley refused to be cut off and insisted on oversharing. For one, his sexual relations -- "fantastically promiscuous," always with himself fully clothed and the young trade fully naked, never ever oral -- were ruined by premature ejaculation. In the New Yorker, Joan Acocella pondered the moral dimensions:

"How do you survive the humiliation of always having your body go against your will? Do you have to succeed at sex in order to feel that you have succeeded in life? And how do you tell your partner, who at that moment is innocently taking off his clothes, that the act for which he is preparing has already been completed?"

More importantly, she realized, "The real fruit of Ackerley’s candor, however, is the power it lent his writing: the richness of characterization, the tartness of metaphor, the protection that honesty gives against sentimentality, or just a stupid simplicity."

Read his biography by Peter Parker which Acocella calls "superb."

The 21st Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival

Four days of ornithology. Twenty of us took a boat to the uninhabited, unvisited Barren Islands. More photos here. The very best reference book on same-sex activity in nature is Bruce Bagemihl's Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity [Kindle]. A must own title.

Born June 13: Siegfried Fischbacher

How’s this for meeting cute? Two German teenagers escape postwar strife by working on a cruise ship. One is a waiter who, when his bosses aren’t looking, performs magic tricks for the passengers, which proves so popular he’s given his own show. The other is an enraptured bellboy who becomes his onstage assistant and, to spice up the disappearing animal act, smuggles a cheetah on board. So began Siegfried & Roy. They fell in love, toured Europe, played Princess Grace’s Red Cross benefit in Monaco, then the Lido in Paris, and by 1970 it was Vegas, baby. They began to use more exotic animals in their illusionist show and, in 1989, when Steve Wynn opened the Mirage, they were so popular he guaranteed them a minimum of $57.5 million for the next five years. In 2000, they were the ninth highest-paid celebrities in the United States, just behind Steven Spielberg. Audiences adored their exotic white tigers and their camp theatrics, which featured hooded musclemen, capes, ultra tight leggings, and Roy's ludicrously oversized codpieces described as “certainly more frightening” than the tigers. Their last performance was October 3, 2003, when it was widely reported that a tiger “bit” Roy. Siegfried disputes this, saying if the tiger intended to harm Roy he would have snapped his neck and vigorously shaken him. Instead, Montecore, a seven year-old tiger who had been in the show for six years, wanted to help. Roy fell, possibly attempting to intercept a woman in the front row who may have been reaching out to touch Montecore, and the tiger was trying to rescue him, carrying him in his mouth as a mother tiger would her cubs. Roy suffered severe blood loss and critical injuries that kept him in rehabilitation for years. In April 2010, they gave a final benefit performance, with Montecore, lasting ten minutes. Siegfried and Roy continue to share a west Las Vegas eight-acre estate called the Jungle Palace, though they maintain separate living quarters.

It is Roy, not Siegfried, who last month was hit with a sexual harassment lawsuit from three male caretakers who have videotape of the incidents.

Shenandoah Sunday

Llots of llamas and lleaves. (Like being in a Todd Haynes movie.)

Born November 4: J.R. Ackerley

At prep school in the 1910's Joe Ackerley was so extremely good looking he was nicknamed Girlie, and decades later he named the love of his life, his Alsatian, Queenie. So why is his classic book called My Dog Tulip? Because the magazine editors who bought first-serial rights worried Queenie would inspire jokes about Ackerley's homosexuality, they insisted he change her name. Other revisions went the right way. In 1952 (after his parents' deaths) he rewrote and expanded his 1932 memoir Hindoo Holiday to be more open about gay exploits in India.

Earlier he had served in two tours of duty in WWI, with two serious injuries, nearly two years as a prisoner of war, and surviving the death of his older brother who had been their father's favorite. Later, he became editor of the BBC magazine The Listener, where he could promote the works of many nascent gay writers including Auden, Isherwood, Larkin, King, and Spender. 

More out in his homosexuality than many after him, Ackerley openly pined for a longterm relationship with what he called an Ideal Friend. Failing that, he paid for sexual encounters with young guardsmen, laborers, and sailors. E.M. Forster, who had gotten Acklerley his job in India, told him, "Joe, you must give up looking for gold in coal mines," but it was through one of these rough trade lovers, Freddie Doyle, that Acklerley at 49 inherited Queenie, as Doyle was being sent to prison for burglary. Ackerley tells their story in his only novel, We Think the World of You. The animated movie of My Dog Tulip is a quiet charmer, with voice work by Christopher Plummer and Lynn Redgrave.

Born October 26-27: Adam Mars-Jones, Dan Matthews

 

Adam Mars-Jones and Alan Hollinghurst were born precisely five months apart in 1954 and each published his first book, boldly gay, in the 80s, both winning a Somerset Maugham Award. Second fictions appeared from each in the early 90s, and Hollinghurst, with his steady output of a novel every six years, became a star, a constant prize winner, and a literary novelist who can debut a new book at #1. Mars-Jones disappeared for a decade and a half and re-emerged in the era of Twitter snippets with a monumental work rivaling Proust. In 2008, Pilcrow took 544 pages to see its gay, disabled, vegetarian protagonist John Cromer to age sixteen. Earlier this year, Cedilla added 752 pages, with even stronger reviews, bringing John through Cambridge and his twenties. The Telegraph said, "There isn’t a passage here that doesn’t sparkle." Two more volumes are forthcoming, with an expected total of 2,500 to 3,000 pages devoted to an ordinary gay life. 

A towering outsider with massive insider pull, 6'5" Dan Mathews led the "I'd Rather Go Naked" anti-fur campaign and convinced Morrissey, Pink, Pam, and Paul McCartney to do spots for the love-them-or-hate-them animal rights group PETA. He started poor, was bullied in high school, worked at McDonalds and as a model to put himself through American University, and after graduating started at PETA as a receptionist. His memoir Committed: A Rabble-Rouser's Memoir [[Kindle]] finally pubbed in the UK in 2009, when gay rights living legend Peter Tatchell chose it on Band of Thebes best lgbt book poll saying, "It’s a story full of ideas, action and loads of gossip about the many celebrities who support PETA’s work. Off-beat, hilarious, irreverent, and highly ethical, Committed is a damn good read. It shows how direct action can raise consciousness and secure social change – and be lots of fun." 

Sea Lions

Disappointing day trip from Seward. Plenty of puffins and sea lions.

Best of Summer: The Call by Yannick Murphy

Don't tell me everything is dandy in book publishing. Throwaway thrillers get the full hardcover treatment in prime months and enduring literary fiction is released as tissue-grade paperbacks in the off season. Two marvelous, midlist, mid-career straight novelists who ought to be poised for major breakouts, Martha Southgate and Yannick Murphy, both coming off wonderful recent hardcovers, are seeing their new work relegated to paperback originals. This robs them of the proper build-up of stellar reviews and great word of mouth in hardcover that can burst into a huge success when the book is reinvented as a paperback a year later. The gold standard in this model is Bel Canto, a fourth novel that underperformed in hardcover then made Ann Patchett's career in paperback when most of the reading world wondered, How did I miss this? Without that two-tiered strategy, the time for Southgate's The Taste of Salt [[Kindle]] and Murphy's The Call [[Kindle]] is now or never. Choose now.

Yannick Murphy's The Call [[Kindle]] is the best novel of the summer. The story of a rural New England veterinarian, his wife, three kids, and a county of animals is touching, tense, funny, and true. Spiritually, the book belongs on the same shelf as Wendell Berry, Kent Haruf, Barbara Kingsolver, and Wallace Stegner. Indicative of Murphy's immense talent and gripping storytelling is that very soon into the novel you will no longer notice it is told entirely in the form of call reports from David's vet visits. It isn't a gimmick, it's the perfect distillation of the way he thinks. And of how he tackles problems, the worst of which are severely dwindling business, mounting bills, and two domestic crises. The first is a hunting accident that leaves the family and the reader in suspended anxiety. Yet that awfulness also, inevitably, heightens his perceptions of everyday life. David is a keen observer of creature habits, nature, mechanics, personality quirks, language (English, German, cussing), food, familial bonds, swimming, and substitute teaching. Unlike the overwritten State of Wonder which sledgehammers home its allusions by having Marina point out how similar she is to the mythic heroine she is watching on stage, The Call thrives on subtlety. A looming decision of vital importance is given a pair of doppelgangers -- scar and cheetah -- gracefully woven into one natural paragraph.

What Video We Rented From the Library: How we love the library and leave it with armloads of books and movies, even if the service at the library is slow, and the librarian who has been there for years always looks at the scanner gun for a few moments first before he uses it on our books' labels as if he's never seen the scanner gun before. And I know this librarian and he is also on the masters swim team and I have seen him in his swim trunks, and there is a huge scar on his belly that even pulling up the waistband of his trunks way up past his navel does not hide and I wondered what part of him was surgically removed or rearranged. He is a very slow swimmer, and it seems as if he goes backward instead of forward in the water, or that he goes nowhere at all. It was the librarian who recommended the video to Mia. The video was about mammals and Mia watched it first and then wanted me to watch it with her. The cheetah, I learned, will let one of her offspring share her kill with her even years later, even when the offspring is an adult she will remember it, but she will never let any other adult share with her. Isn't that amazing? Mia said.

What I Said: Yes, it really is amazing, and I hugged Mia on my lap while I said it and I smelled her hair that smelled faintly like our house when we walk into it after we've been away for a few days.

Although in its final pages the story stumbles with a too-tidy resolution, nothing should deter you from this beautiful and powerful ode to gentle, modest lives lived with integrity.

Male Zebra Finches In Longterm Pairs, Ignore Females

Yet another scientific study suggests that, contrary to endless heterocentric brainwashing, maybe nature's top priority isn't always reproduction. UC Berkeley's Dr. Julie Elie led a team researching zebra finches. Raised in same sex groups, more than half the males pair bonded with another male. They exhibited the same behavior as male-female pairs including singing to each other, preening, sitting closely side by side, nuzzling beaks, and sharing a nest. The BBC reports, "Same-sex pairs of monogamous birds are just as attached and faithful to each other as those paired with a member of the opposite sex." Here's the kicker:

"In the next stage of their study, the scientists brought novel females to a group of bonded male-male pairs. Out of eight males that were engaged in same-sex pair-bonds, five ignored the females completely and continued to interact with their male partner.

"The findings indicate that, even in birds, the drive to find a mate is far more complicated than simply the need to reproduce.

"A pair-bond in socially monogamous species represents a cooperative partnership that may give advantages for survival," said Dr Elie. "Finding a social partner, whatever its sex, could be a priority."

The best book on the subject is Bruce Bagemihl's encyclopedic marvel, written for lay readers and scientists alike, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. 

Below, a male-female pair demonstrate the one-step-forward two-steps-back nature of all flirting.

Fourth Day in the Aleutians: Tiny Towns and Many Whales

Altogether we made seven brief stops, several of them to treeless, gardenless villages of fewer than eighty people but zillions of wildflowers. Akutan, above, has seventy-five residents. During World War II, Cold Bay was home to 20,000 troops and now has a population of seventy-six. According to the National Weather Service, it is the cloudiest place in the United States.

The utterly hopeless photo far below is for certified whale geeks only. We cruised alongside the largest pod of humpbacks I've ever seen. How many must have been there if ten were spouting simultaneously? (My lens could only capture four in this frame.) The best book on humpbacks is Roger Payne's Among Whales, packed with boogling details such as scientists still have no idea how or where whales generate the sound of the "songs."

Third Day in the Aleutians: Crossing the Bering Sea

The reason the Aleutians are devoid of trees is the epic battering wind, which regularly exceeds 100 mph. We really felt it at Dutch and crossing the Bering Sea, but the birds seemed to frolic. On its previous voyage, the ferry had passed a raft of two million Norther Fulmars. We saw a steady stream of them fly past for hours, a fine start to our 1,003-mile trip aboard the no-frills Alaska Marine Highway ferry M/V Tustumena, which in some ways is like twice-monthly bus service for the Aleutian chain, ignoring the more remote 800 miles from Unalaska to Attu.

Second Day in the Aleutians: Red Foxes and White Russians

Hard to remember as this shy creature gently wooed me on a remote hike that skulks of foxes were the incessant tormentors of the shipwrecked sailors on the Vitus Bering - Georg Steller voyage to find North America from Russia in 1741. Constantly yapping, and starving, the wild foxes bit everything from the toes and nostrils of the dead to the one exposed part of a sailor who tried to answer nature's call in the middle of the night without leaving his tent. The foxes also ran off with Steller's papers and inkwell as he made field notes. Those were native animals. Bigger trouble came later when fur traders introduced other foxes to the islands who eventually decimated the Aleutian Cackling Goose population, among others. A global look at the subject is Alan Burdick's National Book Award-nominated Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion.

At this rate, you'd expect the third day photo to be a silver fox. As it happens, I live with one, but my partner gets camera shy.

First Day at Dutch Harbor

Our three-hour nonstop flight from Anchorage to the Aleutians became a four-hour journey with a detour to King Salmon to refuel. If we had arrived on time, maybe this black fox would not have been around to greet us.

Born June 12-13: Henry Scott Tuke, Siegfried, Djuna Barnes

Born in York in 1858, Henry Scott Tuke grew up in Falmouth where he discovered the pleasures of nude swimming that become the core subject of his en plein air paintings until his death at 70 in 1929. Moving to London when he was sixteen to attend art school, he graduated six years later, then toured Italy and Paris. His friends and acquaintances of the time included Symonds, Wilde, and Sargent (whose many, secret paintings of male nudes were numerous enough to fill this book). But by 1886 he was back near Falmouth, spending £40 to buy a two-masted sailboat which he converted to a floating studio and living quarters. Initially the only models he could get to pose were from London but before long he and the local youth had become friends for life, though many of them died in WWI. An avid traveler, in the 1890s Tuke returned to Italy, adding Corfu and Albania to his list and a new, vibrant light to his palette. Later he ventured to the Caribbean and Central America, further brightening his colors. Critics emphasize the innocence of his art, stressing that if anything the depictions are sensual not sexual, and making obvious comparisons to Eakins. Among Tuke's big collectors is Elton John. His work fills many books like Catching the Light.

How’s this for meeting cute? Two German teenagers escape postwar strife by working on a cruise ship. One is a waiter who, when his bosses aren’t looking, performs magic tricks for the passengers, which proves so popular he’s given his own show. The other is an enraptured bellboy who becomes his onstage assistant and, to spice up the disappearing animal act, smuggles a cheetah on board. So began Siegfried & Roy. They fell in love, toured Europe, played Princess Grace’s Red Cross benefit in Monaco, then the Lido in Paris, and by 1970 it was Vegas, baby. They began to use more exotic animals in their illusionist show and, in 1989, when Steve Wynn opened the Mirage, they were so popular he guaranteed them a minimum of $57.5 million a year. In 2000, they were the ninth highest-paid celebrities in the United States, just behind Steven Spielberg. Audiences adored their exotic white tigers and their camp theatrics, which featured hooded musclemen, capes, ultra tight leggings, and Roy's ludicrously oversized codpieces described as “certainly more frightening” than the tigers. Their last performance was October 3, 2003, when it was widely reported that a tiger “bit” Roy. Siegfried disputes this, saying if the tiger intended to harm Roy he would have snapped his neck and vigorously shaken him. Instead, Montecore, a seven year-old tiger who had been in the show for six years, wanted to help. Roy fell, possibly attempting to intercept a woman in the front row who may have been reaching out to touch Montecore, and the tiger was trying to rescue him, carrying him in his mouth as a mother tiger would her cubs. Roy suffered severe blood loss and critical injuries that kept him in rehabilitation for years. In April 2010, they gave a final benefit performance, with Montecore, lasting ten minutes. Siegfried and Roy continue to share a west Las Vegas eight-acre estate called the Jungle Palace, though they maintain separate living quarters. They are big boosters of the College of Magic (not Hogwarts) in perfectly named Cape Town, South Africa.

If Djuna Barnes lived in our age of the dysfunctional, harrowing memoir, she could outsell Mary Karr, Augusten Burroughs and James Frey combined. Her father believed in polygamy and moved his mistress into their house in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York when Djuna was five. He had eight children but no interest in supporting them; his mother had to write letters begging money from friends. Djuna was never sent to school and was raped at sixteen by a neighbor, with her father’s consent. For years Djuna shared a bed with her grandmother, whose sexually explicit letters much later suggest they were intimate. When Djuna was seventeen her father and grandmother forced her to marry his mistress’s brother, Percy Faulkner, who was fifty-two. After two months, Djuna fled and later, confronted with financial ruin, the family split up. Djuna, her mother, and three of her brothers moved to Manhattan, wher she was thrilled to study at the Pratt Institute, but within six months she was forced to leave to help support her family. She was a fulltime reporter and freelanced hundreds of articles to bring in more money. When she was twenty-three she moved to her own apartment in Greenwich Village, where she befriended bohemians, joined the Provincetown Players, and had many affairs with men and women. She became engaged to Ernst Hanfstaengl who reacted to the increasingly anti-German sentiment in America by breaking up with Djuna in favor of a German wife. (He later moved to Germany and became a close associate of Hitler.)

Djuna rebounded by falling deeply in love with fellow journalist and Provincetown Player Mary Pyne, who caught tuberculosis and died in 1919. Two years later McCall’s sent her to Paris, where she also interviewed James Joyce for Vanity Fair. By winter of the following year, she was

If Djuna Barnes lived in our age of the dysfunctional, harrowing memoir, she could outsell Mary Karr, Augusten Burroughs and James Frey combined. Her father believed in polygamy and moved his mistress into their house in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York when Djuna was five. He had eight children but no interest in supporting them; his mother had to write letters begging money from friends. Djuna was never sent to school and was raped at sixteen by a neighbor, with her father’s consent. For years Djuna shared a bed with her grandmother, whose sexually explicit letters much later suggest they were intimate. When Djuna was seventeen her father and grandmother forced her to marry his mistress’s brother, Percy Faulkner, who was fifty-two. After two months, Djuna fled and later, confronted with financial ruin, the family split up. Djuna, her mother, and three of her brothers moved to Manhattan, wher she was thrilled to study at the Pratt Institute, but within six months she was forced to leave to help support her family. She was a fulltime reporter and freelanced hundreds of articles to bring in more money. When she was twenty-three she moved to her own apartment in Greenwich Village, where she befriended bohemians, joined the Provincetown Players, and had many affairs with men and women. She became engaged to Ernst Hanfstaengl who reacted to the increasingly anti-German sentiment in America by breaking up with Djuna in favor of a German wife. (He later moved to Germany and became a close associate of Hitler.)

Djuna rebounded by falling deeply in love with fellow journalist and Provincetown Player Mary Pyne, who caught tuberculosis and died in 1919. Two years later McCall’s sent her to Paris, where she also interviewed James Joyce for Vanity Fair. By winter of the following year, she was

Scenes from Spring Break 2011

Above, April 5. I'm sparing you the endless mud, fog, drizzle, sleet, slush, and hail. And I won't reinforce stereotypes by claiming this bald eagle is gay but I will say he is extremely fussy about his building materials for interior decor. Every morning he flew onto the same branch of our tallest cottonwood tree, broke off a large twig, and flew off to his distant nest. (Some days a talon grip, other days a beak hold.) Yesterday he brought a "friend." For those of you keeping track, sunset is now around 9:30pm. In June it will be 11:40pm. Click each image to enlarge.

 

The Kri-Kri of Crete's Samaria Gorge

 

Even the pummeling Mediterranean sun couldn't make me confuse my Capra aegagrus creticus with my Antilope cervicapra, but an overheard comment about the Kri-kri did bring to mind the Blackbuck. In all the world, the Kri-kri exist only in Crete's high White Mountains above and down in the Samaria Gorge, so I felt lucky to spot and photograph this mother and kid. Miles later I heard a Homo sapien explain that the Kri-kri adult males live in "bachelor" herds, which is often how people discuss the homosexual flock of male Blackbucks. According to research published in the peer journal Behavior, scientists know that all Blackbuck males over three years leave the male group only "once or twice in each male's lifetime" to attempt mating with females. In other words, they try it, hate it, and say in their traumatized gazelle voices, 'Hell if I'm ever doing THAT again.' Instead, "adult males often perform courtship displays toward adolescent males prior to mounting them." The researchers conclude: "Because of the organization of Blackbuck society into sex-segregated herds and the small number of active breeding males, only a fraction of the male population is ever involved in heterosexual activity.... life in the bachelor herd is preferable for many males." You owe it to yourself to buy Bruce Bagemihl's mindblowing book, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. 

Samaria gorge offers eleven miles of hiking wonders, not least of which is the remarkable signage. Whereas our national park posters advise, "Watch for falling rock" theirs warn, "GREAT DANGER!! WALK QUICKLY" We ended the day taking a water taxi with a woman from Colorado in a little boat piloted by Captain George, who explained to me he was in a new movie called The Kings of Mykonos. Also, he has a pet Kri-kri named Romeo whom he bottle-fed for six months and now follows him everywhere, even in the boat, even in the helicopter to Mykonos to make the movie. And you need a scientist to tell you that animal is gay?

   

(Note the two hikers for scale. And, yes, the water is that turquoise.)

Born June 13: Siegfried Fischbacher

The half of the white tigers Vegas couple who wasn't injured. They will finally return to the stage on February 9, 2009.
 

Breakfast with Eagles