Quacking Data

I drove up to the San Diego Wild Animal Park yesterday, which is sort of part of the San Diego Zoo. It's way out in the middle of nowhere in order to facilitate its main attraction, which is a large, sort of simulated plain on which animals can roam while guests tour in little buses. Kind of a simulated safari with real animals.

But I got there just past 4 o'clock, an hour before the place closed, so the tour bit had already closed. I ended up just seeing a lot of birds and gorillas. Which I guess makes up for the gorillas that hid from me at the zoo--I swear the ones I saw yesterday didn't like me. The biggest one immediately started growling when I walked up.

Here's the best of the video clips I got;





The music is Joan Crawford performing "I Never Knew Heaven Could Speak".

Mostly I took still photos;











It's hard to tell, but that white stork was huge. Only slighter shorter than me.



I walk very fast, which enabled me to see a lot of the park in under an hour, but it really was a ridiculously brief visit.

I drove back through the hills that are for some reason filled with ostrich farms--there were several roadside stores with crudely painted signs advertising ostrich jerky and ostrich eggs. I guess since I'm the sort of vegetarian who eats chicken eggs, I could therefore eat ostrich eggs. I fantasised about getting one, but I would have no clue how to prepare it. I thought about what I'd do if I got one that hatched--would I feed the baby ostrich sardines? Cow's milk? Formula? What would I name it? Oswald and Oscar seemed too obvious, but it would need to be something beginning with the letter "O". I settled on On. I'd say, "Hey, here's my ostrich, On. Say hello to the nice folks, On." It goes without saying On would always be on.

I drove to the nearby North County Fair mall, which is one of my favourite malls, as it's remote, indoor, and huge. The more a mall feels like a microcosm, the more it represents what I like about malls. I sat in the Nordstrom cafe and wrote the rest of the next Venia's Travels script.

With breakfast to-day, I read the two other Sirenia Digest stories. "Persephone Redux" was a nicely grim portrait of a post-apocalyptic world, with an interesting focus on the relationship of religion to a true apocalypse. It's apparently a fragment, a beginning of a larger work, and it feels like a world just getting set up. Both it and the last story in the new Digest, "The Eighth Veil", reminded me of the Fallout games, "Persephone Redux" for the post-apocalyptic landscape, and "The Eight Veil" because it featured a lethal substance called Jet, which is what a popular drug is called in the Fallout universe. "The Eighth Veil" is also an interesting anthropological exercise, focusing on a bunch of low level gangsters who speak in a sort of alternate universe slang dialect that's very fun to read. A large audience of them seem to get sadistic pleasure out of watching a pretty girl getting killed by Jet, basically disintegrating, which I found oddly sweet--it's a curiously tame form of entertainment for bloodthirsty degenerates. Instead of people or animals ripping each other violently apart, it's pretty much just someone passing away. That this culture sees something like this as exciting is as much a curious anthropological element as their dialect.

Last night's tweets;

Q-tips are oil drills of the mind's sea.
Famished, free ducks might tip you a feather.
I think perhaps gorillas don't like me.
Noisy geese aren't really my fans, either.