Dawn til Dusk

This morning, thick fog and icy pavements. I captured the fog and managed to avoid the ice.

Well here's a story you wouldn't have been able to prophecy. Oil companies offering scientists large sums of money to dispute that climate change is causing global warming. I really don't know why they bothered. Bush's recent conversion to environmentalist supremo didn't get much past the lip service stage, add ethanol to petrol and send giant mirrors into space to protect us from the sun's rays. Clearly the star wars option seems a more doable solution than persuading his fellow Texans to cut down on the fuel usage.

Meanwhile, back at the endangered environment...I have been learning more about the critters that we don't have back in Blighty.
'When you talk about raccoons,' Lori told me, 'everyone will have an attack story.' Yeah but, no but, well they'll all be interesting stories of course, but they will want to tell them during my story, my story of Ruby the Ninja Raccoon. We had to have a high-level discussion about whether there will be complaints about Ruby being a ninja raccoon. I thought it was spurious since there have been ninja turtles for years now and it helps me to talk about the raccoon's ninjaracious ways, stealth and such like. Oh and the black mask. My story's soppy, it needs to have a short film clip and a voiceover rather than a storyteller.

People, it turns out, will feed raccoons. You only need to do it once and you have a friend for life. Until you forget to put the food out or the beastie wants more, then you have a vile harpy who will shred any bit of you that comes into its grasp with its sharp claws. Oh you don't want to go messing with raccoons.

But I foresee a problem for even the most wary Brit. It is not uncommon here to hear people refer to these varmints as 'coons'. And...well it's just I don't think I can let that go. You simply cannot go around using words that Alf Garnett used to use to talk about black people, and in a very derogatory way.

A while ago now, my friend Dawn wrote to me as a result of a question from one of her students, to ask whether there was a British equivalent of the term 'African American'. I told her that we used the term 'black'.
We used to tell the kids at school that calling someone who is black, black isn't racist, being racist is racist. But then I also tried telling them that acknowledging that someone who is fat is fat isn't insulting, and I don't believe it is, but they never really got that one either.

I've brought my bat home with me. I have to practise making him speak. I need a new voice for him, RP English just isn't right, in fact it makes some of the things he says sound just silly.

He's learning to fly. Me too.