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Everyone, meet the steamer duck. The steamer duck is one bad mother. See those orange nubbins on its wings? Those are keratinized spurs, which the steamer duck has evolved to wallop the living cuss out of any creature hapless enough to cross its path. (See that red stuff on the duck's head? Yeah. That's blood.)
Photos featured by kind permission of Arthur Grosset.See more of his photography here
Over at Absurd Creature of the Week, Matt Simon recounts a disturbing instance of duck-on-duck violence, involving a pugnacious male steamer duck, an unfortunate shoveler duck, and an onlooking female steamer:
From time to time the steamer would drag the shoveler under, then resurface and continue beating the tar out of it as the female watched. At one point he shuffled over to her, but after 30 seconds returned to his victim and punched the poor critter 15 to 20 more times. "He then released the limp body of the shoveler," wrote Nuechterlein, "pecked at it, and released it again." At last he returned to the female for good, calling to her while she stretched, and the two flew off together. The shoveler eventually regained consciousness, and though seriously crippled, struggled to shore. It died 15 minutes later.
This is the avian version of Bloodsport, only without all of the terrible yet somehow endearing acting. The four species of steamer duck (so named for their penchant for flapping and running along the surface, kicking up water like steamboats) in South America are famous—at least in ornithological circles—for their brutality, getting all up in the grills of not just other steamers, but also other species in scrums lasting as long as 20 minutes.
Why the ducks are so aggressive is unclear, but one hypothesis is that steamers have evolved to be violent not only to chase off threats and competition, but tomake an example of them:
Says Nuechterlein in the paper describing the fight between the steamer and the shoveler: "Possibly observational learning is important, and holding a 'public beating' enhances the effectiveness of territorial displays." And that, my friends, may be the only time "public beating" has ever appeared in a scientific paper.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to announce hiring freeze, school funding revamp in state of state address
Associated Press
PHOENIX - Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey will announce a statewide hiring freeze and a proposal to get more money into classrooms in his state of the state address to a joint session of the Legislature on Monday.
In an interview with The Associated Press in advance of the speech outlining his policy goals, Ducey also said he plans to challenge the Legislature, attorney general and school establishment to settle a long-standing legal dispute over school funding.
Watch Gov. Doug Ducey's State of the State address LIVE on abc15.com and ABC15 Mobile .
The state Supreme Court has ruled schools were shortchanged by the Legislature during the recession and a judge then ordered the state to boost funding by $331 million this year and similar amounts going forward. That same judge is now considering back payments of about $1 billion. The two sides are considering settlement talks and plan to meet with a panel of appeals court judges Monday.
Ducey also said he wants a requirement for high school students to master U.S. civics to be the first bill on his desk, fulfilling one of his campaign promises that students have a basic understanding of U.S. history and what it means to be a citizen.
Ducey is facing a $500 million deficit in the current budget year and a $1 billion shortfall in the 2016 fiscal year that begins July 1, and the hiring freeze is the first step in his plan to make government more efficient.
"There will be exceptions for child safety, there will be exceptions for public safety, but we're going to rein in the bureaucracy," Ducey said.
The classrooms-first initiative is part of a plan to shift state spending from support to actual classroom teaching. Arizona schools spent 54 percent of their available operating cash on classroom instruction in the 2013 budget year, more than 7 percentage points below the national average, according to the most recent state Auditor General's report. That lower spending translates into larger class sizes.
The remainder of the school money goes to administration, which is lower than the national average, transportation, food service, building maintenance and IT systems.
Ducey said his plan is aimed at reducing what he calls "duplication and replication" in those support services among the state more than 230 school districts.
"You're talking about numerous transportation systems, food service systems, IT systems, janitorial systems, plant maintenance systems," Ducey said. "We're going to work very hard to incent efficiencies in this system while putting more dollars in the classroom."
The auditor's report, however, noted lower overall state support was one reason for the drop in classroom spending, and for resulting larger class sizes. That's because it's harder for schools to cut other costs.
Ducey also is expected to announce plans to eliminate waiting lists are top-performing schools, but he declined to provide specifics on that issue, a key campaign talking-point.
The Republican governor, who took office last week, said he would provide more specifics on his proposals in Monday's speech and in Friday's release of his state budget proposal. He's been working with Republicans who hold majorities in the House and Senate on his budget proposals, but would not say if a budget deal was close.
In an interview last month on the legislative session that opens Monday, Senate President Andy Biggs was hopeful a deal could be done quickly. A real message will come if Biggs is present when Ducey unveils his budget proposal.
"If you see us standing there behind him, the legislative leadership team and some of the other legislators, and we're there and in a unified mode, then I don't know why we can't solve that budget on a fairly rapid basis," Biggs said.
Cutting $1 billion from the current $9.2 billion budget will be a major challenge, and Ducey has promised not to raise taxes. The estimated $500 million shortfall in the current budget will likely be filled with money from the state's rainy-day fund. In the 2016 budget year starting July 1, that $1 billion projected shortfall could come from spending cuts, shifts of spending and other so-called gimmicks.
But Ducey said the plan is to trim government, with the goal of presenting a truly structurally balanced budget in the 2017 budget year.
"We've got to get through these six months of 2015, we've got 2016 to get our reforms and improvements there and we'll look for structural balance in 2017," he said.
http://jezebel.com/clueless-mom-doesnt-get-why-her-kids-hate-her-1679546713Why Some Grown Kids Cut Off Their Parents
Could their estrangement be caused by how we raised them?
By Elizabeth Vagnoni
The truth is — I am estranged from my two adult sons.
The truth is — I love my sons and I miss them every day.
The truth is — I can’t understand how in the world this has happened.
The truth is — saying you love them and miss them is not enough. There is much more to say, but you need a conversation — you need actual interaction, not just silence.
For me, the estrangement began over what I believed to be a misunderstanding. Since then, I’ve been on a journey of understanding, or at least trying to understand.
Since I have been met with silence when trying to understand my children’s point of view, however, I have turned to studying estrangement. I have researched every article I could find on the topic, presented at conferences and co-authored a paper about estrangement. I started a private social network for those who are experiencing the same thing, and one thing is clear — there are literally thousands of stories just like mine.
These are stories of love, though sometimes hearing parents tell their stories, a reader might understand why an adult child would need a breather.
The Rise Of Narcissism In The Young
Parents tell stories of ill-spoken words, of misunderstanding, of unhelpful interference from others. Much of what they describe, while conflict-laden and uncomfortable, doesn’t seem bad enough to have caused estrangement. The scenarios don’t appear to warrant a total cutoff. At least not according to the way I was raised. I hear that phrase a lot, too.
Most of the parents I talk to are boomers, who share similar values and beliefs, including thoughts on how parents should be treated. The similarities I’ve seen in stories about how they lost contact with their children created a new direction for my research — our culture.
Specifically, I have directed my focus to the rise of narcissism among younger people. The topic is hot right now.
The book, The Narcissist Next Door, was released just last month by Jeffrey Kluger, science editor of Time magazine. Kluger writes: “Parents spend a lot of time ensuring their children have high self-esteem. You need a healthy ego to climb to the top of your profession. But when does self-regard become narcissism?”
Narcissism has been long been associated with the notion of entitlement, which typically suggests a lack of empathy, a feeling of superiority and a tendency to overreact to criticism.
So I wonder.
Children At The Center, Adults On The Outs
In previous generations, no one worried about a child’s self-esteem. In the past, elders’ experiences were valued and their children listened to them. Estrangement did happen, but it appeared to be reserved for parents cutting off a wayward child — the “black sheep” of the family.
After WWII, Dr. Benjamin Spock entered the scene as one of the first parenting experts trying to understand children's needs and talking about family dynamics. Spock gave parents what he considered the best recipes for a healthy happy child. He believed that parents should be more flexible and affectionate with their children and should treat them as individuals. Previous conventional wisdom had been that child-rearing should focus more on building discipline.
So maybe the seed of children cutting off their parents started with us. We boomers were the first generation with parents who were ultra-concerned about making sure their children had a “better” childhood than they had.
A common story among parents who have estranged adult children is how much they had focused on their children, how much they did to make sure their children had all the best advantages, made them the center of the family universe — and often how they treated them more like an equal or an adult than a child.
With more permissions, more social pressures and changes to the traditional family structure, I believe the shift in parenting that started back in the ‘40s needs to be examined.
Has a change in parenting style led to the rise of narcissism in subsequent generations over time, resulting in the ability of adult children to cut off their parents without much thought or concern for the consequences?
I believe that a culture of “self-esteem” — give everybody an award, change dress sizes so larger people feel smaller, allow teens to be disrespectful to those in authority — has set the tone and created a possible outcome I don’t think anyone expected: the idea that it’s OK to cut off contact with your parents.
When something, or more specifically, someone, no longer supports the view you have of yourself — get rid of them!
Problems Must Be Resolved
According to a survey of estranged people conducted through my website, out of 907 respondents, 82 percent of the adult children who are currently estranged from their parents acknowledged their parents’ past efforts to provide for them, but only 58 percent of those respondents report having any desire to have a relationship with the parent they are estranged from.
At the same time, 76 percent of the adult children say that being estranged has affected their well-being (even though it appears to have been their choice).
My sons consistently refuse to reply to my emails and let my calls go to voicemail, or barely speak if they do answer. They accuse me of being a terrible person, but won’t elaborate about exactly what I’ve done. Well, sometimes they do, but it doesn’t make sense, at least to me. For example, it’s hard to be part of the birth of my grandchild if I didn’t know that I was going to have one!
All this started because of a personal email they felt entitled to read on my computer.
If they are like the adult children who responded to my site’s survey, they are probably suffering, as I am.
Relationships might feel better when there is no contact. But, as Dr. Murray Bowen, credited with the most original new thinking about family systems since Freud and who coined the phrase “emotional cutoff” observed, the problems are just tucked away through estrangement, they are not resolved.
The only way to move forward is to get to resolution. To talk. To find common ground. To forgive.
Elizabeth Vagnoni's career in advertising let her work on campaigns like AT&T's Reach Out and Touch Someone and DeBeers' Diamonds Are Forever. Now, she's teaching and writing about estrangement, while trying to bring peace and hope to those who have experienced this loss.
Brazen Mom Bills a 5-Year-Old for Missing Her Son's Birthday Party
By Jay Hathaway
A five-year-old U.K. kid who missed a friend's birthday party at a ski and snowboard slope over Christmas break received a bill for $24 from the birthday boy's family. The invoice was slipped into Alex Nash's backpack at nursery school and brought home to his parents, who couldn't believe it wasn't a joke.
But Alex's dad, Derek Nash, confronted the birthday boy's mom and found out she was serious about charging him a £16 "no-show fee" based on a conversation they'd had before the holidays.
"She saw me and asked if Alex was coming to the party. At this time I agreed and said that Alex was looking forward to it," he told the Plymouth Herald.
But Alex's plans changed, and he ended up spending the day with his grandparents instead. Nash said he didn't have contact info for the birthday boy's parents, so he wasn't able to call and let them know.
"My partner looked out for [the friend's mother] to apologize for Alex not showing up to the party, but didn't see her" at school, Nash said.
And then the bill for a "child's party no-show fee" arrived home with Alex, stuffed in a brown envelope:
Brazen Mom Bills a 5-Year-Old for Missing Her Son's Birthday Party
After talking to Alex's teacher, who apologized for passing on the bill even though it's against school policy, Nash went to the address on the form to confront the angry mom over, again, roughly $24.
He told her that he was sorry about the cost of Alex not showing up, but he wouldn't be paying the money because of the ridiculous way she decided to ask for it.
After he left, the petty, passive-aggressive fighting over an ultimately trivial amount of money continued on Facebook—the Herald ran the whole conversation, which is embarrassing for everyone involved.
"I don't like fighting with people," wrote the mom who billed someone for no-showing to a child's birthday party. "This is not the first time Alex has not turned up to a party that he has been invited to, either ... the amicable way round this I believe would be to pay me the money and let a lesson be learnt."
"Like I said before, no money was mentioned when we spoke ... I am not a child, so please do not speak to me like I am one," Alex's mom replied.
Now the Nashes claim the other mom is threatening to take them to small claims court, a process that costs more than the paltry amount of money they allegedly owe her. It's the principle of the thing, I guess?
A lesson has been learned in this situation. Unfortunately, it's a stupid lesson, and it's the kids who've learned it from their bickering parents: Alex says his friend will no longer play with him at school.
Report: Hillary Clinton Only Used Personal Email as Secretary of State
By Hudson huongo
According to a report published by The New York Times Monday night, Hillary Clinton exclusively used personal email while acting as Secretary of State, a possible violation of federal record-keeping laws.
The newspaper says Clinton never had a government email address during the four years she served as head of the State Department and aides made no attempt to archive her emails as required by the Federal Records Act, behavior experts found troubling.
"It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario—short of nuclear winter—where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business," said the National Archives' former Director of Litigation, Jason R. Baron.
A Clinton spokesperson told the Times that the former Secretary of State followed the "letter and spirit of the rules" in her use of email. However, the paper notes that Clinton's official emails were given to the State Department just two months ago, selected from tens of thousands of personal emails by Clinton advisors.
NY's Rats and Fleas Could Bring Back the Plague, Party Like It's 1346
Mark Shrayber
In order for the plague to come back full force and kill all of us with festering boils, three things are needed: A carrier, a transmitter and a pathogen. It may be too early to panic, but a new study reveals that New York City has two of the three components necessary to make a really good Criminal Minds episode.
The study, published in The Medical Journal of Entomology looked at what the parasites living on the bodies of rats have been doing lately and is the first of its kind since the 1920s, according to Newsweek. Researchers found lots of different bugs all over NYC's rats, but the one that is most concerning is the Oriental rat flea, which can carry and transmit the plague, typhus and other bacterial infections.
From Newsweek:
Researchers collected more than 100 rats from five locations throughout Manhattan. Most of the Oriental rat fleas came from specimens found in a single residential building, in an unspecified area of the city.
But many of these rats from this one location were teeming with the fleas. When [Matt] Frye killed the rats and went to comb the parasites out, "they were pouring off the dead rodent," he says.
Pouring off. What a beautiful and not-at-all-terrifying way to describe the mass exodus of disease-carrying fleas off a freshly dead rodent. Good thing there's currently no pathogen, which is the third component needed to bring Europe 1346-53 to the future!
But, again, don't worry about the plague. The Oriental rat flea is globalized, so you'd likely find it in lots of places. Worry about this instead:
A study in October, involving some of the same scientists behind this research, found 18 previously unknown viruses in New York City rats, some of which are very similar genetically to variants known to infect people.
Man Who Burned Face Praying Over Sizzling Fajitas Can't Sue Applebee's
By Taylor Berman
On Wednesday, an appellate court ruled that a man who burned his face while praying over a plate of fajitas could not sue the New Jersey Applebee's where the face-burning reportedly took place.
The Courier-Post reports that Hiram Jimenez seared his face at the Westampton, N.J., chain restaurant in March 2010 after he bowed his head over the table—on which a plate of hot meat had just been placed—to pray. According to court documents, Jimenez heard "a loud sizzling noise, followed by 'a pop noise' and then felt a burning sensation in his left eye and on his face."
Jimenez claimed he suffered "serious and permanent" injuries "solely as a result of (Applebee's) negligence when he came in contact with a dangerous and hazardous condition, specifically, 'a plate of hot food'."
A trial judge disagreed, as did a two-judge panel who heard Jimenez's appeal of the initial ruling.
The restaurant, the ruling stated, did not need to warn Jimenez "against a danger that is open and obvious."
"A danger that is open and obvious" is a good way to describe most food at Applebee's. Be careful praying there.