Disneyland

We go to Disneyland a lot. We're fairly local, and friends and family from out of state inevitably want to go so we end up buying season passes. Visiting Disneyland several times a year gives you a very different perspective on the place. You start looking for weird little details, seeking out Hidden Mickeys, and making up bizarre games. My favorite is Stroller Safari, wherein you watch for unusual/expensive/international strollers. (My stroller knowledge is based almost entirely off of writing for work and also a mild obsession with this study.)

I often see small children looking concerned about getting on rides. My mother has always been good at allaying their fears.

I, on the other hand, can just barely manage to contain my desire to terrify them.

Hamstertrap

Once again my hamster went mising, and given his stellar survival rate in my house full of lazy predators, I decided to be proactive and set a trap for him. A simple bucket trap can be made by smearing peanut butter in the bottom of a bucket and then stacking books or other objects up to make steps to the top.

Of course, as soon as I set it up I found the hamster in his vast network of cages, right where he should be. I did, however, catch something.

Flying Horses.

Once upon a time, prior to 1878, people genuinely didn't know how horses ran. Actually, they didn't know how any quadropeds ran. This might seem a little silly, but it's actually quite difficult to tell what all the legs are doing when an animal is moving very fast. Without the ability to slow things down, you had to take a guess. Painters depicting horses in motion tended to show the most dramatic and obvious part of the gait, and so running horses were generally painted with all four legs extended, like this 1828 painting by Charles Bentley:

All that changed in 1878 when photographer Eadweard Muybridge (who had a strange addiction to vowels) was called in to settle a debate on what exactly horses did with their feet while trotting and galloping, and how many feet they had off the ground at any given time. Muybridge, a pioneer in motion pictures, took high-speed photographs of a horse running. The result was a beautiful and extremely famous frame-by-frame depiction of the gallop.

Note that the only time all four feet are off the ground is when they are all under the horse. The rest of the time, at least one foot is touching down. The above depicted fully extended portion of the gate did not exist. This was rather widely publicized, and from then on horses in art were depicted running properly. This is a John Sanderson-Wells painting from sometime after 1895:

When I go to antique stores, I like spotting the pre-1878 flying horse paintings.

Undead.

I watched Pet Semetary last night.

Fairies.

I recently acquired the book How to Find Flower Fairies by Cicely May Barker. It's a gorgeous pop-up book instructing children on the best ways to find signs of fairies outside.

We also just finished watching three seasons of "River Monsters" with Jeremy Wade.

Hamster vs World

I acquired Wheatley the hamster a few months ago. He came with a typical name, typical story, and typically tiny cage.

I plugged his cage into my collection of modular tube cages because that's basically the point of owning a hamster, right? He was very happy until a couple of weeks ago when he discovered he could push a certain plug out of the top of one of the cages.

After several days of intense searching I failed to find any trace of Wheatley. There was no signs of nesting, no poo, and no hamster tracks in the dust under the furniture. I assumed he had been eaten by one of the many predators in the house shortly after his escape.

So we were very surprised indeed when he turned up on the kitchen counter a week later in perfect health.

I ended up grabbing a small pod from the tube cage complex and setting it down in front of him. Wheatley climbed in immediately, and was plugged back into his cage system with minimal fuss. I still have no idea where he was for that week, how he avoided being devoured, or how he got onto the counter.

Totally Unspecial Needs

My less-than-two-years-younger brother is autistic. Now that he is in his late 20's and enough random people have pointed it out, my parents have very nearly excepted that he might have Aspergers Syndrome. Meanwhile, people who have any familiarity with the condition basically have him pegged within five minutes of meeting him. I personally have been trying to convince them for well over a decade, which means I get to do the "I told you so" dance every time this happens in my presence.

He had a fairly difficult childhood, a fact that I was very aware of. However, as far back as I could remember I only ever heard my parents talk about how wonderful he was. My 4 or 5 year old brain could never fathom why they were constantly singing the praises of someone who was clearly a total screw-up.

They also had completely different standards of behavior for him than they did for my sister and I, meaning he constantly got away with shit that earned us epic punishments. My sister was old enough to figure out that what sounded to me like bragging was attached to the end of statements like "Sure he just got expelled from preschool, but..." While she just resented the unfair treatment, I developed a deep-seated and mostly subconscious resentment of my brother. I didn't realize any of this until we were in high school, and my relationship with my brother had suffered for years because of it.

My parents never got me or my brother diagnosed with anything because they said they didn't want us to have "labels". If you had a "label", people would treat you differently. No shit. If I had been told from the beginning that my brother had something wrong with him, I would have understood why he was treated differently and the constant gushing about him would have made sense. Instead, my kindergarten self could only conclude that they must like him better.