To everyone who has acted as a caregiver and nurtured a living thing. Thanks! Guten Muttertag!
You’re
polite and shy and its rare for anyone to see you doing any wrong or
speaking vulgar. You’re straight arrow personality however keeps you
from being the most exciting person around. You’re cool and collective
though so you tend to be the binding glue of your group.
National Lampoon archives, including Death is… View at own risk.
I want to hang with Blackie & Walter’s mamma today, and sing oompy-loompy songs. I wonder how all the kidlets are taking care of the mothers today?
I never heard back from that gamer that wanted to start/get in on a Fort Lauderdale group.
Quoting his email: (He’s also a Scott)
Sorry to bother you but I found your name on a role-playing database as being part of a gaming group in the Fort Lauderdale area. My name is Scott, I’m 32 and recently returned from living in Germany. When I got back, I found my old gaming group had spread to the winds, and I’ve been looking for a game since. I was the DM of that group but I’m willing to be a player too.
I’m more into roll playing than hack-n-slash. I own/played Call of Chuthulu (however you spell it, I don’t feel like getting up to check), Star Wars, Robotech, Shadowrun, Top Secret, Millennium End, and AD&D (2nd Edition). I have the most experience in the World of Grayhawk.
Please respond when you get this e-mail to let me know if/if not your interested in adding a damn good player with a lot to offer to your group — or if you want to help me get a new group together.
I only have two requests….
1. The majority of the players should be over say 20ish years old
2. English is a must
Quoting my reply:
Sounds good! I’m not currently in any group, but wouldn’t mind looking into getting another one rolling in my area. I’m more proficient in Hero system and GURPS, but am happy to work with any system that the majority will pick. I haven’t played many of those TSR games / Robotech for quite a while, but I’ve dabbled a little in D20 and it looks pretty decent.
I’d like to add two more requests to the list:
3. All players should bathe regularly, or at least be willing to arrive to games clean and free of excessive odor.
4. The ability to pick up after oneself is a must.
I look forward to hearing from you!
I wonder if he just got busy, or didn’t meet the criteria? Maybe it was the diversity of game systems.
Celestia is a free real-time space simulation that lets you experience our universe in three dimensions. Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. All travel in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A ‘point-and-goto’ interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.
Available for Windows, Mac OSX, Mandrake, and SuSE 8.
Residents who have become accustomed to sharing their neighborhood with ducks might be in for a fowl surprise this month: new state-issued permits give people license to catch mallards — and require that they be killed.
“I won’t do it,” said Robert Rosa, owner of Rosa Safe Animal Trapping company, who makes a living catching nuisance animals such as ducks. “If they say I have to kill them then I’m not touching the mallards.”
The new control permit is an attempt to save the genetic purity of Florida’s mottled duck, which mates with the non-migrating mallards. The permit, which is free and easy to obtain, allows the birds to be captured from May through August. But there’s a catch.
“The only thing you can do with a captured mallard is kill it,” said Diane Eggeman, a waterfowl management leader with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “We are trying to get that changed.”
A mother duck trailed by a line of ducklings is a common sight each spring in St. Augustine’s pond-filled neighborhoods.
“I enjoy them coming around,” said Tamre Mullins, a resident of the Seaplace subdivision on Anastasia Island. One duck with a broken wing waddled to her back door twice a day, tapping with its beak so she’d bring out food. “That duck was more like a pet.”
But as ducks grow up and leave feathers and feces in their wake, officials say they can create a health risk even in chlorinated pools.
Ted Thull, one of Mullins’ neighbors, said the community has tried several unsuccessful tactics to keep ducks from using their pool when nature calls.
The fake alligator was ignored. The menacing phony owl was met with the same indifference. When Thull painstakingly strung fishing line to block their access, the ducks simply started walking into the pool.
“I don’t want to kill them,” the retired airline pilot explained. “I just want to make an impression so they’ll stay out of our pool.”
Seaplace hired Rosa to remove its Muscovy ducks, larger non-native birds with distinctive red face coloring that can be legally killed or relocated.
When he caught some of them, two residents refused to let him cross their yards to take the birds away.
“I’ve been called names and everything else,” he said. “One lady came out screaming at me the other day. I tried to explain what I was doing but she didn’t want to hear it.”
Though Rosa could now get a permit and begin clearing out mallards permanently — a change he just learned about this week — he adamantly rejected the idea. “I have never killed anything during my two years of trapping and I’m not going to start now,” he said.
The new catch-and-kill permit is an attempt to protect Florida’s mottled duck, a non-migratory species that frequently mates with domestic mallards, said Eggeman. This interbreeding threatens the genetic purity of the mottled ducks, a subspecies that only can be found in the state.
By this time of year, most wild mallards have already migrated north, leaving behind domestic mallards that lack the gene that spurs them to migrate, according to wildlife officials. These year-rounders likely originated as ducks sold by breeders.
At Robert’s Feed in St. Augustine about 500 mallards were sold each spring, said owner Robert Sterner. “They were very popular,” he said. “People would buy them for pets and put them in their ponds. Easter played a big part.”
Another new rule that takes effect July 1 mandates that mallards can be sold only to people with a state-issued purchasing permit. One permit for pet owners requires that a pet duck be confined in a cage with a roof. A mallard only can be adopted as a pet if designated for that purpose by 6 weeks of age.
Sterner said he stopped selling the mallard ducklings after he got the state’s notice of the July 1 rule about two months ago. “I had no idea they were causing problems,” he said.
About 12,000 baby mallards are sold annually by Florida retailers, and officials say they hope most storeowners react like Sterner to the new rule. “We are doing what we can to make sure the mottled duck is here for generations,” said Ron Bielefeld, a waterfowl biologist with the wildlife commission.
The female mallard looks similar to the male and female mottled ducks, Bielefeld said. But a female mallard will have two broad white lines of feathers above and below the blue colored portion of the wing. “If you unfold the wing of the bird and you don’t see the two bars, put it back,”
Bielefeld said. “If they’re not sure, they should put the bird back.”
A mallard control permit is free and can be obtained from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Web site at www.wildflorida.org or by calling the North Florida Waterfowl Management Field Station at (850) 488-5878.
Though wildlife officials expressed reluctance to explain how captured mallards should be humanely killed, the Web site links to an American Veterinary Medical Association report with 28 pages of instructions covering such options as “kill traps,” electrocution, and “euthanasia by a blow to the head.”
“We’re not making any recommendations on how to do them in,” said Eggeman, adding that the Florida statute prohibiting cruelty to animals must be followed.
Because mallards are protected under the federal Migratory Bird Act, any change to Florida’s new catch-and-kill permit requires approval by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “When you start talking about multinational treaties, things get complicated,” said Bielefeld, who favors a change to allow non-lethal options. “We’ll keep trying, though.”
Most duck nuisance situations involve Muscovies, the state’s most common domestic duck, which only can be relocated to another property if someone takes ownership. “You can’t release any domestic duck into the wild,” Bielefeld said.
Rosa has begun having trouble finding homes for trapped Muscovies this year. Granted verbal permission to put a dozen in the lake behind the St. Augustine Beach Police Department, he said he was subsequently told to remove them.
“A woman came out and screamed at me that they didn’t want those ducks,” he said. “No one wants these ducks.”
On the flip side, Rosa says he’s often confronted by people who don’t want him to take the ducks away from neighborhoods like Seaplace.
Mullins, who enjoys feeding ducks with her three grandchildren, even scanned stores for duck food. “I was going to put out a feeder,” she said.
“That’s how hyped I was about them.”
When Rosa couldn’t get permission to take ducks through the yards of her neighbors, Mullins allowed him to use her property to carry off her feathered friend. “He’s just doing his job,” she said. “We are the ones taking their land.”
Ted and Elsie Thull hope the duck removal will help give them back their pristine pools. Duck feces, in quantity, could overwhelm chlorine and become a source of salmonella and other harmful bacteria, said Mike Towle, environmental manager with the St. Johns County Health Department. “If someone got sick, the homeowners association could be held liable.”
She and her husband like ducks, said Elsie Thull. “But we are in a rock and hard place here. We don’t want our pool shut down.”
Muscovy overpopulation has been a problem in Florida for more than 20 years, said Bernice Constantin, state director of the United States Department of Agriculture’s wildlife services program in Gainesville.
“We have a saying that the Muscovy eats a pound and poops a pound and a half,” Constantin said. “A pair can raise up to 8 or 12 young a year, so they multiply very quickly.”
He said his department has handled cases in apartment complexes where a Muscovy population surpasses 200 birds. They spike bait with a sleeping drug, allowing the property owner to dispose of, or relocate, them.
To make sure ducks don’t get out of hand, Constantin recommends that communities spread the word never to feed them. “It’s bad for the ducks; it’s bad for the people; and it’s going to cause problems.”
People-fed ducks produce more eggs, become fat and unhealthy and skip their normal diet of mosquitoes and other insects.
Adding turtles, small alligators or even large bass into a pond will thin out the number of ducklings, he said. Muscovies like to dig nests under shrubbery, so limiting that kind of cover can help.
Several experts said shaking duck eggs will kill the embryos and reduce overpopulation during nesting season, which is at its peak. The new control permit is required to shake mallard eggs.
“I pull the eggs, boil them and feed them to our other animals,” said Karen Lynch of the local animal rescue organization Noah’s Ark. “You feel terrible taking them from the mother. I apologize the whole time.”
Bielefeld recommends putting the shaken eggs back in the nest or the mother might go build another nest and lay another compliment of eggs, he said.
Leaving one viable egg will likely ensure that the mother doesn’t try again. “I would think if she hatched one egg that should be enough to satisfy the duck’s reproductive urge for that season,” he said.
Like Rosa, Lynch has found it difficult to find people in the area willing to take in Muscovies. “All the places we used last year are overpopulated,” she said. “They become prolific very quickly.”
Lynch had not heard about the new catch-and-kill permit for mallards. “I’m stunned,” she said. “These are very docile, timid ducks.” 
a year ago – owie sleeps, There Quest victory, telecommuting, clear channel hubbub, Hala finished Portalzilla, CitizenX closed down.
two years ago – cleanup, and milk crate shelf, did new code that’s all over Ramada, playing with Newtie, real estate invaders. newt pics I need to locate and rehost.
three years ago menstrualhut grows rapidly, journal types, mp3s in rotation, illegal confessions (feel free to keep adding to it.)
