paging Sherlock Holmes

Wednesday and Monday updates below. In brief: Free World Safe, at least hyperlocally


Who did this?

It happened this morning, in garden and/or on lawn. It started out a mosquito-bite-sized white lump, with a red pinpoint center; now - 15 hours later - it's 4 inches in diameter and fixing to take over the free world.

Not a black widow - their bites are supposed to cause intense pain, and this doesn't hurt.
_____________

Wednesday update - it's less impressive today, but here's how it looked by Tuesday morning, at roughly 8 inches wide -



(there's something awkward about flaunting one's bloated corpulence like this...would that it was a shapely leg instead. On the other hand, seeing as how I get to keep it, maybe a little more gratitude is called for. And fortunately it is not the leg of two weeks ago, after weedeating in gravel, which could have passed for an Appaloosa's)

In any case - Anonymous in comments has raised the specter of Lyme, and Russ wanted an update ASAP (sorry Russ; my excuse is "the venom made me slothful" - sad to say, this was no radioactive spider.)

I would fear Lyme too, but: first, I got it in the backyard, which a) is in town and b) is occupied by a very suburban lawn and ground cover; no self-respecting tick would visit here. (although it does call forth the memory of one afternoon at the movies after a morning hauling brush, when in Theatre Number Two a tick made its tactile presence known. I grabbed it between thumb and forefinger, but didn't want to walk out right in the middle of the scene to flush it; later on when I left, I looked, and - the tick was gone.

Whoever you were, who next made its acquaintance, by engaging in that high-risk behavior "going to a movie" - sorry.
(And if you're the same person who was outdoors in Orinda decades ago, when my cousin's lunch exited the plane after I'd shown her how much fun parabolic-flight-induced weightlessness can be - double sorry.)

Related - respect and appreciate your Western Fence Lizards, whose blood purges ticks of Lyme.

Returning from digressions -
It also shouldn't be Lyme because

• It was sudden - bite and rash happened in same day
  
• No tick visible.
  and
  
• The colors, man. They're not the right ones, or not in the right order, for Lyme.
  

Shades of the Firesign Theatre's "Name that Disease" ("you've got...the plague.")

The California Poison Control System's spider bites page had a description which matched perfectly:
With the benefit of hindsight and web research:

• Do not sit down upon the lawn in shorts, early, when it's cool and moist and the lawn denizens are likely to be about, to feel threatened by the imminent descent of mountains of pallid meat.
  
• Wash the wound and put antibiotic ointment on it.
  
• Contact your doctor and ask if s/he wants you to get oral antibiotics - spiders typically don't put a lot of effort into hygiene, so their fangs can inject microbes as well as venom.

Nobody's proposed a brown recluse culprit, but since we're on the topic of venomous spiders -

Unfortunately The Union's Search function is, as of Sunday at least, still defective - has it been a whole year yet? - so when I searched for local citizen scientist Bob G.'s discovery of the "plaid recluse"* - yes, EZ-Off Oven Cleaner has eight legs and a fiddle on its back, and is considerably more likely to attack - I couldn't find it, else would provide the link.

oh, the marketing...searching Google for brown recluse info, this Google Ad came up:

Recluse Spiders Great deals on Recluse Spiders Shop on eBay and Save!

[Quote from recluse arachnologist Rick Vetter (as recounted by B.G.) along the lines of "Why is it that a carpenter can recognize a brown recluse from 20 feet away while I have to look at its [private parts]?" will appear here, when the scrap of paper it's written on resurfaces.]
Meanwhile, from Vetter here-
_____________________

Mon. Aug 1: I don't think anyone saw this spider either, but it must have been a whopper. Bet they had to repair the roof...
(via)

posted by Anna at 7/24/2005 10:34:00 PM | Comment

 

Restoring honor and integrity to the White House

Updated.
It seemed Karl Rove violated the Espionage Act - "(1) possession of (2) information (3) relating to the national defense (4) which the person possessing it has reason to believe could be used to damage the United States or aid a foreign nation and (5) wilful communication of that information to (6) a person not entitled to receive it."
(update - as Russ Steele points out in comments, this assumes that Rove _did_ provide the info to Novak, but newspapers now report he says he didn't, he merely confirmed it.
On the other hand, apparently he did volunteer the info to Matt Cooper of Time, so...)

The Union sees the news as "Rove's publicity could jeopardize his image" - this being the headline they applied to Tom Raum's July 12 AP story*, elsewhere* titled "CIA Leak Probe Focuses on Rove".

It echoes their June 20 "Downing Street memos reveal British reaction to U.S. plans for 'regime change' in Iraq" - I did an informal survey to see if anyone could infer the actual news from this, and the only person who had any inkling was an NPR listener, so knew full well.
(although the article's apparent AP title, "Memos Show British Fretting Over Iraq War", isn't a whole lot better)

posted by Anna at 7/14/2005 11:16:00 PM | Comment

 

The mind reels

Tuesday update: toned down some wording, added a question.

It takes a lot to raise me from the moribund, but The Union has done it.

They've won prizes from the California News Publishers Association's Better Newspapers Contest (PDF evidence) - for a feature by David Mirhadi*, and for Becky Trout's reporting, which was used to form part of The Union's pre-election volley against Conklin - widely regarded to have been a (successful) smear.

Four questions for Becky Trout -

1. Are you proud of this series, as it appeared in The Union?
   
   
2. When you wrote the "Crowd Defends Land Trust" story (the more informative headline, "Investigation Finds No Wrongdoing", wasn't used) for this series, was it published as you wrote it? (did you wait until your sixth paragraph (and the story's jump to the back page) to note that "[counsel found that]...based on current evidence, Conklin's hiring by the Land Trust did not violate any laws governing conflict of interest for public officials", or was this the editor's doing?)
   (For any newcomers to this story, here's a summary with links; Yubanet's report is here)
   
   
3. Would you be willing to discuss how this series came to be written, on the record?
   
   
4. Who (plural) thought it was a good idea to submit the series in this contest?

Update:
I went looking to see what the judges for the contest were like, and ran across this from Jack Ronald * on the hardships in running a newspaper in Russia:
Contest judge Chris Braithwaite also has thoughts worth reading.

posted by Anna at 7/11/2005 11:12:00 PM | Comment