Cougar Menu

As a follow up to my posts about urban wildlife I am reading and reviewing a suggested book, “The Beast in the Garden”  by David Baron.   I hope to have my review done in a few weeks.   But for now, lets look at a cougar menu, from page 51 – you may even be able to use this as your quote of the day:

They have been known to eat grasshoppers, snails, mice, rats, lizards, turtles, snakes, squirrels, rabbits, bats, gophers, weasels, prairie dogs, skunks, beavers, raccoons, opossums, armadillos, marmots, porcupines, turkeys, chickens, geese, grouse, badgers, foxes, bobcats, coyotes, bighorn sheep, domestic sheep, pigs, goats, cows, horses, elk, moose, alligators, bison, bears, and other cougars.   But a mountain lion’s favorite meal, by far, is venison.

One more, the occasional human.   Ah, diversity.

This Work Could Get Dirty

Today on a Fox News live feed I saw some people littering up the Golden Gate bridge with some unreadable banners about Tibet.   In the same news cycle I read about protesters “for Tibet” in London and France mucking up the running of the Olympic torch.   In France it appears that they even decided to take it up with a person in a wheelchair who was probably living out some sort of dream by moving the torch.   Nice.

 To this very simple blogger it seems that all of the Beastie Boys front row seats, bridge scaling and Richard Gere speeches are doing exactly zero for the people of Tibet.

I would have to assume that the only real solution is a dirty one for those who want to “free Tibet”.   Two words:   Send Guns.

I suppose nobody who is doing all of this protesting, bridge scaling  and other nonsense is interested in the real solution, but  are more interested in making  a statement and feeling good.

Pavlov’s House Bleg

I mentioned a few weeks ago that my military history reading (mostly WW2) has changed quite a bit over the last few years.  

 There are only so many books I can read about Barbarossa, Market Garden, Anzio, etc.   I was starting to actually get bored of the subject.   So I decided to begin to read “niche” books like memoirs, biographies, or books that specialized on one tiny subject.   This not only opened my eyes to a lot of things, but made WW2 in particular more colorful.

 To that end, I am trying to find a book about Pavlov’s House.   Most books I have seen only give it a cursory mention, but you would think that someone, somewhere has written a complete text about this insane  subplot in one of the most horrific battles of the 20th century, Stalingrad.   My Amazon-fu is very strong, but hardly a mention there.   My Google-fu is also pretty strong, but maybe someone has stronger Google-fu than myself.

Any help is appreciated and heck, if nobody can find a book on this, I just may have found myself  a topic to write a book on.