Kakapo-rn

I don't even know where to start with this. First off, how is it that this fat, flightless green parrot exists in New Zealeand and no one has yet informed me of it? It is so wonderfully dumb and trusting and fantastical and exhibits such endearingly unapologetically extinction-prone behavior in this scene that how could we not throw everything down right now and commit our lives to saving it from that fate? And we thought we'd seen the last of the dodos...



From the BBC's Last Chance to See

A Spot O' Literature

"Things duplicate themselves in Tlön. They tend at the same time to efface themselves, to lose their detail when people forget them. The classic example is that of a stone threshhold which lasted as long as it was visited by a beggar, and which faded from sight on his death. Occasionally a few birds, a horse perhaps, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater."

- Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius," in Fictions

An Otter for Pooh!

Whether this should have been done or not - and you can read the article for a taste of that debate - I think we can all agree that there is never any harm in the addition of an otter. To anything.

(Except maybe an insipid rebranding which instills nostalgia simply in order to carve out new opportunities to profit from crossmarketing to FAO Schwartz et al. Debate below.)

predicate post: Seahorse Spotting

One reader, seahorse-toter, and predicate informant reports that she has been detecting increasing seahorse activity on New York City streets:

I saw someone else with the sea horse bag on the street the other day...its spreading!!!!!

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Thanks for your careful surveillance, Caitlin S.! Keep your wits about you...

Send your spottings to tessa@predicateink.com

predicate post: Good Penmanship

And speaking of fonts -- we received a gorgeous handwriting specimen via snail mail from one friend and newly-minted toter in Washington, DC, who proclaimed that ordering her bag via PayPal would be "too complicated" and decided to support the US postal service instead:

It was so beautiful, I just had to share it. An official predicate, ink. stamp of approval on your snail mail, Chris L.!

I Love This Debate

I love that, last week, there was some mini AP ticker story on this giving the basic facts -- that Ikea had changed its font from Futura to Verdana and that some marginal sect of population that cared about typography was up in arms about it, yadda yadda, Ikea corporate wasn't really too concerned -- but that now, a week later, it has grown into a big enough issue to warrant this entire piece in the arts section analyzing the consequences - business, political, and otherwise - of the Ikea font change.

It makes me feel that there is hope yet for our society.

Refreshing Essay on Semenya (by my neighbor)!

Check out this essay in the Times by East Lansing neighbor and friend Alice Dreger! Even before I noticed the essay's byline, I found it a refreshing antidote to the uncritical news reports I had been reading about Caster Semenya, the 18-year-old world champion runner from South Africa whose gender has recently come under "suspicion" and scrutiny by the I.A.A.F. All of these articles (with the exception of maybe this one) left the notion of "gender testing" pretty much uninterrogated as their authors simply listed off the frighteningly long number of "-ists" who would have to examine the athlete in order to perform one (a gynecologist, a psychologist, an endocrinologist, a geneticist...)

Dreger, on the other hand, asserts something that I was surprised to find no article in the mainstream media had yet: "The fact is, sex is messy." And she manages to take a critical stance on the "gender testing" brouhaha without doing what I would probably do (that is, rail and whine that "this is so f*&$ing ridiculous!") Instead, she coolly and expertly points out that the outcome of any such "gender test" will depend on on how all those "-ists" listed above choose to weigh the many forms of sexual data they collect. As Dreger puts it, "Science can and will inform their decision, but they are going to have to decide which of the dozens of characteristics of sex matter to them."

We could do with more public intellectuals like Dreger -- who are able to write knowledgeably in many media and for many types of readers, without sacrificing the criticality or complexity of their arguments!

Also, no matter what Dreger says about gametes, Mermaids don't exist. And I can vouch for the existence of that "big ol' rainbow flag"!