Final zoo anecdotes of 2010

I won't ever work at the zoo again. In 2010, that is.

Today produced the following interactions with zoo patrons:

--A customer told me she saw a visitor bring a seeing-eye dog into the feline house. Bad idea. In her words, "the cheetahs were hopping and the lion king was looking at lunch." Wish I could have seen it.

--Mother to her daughter: "I saw on TV this morning that spiders have fuzzy legs. That's how they stick to the ceiling."
(Child mutters something)
Mother: "Did you know that when I was your age they hadn't even invented spiders?"

--When I was sweeping near a table, a young girl asked her father what I was doing. The father turned to me and said "I don't know, what do you call that? Sweeping?" Holding my broom and taken aback by the question, all I could respond with was "Um, sweeping, yes."

--A very excited boy yelled to me, "Thanks for the food!" Then he ran over to me and proudly showed off the pressed penny our machine had made for him, pointing to a smudge he claimed was Abraham Lincoln.

And I didn't learn this today, but: did you know that the hoofed mammals are not allowed outside in the winter? It's because if an ungulate slips, he or she is much more likely to break a leg.

Happy 2011!

Social experiments at the zoo

Today I had it in my mind to play Santa Claus.

Recently, I've been going through some of my old toys to see which ones I could throw out/give away and which ones retained some sentimental value. I have a vast collection of toy cars, and after sorting through them I found a few dozen I could part with. Since the Salvation Army and most other outlets apparently don't want used toys (and who would want decades-old Matchbox cars, anyway?) I decided to find creative ways to give them away.

I took one bright green Lamborghini (pictured below) to the zoo in a gesture that was half altruism and half curiosity. If I left a toy car in the dining area two days before Christmas, in a place guaranteed to host lots of little kids, would it still be there at the end of the day? I placed it near the trash bin (where everyone inevitably goes) before 9am. Then I waited.

At 1:30, as I returned to clean up the dining area, the car was still on top of the trash bin. It had definitely been moved since 9am, but no one had taken it. Part of me was upset. Was this a judgment on the type of toys I grew up on? Were today's four-year-olds more interested in things with microchips?

My mom later said it was likely some kid did pick up the car, but was told by his/her parents that it may have been left there by another kid -- in other words, Put it back! This is probably what happened. Let it be known: people who visit the zoo two days before Christmas are not inclined to take something that's not theirs, even a toy with no apparent owner. I'll have to get rid of my old toys through a good old-fashioned rummage sale.

I brought the car home. It survived getting snatched up at the zoo; I might as well give it a reprieve and keep it around.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everyone!

Santa is watching, kids

Three stories from today's shift at the zoo, a place that can still provide anecdotes in the dead of winter.

1) I was talking with a middle-aged employee and at one point asked if she was from the Milwaukee area. She volunteered the exact street where she grew up, and it just happened to be the very same one I am living on -- just a block down from my house, in fact.

2) A chaperone came up to the counter and bought Twizzlers for the three or four school children crowding around her. While I rang up her order, she asked me if there was anything going on with Santa today. "No," I said, "Why do you ask?" She then told me she saw Santa and his wife walking down near the caribou. I said no, the zoo's Breakfast/Lunch with Santa isn't until the weekend. She smiled and left it at that.

I wonder now if she was making the whole thing up and expected me to reply with something like, "Oh yeah, he's just here looking for some new reindeer!" That would go along with the whole caribou thing. After all, there were kids around her, some of whom might still have been the believing age. I might have played along if I'd been quick enough, or if she'd given me more of a hint. Or maybe there was really someone dressed as Santa wandering around the zoo.

3) There is still one pay phone at the zoo. I have never, ever, seen it used. Today, as I was wiping off a counter in my restaurant, a zoo employee asked if I could keep an eye on some of the school children wandering around the building. Apparently, one of them had prank-called 911 from the pay phone. I wondered not where the kids' chaperones were, but instead why these whippersnappers were so desperate to get big lumps of coal in their stockings.

Christmastime Rhymes

Something that has bothered me for several Christmases: a few verses just don't rhyme in the carol "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." In the first verse, we have sing/King, mild/reconciled, rise/skies, and finally, proclaim/Bethlehem. What's up with this? Did the author just get lazy and force a rhyme to fit the hymn?

I have a theory. Charles Wesley wrote the carol back in 1739 -- toward the beginning of what we know as the Modern English period, if my class at Lancaster taught me anything. My guess is that they hadn't yet worked out the kinks in the system. Certain words just weren't pronounced the same as they are today. Either proclaim was pronounced proclem or Bethlehem was pronounced Bethlehaim.

Perhaps someone more knowledgeable could help me out with this?

(This happens again in other verses. In the second, come is rhymed with womb. In the fourth, seed is rhymed with head. In the third, righteousness is rhymed with peace, and no one can tell me that wasn't just Wesley being lazy.)

Blogging advice from Mark Twain

A passage from Mark Twain's bestselling autobiography, via Mark Liberman at Language Log:

Finally, in Florence in 1904, I hit upon the right way to do an Autobiography: start it at no particular time of your life; talk only about the thing which intrests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.

Also, make the narrative a combined Diary and Autobiography. In this way you have the vivid things of the present to make a contrast with memories of like things in the past, and these contrasts have a charm which is all their own. No talent is required to make a combined Diary and Autobiography interesting.

And so, I have found the right plan. It makes my labor amusement — mere amusement, play, pastime, and wholly effortless. It is the first time in history that the right plan has been hit upon.

Liberman calls this "the right plan for successful blogging." Perhaps I should take a page from Mark Twain?

Finished!

Yesterday, a little before 4pm, I finished my novel! I started it in May, though the exact date escapes me (the Word document was created in January, so that wouldn't be of any help).

What an incredible feeling! Now I'll sit on it and work on something else, ready to look at it with fresh eyes in the future.

I broke Microsoft Word Again

Mere weeks after causing Word to stop spell-checking my novel, I've once again upset the internal workings of this program. On Monday I reached the magic number of 100,000 words. As soon as I passed 99,999 the "word count" indicator at the bottom of the window disappeared, as you can see in the screen shot below:


This is merely a glitch with the indicator on the window, because the number of words is still counted by the program:
I imagine this isn't a big problem because, let's be honest, who ever reaches 100,000 words in a document? Ah, what a magical number.

Mackinac redux

Forget what I said about most zoo visitors knowing how to pronounce "Mackinac." I've noticed over the past few days that 90% of the people are, in fact, pronouncing it "Mackinac" with a k sound instead of how it should be pronounced, as if it had a w at the end.

Either I was giving visitors too much credit in September, or a different kind of crowd is visiting. Perhaps fewer Wisconsinites or Michiganders (?) are visiting and more people from farther away are getting ice cream. But that doesn't make sense, since you'd think more out-of-staters would visit during the summer than during the fall/winter. Was I simply giving everyone too much credit?

As you can tell, I still have a job scooping ice cream. No indication as to how long my part of the zoo will stay open, since I'm scheduled to be back there next weekend. Ice cream cones in winter--mmmm!

I broke Microsoft Word

I am currently writing a science-fiction novel, which has ballooned recently to 250 pages and 70,000 words (two-thirds done!). The other day when I was typing away on it a Microsoft Word error message popped up:

"There are too many spelling or grammatical errors in (document name) to continue displaying them. To check the spelling and grammar of this document, choose Spelling and Grammar from the Tools menu."

What this means is that I won't get anymore red squiggly lines under words unless I break up the novel into smaller documents. There are so many made-up words (alien names, planet names, etc.) that Word has stopped counting them--trust me, I'm not that horrible at spelling and grammar.

I have taken this error message as a compliment, since it shows I've written so much that even my computer can't keep up!

Canadians invade the zoo

A lot of Canadian currency has been showing up at the zoo. Just about every time I open a new roll of change to start the day, I will find at least one Canadian coin in it. Sometimes customers even give them to me, and in the past I've said "I'm sorry, ma'am, this is Canadian." Usually they are good-hearted about it.

I used to filter these coins from my drawer, figuring that the zoo people who count the money wouldn't accept them, but the Queen has been showing up so often that I don't really bother anymore. If Canadian pennies or dimes look like American ones, and no one ever notices the differences when they hand someone change, doesn't that make the coins just as good as American money? Both currencies are currently about equal anyway.

I rarely noticed this in past years. Are the people who roll coins getting lazy, or is more Canadian currency being spent in America?

Sherbert or Sherbet?

A few days ago I brought up the Mackinaw vs. Mackinack question. I reached the conclusion that most customers were really pronouncing the word the correct way and I was the one that was wrong. Congratulations, America.

But when it comes to sherbet all bets are off. Most people who order sherbet-flavored ice cream pronounce it "sherbert," as I did when I was a kid. This mispronunciation knows no age limits; people young or old will order "sherbert." I don't really have any problems with it, as the corruption is so common as to be accepted, but I really want to know where this mangled word came from. Is it because it gives the word a kind of symmetry? Is it because of the name "Herbert?" Did this form become commonplace after the Supreme Court decision Sherbert v. Verner?

(Actually, the Supreme Court case does give me a clue: if Sherbert is a surname, probably German, did the corruption stem from people confusing the flavor with someone they knew with that name?)

Google hasn't turned up a study on this. Maybe this is because this is something you can only track through speech and not the written word because no one ever writes the word as "sherbert." After all, spell check puts that red line through it. But someone must have pinpointed its first appearance in language.

Snowing on the inside

Two weeks ago some ice built up on the freezer door where we keep all the ice cream tubs. As a result, the freezer door could not close properly, and the moisture mixing with the below-freezing temperatures inside caused an unusual weather event: it was snowing inside the freezer.

That's right.

I wish I had some pictures or video to show you. When I opened the freezer door last week (the ice incident did not occur on my watch), you can imagine my shock at seeing a six-inch thick ice chunk on the floor and condensation building up on the top of the freezer. All of the ice cream tubs were covered with a fine white powder.

Hammers and chisels were useless on the ice. Maintenance was eventually able to turn off the freezer to melt the ice, but not after the valiant concessions workers moved out all 15 tubs of ice cream to auxiliary freezers. And once the ice melted, I had to mop up all the water from the freezer and the floor outside...not to mention move every ice cream tub back in the freezer.

The lesson here: winter will find you anywhere in Wisconsin.

Mackinac or Mackinaw?

There is a flavor at the zoo called "Mackinac Island Fudge." In recent days I've done an informal study of how many people call it Mackinack (pronouncing the hard c at the end) versus how it's supposed to be pronounced, Mackinaw. I was surprised that most people pronounced it Mackinaw as opposed to the incorrect way, which I'd been calling it. I suppose I thought the w-ended pronunciation was a regionalism. But I was wrong, because the Indians who named the place pronounced it Mackinaw. This has forced me to give some credit to the supposedly geographic-illiterate U.S., where even Wisconsin residents can pronounce a foreign-looking word correctly.

(But can they tell me what the capital of Ecuador is?)

Just a few more observations:

--I've seen more strollers in the past few weeks then I think I've seen in the preceding 22 years of my life. And I keep calling them "prams."
--A young girl came in today named Kennedy. I thought this was a strange name and wondered where it came from, and what kind of a parent would name their child such. Apparently, according to behindthename.com, Kennedy is the 110th most popular girl's name in America, right above Amanda (!).
--A different young girl, about 10 years old, came in and said the following: "Chocolate? I've never had chocolate ice cream before!" How, I asked myself, is this possible?
--Yet another young girl came in and said of her companion's choice of getting her ice cream in a dish: "You're eating ice cream with a spoon? That's funny." What is it with kids these days?

Ice Cream Happenstancery

As the zoo transitions into its Fall Hours, I have been shuttled to several different stands (no doubt to test their reactions to my awesomeness). The past few days I have been shoveling ice cream in the dairy part of the zoo. Here are some things I've noticed and experienced from my time there, and please note that some of these apply to the other stands at the zoo as well:

--At least twice a day I will hear a mother/father say to a child some variation on the phrase "you need a nap!" (the most common variation being "you're taking a nap as soon as we get home!")

--On the other hand, at the opposite end of the energy spectrum, you wouldn't believe how often kids are upset at the prospect at having to eat ice cream. "No, Mom, I don't want any!"

--This happens most often with Blue Moon: a kid will pick a flavor and her mother will give an "icky" face and explain that, honey, you won't/don't like that flavor. The mother will then usually end up picking vanilla or chocolate for the child. Now, I know it's none of my business, but I feel that on most of these occasions the mother is letting her own bias get in the way of what the child wants--she thinks Blue Moon tastes bad, so she won't feed it to her child. Not that Blue Moon isn't bad, mind you--it's a terrible, terrible flavor.

--I don't care if "ice creams" is a proper plural form, I still find it weird.

--The other day a very nice man walked up to the counter and said the zoo was one of the best he'd ever visited, and he'd "visited quite a few." He said it was very clean and the staff was very friendly. I suppose that counted as his tip.

Lastly: Please make sure you have change before you hand your money to the person at the register. Don't suddenly remember you have some after we've entered the cash into the drawer. Most likely we will try doing the calculations in our heads and you will end up shortchanged.

Grammatical craziness

OK, a little bit of politics. There was a political ad I saw on TV not a half hour ago that featured a glaring grammatical error:

RGA TV Ad: Tom Barrett - Wisconsin

The ad, critical of gubernatorial candidate Tom Barrett, features two bar patrons arguing whether Barrett was responsible for "Higher Taxes" or "Less Jobs." I cringed when I saw this commercial, because the latter claim should read "Fewer Jobs." The word "less" refers to something that can't be counted, as in "I'm in less pain than I was yesterday;" meanwhile, "fewer" refers to something that can be definitively quantified, as in, "If only I'd taken fewer doses of epinephrine."

Way to go, Republican Governor's Association. A focus group thought of this commercial, editors approved it, and a bunch of actors read their lines without anyone noticing? Or were these naysayers dismissed for being too grammatically elitist like they came from the East Village or something?

And perhaps it wouldn't get my goat so much if "Less Jobs" wasn't screamed repeatedly throughout the ad, and featured in two additional TV spots where it is also shouted at the top of everyone's lungs. Come on, RGA.

This is what I get for reading the Language Log.

Still here

Yes, I'm still alive. There hasn't been much to report at the zoo since the mad rush of a la Carte (oh, you didn't hear about that? My bad). In the future I'll try to report on the madcap hijinks that go down in the fall and winter, all in preparation for that brilliant three-act zoo play I'll write (no animals will be in the play, and in the end the message will be that humans are the real animals). Samuel Beckett mixed with David Mamet, anyone?

Encounters at the zoo

Anecdotes from the zoo, over the past several days:

Kid: "Hey zoo man! An animal is loose!"
Me: "They're the peacocks, they're supposed to be loose."
Kid: "Ewwwww!"

Zoo employee: "I've been in the kangaroo pen, they're so afraid of people."

Same zoo employee: "I've actually fed the polar bear. Did you know you can see it through the fence out back." (My stand is situated right next to the polar bear den).

Woman: "Hey, you're a zoo employee. Can you hop that fence and get me that peacock feather?"
Me (eyeing the rhinos nearby): "Ummmmm, sorry. I'm not allowed to go past the fence."

Young girl, with brother, to her dad who'd bought both popcorn, a slushie, and lemonade: "We're expensive."
Dad: "Yeah, you're expensive."

Man, to a friend: "Yeah, Gene Hackman's a funny guy. He did all those Mel Brooks films. I was watching their take on Star Wars a few days ago, that was hilarious."
Friend: "Ha ha, that was funny! That guy's helmet was like three feet long."
(Referring to "Spaceballs," and mistaking Hackman for Gene Wilder)

Kid: "Metro Goldwyn Mayer, that's it." (I swear a kid said this to me out of the blue. Maybe I misheard)

And, of course, the question you will only be asked if you work at a museum or where I do: "Where are the dinosaurs?"

Playing host twice

Last week I spent a wonderful 2+ days with a friend from Lancaster (lives in Wisconsin, but also studied abroad with me). It was the first time I'd invited someone over for an extended stay since...since, well, ever. Minus a sleepover or two, I don't think many of my friends have seen life in the BP household firsthand. This coming weekend another friend from a little farther away will be visiting, so I will have a chance to repeat the process.

Everyone I want to spend time with lives so far away. Life can be cruel sometimes.

Once again on the subject of animals

Is this going to turn into a blog about the zoo? Or about the animal kingdom? Who knows, these types of things just evolve on their own.

Last week I finished a fascinating book that I recommend to all those reading this blog. It's called "Monster of God" by David Quammen, and it deals with humanity's relationship with big, man-eating creatures. There's enough history and travelogue and zoology in there to appeal to a lot of tastes.

All Creatures Great and Small

As my mom pointed out to me the other day, I work just about the only job where I could be killed and consumed by one of my employer's income generators. That isn't to say I fear for my safety -- I never interact with the animals, and a Google search tells me that the last time a visitor was hurt by an animal at this zoo was back in 1992, to a black bear bite -- but nevertheless, I am always reminded that there are dangerous creatures behind the pens. Think San Francisco in 2006.

Last week I was given a memo regarding the procedures in case of an animal escape. It's about what you'd expect: move the visitors to a safe point inside a building, making sure not to give them any specifics but assuring them there's nothing to worry about. And do not, under any circumstances, try to interact with the animal. That is the responsibility of a select few with access to the zoo's arsenal. Interestingly, this memo listed animals on their likelihood of being designated "shoot to kill," with the grizzlies, lions, tigers, snow leopards, and hippo being among the most dangerous animals. Trust me, you don't want the polar bear to escape.

A Starbucks barista doesn't have to worry about this kind of stuff.

And I have

I'm back after a year. Sorry it's been so long, but I was recently recalled to Washington over my controversial comments in Us Weekly.

Where will I take this blog? If possible, I may change its title to a clever, punny one not related to English poets. I may also use it as a place for ruminations of my life and the world. Right now I'm working at the Milwaukee Zoo and also writing a little bit of sci-fi.

Stay tuned.