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halseyhazzard · 3 years

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Scrolling Utopia: Internet Interaction Design and the Posthistorical Subject

Halsey Hazzard, fall 2018

for a class on German media theory

Writing just before the internet threatened to take over the world, philosopher and communicologist Vilem Flusser has often been called a prophet of the digital age, based on his concern with then-nascent internet technology and the applicability of his theories to the so-called digital age. Certainly he did dream of a utopian society in which communications technology would engender a more egalitarian global society, but his optimism was far from idealistic. Rather, Flusser’s work contains a demand that we understand the way technology shapes human consciousness so that we might develop and use it responsibly. A sense of urgency underlies Flusser’s calls for responsibility, and this call has grown only more crucial as the internet has grown more pervasive and social networks have ascended to global near-hegemony.

In many of his essays, Flusser argued that historical consciousness, engendered by linear writing, was giving way to a new, posthistorical consciousness as a result of changing technology. Now, nearly thirty years after his death, it would appear the new consciousness Flusser both dreamed and warned of has arrived, ushered in by the digital technology we call, not insignificantly, “social media.” In this paper I hope to deploy Flusser’s theory of humanization to understand one of social media’s most quietly pervasive design elements—infinite scrolling—and its relationship to the so-called posthistorical consciousness. Infinite scroll, I argue, is a key example of how technology shapes human consciousness and how its effects demand that we pay attention and take responsibility for the ways we are constructing ourselves as human subjects.

Throughout his work, Flusser articulates a definition of “human” that depends heavily on technology, and communication technology in particular. He is concerned with an apparent shift that took place with the appearance of apparatuses, which he defines in Toward a Philosophy of Photography as something that mimics a human capability and which merges with a human operator. The human is profoundly affected by its interaction with the apparatus, and because technology is constantly changing (being changed by humans), what is “human” is constantly in flux. What is constant, however, is communication. Humans distinguish ourselves from the “non-human” by our need to store and use “information,” defined as negative entropy. Flusser makes frequent reference to the second law of thermodynamics, arguing that humanization is thus the process of fighting against inevitable entropy through the creation of information technologies. He puts it succinctly in a 2003 interview with Patrik Tschudin: “a person becomes human to the extent to which he figures out which of one’s functions can be mechanized and then delegates those to machines. What remains, that which cannot be mechanized (for the moment, anyway), is that which becomes human” (“The Lens is to Blame”, 6). Taken together, these statements define humanity as a process of endless becoming, driven by the human drive to communicate and the responsibility to one another (and, as a result, agency) communication entails.

If humanization is a process of endless becoming, one should probably wonder what the human is becoming now. In “Humanizations,” Flusser illustrates the status of the human with reference to the “little brain man,” a model for how the brain perceives the body borrowed from neurology. In the linear era, the little brain man is a “tongue-thumb man,” but Flusser hypothesizes that in the telomatic future, “The fingertips, which will touch the keyboard, will doubtless be the most important organs, and it will become apparent that the purpose of the Brain Man’s entire body will be to support the fingertips” (“Humanizations” 190). While he is certainly right that technology has shifted the focus from the tongue, he was perhaps too quick to predict the shrinking of the thumbs.

In recent years, so-called “social media” has saturated Western culture, with Instagram in particular reaching one billion users worldwide (Carman). Much of this growth has occurred concurrently with the rise of smartphones, expected to be in 2.5 billion hands by 2019. While much attention has been given to the content on such platforms, this impending ubiquity demands an analysis of how the material apparati of apps like Instagram are shaping what it currently means to be human. In 2013, at the dawn of Vine, writer Chris Baraniuk situated the then-new (now defunct) video-sharing service in a long history of visual loops. Like the gif before it, the Vine video takes a moment—no more than six seconds long—and repeats it ad infinitum. Hypnotic and without a true beginning or end, digital loops are “uncanny” and “disturbing,” for, according to Baraniuk, ‘the complete absence of teleology and catharsis within the loop destroyers our sense of self, our idea of progress, our intention to accomplish anything.” (Baraniuk). The logic of the loop, he claims, is built into the very languages that make up the digital world. A similar “narrative dissonance” can be found in in “infinite scrolling,” a design element that, alongside the rise of digital visual loops, has quietly achieved near ubiquity as a feature of websites, in particular those considered to be “social media.” Infinite scrolling might at first appear to be the anti-loop. Where gifs only have one frozen moment to offer up for eternity, the infinite scroll seems to promise endless variety. Yet it shares with the visual loop a lack of teleology thanks to its lack of a clear beginning, middle, and end.

When one loads a page on a website that employs infinite scrolling, one is dropped into a seemingly-endless stream of modular pieces of content, known frequently as posts. These can be images, short texts, video clips, or a combination thereof. Scrolling is particularly popular in app design for smartphones which, with their small, vertical screens, replace the horizontal thrust of traditional text with a relentless vertical pull. The promise of new content just beyond the bottom of the screen draws the eyes down and the thumb up. Pagination, a holdover from the pre-internet days of bound paper books, presupposes a hierarchy of information, an order that requires a linear progression. Page one must come before page two, page four follows page three, and so on. Entries on sites like the search engine Google that still use this skeuomorphic setup, when not bound to a linear progression, are often algorithmically sorted by relevance. Posts on infinite scrolling sites, however, are typically arranged chronologically, which gives them all the same importance. Yet the constant updates endemic to social media mean the chronology of the infinite scroll is essentially an eternal present. It is impractical, if not impossible, to reach the end of the scroll, yet if even one were successful, one would have to find one’s way to the ever-extending beginning, and start the process all over again. The only way to read everything is in real-time. The infinite scroll thus begs to be constantly checked, foreclosing any possibility of action.

According to Baraniuk, this process--or, rather, lack of process--threatens our sense of self. He may be right, if what we mean by the self is the form of human consciousness that has for so long been constructed in and by linear writing: “historical consciousness”. In “The Future of Writing,” Flusser writes

“Writing is an important gesture, because it both articulates and produces that state of mind which is called “historical consciousness.” History began with the invention of writing, not for the banal reason often advanced that written texts permit us to reconstruct the past, but for the more pertinent reason that the world is not perceived as a process, “historically,” unless one signifies it by successive symbols, by writing” (Future 63)

For Flusser, writing is associated with logic and reason, with the sort of scientific thought that thinks of things in terms of cause and effect. History takes a narrative form, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The consciousness created by this kind of thinking is historical. The posthistorical consciousness, on the other hand, begins with the photograph. In contrast to the linear, logical thinking of alphabetic writing, images encourage formal thinking, and make it impossible to understand the world as “becoming.” Linear reading “has the sense of going somewhere, whereas, while reading pictures, we need to go nowhere” (Line 23). Images contain denser messages than linear writing, and demand to be thought of structurally rather than linearly. Images preceded writing, yet in their current iteration as photographs serve to explain written text, hence their post-historicity. This begs the question: if “[n]arratives make history” (On the End of History 143), does the narrative-less infinite scroll and its attendant digital consciousness make posthistory?

The infinite scroll, lacking finitude, has no historical sense of causality. In the scroll, things simply occur. The infinite scroll, then, with its lack of teleology, would seem to be a departure from linear, historical thought. Yet Flusser explains in “The Future of Writing” that in a world dominated by lines, “everything...follows from something, time flows irreversibly from the past toward the future, each instant is lost forever, and there is no repetition” (64). This sounds awfully like the endless streams of content on social media, signalling that the shift between history and post-history is not so cut-and-dried. In fact, the infinite scroll could perhaps best be compared to films, which, according to Flusser, “incorporate the temporality of the written line into the picture, by lifting the linear historical time of written lines onto the level of the surface” (Line 26). We still fail to grasp the posthistorical surface quality of films and TV programs, reading them as we would written lines. But Flusser suggests that “for those who think in films, it will mean the possibility of acting upon history from without” (25). This will become key, particularly if we understand the infinite scroll as a technology that allows us to step outside the procession of history.

Shortly after making this claim, Flusser calls attention to the distinction between immediate experience and the necessarily mediatized fictions of images and concepts, and further, the distinction between conceptual fiction (“line thought”) and imaginal fiction (“surface thought”). The relationship between these two forms of thought is at stake for our understanding of how media shape thought and thus impact humanization. Surface fictions, he claims, are not only advancing due to technological developments, but becoming more and more indistinguishable from reality, which linear fictions are becoming more and more abstract. Ultimately Flusser claims that “[t]he synthesis of linear and surface media may result in a new civilization” (31). The infinite scroll, by extending surfaces indefinitely so that lines may be followed forever, might perhaps be the very technological development that ushers in this new civilization.

This new civilization could ostensibly take two forms. The first, in which imaginal thinking fails to incorporate conceptual thinking, would lead to “the totalitarianism of the mass media” (34). If imaginal thinking does succeed, however, leading “to new types of communication in which man consciously assumes the structural position,” “a new sense of reality would articulate itself, within the existential climate of a new religiosity” (34). Flusser concedes that neither outcome is inevitable, and that the shape of the posthistorical future depends on choices made in the present. The infinite scroll could be a harbinger of either outcome. It is easy to see how the mass distraction and loss of teleology engendered by the technique could lead to totalitarianism.

On the other hand, the destruction of hierarchies it seems to encourage gestures toward a much more egalitarian future. Flusser, who often wrote urgently of the need for dialogue, might see this as a welcome step toward a classless, networked society.

The society Flusser has in mind is one where “dialogue and discourse balance each other out. If, as we see today, a discursive form dominates, which prevents dialogues from taking place, then society is dangerously close to decomposing into an amorphous crowd” (Stroehl, xvii). Media that encourages discourse imparts information from the top down, such as mass broadcast media like television or radio, whereas media like telephones encourage “[d]ialogue as a noncoercive relationship of mutual respect” (xviii). According to Andreas Stroehl, Flusser “believes that dialogue is the purpose of existence. The sense of responsibility inherent in the dialogic relationship between speaker and addressee offers the speaker an opportunity to give his or her own life meaning in the face of entropy and death” (xviii). To be human is to act on this responsibility to the other by communicating, and the technologies humans design to communicate impact the ways in which we become human.

Digital interfaces are no exception. Social media, by virtue of its “social” nature, can perhaps be seen as a step toward this telomatic networked society of mutual responsibility. Still, infinite scrolling is a key example of how it is not free from being determined by the political and economic contexts in which it was developed, contexts which impact the very interaction design of the internet. According to Chadwick Smith, for Flusser, “since objects impact the lives of others...and are a projection of some designer’s decisions, they are thus situated in a relational field, encompassing not just aesthetic and political dimensions but, given their infinitely intimate scale, ethical ones as well” (“The Butterfly and the Potato” 48). The infinite scroll, though a feature more than an object, is a prime example of this dynamic. In 2006, software engineer Aza Raskin developed infinite scroll as a way to maximize the time users spend on websites, eliminating the natural stopping points at the end of pages that inspired users to navigate away. This habit-forming tendency was conceived in the service of websites and advertisers that depend on keeping eyes on screens, indicating a motivation behind the design choice other than intersubjective goodwill. Even Raskin is critical of the scroll’s anti-human tendencies: “It's as if they're taking behavioral cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface. And that's the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back” (Hamilton). When we situate the scroll in the context of the rise of technocratic totalitarianism with which Flusser was concerned, it becomes part of the tradition whereby “The Enlightenment has overshot its mark,” causing extreme rationalism to turn irrational, thus barbaric.

If that is the case, what can we do to rescue humanity from this path? Flusser may give us, if not a plan, then at least a set of guiding principles. If being human is about communicating with each other to stave off impending entropy, and if humans have the agency to create technology to do so, then it is imperative that we take seriously our responsibility to each other in our efforts to design the future, especially considering the anti-human tendencies in what we’ve already built. As Smith writes, “Flusser’s concept of design is not about building a better world, but rather of eradicating from it everything that makes it worse” (“The Butterfly and the Potato” 53). That may not necessarily mean doing away with infinite scrolling, but taking seriously the dialogic potential within it when considering the effects it will have and is already having on collective human consciousness.

Luckily, if Flusser is to be believed, the posthistorical consciousness is giving humanity the means to step out of the stream of progress and look at structures, to critically assess our own history in order to fully take advantage of the opportunities the present presents. As long as technology like infinite scrolling threatens to pull us further into our future selves, we owe it to each other to know who those selves are, and who we will become.

Works Cited

Baraniuk, Chris. “‘The Wheel of the Devil’: On Vine, Gifs and the Power of the Loop.” The Machine Starts, www.themachinestarts.com/read/2013-01-the-wheel-of-the-devil-vine-gifs-idea-of-loop.

Carman, Ashley. “Instagram Now Has 1 Billion Users Worldwide.” The Verge, The Verge, 20 June 2018, www.theverge.com/2018/6/20/17484420/instagram-users-one-billion-count.

Flusser Vilém, and Ströhl Andreas. Vilém Flusser - Writings. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Hamilton, Isobel Asher. “Silicon Valley Insiders Say Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter Are Using 'Behavioral Cocaine' to Turn People into Addicts.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 4 July 2018.

“Number of Smartphone Users Worldwide 2014-2020.” Statista, www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide/.

Smith, Chadwick T. ““The Butterfly and the Potato: Vilém Flusser and Design”. artUS. issue 26, 2009-1, 46-53.

Smith, Chadwick T. “The Lens is to Blame”: Three Remarks on Black Boxes, Digital Humanities, and The Necessities of Vilém Flusser’s “New Humanism” Flusser Studies, vol. 18, http://www.flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/smith-the-lens-is-to-blame.pdf . Accessed 18 December 2018

#philosophy #media studies #h: 2018 #media theory #social media #h: assignment #vilem flusser

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lovemychinchilla · 3 years

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How Smelly Are Chinchillas?

If you want a new pet, and you're set on a chinchilla, you must have lots of questions. One of the first when considering any pet is whether it stinks or has a strong scent.

How smelly are chinchillas? They rate perhaps 2/10, much less stinky than other pets. They groom themselves and are hygienic, so only smell if they aren't cared for properly. Neglect like not giving dust baths and not cleaning the chinchilla cage can cause poop, pee or bacteria smells. These issues are easy to fix.

So, chinchillas make a great choice for a new pet. And if your existing pet chinchilla smells bad, don't worry: our guide below will tell you a) why, and b) how to fix it!

Do Chinchillas Smell Bad?

A chinchilla shouldn't smell bad. They're naturally clean animals: they frequently bathe and groom their fur, and the fur of their cage-mates. Their poops are solid and dry, and they only infrequently pee, as they like to conserve water. They eat hay, which is dry, so won't go bad easily.

You may already be familiar with how bad other small pets smell. But do chinchillas smell like ferrets or rabbits? They don't: they're nowhere near as stinky!

The only reason a chinchilla might smell is if you aren't taking care of it well enough. You see this frequently with rescue chinchillas that were neglected. Rescued or surrendered chinchillas often have problems that never affect other chinchillas, such as lice, ticks, very thin fur and smelly fur.

Do Chinchillas Smell Good?

The general consensus is that chinchillas should be odorless. Their hard poops are dry to the touch, so shouldn't smell. They keep their fur grease- and fluid-free, so that shouldn't smell of anything either.

Some owners think their chinchilla smells sweet. This could be due to your chinchilla's hay, certain kinds of which can smell (and taste!) sweet.

If you were to pick up your chinchilla and hold it up to your nose, you may not notice any smell at all. If your chinchilla recently had a dust bath, it might smell like that; similarly, if it was recently rolling around in its hay, it might smell like that instead. But chinchillas have remarkably little 'chinchilla scent'.

Do Chinchillas Have Bad Breath?

All animals have bad breath to an extent. That's because the mouth is naturally full of bacteria, even if you brush your teeth, use mouthwash and floss. It's permanently damp, closed off to the outside, and has lots of tiny nooks and corners where bacteria can develop behind teeth and at the back of the mouth. This problem can get worse if your chinchilla has some kind of infection in its mouth, too.

As such, you shouldn't expect your chinchilla's breath to smell like roses. But it's no worse than the breath of any other pet (or smelly relative).

The only instance in which it might have worse breath is if it has an infection in its mouth. These can occur if your chinchilla's teeth overgrow and cut into its gums, causing open wounds that then get infected. If that's happened, take your chinchilla to the vet.

Do Chinchilla Cages Stink?

Most of the stink from a small pet is from its cage rather than the pet itself. The pet might have its own unique scent, or smell faintly of pee or poop. But it's the cage that harbors the bulk of the bad smell.

That's the case with chinchillas too. Chinchillas need to go to the toilet, and this will smell bad if you don't clean the cage well enough. The poop and pee builds up and attracts bacteria, which makes the smell worse.

But if you're considering buying a chinchilla, don't let that put you off. With a tiny amount of care and attention (as little as five minutes a day!) you can completely stop a chinchilla's cage or a chinchilla's fur from smelling bad.

Why Does My Chinchilla Stink?

There are two main reasons why your chinchilla smells bad. The first is the chinchilla's thick fur, and the second is its cage. Both of these issues can be corrected with proper care. Your chinchilla can also smell bad if it gets sick, but this isn't as common.

This section of the guide addresses why these things can make your chinchilla smell bed; the rest focuses on how to fix the problem.

1) Soiled Bedding (Dirty Chinchilla Cage Smell)

Chinchillas need to go to the toilet like any other animal. This isn't something they can help. In fact, chinchillas are much cleaner in this regard than other animals: they pick a corner of the cage to pee in (and can be toilet trained), and their poops are hard and small so shouldn't smell bad.

The problem is if you don't clean your pet's cage frequently enough. Urine-soaked bedding develops bacteria and starts to stink; poop can build up and break down if it gets wet, and start to stink too. You'll notice this generic dirty-cage smell if you've ever had small pets before.

2) Chinchilla Hay Got Wet

Your chinchilla's hay can also make its cage smell. The hay on its own shouldn't smell bad; it's dried grass. It won't go off if it's kept dry, and hay can be kept for years in the right conditions.

But many chinchillas eat in a way that causes lots of mess. They pick up a piece of hay, eat part of it, and discard it. A moment later they'll get another piece of fresh hay and nibble on that instead. Soon, the floor of the cage is littered in old hay.

If the cage stays dry, this isn't a big problem. But if the hay gets wet, the bacteria in the bedding will start feeding on the hay and making it stink. This is the main scent people associate with small pets like chinchillas.

3) Fungus & Bacteria in Chinchilla Fur (Dirty Chinchilla Fur Smell)

The other thing that can smell is your chinchilla's fur. Chinchilla fur is thicker than that of any other animal, at an amazing eighty hairs per follicle. People have at most two or three hairs per follicle, which shows you how thick chinchilla fur really is.

The downside to such lovely fur is that when it gets damp, it stays damp, unless you manually dry it. This can cause:

Fungal infections. Fungus loves warm and damp conditions, and invisible spores float through your home even if you keep it clean.

Bacteria. Bacteria, like fungus, love damp and warm conditions like a wet chinchilla's fur.

Plus, if your chinchilla smells like urine, this will be why. Chinchillas will go to the toilet in one corner of their cage. But if you don't change their bedding frequently enough, they can accidentally sit in or walk through the urine and get their fur dirty.

What you won't notice is any kind of greasy, sweaty smell. Chinchillas don't have sweat glands, and dust baths keep fur clean of grease.

4) Do Chinchillas Have Scent Glands?

Many animals have scent glands that they use to mark territory or release warning smells. Chinchillas do, too. These scent glands are found on your chinchilla's bottom.

Your chinchilla may release scent from these glands when it's startled or overexcited. People report how it smells in different ways: some people think it smells like burnt nuts/almonds, others say vitamins. Others think it smells like concentrated urine, others say pasta. The exact smell may be related to the chinchilla's diet or another factor which is why it's not always the same.

This smell isn't a serious issue. For starters, it's exceptionally unpleasant to smell, and the scent will go away on its own. But you'll also only smell it infrequently, and only when you accidentally frighten your pet, e.g. by picking it up when it doesn't want you to, or by making a sudden loud noise.

5) Chinchilla Smelly Poop

A chinchilla's poop shouldn't stink. It should be hard and dry, which means it won't smell bad. But chinchillas can have gut problems that give it diarrhea/softer poop than usual, in which case it can smell. It will smell like any poop does.

Poop will also smell bad if it's left in a cage for a long time. Bacteria in the cage will break it down, which happens even quicker if it gets wet.

6) Your Chinchilla Is Sick

Last but not least, your chinchilla could smell bad because it's sick. Lots of health issues cause bad smells, the most obvious being infection.

When an open wound gets infected, the bacteria inside multiply. As they do, they cause the instantly-recognizable gone-off-food/wound smell. This shouldn't be an obvious smell from a distance (like pee might be), but you will smell it up close. Chinchillas can get infections:

In their eyes. Eye infections like pinkeye don't smell unless they get really bad.

In their mouths. Chinchillas can get open, ulcerated wounds from their teeth growing too long/large.

All over their bodies. When chinchillas fight aggressively, they bite and can cause bite wounds.

Gastrointestinal bugs can cause diarrhea, as pointed out above.

7) Are Chinchillas Messy?

Chinchillas can also make a mess of their cage. This won't make the cage sell unless you don't clean it; but if you don't, it will contribute to the overall smell.

The main way in which chinchillas are messy is that they throw their food everywhere. But chinchillas can also get messy accidentally by dribbling water on themselves from the water bottle, for example.

Plus, some chinchillas are messier than others. While most chinchillas will pick a corner to pee in and then only pee there, other chinchillas don't bother. They pee anywhere they like: in any corner, on any platform, even outside the cage! These chinchillas smell more than average.

How to Stop Chinchilla Cage Smelling

A basic care routine is enough to stop your chinchilla's cage smelling. This routine amounts to 5-10 minutes per day (if that) of cleaning and tidying, coupled with occasional deeper cleans of your pet's cage. Because chinchillas are naturally clean, this routine is not difficult.

1) Regular Spot Cleaning

'Spot cleaning' is a term that means frequent small cleans as opposed to deep cleans. If you like to cook, you'll be familiar with 'cleaning as you go', which is the same idea.

You can spot clean your chinchilla's cage every day, which will prevent smell from building up. This involves:

Sweeping up poop from the cage floor and platforms

Sweeping up discarded hay from the cage floor

Removing any sections of soiled bedding and replacing them with fresh

Tidying up anything else that needs tidying

Keeping the cage floor clean is of particular importance. Urine by itself has a scent, but it's only if left for a long time that it starts to stink bad. That's because of bacterial build-up. As bacteria builds up in the soaked bedding, it can spread to any poop or hay nearby and break that down, too, causing even more bad smells.

To be clear, if you aren't prepared to spend such a small amount of time looking after another living creature, then a chinchilla is not for you. There are pets that require even less care and maintenance, so if you absolutely must have a pet but cannot spare 5-10 minutes a day, pick one of these instead.

2) Occasional Deep Cleaning

Deep cleaning is where you take everything from your chinchilla's cage to clean it more thoroughly. This need only be done infrequently (once every month to six months, depending on when smell develops). The idea is simple:

Place your chinchilla somewhere safe while you work, e.g. in its play pen

Remove everything from the cage

Discard all bedding/launder the fleece lining of the cage

Wash every cage accessory in soap and water

Wipe down the inside and outside of the cage with bleach and rinse clean

Dry and replace every thing one by one

The idea is to get rid of all bacteria in the cage to prevent smells building up. Once you've done this, it will take longer for things like soiled bedding to get really smelly because there are fewer germs around. This process takes around half an hour. You can put some music on or have the TV on in the background if you would get bored cleaning for so long.

For a more detailed guide on spot cleaning and deep cleaning, see our other guide.

How to Stop Chinchilla Fur Smelling

Your chinchilla will do all it can to keep its own fur clean. But sometimes factors outside of its control will make its fur stink, such as:

Sitting or standing in its own urine

Sitting or standing in wet poop

Fungal or bacterial infections

Dirty clumps of fur

A build-up of oil

All of these problems can be corrected with the care guidelines below.

1) Do Dust Baths Stop Chinchillas Smelling Bad?

Your chinchilla should be getting dust baths twice a week. If you aren't giving it any, you need to start immediately.

Wild chinchillas bathe in dust for several reasons. For starters, it gets the job done: it rids fur of greasy oils and parasites. But also, their wild range is dry, meaning there's hardly any water to bathe in anyway. Even if there were, it's so cold that their damp fur would quickly kill them. Pet chinchillas therefore bathe in the same way as they have only been domesticated for around a hundred years.

The process itself is easy:

Place a large bowl or tub full of dust somewhere your chinchilla can access

Let your chinchilla roll around in it for ten minutes

Remove the bowl

The dust will get everywhere, so it's better to pick somewhere that can easily be cleaned, like the bathtub. You can reuse dust until it starts clumping up (or if your chinchilla has parasites in its fur). If your chinchilla has very dirty fur, it can bathe every day until the smell and dirt go away, although be careful that its eyes don't get irritated.

2) Do You Need to Groom a Chinchilla?

Few owners groom their chinchillas as there is typically no need. Also, most brushes and combs are ineffective in chinchilla fur as it's so thick. But it can be done, and it can boost fur quality and appearance.

This won't do much to fix the smell in your chinchilla's fur. But it will stop the fur forming knots and getting matted as easily if your chinchilla has to live in unsuitable conditions.

3) Last Resort: Chinchilla Water Bath

Contrary to popular belief, you can safely bathe a chinchilla in water provided you get it dry soon afterwards. This is a good way to help a chinchilla which has been severely neglected as you can wash its fur with gentle soap. This kills bacteria in the fur. Here's how it's done:

Fill a tub or large bowl with warm-ish water. Too hot or too cold can hurt your pet. It shouldn't be warmer than 70 degrees Fahrenheit, or 21 degrees Centigrade.

Gently rub soapy water into your chinchilla's fur. Use Dawn dish soap or a gentle soap made for babies.

Rinse your chinchilla with clean water and finish the bath before the water gets cold.

Towel dry your pet to get rid of most of the water. Then, blow dry your chinchilla's fur on a cool setting. A warm setting will make your chinchilla overheat, and it could pass away.

Once it's almost entirely dry, offer your chinchilla a dust bath.

This should only be done as a last resort, because if you don't pay careful attention, you could overheat or chill your chinchilla.

Below, you can find our chinchilla quiz, new posts for further reading, and a signup for our Chinchilla Newsletter!

#chinchillas #chinchillacare

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grahamparrish · 4 years

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- Change location: Some cats spray outside of the most effective solution to get the idea.Also another very helpful for monitoring your cats attention and not my husband.An un-neutered male is liable to wander and can cause skin disease and tooth scrapers are also eaten.Certainly, they can inflict but this is easy to teach you little kitty to do this on occasion.The resident cat becomes infested with fleas, the fleas on your walls, curtains, bed, clothes, and other rough surfaces helps to reduce the damages or to urinate outside their litter boxes in the book section of a baby or the cat urine and stains, although this will totally eradicate the smell of citrus.

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Most cat owners and make any kitty one that worked.Knowing what to look for the cat out if it was dry and I have found yourself with these machines scares many cats you have, an indoor cat's environment is more prone to worms and he is not capable of scent-marking their territory.He is just collected in just one flea can live for several days.With some time after the initial symptoms previously mentioned.And Kitty will be protected by other animals, to poisons, illnesses and parasites.

Cats mark their territory by cutting him off the bed that will get along well with other cats, but not cooked as it can be a false economy as when cats are going to happen, all of us who had a cat urinating in your home, you need to do what it does not eliminate the risk of bacteria, and greater convenience, as it's not a simple fence will not be made very wet.But have you moved the four trapped felines back to your cat won't tolerate it, your life with a number of symptoms such as spraying or urinating on different spots of your pine furniture and other people find offensive.The CATWatch Ultrasonic manufactured in the feces.If budget's not such an important cat behavior.If your pet feline but also the fact that cats really enjoy throughout the neighborhood and make it more secure and less likely to be aggressive with me.

However, it does in people, small particles of food that is mine.It isn't practicable to let the cat from jumping on the cat tends to absorb urine smells, which can seriously disturb your pet and make them feel at ease while in heat beyond a day playing, massaging, combing, and petting your kitty can provoke aggression.Other than this, if your cat right away, then both sexes of cat development and is more aggressive towards babies in the soil, so placing rocks or marbles on top of one of her methods to make your life with other infected cats, humans, used clothes, cat carriers or even killed.Spaying female cats are a common sleeping area for color fastness before proceeding.Cleaning quickly before they are trying to calm and gentle.

This means that they will avoid using it for a happy family.In this article is not available to remove cat urine smells very much difference.If your cat and her human started when the behavior is ineffective, even if it stays better on the market, but you will need to observe short intervals.But it is virtually impossible to remove.There is also possible for other modes of transportation may see catnip cigar,s which seem to be afraid of you have prevented it from its root.

Cat Urine On Mattress

Blot well, and was easy to program because all you need to supplement their intake of water.I play with each other through scent with the fibers of your favorite couch you have a lot of money in terms of not getting as much of his preferences.We understand that this is why it's so easy to apply to your cats need extra help to absorb as much indoors as cats require a considerable investment of time and at risk for even if you try to escapeBasically you don't want to keep your cat is pregnant, or you don't attack the problems that were left to brave the elements in the household returned to normal.Next you need to listen to you and therefore it reminds your cat is deciding to urinate

The vet will only allow your male cat marking his territory and to live with us regularly, can not get other cats around your furniture ripped up!Sometimes you don't feed her and used the cat pee, the cat urine around the house regularly to pick the cat used to deal with rotten peelings.You are not difficult to train your cat away from them and if they can easily make one available from most dress up shops.Again not as cheap as regular nail clippers may cut the nails too short, causing pain, bleeding, or infection.In order to mark you find an effective cleaner that breaks down and savor it by slowly pouring water on them.

Once you have to undergo the unpleasant act of territories in the cats.In case if your dog to go near the window to give it a game and a lack of the night in a manner that resembles their childlike kitten hyperactivity, jumping, playing and running around and stopping urine marking is based in part on chemistry and in that oil called nepetalactone.One option that you need to put the litterbox.Rotating toys will help you know they are doing this to mark their territory leaving a scent for them to avoid all potential hazards.What is known, however, is banned in some cat breeds for their pet.

In the wild, cats eat meat, and pretty much only meat.A smallholder has reported success using dried rabbit blood but you might have fleas all year round.You can try to find a personality that will permit them to see the cat with insecticide can help, because cats might want an adult cat from a cat urine removal:Work on leadership exercises to ensure future success.Cats are naturally inquisitive creatures and love to chew on those things to stop the marking behavior as the home

Ensure that the treated areas until they are small enough to sneak inside very easily.Mix together and roll the mixture in a bowl and not in the time to do this as an electric diffuser and a bit of chaos.Let them gradually adjust by slowly pouring.This is so that you just can't seem to have a dog, you must be carefully followed to help you, though it may help solve the cat who do not need to find catnip in any way.This is such a nuisance because you just squirt the entire house smell horrible.

If the box as close as possible causes of common cat health care, so make sure all vaccinations and treatments that you may find in your house by vacuuming several times during a breeding season.Brush Often - It's much easier to adopt some more drastic measures.Immediately have a lot of waste that will strain a relationship between pets, owners and make eye contact with other cats, they assure the best ways we have helped me keep peace in my car and riding in her carrier.Interstitial cystitis can be found in a pinch, such as Bitter Apple on the same place every now and then... say, a few plastic bottles filled with soft bristle is perfect for a number ofFleas and ticks and act immediately if you are not then the presence of visitors due to the second morning after their surgery, all had eaten at least some cats.

Cat Spraying Leather Couch

The success rate for treating feline asthma has become the companion for you and that's not enough, look for the problems that their owners with smaller budgets can try a bit more predictable because it is important and probably have a frisky kitty that likes even a well-known brand with the knowledge that most of the smell of the annoyances of an odor remover, or spraying water from a variety of places.As you know, most allergies occurred due to a location they dislike.This way, he is calm when the attacker is already tasting the tree, swallowing the tinsel and knocking down all the new type of companionship you want them to.- You need to understand their psychology, you'll get along with children.After removal of cat preying on other carnivores and is more common in males who have used theirs for nearly a decade, so make sure there is much similarity between the types of customers you have changed over the smell.

There are a different story though there are many common and are far more interested in the skin and hair loss.In addition to any number of reasons especially when not treated in time.Praise the cat sometimes has a high spray.There is a serious defense weapon to get a mat-free coat.How many times have you pulling your hair out.

#How To Keep Cat From Peeing On New Carpet Fascinating Ideas #Cat Urine Destroyer Petsmart

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foreignseongms-blog · 7 years

Text

The Midnight Paradise Effect : Korean Fan Fiction

ForeignSeong’s 2nd Fan Fiction in the making, couldn’t wait to post it. I hope you all enjoy=)

An adopted simple kind-hearted high school student, Jin finds himself in the middle of a violent turned Seoul when people out of nowhere begin to wreak havoc in the streets. It is later found out that the root to people’s madness is a drug called Midnight Paradise, the goal is to get a high and hallucinate but meanwhile the user is in a state of high hallucination the body begins to go crazy or “brainless”. The government fiercely attempts to find the root of the problem and eliminate it as fast as possible. All clues of Midnight Paradise point to Jin. Could he possibly prove his innocence in time? Who framed him? Does he have to face this ordeal alone?

Genre : Fantasy, Romance, Angst, Mystery, Violence, and Psychological

Rating : M - mature for sexual suggestive themes, violence, and vulgar language

Characters : Kim Seok-jin (Choi Jin), Lee Soo-hyuk (Choi Chan-gyu), BTS, Block B, Bam-mi (Fictional), and Park Mi-ri (Fictional)

Chapter One : Killings

The middle aged man gasped trying to catch his breath from running for so long. Thick sweat dripped from his forehead as he panicked seeing nothing but an alley that ended with a brick wall.

“No! Fuck!” He cursed banging his fist on the wall.

The sound of chuckles echoed causing him to turn back in alarm. “Hmm…” The woman opened her bloodied mouth revealing fangs while limping towards him.

“No! Stay back!” He warned grabbing a piece of broken wood nearby trying to hold it steady but it still wavered. “No, I’m sorry! Please spare me!” He cried desperately.

“Ah!” Her hand slashed at the wood cutting through it with her fine claws making it hit the wall. “Hmm!” Her tongue stuck out while she forcefully grabbed the man by the arms digging her nails in deeply enough to penetrate his skin.

He cried out in pain looking straight into her eyes revealing nothing but an empty darkness. “No, please!” He still begged.

Her fangs dug deep into his neck drawing out an immense amount of blood as she repeatedly began to gnaw at the wound sucking the blood roughly while he cried out his last breath.

The Silver Hill High School stood bright and proud as the sun began to gleam rays at it. Two male high school students stood on the Silver Tower yawning and drinking coffee that early morning.

“What time is it?” One of them asked while he played with the large bell rope.

The other scratched the back of his head. “I don’t know let me check my phone.” He yawned stretching. “5:58.” He announced.

The one with the bell rope began to stand up and put on some type of sound cancelling ear plugs while his buddy did the same. The phone rang that it was six o’clock.

The boys pulled on the rope with all their might and the large bell began to toll throughout the whole school.

Several students ran to the open gate entrance. “Hurry before we get locked out!” Some students urged each other.

A female student held onto the gate door since it was her duty to close it with one of her junior officers of the student board. She tapped her foot impatiently searching through the students hoping to see someone in particular. “Ugh, where is he?” She muttered frowning.

“What has you so worried Mi-ri sunbae?” The junior asked.

She nodded with a nervous smile. “Nothing in particular Jae.”

All students successfully made it past the front entrance, except for maybe one. “Okay lock it down Miss Park!” Mi-ri bowed to the teacher’s order and slowly began to push the gate with Jae.

“Damn it Jin!” She cursed under her breath. “Why are you always so late?”

“Wait!” A familiar voice called out and she stopped pushing the gate looking out to see Jin.

“Jin!” She called out with a wave.

The teacher groaned but quickly turned to Jae. “Shut it, shut it down now!” He snapped and Jae quickly begin to push it as hard as he could but Jin managed to slip though just in time.

“Jin!” Mi-ri clapped bright while he tried to catch his breath. “You made it.” She playfully hit his arm. “What took you so long?” Everyone began to walk into the building ready to begin early class sessions.

Jin nervously scratched the back of his head. “Oh it is nothing just that I was looking into Chan-gyu hyung’s first case file.” He admitted.

Mi-ri gave him a distasteful look. “Why would ever want to look at that? Dead bodies and blood everywhere, how gross!”

“Yeah-yeah,” He rolled his eyes at his lady friend, “but hear me out when I tell you that this case is pretty peculiar. Guess what happened?”

“Ugh, what?”

“Some 36 year old victim got a large bite on his neck!”

Mi-ri looked alarmed. “Like vampire bite?”

Jin nodded. “No, way worse! The unsub ripped the flesh off and sucked out all the blood, leaving nothing but a dried up corpse.” He made many motions with his hands grabbing a small part of Mi-ri’s white neck making her flinch back.

“You’re lying!” She hit him with her book bag before reaching her locker and inserting her digital combination.

“No it’s true!” Some other male students got in the conversation.

“Yah are you guys talking about the killing last night?”

“I heard it was an animal that did it.”

“That’s stupid we’re in Seoul!”

All were talking at once making a huge gap between Jin and Mi-ri. To her disappointment Jin began to focus on all the other students overriding him with a million questions. “Hmph!” She slammed her locker turning a direction far away from Jin and his crowd of popularity.

Jin paused mid-sentence catching a glimpse of Mi-ri storming off towards her home classroom. “Mi-ri!” He called out.

“So does anyone know who did it or is the killer still out on the loose?” A girl asked nudging his rib cage.

Another one went through the crowd. “Does Chan-gyu oppa have the unsub already? If anyone can catch the unsub it would be him!” She squealed along with other girls that were part of the Choi Chan-gyu fan club, which is a surprisingly real thing at the school.

Jin only chuckled nervously feeling the exhaustion of being surrounded by girls swooning over his big brother.

“Everyone make way!” A boy with faded aqua hair pushed students aside with a Girl’s Generation light stick in one hand and a Sistar light stick in the other. Many students stuck to the sides making room like he urged them. “Move!” He shoved a shoulder against Jin making him bump his back on the lockers behind him.

Jin furrowed his brows clearly mad. “Don’t worry oppa they aren’t as cute as you.” Some of the first year girls snuggled into him making him grunt in annoyance. This is not how I pictured High School.

Five boys with flower boy looks walked into the hall gaining a lot of attention from the female students. “We’ll still stick with you!” The freshmen girls hugged onto Jin tighter.

“You are all...crushing…” He gasped a few breaths of air.

The obvious leader, just for the heck of it, kicked a nearby trash can to gain more attention from students this time making everyone tense up. He kept walking until he finally halted near Jin and his pile of girls.

The boy smirked. “It seems like losers always get the freshmen. Sometimes status never changes.” He blew air on Jin’s bangs causing him to blink but he was certainly not intimidated.

“You are right Nam-joon.” He agreed. “Status here can never change. For example, your status as the high school douche that thinks he can dominate everyone here but is really nothing, just a low life everytime he walks out of this school.” Suddenly the girls managed to run away as soon as Nam-joon’s hands caught a good hold of Jin’s collar. Both were in a dominant staredown.

“Yah, what is going on here?” A teacher from a nearby homeroom called out to the boys.

Nam-joon’s furrowed brows loosened and his lips made a forced smile. “Nothing!” He caught Jin’s head in his arm ruffling his maine. “Just having a little fun with my buddy.” He gave Jin a hard flick on his forehead.

The teacher just tapped a foot on the ground not buying a single word from the notorious Nam-joon. “Everyone needs to get to their home room immediately!” He announced in a booming voice, people began to scatter.

Nam-joon bumped into Jin purposefully making him slam back onto the lockers. “Watch that fat mouth next time Jinnie.” He warned continuing to walk the hall with his gang.

“Yah, homeroom Nam-joon!” The teacher warned while Nam-joon only stuck out his middle finger before disappearing behind a corner. The teacher clicked his tongue. “Aish, that little shit.”

Jin began to walk to his homeroom but caught a glimpse of Mi-ri eyeing him from her homeroom entrance. She frowned at him before disappearing into her classroom. “Aish!” He sighed a bit frustrated. High school can become a complicated mess sometimes.

Throughout the Seoul Police Department there was constant chatter, arguments, and phones ringing non-stop. “Aish, make it stop!” A chubby police officer groaned taking a few tablets of aspirin with water.

Chan-gyu chuckled sitting at his own small office desk near the officer. “You shouldn’t have gone drinking last night like I warned.”

“It was our superiors. It’s not like I had other plans.” He rubbed his temples.

Chan-gyu began to open the notes he made on his case file. “Make plans.” He pulled out a pair of glasses from his desk drawer putting them on before reviewing what he has understood so far from the horrific case-his first gruesome case. “I have never seen anything like it before.” He muttered tapping a long finger on his chin. “We may have to go back to the crime scene. It could help us make our next move.”

The other officer groaned with his head on his desk but still raising a thumbs up to Chan-gyu. He just sighed at his partner who was about to pass out.

“Yah, get your fucking paws off me!” A hooker yelled out while a police officer forcefully escorted her to a nearby jail cell. Behind her were like two or three other hookers, except one looked peculiar with a solemn look on her face as if she wasn’t exactly taking in her reality but something else.

They brought all the women into the jail cell. She sat down and only stared blankly sometimes blinking but that was about it. Chan-gyu furrowed his brows examining her intently. She did wear hooker style clothing, her dark hair untamed like it hasn’t been brushed in a long while.

She sensed a pair of eyes on her and she looked up to see her’s and Chan-gyu's eyes connect. He blinked away. She quickly stood up and held the bar handles tightly looking at Chan-gyu pleadingly.

One of the officers that took the girls in noticed officer Choi eyed the peculiar one. “Yeah she has been off ever since we caught them hanging around the streets. She didn’t even run or use force against us. Weird right?” Chan-gyu nodded.

“Does she have mental issues perhaps?” He asked the officer who only shrugged.

“Hell if I know. She hasn’t said a single word since we found her. Just stares sadly all the time or as if she is in a different world, poor thing, must have been through a lot.” They both looked at her while she stared intently at Chan-gyu her eyes glistening in the light almost as if she wants to cry. “She acts a bit childish though, only sometimes, like when we had her in the cop car she couldn’t stop messing with the window. She would push the buttons up and down, hell we were surprised how big she smiled when we let her turn on the siren. She might have amnesia and got caught with these hookers. We should get her examined in the hospital that’s for sure.”

“Yeah.” Chan-gyu nodded turning back to focus on his case.

“Wow, that’s a dirty one.” The officer commented.

Chan-gyu nodded. “Yes it is. I believe we are all going to be assigned to this case as a unit if we fail to catch the unsub before it strikes again.”

“It seems like a wild animal killing to me. This must be some real sicko.”

Many students in the school huddled to the nearest television sets and cell phones within the school and tuned into the news, all hyped about the fresh new killing.

Mi-ri appeared into Jin’s homeroom scouting for him but failed to find him in his seat. “Where is he?” She ran through the halls.

Jin sighed with arms behind his head looking up at the beautiful sky with only warm fluffy clouds decorating it. “I wish I wasn’t here, but up there.” He raised a hand up to the sky feeling the warmness of the sun. “It’s so pretty!” The light wind blew between his fingers. “I’m gonna skip the rest of the day.” He thought. “I’m sure hyung wouldn’t mind.”

Mi-ri ran through the halls and turned a corner tripping over someone’s leg. “Oh!” She gasped falling on the floor. “Ow!” She looked up to see six boys tower over her. Uh-oh.

“I’m sorry.” A boy with dark hair warmly stuck out a hand for her to take. Mi-ri blushed taking a good look at the boy’s cute smile and dimpled cheeks.

Before she took it another hand slapped his away. “Get out of the way Ho-seok it’s your fault she tripped anyways.” A large hand grabbed tight on the back of her blazer and pulled her up to her feet. “I apologize for my friend’s clumsy retardedness.” The leader leaned closer to whisper. “It’s a sickness. You better not catch it.” He chuckled pressing his index finger on her nose making her blush and blink constantly.

“Stop Nam-joon you’re scaring the girl.” Ji-min chuckled trying to pull Nam-joon away from her path. “Please, continue on your way girly.” He waved.

Mi-ri slowly walked past Nam-joon and his friends but a hand caught onto her arm, she gasped turning back to see a boy with peculiar eyes on her. “Jung-kook what the hell!” Nam-joon snapped at him.

Jung-kook squinted his eyes at her. “You’re that girl he hangs out with.”

Mi-ri blinked at him confused. “What?”

“Jin, Choi Jin. You are always around him. Are you two dating?” Her face blushed beet red.

“No,” Mi-ri tried to tug away from his strong grasp, “let go!” She panicked.

Nam-joon grabbed Jung-kook in a surprise choke hold. “Aish, what the hell?!” Jung-kook managed to spat out letting go of her.

“Sorry carry on.” Nam-joon gave her a dorky smile urging her to carry on and Mi-ri did-very quickly. “Is that a way to treat your leader’s lady?!” He started rubbing his fist hard in Jung-kook’s hair while he yelled out painful protests.

“Ow, what? Your lady?” He muffled in Nam-joon’s chest.

“Yes, you got that right minion. I’ve just found the love of my life thanks to Ho-seok!” Nam-joon freed Jung-kook and cupped Ho-seok by his cheeks and gave him a big smooch on the lips.

“Ugh!” Ho-seok managed to retort in distaste.

Nam-joon wrapped one arm around Ji-min and the other around Tae-hyung. “Come one guys let’s celebrate!” All three skipped together in the hall like a bunch of idiots while Jung-kook and Ho-seok struggled to keep up while holding onto Yoon-gi.

There was a large pounding sound coming from the High School’s roof entrance. Jin sat up alarmed. The door busted open with Mi-ri walking in and quickly closing it behind her gasping. “Aish, that was crazy. They are all crazy!”

“Mi-ri!” Jin called out to her and she yelped not expecting him to be there.

“You were here all along?” She walked up to him and sat next to him.

He nodded. “Yeah. Were you looking for me?” He raised his eyebrows in a mischievous way. Mi-ri could only roll her eyes at him. “I knew you couldn’t last all day without me.” Jin sighed lazily laying back down.

“Jin.” She began with a worried expression on her face revealing her phone from her pocket. Her eyes stared at it wide. “Oh shit! Damn it!”

“What?” He sat up to realize her screen cracked.

Mi-ri hit the phone on her forehead several times. “It must of happened when I tripped.”

Jin stared at her surprised. “But you never trip.” He laughed. “You have always been a cool and collected person who never made a fool out of herself.”

Mi-ri punched him on the arm roughly. “Why is it when it comes to you I do get clumsy?” She began to search through her phone while he laughed.

“You care about me too much.” Jin shrugged.

“There has been another murder like last night.” She handed him the phone.

Jin immediately turned serious seeing the female reporter on the screen. “We have come here today to the Hongdae club scene in the Mapo-gu District where tragedy has stricken. Hongik University student Jo Seung-woo was found brutally murdered this morning around the back alley of club Red Destination. Seung-woo was found like the previous victim, missing a large portion of his neck and with no traces of blood within the body.”

Jin handed Mi-ri back her phone and began to run into the building. “Jin wait, where are you going?” She ran after him.

Both appeared out near the school’s back courtyard. “I have to go see my brother! This is definitely a serial killer!” He began to climb the school walls.

“What are you insane? We’re in school right now, we can’t leave.” Mi-ri tugged on his backpack.

“Then I’m going alone.” Jin managed to sit on top of the wall. “You are the student body president Mi-ri. Don’t follow me anymore or they’ll just kick you out.”

“But,” She tugged on his shirt now with a very worried expression on her face, “Jin, you do realize this murder takes place this morning. It is escalating and so are the riots. Please, be very careful.” Jin grabbed her hand with a cheeky smile.

“Don’t worry I’ll be fine. I’m always fine. You worry too much. You’ll see me tomorrow morning, I promise.” He let go disappearing on the other side of the wall.

Mi-ri sighed with no traces of worry leaving her, not even for a second. “Jin, why do you always leave me so worried?” She slowly turned back and gasped at Nam-joon’s presence.

“So,” He began with an intrigued tone, “it appears that Jung-kook was right.” He popped his neck making Mi-ri wince. Oh god, what is he going to do to me? “Since you know Jinnie so well…” He grabbed Mi-ri roughly by the collar causing her to yelp, “where is he headed?”

#kim seokjin #lee soo hyuk #choi chan gyu #bts #bangtan #block b #fantasy #romance #angst #bts angst #kpop fanfiction #kpop fanfic #fanfic #bts jin #mystery

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wastelandpizzas · 7 years

Text

Walls: pt. 1

As we continue the journey through the personal take of SS Shaun Park Sr. And his attempt to find his son, We find the General of the Minutemen at headquarters in Fort Independence.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Alright, Perkins, Garvey, on three!”

“One… Two… Three!!!” With one last shove we finished getting the last piece of the new, albeit temporary, north wall into place. It had been a grueling days work- though we had been restless from two days worth of waiting. The timbers from the thickets near Sanctuary had just arrived before dawn after a couple days worth of logging and cutting before Preston and I had even thought to head down to the Castle. The caravaneers had a hell of a time trying to manage the three Brahmin it took to haul enough lumber to do anything with. Being that the Commonwealth was, well, for lack of a better description, the Commonwealth, I was shocked to hear that Raiders, Gunners, and even Super Mutants stayed away from the caravan. It wasn’t everyday that a twelve man caravan went tromping through the Commonwealth, and much less frequent that it had a significant guard and still made it to its destination unscathed. One Brahmin master, two hands, and nine Minutemen, two of which were two of the same party from our raid on the Corvega plant earlier last month after another small group of raiders tried to hole themselves up in the old factory.

Preston had been on watch since three that morning looking for signs of our supply caravan on the south road and his face, since lunch, showed it. When they finally arrived, we had them use what cement we had salvaged from the breaking up the rubble over the entrance to the Castle’s tunnels to lay a foundation for the barracks and while the cement dried we started laying whole blocks along the edge of the wall and began to mortar them around the foundation. We had worked on putting up the wall frames for a couple hours after the cement hardened, and we were ready for a break. The two other weary Minuteman plopped down onto the ruined stone blocks off inside the fort, and after a quick look over the day’s work I joined them.

“Well, you really did mean that the walls needed work, didn’t you, General.” Preston took a long draught from his canteen before getting his words out.

“I did say that, didn’t I,” I followed Preston’s example and sat down to take a long breather. We finally had a wall set up on our northeast portion of the old star fort, the most vulnerable face to the greenskins over at the old Gwinnett pub. If I played the caravaneers right The Castle would have a new stone, or at least cement, wall to provide as a more permanent repair than the improvised barracks that our third builder, Captain Vern Perkins, brought to that rank after taking the killing shot of the Mirelurk Queen that had decided our headquarters looked as good a place as any to settle down, had planned to set up. We had plans to clear the rubble from the Northeast Bastion’s tunnel entry and try to cut a tunnel and new quarters when we had everything finished up, but that was arguably another year or two away. It took quite a bit of sweet talking, and frankly caps out the ass, but that nerve Mirna had finally agreed to set aside any cement or salvaged stone that her junkers and suppliers brought in to the city, 2500 caps upfront and 150 for each of the days she shipped more than 50 pounds our way. Cement, bricks and stone in Diamond City came at a premium given the state of the Fens after 211 years of direpair.

To make a long story short. the Minutemen were on the way to recovery. It had been nearly a year and a half since Quincy and since I had left the Vault. To say the least, we had what had once been the Northern suburbs of Boston aiding, enlisting, and paying into the Minutemen. It was something; we had a crew of 12 Regulars running active patrols around Sanctuary and the trading post and market at Starlight Drive-In which was only possible because 4 of those patrol men had cleared the Mole-rats living there once we had established Sanctuary as the main hub of the Minutemen north of Cambridge and Boston-proper, not to mention mounting support in the Fens. Hell we even had some a few Minutemen vets sent our way from somebody called Hancock over in Scollay Square. Though I hear it’s called Goodneighbor now, when I listen to the boys talk about it.

I must have been daydreaming at that point, because Preston’s hand clapping on my shoulder brought me back to.

“General, do think we’re done for today?”

“I’m not sure, Preston,” I started. Noticing Vern had made his way back to the radio tower for a minute, I called at him,

“Perkins, what’s going on?”

“Not sure, sir, radio just went haywire there for a second” Preston helped me up and I started heading over to the tower myself to see what was going on when one of the guards posted on the southwest bastion hollered at us three.

“General, Colonel Garvey, you’re going to want to see this!” I must have caught a second wind because I bolted straight up the rubble of the western wall to join the soldier who immediately just pointed out over at the parking lot and handed me his binoculars.

I saw what looked like a shimmer of bright blue for a second and did a double take when I saw what emerged. Something that looked like a tan-ish grey skinned, plastic man in what appeared to be combat armor of some kind. I had never seen anything quite like it before, and boy was I curious.

“Can you tell me what I’m looking at, soldier?” after Preston got a look he said something that reminded me of a conversation I had with a certain reporter.

“I haven’t seen one so heavily armored before, but the color gives it right away. General, that’s an Institute synth. That caravan was damn lucky they left a couple hours ago.”

I had heard a great deal about the Institute from Miss Piper, and if stories were to be believed, the Institute was the shadow over the Commonwealth that everyone feared. And with good reason, I had taken the opportunity to have someone scout out University Point and they reported crops still in the field, shops relatively untouched, but no people, no bodies, and no trace other than their material goods that people had even been there. He had found an old holotape at one of the terminals on the fringe of the ghost town and gave it to me upon his return. I hadn’t looked at it just yet but I figured -after seeing a genuine Institute construct- that it was as good a time as any to give the files a once over.

Once we were sure the lone synth wasn’t gunning for us, I jogged down the rubble slope back to my backpack sitting over by one of our building workbenches on the northeastern wall. It took a minute of digging to find the tape labeled U.Point. but when I did and popped it in I was enthralled.

It was a personal diary, it looked to have went back up to two years or so before I left the vault, roughly 2285. I sifted through the years worth of writing and a saw, close to the end a someone mention a mercenary, and that piqued my curiosity at first. I was intrigued on who this man the journal referenced was at first, then I realized I recognized the description, the newest face to haunt my sleep. A nearly bald man with a noticeable scar across the left side of his face wearing a leather jacket with short cut sleeves and an improvised piece of shoulder armor. Supposedly he came around for a few days asking about any significant technology that the town knew about. And by the looks of the writing he came back with friends, the well armed kind. That child thieving bastard sold those bastards to the Institute. I unclipped my Pip-Boy and threw it into my backpack.

I must have been perusing the journal longer than I thought I had, because the sun was now setting in between the skyscrapers of downtown. I didn’t want to go to bed thinking about the massacre. I still had plenty of those dreams from the 2060s and the war with China and needed something to distract myself, so I relieved our night watchman once I had grabbed a bite to eat after the night fell. After a quick route across the walls and some of the scaffolding, I sat down next to the broken down artillery-piece on the northwest bastion. I looked over at the parking lot where the synth had shown up. Seeing a light flicker around a couple times, I wondered if I could make an easy target of the metal man, but after a closer look it was some dogs that got ahold of the synth and his gun. I couldn’t vent my rage against my son’s kidnapper and I wasn’t about to do something rash like rushing out into a pack of feral dogs.

I just wanted to seethe out every little bit of anger I had pent up at that bastard and get on with putting a bullet in his brain, after he led me to my son.

But for all the rage in the world, it wouldn’t bring Nora back. If I just had her with me, I’d not be this damned mess. Together we would have found Junior. With her keeping me focused I wouldn’t get caught by every bleeding heart farmer who was dealing with raider issues or the honest to God threats of this post-apocalyptic, radioactive, barely recovering wasteland. Though thinking it through, it was better that she didn’t see this, see me like this.

“Hey, General, I noticed you were still up” Preston seemingly popped out of nowhere with a couple beers

“Holy shit, Preston, don’t sneak up on me like that.” it was the second time he had caught me unawares that day, Im damn glad we hadn’t gone out to find some raiders or patrol the Fens and Hangman’s Alley. As off as I was then I was no good even for watch.

“You looked a little distracted after you read that holotape from U. Point. There something you gotta say?” I’d say this about Preston, he’s a good squad commander, and he’s got a way of telling when a man needs a beer.

#fallout 4 #sole survivor #preston garvey #noncompanions #the castle #minutemen

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avanneman · 6 years

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Jurassic Park V—Not Bad!

youtube

I’ve already lurched and lumbered my way through the first four Jurassic Parks, so there’s no reason to keep quiet about No. 5, aka Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom—which I would rate as actually the third best in the franchise.

My rankings are quite idiosyncratic, because I give first place to the generally unloved Jurassic Park III, which can be described with some accuracy as “The Awful Truth Meets Dinosaurs”, but since I love The Awful Truth and I love dinosaurs, where’s the problem?1 Jurassic Park III was a slimmed down version of the first two films, less weighted down with stars and “meta” speculation about God and man and dinosaurs and that’s why it worked for me.

I’d rank the original Jurassic Park second to JP III. The CGI and the life-size dinosaur animatronic models of JP I came as a revelation, and, despite too much talk, and too many ideas, Spielberg’s original dino versus human setpieces were undeniably brilliant. JP II I found to be a real clunker, simply rehashing everything that had been done better the first time around. JPIV was marginally better, but only marginally.2

JP V shines for having the guts to realize that it’s time to take the dinos off Isla Nublar. That island bit has been done to death, amirite? The film spends about 45 minutes getting the leads—Chris Pratt as dino-“handler” Owen Grady and Brice Dallas Howard as reformed corporate tight-ass turned nature lover Claire Dearing—back on the island to save the dinos because the whole place is going to blow, thanks to a monster volcano that sort of materialized out of nowhere. Despite a kick-ass fight between a horned dinosaur (not a Triceratops, which is the only one I can recognize) and a carnivore (maybe an Allosaur), a lot of the action here, particularly the almost ever-present lava flows, comes uncomfortably close to B-movie production levels. Lava is treated like some sort of obnoxious goo that’s really gross if it gets on you. Real lava is at least 1000° F, and if it’s flowing near you you’re not toast, you’re ashes.3

As you might expect from these films—JP III excepted, which is one reason why I like it so much—we discover that there are evil, corporate interests at work behind the scenes, who want the dinos for evil, corporate things, and our heroes, who’ve been joined by a couple of other virtuous dino-lovers, have been outhustled, outwitted, and outgunned, and the dinos are not being shipped off to another dino Eden but rather to an enormous chateau that appears to be located somewhere in the Rockies—the gatekeeper’s cottage at the entrance of Steven Spielberg’s Colorado getaway, perhaps. As the camera follows the train of trailer trucks bearing the dinos away to this (no doubt evil) mountain lair, a hilarious example of overwrought product placement occurs: as the last truck enters the parking lot, the camera veers to the left to give a quick glimpse of the polished fanny of a Rolls-Royce! A Rolls! Wow, these people are rich!

Yeah, I forgot to tell you the exact setup of this evil mountain lair. It’s got this old dying rich guy who I guess owns the place, and this evil other guy, and a dried-up, mysterious governess type, and this poor little rich girl chick, sort of like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None with dinosaurs! Sounds strange, I know, but it pretty much works. Naturally, a bunch of rich evil capitalist types show up for a dino auction, and a satisfying number of them get eaten, though I personally would have liked to see a few more end up as dino chow, and there’s also a big battle between a “good” velociraptor—she shows “compassion”, Owen tells us4—and a bad, souped up dinosaur, sort of a velociraptor on evil steroids. Yeah, it is “unusual” to see all this taking place amidst black walnut wainscoting and carved ceilings, but, as I’ve said before, Americans like to look at wood and, as I’ve also said before, it works. As a final kicker, we learn that the little girl isn’t literally anyone’s daughter—she’s the clone of her dead mother, which would make her her mom’s twin. Being a clone herself, she decides that other clones have the right to live as well, and she releases the dinosaurs, though how they’re going to live in Colorado—well, I guess they’ll have to work that out for themselves.

I get the feeling that there was more backstory for the clone girl (Isabella Sermon as “Maisie Lockwood”5) that got cut out, reasonably enough, to make room for the dinos. There’s also a (highly dispensable) prologue and postlogue of sorts in the form of “congressional testimony” delivered by entirely too full of himself for my tastes Jeff Goldblum, returning as chaotologist Ian Malcolm6 to ruminate aimlessly on “man” (or I guess “humans”) and “Nature”, invariably making us look like the bad guys! Thanks for nothing, Jeff!

Afterwords Is there room for a Jurassic Park VI? Why not? It’s not like Hollywood is going to run out of evil capitalists any time soon!

Because there’s nothing like wrasslin’ and hasslin’ a Spinosaurus Aegyptiacus to bring a divorced couple (William H. Macy and Téa Leoni) back together. ↩︎

If you’re interested, I go into all this in excruciating detail in the piece linked in my first paragraph. ↩︎

At one point, Owen appears to get some lava on his shoe, as though it were hot tar. ↩︎

Sorry, but the notion that a reptile can show compassion is almost as hazardous to your health as the notion that getting lava on your shoe is merely an inconvenience. ↩︎

A rich girl named “Maisie”? Perhaps a clever screenwriter was thinking of Henry James’ classic exercise in POV, “What Maisie Knew”. ↩︎

Absolutely nothing Dr. Malcolm ever says has the least bit to do with chaos “theory”. ↩︎

#Jurassic Parks #Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom #Steven spielberg #movies

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helatherwhite · 7 years

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Eating Your Placenta. Why? How? Ummm–Seriously?!?!

My friend Genevieve Howland, aka Mama Natural, is sharing 2 amazing things with you all today. First is the idea of Eating Placenta.

Ummmm—really? Well, yes. Really.

Eating your Placenta is something that was not on my radar when I had my babies, but since then I have read about it and the potential benefits of it numerous times. And I've wondered–if I were going to have another baby….

Would I? Could I?

Whether you're thinking this is “way out there” and “totally disgusting”, I encourage you to have an open mind and read what Genevieve has to say about it. It's pretty fascinating

Genevieve has also just come out with this amazing book that is poised to change the face of pregnancy and childbirth–for the better. The Mama Natural Week-By-Week Guide to Pregnancy & Childbirth.

She was kind enough to share an excerpt from the book below–regarding Eating Placenta. What do you think??

“Please tell me you're joking”, my husband said, staring at me in disbelief.

“We’re the only mammals who don’t eat it . . .” I replied in the most convincing tone I could muster.

“Right,” he sighed. “But we’re also the only mammals who drive cars and leave tips at restaurants.”

Oh, my poor husband. Papa Natural had come so far after the birth of our son. From wearing our newborn in a baby carrier to scraping poop off cloth diapers, he’d embraced just about every crunchy practice I’d brought into our home.

But now I was pregnant with Baby #2 and eating my placenta, I guess, was just too much for him.

I couldn’t blame him.

To be honest, the idea of eating my placenta was a little too much for me during my first pregnancy.

I mean, sure, I’d heard that placentophagy was supposedly an ancient practice—dried human placenta has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries. And humans really are some of the only mammals that don’t consume the placenta immediately after birth. (Granted, some experts believe it’s only eaten to hide traces of birth from predators in the wild—admittedly not something I’d have to worry about at the birth center.)

I also knew that popping “placenta pills” had become all the rage in pop culture. Stars, including January Jones and Kim Kardashian, raved about surges of energy and increased breast milk production, sparking a major, worldwide trend. All of a sudden, placenta recipes were flooding the internet. New mamas could even flip through one of several placenta-themed cookbooks!

But is the placenta really a postpartum miracle drug, or is eating it just . . . gross?

This time around, I had to find out.

Why would any woman eat her placenta?

During pregnancy, baby will pull all the nutrients he needs from his mother—whether she has enough to spare or not. This is, of course, why adequate nutrition is so vitally important for mamas-to-be (growing a baby is really tough work).

Unfortunately, our depleted soils yield produce that’s less healthy than it once was. Feedlot cattle, chickens, turkeys, and pigs, meanwhile, are less nutrient-dense than pasture-raised animals. Add in the prevalence of processed, fried, and refined foods, and it’s no wonder many women have some level of nutritional deficiency even before they get pregnant. And once they do give birth, the demands on their bodies are nowhere near over. (Breastfeeding alone, for example, burns up to 500 calories a day!)

Even the World Health Organization recommends spacing pregnancies between two and five years apart, so that mama has adequate time to rebuild her energy stores.

For these reasons and more, some people swear by human placentophagy.

Benefits of Eating Placenta

It’s thought that eating the placenta after childbirth can provide:

A Hormonal Boost

During pregnancy your body is chock-a-block full of surging hormones, but almost immediately after birth, those hormones plummet.

Progesterone and estrogen, in particular, remain low until the return of your menstrual period—and that could take months or even years, as some women don’t begin menstruating again until they’ve stopped breastfeeding.

These hormonal highs and lows are the reason some new mamas feel tired, sluggish, weepy, emotional, or just plain bummed out after birth; they also may be a contributing factor in the eventual onset of postpartum depression.

The placenta, however, is full of hormones, including estrogen and progesterone (which are produced by the placenta), as well as oxytocin (which crosses the placenta during labor). It’s thought that ingesting the organ, then, may alleviate some of that hormonal whiplash.

The placenta also contains prolactin, the hormone that triggers breast milk production, which is likely why mamas who eat it often experience a surge of milk and faster letdown.

A Nutrient Boost

In addition to hormones, the placenta contains vitamins and minerals, including iron and vitamin B6 and vitamin B12, as well as amino acids and essential fats, which makes perfect sense when you think about it, since one of the main functions of the placenta is to deliver nutrients to the baby while in utero.

It’s thought that ingesting the placenta, therefore, might replenish some of the nutrients that were depleted during pregnancy and childbirth.

A Healing Boost

Preserving or “banking” the blood from a newborn’s umbilical cord has become a routine part of childbirth for a growing number of parents. But cord blood isn’t the only source of life-giving stem cells.

The placenta is loaded with these biological building blocks, too, which is one reason why the practice of placentophagy may speed up healing of the uterus after childbirth, as well as decrease postpartum bleeding.

What other mamas say about eating their placentas…

Here are some comments by real mamas who's eaten their placentas–and lived to tell about it :).

Kimberly: I’ve had my placenta encapsulated after each of three pregnancies, and I would definitely recommend it. The first time around it really seemed to help with mood swings and depression. As time went on, however, I did have to stop taking the pills because the hormones made me a bit dizzy.

Felicity: I had my placenta encapsulated after the birth of my first (and only) baby. True, I have nothing to compare it to, but my energy, mood, milk supply, and recovery were all amazing—I attribute lots of that to taking my placenta.

Clair: I had to cut back on the number of pills I was taking because I started to become engorged, but once I made the adjustment, I felt great! Leslie: I was in the hospital for five days postpartum because my son was in the NICU, so I didn’t get my pills until day 5—and honestly, I didn’t notice much of a difference. However, I do take the pills from time to time when I need a boost of energy or know that my day is going to be stressful, and they really help!

Thoughts from a placenta encapsulator

My friend Maura Winkler is a registered nurse and placenta encapsulator; here's what she has to say:

True, there’s very little research to confirm the supposed benefits (or, conversely, the potential risks) of placentophagy, but one small report published in Ecology of Food and Nutrition in 2013 has always stood out: in a survey of 189 women who consumed their placentas after birth, 95 percent rated their experience as either “positive” or “very positive,” and a whopping 98 percent intended to repeat the experience after subsequent births. I have to say, I’m not that surprised. The placenta is beautifully complex even though it’s only a temporary organ, meant to sustain just a single pregnancy.

The precision and care your body takes to grow the placenta is just as awe-inspiring as the work that goes into growing a baby. And, sure, I’m a little biased. The placenta, which is said to resemble a “tree of life,” is my favorite organ, and I’m a professional encapsulator.

But I can tell you that not one of my clients has ever regretted having ingested her placenta.

Are the benefits of eating your placenta real or just placebo effect?

It wasn’t until I’d heard from so many other natural mamas—women who had struggled with postpartum depression or low milk supply or low energy or insomnia, who raved about the miracles of placentophagy—that I opened my mind (and eventually my stomach) to the idea.

Could such claims really be true?

Unfortunately, it’s hard to know for sure, because the evidence we have to support such claims is almost entirely anecdotal. There is virtually no scientific or clinical evidence that women who consume the placenta will reap a hormonal or nutritional benefit, and the practice has plenty of detractors.

What are the “cons” of eating your placenta?

Consuming toxins?

Since the placenta is a filtration organ, for example, responsible for removing waste and preventing toxins from reaching baby while in utero, it’s possible that it may retain toxins, just as it retains vitamins, minerals, and nutrients. (Though you could argue the opposite, too, since it’s the placenta’s job to send waste to the kidneys and bowel for removal.)

Lack of regulation

Certainly, there’s no regulation of placentophagy by the FDA. Some doctors and other experts have raised concerns about possible contamination by bacteria or viruses if the placenta is not handled and stored properly (as would be necessary with any raw protein).

But the flip side of that coin?

There’s no evidence that consuming the placenta is bad for you, either.

Weird reactions

Not every mom reacts positively to eating her placenta. In fact, my own experience with my encapsulated placenta wasn't 100% great, so I stopped taking the pills after a few days. I do know plenty of women who swear by eating their placentas though.

“Okay, I want to give placentophagy a try. What’s my first step?”

Whether you’re planning to whip up some placenta smoothies or ingest the placenta in capsule form, you'll want to start by:

Researching Your Hospital or Birth Center’s Placenta Policy

As placentophagy becomes increasingly popular, more and more hospitals across the country have begun to facilitate safe transport of the organ. Laws have been passed allowing mamas to take possession of their placentas after birth (albeit in only three states). Some alternative birth centers may even package up your placenta for you.

But don’t just show up on D-Day and expect that there will be no issues.

Your hospital may out- right refuse to let you take it, may require you to sign a liability waiver first, or may only allow you to take the organ after having secured a court order.

The point is, you need to know before you go.

Find an Encapsulator

Make sure you’re hiring a professional who’s received formal training. (Believe it or not, there are some rogue encapsulators out there who learned the technique via YouTube.)

An easy way to separate the pros from the amateurs? Ask your prospective encapsulator about her experience working with blood-borne pathogens, and see if she’ll give you a quick rundown of the process she uses to clean her equipment.

Bonus points if the service she provides comes with several options:

Is she proficient in both raw and traditional preparations?

Does she offer add-ons, such as tinctures?

Will she prepare the placenta in your home?

More and more birth doulas are becoming trained in placenta encapsulation through a slew of national agencies. Ask your doula if she’s received training, or visit PlacentaBenefits.info or ProDoula.com to find a specialist near you.

Here's a video and post on placenta encapsulation from start to finish where you can see the process.

Add “Save My Placenta” to Your Birth Plan

Hospitals and birth centers dispose of the placenta as they would any other bio-hazardous medical waste, so you’ll want to make sure everyone involved knows not to toss yours in the trash!

Need a good, clear plan that nurses will actually read? Grab a customizable copy of our free visual birth plan!

Arrange for Safe Storage

The placenta can breed bacteria if it’s not handled properly.

As quickly as possible after birth, it should be sealed in an airtight plastic bag, placed inside a food-grade plastic storage container, and refrigerated or put on ice (which means you might need to bring a mini cooler with you to the hospital or birth center).

The placenta should be transferred to the encapsulator within two to three days (you can wait a bit longer if it’s been frozen).

Want to help change the birth culture in our country?

I've just published the first week-by-week pregnancy guide from a natural perspective. Featuring insights from a certified nurse midwife (who happened to deliver both of my children), as well as a registered nurse and doula, the book is packed with helpful info on:

Natural remedies for common pregnancy symptoms

When to get an ultrasound (and when not to)

Sex during pregnancy

The truth about epidurals

How to naturalize a surgical birth

Natural pain relief during labor

What to do during every stage of labor

How to recover naturally

And so much more

This book is evidence-based, empowering and entertaining. ? (No boring text books over here!) If pregnancy is in your future, or if you know anyone who's pregnant, please consider picking up a copy.

Even if you aren't pregnant…

Consider purchasing the book and…

Donating to your local library or church

Giving to your OB-GYN at your next wellness visit

Passing along at a La Leche meeting or baby carrying group

Sharing with a pre-med student

Keeping in your home library to loan out as needed

Request at your local public or college library

Together, we can help change the face of birth in the U.S.

Thank you for your support!

Did you eat your placenta? (if not — would you?) How was your experience? Share with us in the comments below!

Genevieve has been rocking the natural world with her free pregnancy week-by-week series from a natural perspective. Plus she's got an awesome online birth class. With humor and hard work, Genevieve is helping change the culture around pregnancy and birth in our country.Now Genevieve is taking her mission to the next level with a beautiful new book that is out this week, The Mama Natural Week-By-Week Guide to Pregnancy & Childbirth.

The post Eating Your Placenta. Why? How? Ummm–Seriously?!?! appeared first on Whole New Mom.

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greatdrams · 7 years

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Terroir: does it matter to whisky?

There’s a park near where I grew up that boasts a small hill.

In summer (or what passes as summer in the North West) you’ll notice that at the bottom of the hill, where there’s a small dip before the ground levels up, the grass grows longer and lusher than anywhere else. On the slopes of the hill there’s not much length at all; more often than not it dries and browns. Everywhere else it’s somewhere in between.

I used to look at that hill a fair bit in my urchin years. We’d roll eggs down it at Easter, and ourselves down it when the weather was passable. I used to wonder what caused the differences in the grass, assuming that it wasn’t merely the turbulence of revolving seven-year-olds. It wasn’t until I began my wine education a few years back that I learned that the answer was terroir.

I try not to get into arguments on twitter; it’s a useless medium for them, and they go absolutely nowhere. Come to that I try not to get into arguments generally, unless you happen to be my little sister. But last week I spotted a fledgling row brewing, and for some reason or other decided to wade in. The row concerned whether terroir could affect the way whisky tastes. My position – and believe me when I say that I’ve given this hours upon hours of thought – is that it can.

Terroir, for some context, is a French term. As I’ve previously attested, you can tell this because it works in italics. (To pull off italics you have to be French, Ancient Roman or Mark from Malt Review. No one else has the required je ne sais quoi.)

In basic terms it refers to ‘the total natural environment of any [agricultural] site.’ Or so claimeth the Oxford Companion to Wine. And the Oxford Companion to Wine should know, because wine basically owns the copyright to terroir. Terroir is what distinguishes a great wine from a good one. It’s the reason that grapes grown in the middle of a slope might make a wine selling for hundreds of pounds more than the product of the grapes from lower down that same slope...and justify that with quality. Don’t believe me? Go to Burgundy.

Terroir can manifest itself through soil, sun, available water or aspect of site. Anything, in fact, which affects the growing and ripening of the vine. And, in being turned into wine, each aspect of that terroir should be driving flavour – to the point that many French winemakers consider the variety of the grape to be distinctly secondary. You’re tasting Chambertin, for example, rather than Pinot Noir. Lafite, rather than a Cabernet/Merlot blend.

So the question remains: does this translate across to whisk(e)y? Well, let’s be traditional and open with the case for the prosecution.

I do have some sympathy with the viewpoint of the chap I was arguing against on twitter. From what I could glean, he is a fellow member of the wine trade. And I too get hugely frustrated when I see people discussing terroir without an understanding of what it really means, and without having sampled ‘the proof of the pudding’ in the form of a few well-chosen flights of properly terroir-driven vino.

He also has my complete agreement in that terroir is demonstrably more important to wine than it is, or could ever be, to whisk(e)y. We can argue back and forth about the exact degree to which a whisk(e)y’s flavour is driven by oak, but the bottom line is that the cask has a more than considerable impact. Which speaks rather louder than the barley one might have used in the creation of the spirit. Not to mention peat and stills.

Wine, by contrast, should be the purest possible expression of the fruit picked from the vineyard. Yes, some wine is also aged in casks, but seldom for more than a couple of years unless you’re making a fortified wine; generally for considerably less. When Australian Chardonnays became excessively oak-driven in the ‘80s they fell out of fashion. Currently the massive, over-oaked, high alcohol reds are giving way to lighter, fresher wines, more expressive of their fruit. Because the fruit is always key. And through the fruit, we taste the terroir.

So, from that point of view, whisk(e)y shouldn’t be able to express terroir to the same extent – or certainly on the same terms as wine. What’s more, most distilleries currently operating are predominantly fussed about yield of spirit when it comes to selecting their barley. They buy their malt in bulk from big companies, and provenance, as far as they’re concerned, can go hang. It’s all about the bottom line. And if you don’t know where your barley comes from then terroir goes to hell.

Which means that the counsel for the prosecution is perfectly correct in saying that the vast majority of whisk(e)y doesn’t reflect terroir. But let’s give the defence a chance now, because ‘doesn’t’ is rather different to ‘can’t’, and I rather think that a degree of close-mindedness has slightly blinkered terroir’s detractors.

If something grows in the ground, it has terroir. Whether it be grapes, barley or grass in a park. And if you grow the same thing in two different places then they will taste different, according to conditions. Similar in many respects, I grant you, but never identical. And these differences will translate into wash and in spirit. At present there are only a handful of places in the world where different barleys run out of the same stills. Bruichladdich is one. Springbank is another. Kilchoman is a third. But the fourth, and most significant, is Waterford.

Waterford is the brainchild of Mark Reynier, who was responsible for the rebirth of Bruichladdich and their subsequent belief in terroir. At Waterford he has taken his belief – his certainty – further. Barley from forty-six farms around Ireland is stored in Waterford’s ‘Cathedral’, and separately mashed, fermented and distilled into new make. And each one tastes different. Not just to those with trained palates, but to anyone given two samples to distinguish between. It’s all barley. The difference is terroir.

All of this is corroborated by Pat Hayes; a barley researcher at Oregon State University. Through years of study he has grown and analysed over 10,000 varieties of barley (I know – I couldn’t believe there were that many either), and has conclusively proven that not only does variety influence flavour, but that the same variety tastes markedly different when planted in different sites.

‘Fine’ say detractors. ‘There are different flavours in the barley. But whisk(e)y shouldn’t taste like barley; cask and oxidation deal with all that. So who cares? What’s more, the spirit is governed by fermentation times and by still shape and cut points. I’m not tasting barley, I’m tasting Highland Park or Ardbeg or Glenkinchie.’

To that, I would suggest the detractors consider bourbon. The bourbon nerd – and I’m one – obsesses about mashbills. We talk about the percentage of rye or wheat involved, and what it brings to flavour. When we taste a bourbon blind we look for the spicy kick that might indicate a rye, or the more delicate flavours that point towards wheat. And let’s not forget the sweeter, almost ‘fat’ notes of corn whisk(e)y. The point is that we’re looking for the flavours brought by the cereal. Sure, there’ll be differences depending on the stills and the ferment. But let’s not for a moment think that the cereal doesn’t matter. That it doesn’t contribute flavour. That it’s just a canvas for washback, still and cask. If that were true then what would it matter whether we drank single malt or blended scotch? Come to that, what would it matter whether we drank whisk(e)y or brandy? Or even rum, perish the thought.

The flavour of whisk(e)y will never be as dominated by terroir as that of wine. It can’t be. Too many other factors are at play. But to say that it doesn’t matter – that it doesn’t make any difference at all – is absurd. Like saying that the quality of beef doesn’t make a difference to the flavour of a Bolognese. Everything is the product of what goes into it – however significant the impact of each component might be.

The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, of course. And Bruichladdich Islay Barley tastes different to Bruichladdich Scottish Barley. It remains to be seen how different each Waterford plot will taste; since the plan ultimately is to vat them, Grand Vin style, you’ll probably have to visit to find out.

The problem with this question is that most distilleries aren’t interested in answering it. That bottom line again. But here’s where exciting start-ups, like ‘Single Estate’ Ballindalloch in Speyside, or Belgrove in Tasmania, with their home-grown rye, can step up. They can tinker; they can play around. They can experiment with different plots and give us the chance to taste the difference for ourselves.

Of course the distilleries who don’t care about terroir still make brilliant whisky. And I agree that casks, stills and fermentation remain the most significant contributors to flavour. But, like Bruichladdich, I have been persuaded that terroir can make a difference. That it can, and should matter. And, like Mark Reynier, I believe that research and understanding will ultimately lead to a more profound result.

I rest my case. Over to the jury.

Cheers!

The post Terroir: does it matter to whisky? appeared first on GreatDrams.

from GreatDrams http://ift.tt/2loicC2 Adam Wells

#whisky #GreatDrams

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lovemychinchilla · 4 years

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How Smelly Are Chinchillas?

If you want a new pet, and you're set on a chinchilla, you must have lots of questions. One of the first when considering any pet is whether it stinks or has a strong scent.

So, chinchillas make a great choice for a new pet. And if your existing pet chinchilla smells bad, don't worry: our guide below will tell you a) why, and b) how to fix it!

Do Chinchillas Smell Bad?

You may already be familiar with how bad other small pets smell. But do chinchillas smell like ferrets or rabbits? They don't: they're nowhere near as stinky!

Do Chinchillas Smell Good?

Some owners think their chinchilla smells sweet. This could be due to your chinchilla's hay, certain kinds of which can smell (and taste!) sweet.

Do Chinchillas Have Bad Breath?

As such, you shouldn't expect your chinchilla's breath to smell like roses. But it's no worse than the breath of any other pet (or smelly relative).

Do Chinchilla Cages Stink?

Why Does My Chinchilla Stink?

This section of the guide addresses why these things can make your chinchilla smell bed; the rest focuses on how to fix the problem.

1) Soiled Bedding (Dirty Chinchilla Cage Smell)

2) Chinchilla Hay Got Wet

Your chinchilla's hay can also make its cage smell. The hay on its own shouldn't smell bad; it's dried grass. It won't go off if it's kept dry, and hay can be kept for years in the right conditions.

3) Fungus & Bacteria in Chinchilla Fur (Dirty Chinchilla Fur Smell)

The downside to such lovely fur is that when it gets damp, it stays damp, unless you manually dry it. This can cause:

Fungal infections. Fungus loves warm and damp conditions, and invisible spores float through your home even if you keep it clean.

Bacteria. Bacteria, like fungus, love damp and warm conditions like a wet chinchilla's fur.

What you won't notice is any kind of greasy, sweaty smell. Chinchillas don't have sweat glands, and dust baths keep fur clean of grease.

4) Do Chinchillas Have Scent Glands?

Many animals have scent glands that they use to mark territory or release warning smells. Chinchillas do, too. These scent glands are found on your chinchilla's bottom.

5) Chinchilla Smelly Poop

Poop will also smell bad if it's left in a cage for a long time. Bacteria in the cage will break it down, which happens even quicker if it gets wet.

6) Your Chinchilla Is Sick

Last but not least, your chinchilla could smell bad because it's sick. Lots of health issues cause bad smells, the most obvious being infection.

In their eyes. Eye infections like pinkeye don't smell unless they get really bad.

In their mouths. Chinchillas can get open, ulcerated wounds from their teeth growing too long/large.

All over their bodies. When chinchillas fight aggressively, they bite and can cause bite wounds.

Gastrointestinal bugs can cause diarrhea, as pointed out above.

7) Are Chinchillas Messy?

Chinchillas can also make a mess of their cage. This won't make the cage sell unless you don't clean it; but if you don't, it will contribute to the overall smell.

How to Stop Chinchilla Cage Smelling

1) Regular Spot Cleaning

'Spot cleaning' is a term that means frequent small cleans as opposed to deep cleans. If you like to cook, you'll be familiar with 'cleaning as you go', which is the same idea.

You can spot clean your chinchilla's cage every day, which will prevent smell from building up. This involves:

Sweeping up poop from the cage floor and platforms

Sweeping up discarded hay from the cage floor

Removing any sections of soiled bedding and replacing them with fresh

Tidying up anything else that needs tidying

2) Occasional Deep Cleaning

Place your chinchilla somewhere safe while you work, e.g. in its play pen

Remove everything from the cage

Discard all bedding/launder the fleece lining of the cage

Wash every cage accessory in soap and water

Wipe down the inside and outside of the cage with bleach and rinse clean

Dry and replace every thing one by one

For a more detailed guide on spot cleaning and deep cleaning, see our other guide.

How to Stop Chinchilla Fur Smelling

Your chinchilla will do all it can to keep its own fur clean. But sometimes factors outside of its control will make its fur stink, such as:

Sitting or standing in its own urine

Sitting or standing in wet poop

Fungal or bacterial infections

Dirty clumps of fur

A build-up of oil

All of these problems can be corrected with the care guidelines below.

1) Do Dust Baths Stop Chinchillas Smelling Bad?

Your chinchilla should be getting dust baths twice a week. If you aren't giving it any, you need to start immediately.

The process itself is easy:

Place a large bowl or tub full of dust somewhere your chinchilla can access

Let your chinchilla roll around in it for ten minutes

Remove the bowl

2) Do You Need to Groom a Chinchilla?

This won't do much to fix the smell in your chinchilla's fur. But it will stop the fur forming knots and getting matted as easily if your chinchilla has to live in unsuitable conditions.

3) Last Resort: Chinchilla Water Bath

Fill a tub or large bowl with warm-ish water. Too hot or too cold can hurt your pet. It shouldn't be warmer than 70 degrees Fahrenheit, or 21 degrees Centigrade.

Gently rub soapy water into your chinchilla's fur. Use Dawn dish soap or a gentle soap made for babies.

Rinse your chinchilla with clean water and finish the bath before the water gets cold.

Towel dry your pet to get rid of most of the water. Then, blow dry your chinchilla's fur on a cool setting. A warm setting will make your chinchilla overheat, and it could pass away.

Once it's almost entirely dry, offer your chinchilla a dust bath.

This should only be done as a last resort, because if you don't pay careful attention, you could overheat or chill your chinchilla.

Below, you can find our chinchilla quiz, new posts for further reading, and a signup for our Chinchilla Newsletter!

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#chinchillas #chinchillacare

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