Things I did over Patriots Day weekend

Father Scott

The Padre has been noticeably absent in these parts for a while, and here’s why.

For one thing, when I started writing here I focused mostly on music, and I only get music from a couple of sources, so it makes that writing get kind of old. Do you care if I’m on a Pearl Jam kick right now? Probably not. I don’t have anything to introduce you to that you can’t get from RSS feeds to Stereogum and Paste, and frankly I don’t care about music the way I used to, so whatever.

Another reason is Twitter. Not that I’ve been on it much (though you can find me there if you really want), but in my research about it (for work) and my discussions with Pax about it, I’ve gotten depressed. It’s made me rethink this whole web presence thing. Not to be a Fallen Angel-like nonconformist, but everything online eventually becomes marketing-driven, and it gets kind of depressing. The idea of being in touch with celebrities or public personalities that you really like it cool. I was probably too excited to receive a Tweet from Tas Melas of The Basketball Jones last week, for example. But for the most part it’s companies pushing their products on people and expanding their “web presence.” It’s exhausting to try to keep up with. I don’t mean to sound like that old hag from the NY Times that Pax hates, but there’s not a lot of soul to it, it seems.

Then this morning in our group meeting, someone asked me if I fished this weekend (which I did, and will talk about in a bit), and I was briefly bummed to answer the question, because I had planned on writing about it here, and I felt like that spoiled it. The fact that that bummed me out…bums me out. How ridiculous that telling people about my weekend was disappointing because it in some way spoiled a post I might write on a friend’s blog that’s read by people either of us knows and a few people who stumble upon it while Googling for zombie pictures.

I also always thought that personal blogging is kind of stupid. Do any of you care what I did this weekend? Do I have anything to say about it that is worth reading? Not sure. But I am sure that my attempts at doing Pax-like posts come up short, namely because I’m not as funny as he is (in print anyway; I joke circles around him in person) and I’m also not as good of a writer.

The whole thing is kind of depressing. Maybe this is all a waste of time. But fuck that, I’m going old-school and just writing about myself anyway. I’m gonna express myself all up in this bitch. Besides, how else would Perry Ellis keep up with me?

Anyway, here’s 1000 words about fishing and Fenway.

The sea lamprey is too ugly for Vermont

Pax Arcana

Conservationism is the noble effort to preserve the world’s flora and fauna for future generations to enjoy. At its root, conservationism is the recognition that we are all inextricably linked in a magic symphony of symbiosis.

Except for these things, which should be burned and beaten with heavy sticks:

This handsome fella is the sea lamprey, a fixture in Vermont’s Lake Champlain for thousands of years. Recently fisherman have blamed the lampreys — which are parasites — for weakening or killing off many of the lake’s fish populations:

There isn’t a fisherman on the lake without a story: once-prized catches that are now bizarrely scrawny; fish marred by distinctive bull’s-eye wounds; salmon and trout that are pulled up from the lake with live sea lampreys hanging off them like sinister-looking streamers.

Some scientists say humans are responsible for the growth of the sea lamprey population, thanks to our insatiable appetite for putting fish in the water and then yanking them back out:

Since fisheries began restocking the lake with nonnative strains of trout and salmon in the 1970s, the sea lamprey population, judging from the number of wounds on fish, has skyrocketed.

“We’re feeding the lampreys by restocking their favorite food,” said Ellen Marsden, a biology professor at the University of Vermont who has researched sea lampreys. “And we’re competing for the same fish.”

Anyway, state conservation officials and local business owners disagree about what to do with the sea lampreys. Efforts to curb the population by poisoning may not be working, and some argue that the lake should be left alone to allow its ecosystem to find some sort of equilibrium.

I say fishing would be a lot better if you could catch brownies instead of fish. Brownies are the unsung heroes of the dessert tray. Cake and ice cream get all the glory, but it’s the brownies that get the job done.

A monster’s tale [Boston.com]