Aren't they cute, with their little masks?

    The only people who think raccoons are cute are those who have never had to deal with them. In case you want to give them their due, their scientific name is Procyon lotor. If they have infested your house, you will have other names for them.

    Although they prefer wooded areas near water and natural habitats, they are not averse to living in urban areas and often become pests of the first order. They are omnivorous, which means they eat both plants and animals. Animal foods include crayfish, clams, fish, frogs, snails, insects, turtles, rabbits, muskrats, and the eggs and young of ground-nesting birds, including waterfowl. In urban settings, in addition to feeding on backyard fruits, nuts, and vegetables, they scavenge from garbage cans and compost piles.

    The young are generally born in April or May and the usual ‘family’ is 4 kits. They  stay together as a family unit for the first year, after which they begin to assert their independence.

    Their little black-masked faces are adorable, making you think of kittens. But sweet little critters they are not. When looking for a nesting site, they will easily tear off soffits, roofing, gutters, air conditioning ducts and rooftop ventilators. They are amazingly strong and only the strongest measures will foil their attempts to get into your house, garage or barn. Good climbers, they will shinny up downspouts and jump from nearby trees. They will also make a den under a porch or patio.

    As a child you learned that raccoons were clean animals, because they ‘wash their food’ before they eat it. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They wash what they eat to moisten it. Human ideas of cleanliness have no part in their make-up. If they get into your house, you may not notice at first because they are nocturnal. But eventually you will be shocked to see the damage they have done to insulation, wiring, roofing, wallboard, and ceilings of the rooms below. They use their ‘den’ (your attic) as a latrine, and the odor is simply awful and almost impossible to get rid of. You thought cat smell was bad! Wait till you smell raccoon stink!

    They are also destructive in the garden. Sweet corn is a favorite food. They will climb the stalks, peel down the husks and eat every last kernel on the ear. Usually they harvest the corn when it is ripe,  the night before you intended to do it. They are also fond of melons and other fruits and vegetables.

    Raccoons are known to carry a number of diseases and internal parasites. The raccoon roundworm, an infection spread to people by the accidental ingestion or inhalation of roundworm eggs from raccoon feces, has caused increased concern in recent years. Roundworm infection can cause serious disabilities, and young children are thought to be most susceptible. Raccoons are also carriers of rabies and distemper. Be sure pets are properly vaccinated to mitigate this threat. Occasionally a whole colony of raccoons becomes rabid, and that is serious indeed.

    The best way to handle raccoons is to keep them from entering your spaces in the first place. Chimneys need a firmly-attached, strong roof cap; tree limbs must be cut back at least 5 feet from the roof; shrubs and bushes must be kept thinned out; holes dug under patios must be dealt with immediately. Garbage must be kept in tightly-lidded cans. Bungee cords can be used to keep cans firmly upright. Bird feeders are the candy shop of the critters, and their Subway is the pet food left out for pet cats.

    They are not bothered by moth balls, blood meal or any of the other smelly things that you might think would keep them at bay. Noise makers, flashing lights, shrill sound makers: none of them work. Fences won’t keep them out either, unless you add some DC current. Electricity is one thing that they respect, and strands of electrified wire like those used to contain cattle is often the only solution to keeping them out of a garden.

     Live traps are the best way to catch them, and the best baits are marshmallows, peanut butter or sweet rolls. They like fishy smelling food, too, but so do cats, and you don’t want to catch cats. Once they are caught, they need to be killed. Don’t fall for the old ‘trap and release’ thing. They will return to your house before you do.

    If you have a ‘raccoon problem,’ it’s probably best to call in professional exterminators. Make sure they are not proponents of ‘trap and release’ or you will be wasting your money.

    Does this sound like experience speaking? It is.

Resource: ucdavis.edu - Integrated Pest Management Program

Selfies are New, Right?

    Taking a ‘selfie’ is so popular now that it is hardly interesting any more, and those seeking novelty are reduced to finding really weird things to include in the picture or positions to get themselves into. Even our president has gotten in on the act. And I understand that it has reached almost epidemic proportions in teens and pre-teens.

    Personally, I thought I would never on this green earth take a selfie. But then my favorite dog got in my lap one day (Well, half of her got in my lap. She’s a big dog) and I found myself seeing how this selfie thing worked. It’s only a matter of time before every single person who owns a phone capable of taking pictures will succumb to the desire to see how it works.

I suppose most selfies will be shared by email and the likes of FaceBook, if they’re shared at all. There will be few that will be printed out on paper and even fewer worthy of being printed.

We get to thinking that we’ve invented something new. Selfies are new, aren’t they?

    No, they’re really not. Before the advent of the cell phone and digital photography, people were snapping pictures of themselves. It wasn’t as easy though. They had to set up the camera somehow and set a timer and run around in front of the lens and hope the camera caught them when they looked their best.

    Before cameras, there weren’t any selfies. Right?

    Wrong again.

Artists in bygone times were often hard up to find subjects who would sit still long enough for a portrait. So they propped up a mirror and painted their own images. Slo-mo selfies. Some artists were so good and so famous that we can see their efforts in art museums and in books of art. Before the end of the 15^th century, self portraits were rare, but beginning in about 1490 artists of the caliber of Raphael, Giorgione and Durer used themselves as models. Michelangelo made his first selfie as a cartoon protesting the working conditions in the Sistine Chapel. One of every five of Rembrandt’s paintings is a self-portrait.

    Titian was the first to dare to paint himself as the old man he was. And young people today taking selfies of themselves making ugly faces or doing gross things are hard-pressed to equal Franz Xaver Messerschmidt who created a series of 69 busts of himself showing grimaces including one of him vomiting. Sold to a collector after his death, many of the busts were used in a ‘freak show.’ Messerschmidt is given credit to being a pre-curser of Expressionism.

    Everyone who has taken Art Appreciation has seen van Gogh’s selfies. He painted more than 30 or them.

    So selfies aren’t new, and we can only wonder what will come next in ‘self-expression.’

Source: Book review in the June 30 issue of the Weekly Standard by Henrik Bering of The Self Portrait: a Cultural History by James Hall.

Rubela Is Not Extinct

    Do you recall your history of the settling of America? Remember how you learned that one of the worst things the white man brought to these shores was smallpox and measles? Indian villages were decimated when either disease struck. And measles was just about as bad as smallpox in its effect on native populations.

     Measles was never a disease to discount, even for Europeans who had been exposed to it most of their lives. And it wasn’t any fun for a kid in 1943 either. Because of the warning that it could harm a child’s eyes, the sick room was kept dark, making reading or playing nearly impossible. 

     Measles caused permanent deafness in countless people, and the complications from other diseases made it a very real threat to survival.

     I remember when the measles vaccine was announced. It was almost too good to be true. Each of my four children were vaccinated, and it was a relief to know that they would never get the disease.

    Fast forward to 2014. For several years there have periodically been scary articles published that the measles vaccine causes harm to some children. The  result is that thousands of parents decided to opt out of the vaccination program. So now we have thousands of people who are completely unprotected.

    Measles is a highly contagious respiratory disease caused by a virus named rubella. The symptoms are fever, runny nose, cough and a rash all over the body. Very often a sick child will also get an ear infection or pneumonia, and then they are very sick.

    If measles had been stamped out all over the world, similar to what has happened to polio, there would be no problem. But the rubella virus is alive and well in many of the underdeveloped nations of the world.

    From January 1 to April 20 more than 26,000 suspected and 6,000 confirmed cases of measles have been reported in the Philippines. As of May 23, 22 U.S. travelers, mostly unvaccinated, who returned from the Philippines have become sick with measles.

Since measles is a virus, antibiotics won’t cure the disease, and the ailment has been rare enough in the past 25 years that doctors often don’t recognize it.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now recommends that travelers to the Philippines protect themselves by making sure they are vaccinated against measles, particularly infants 6 - 11 months of age (1 dose of measles vaccine) and children 12 months or older (2 doses of measles vaccine). Likewise, adults should be vaccinated before any foreign travel.

    Isn’t it interesting how people get complacent? No one they know has gotten sick with measles, so it must be safe to leave their children (and often themselves) unprotected. In this case ignorance is definitely NOT bliss.