BobHarris.com - Friday pudublogging: Warning -- Actual Pudus May Be Smaller Than They Appear

Books! Actual books!

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-- The Wall Street Journal

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-- The New York Times Book Review

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-- New York Newsday

"A surprisingly touching memoir"

-- Entertainment Weekly

"Snappy and informative"

-- Associated Press

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-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

"I haven't seen Jeopardy! since I was a kid, and yet I was charmed and amused by Bob Harris's fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful book. Through sheer force of personality, he takes this brainy TV show and makes it funny and easy to relate to."

-- Ira Glass, creator and host, This American Life

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-- Brad Rutter, top money-winner in Jeopardy! history

Books I'm Getting

Who Hates Whom:
Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts,
and Various Things Blowing Up —
A Woefully Incomplete Guide™

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— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

"All three [presidential] candidates should read all three of these [recommended] books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris's "Who Hates Whom“... a lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today."

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Friday pudublogging: Warning -- Actual Pudus May Be Smaller Than They Appear

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Friday, 01 April 2005

Spent much of last weekend at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, which has a magnificent collection of tiny ungulates, including at least three different varieties of Duiker.

We haven't gotten to Duikers yet. Their name means "diver" in Afrikaans, and they're called that because the minute anything spooks them (say, a stray electron suddenly changing orbitals) they immediately panic and dive for cover.

It helps if there's thick foliage nearby, but they'd probably try to hide under other animals if there was nothing else around.

In fact, sometimes when a large group of Duikers are caught in the open by something frightening -- the startling sound of light photons hitting the ground, for example -- they'll all begin diving under one another. Pretty soon there's a vertical column of frightened Duikers neatly stacked like a bunch of brown-eyed trembling plastic lawn chairs.

Eventually, if one of them spots a tree to hide behind in the distance, the whole tower of ungulates begins quietly inching sideways.

Don't let on you can see them, though. They'll all panic and try to start diving again. The one on top of the stack could topple over.

I digress.

This is a photo of sleepy-eyed morning pudus trotting out of their house, shortly after awakening.

And, to give you a sense of scale, this is a photo of the same pudus a moment later, as their keeper (a gentle soul who can describe each of their personalities in detail) emerges behind them.

Yep. That's a normal-sized woman's foot. And those are full-grown deer.

You'll notice the pudus are a good bit closer to the lens. So this picture actually makes them look bigger than they really are.

Did I ever mention that pudus are really, really tiny?