Day 31

Lots of love from my 7th and 8th grade classes today.  To tame children seems to be about the same as animals, you just feed them treats.  Some middle school classes have Art twice a week for the first semester, then the second semester is spent at Informatique/computer studies.  It is the end of the semester and so we had a party and watched a movie.   Such a happy thing to do, to eat chips and cookies and drink juice or milk and watch a funny movie, Galaxy Quest, in the middle of the day, at school. 

The 8th grade voted to watch What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, which is a very strange movie.  I had forgotten that there are mild sex scenes in this movie.  It is PG13, so should have been fine, but I was a little shocked by a couple of scenes, worried that they would be too explicit, although the students didn't seem fazed at all.  I suspect that they watch much more than what went on in this movie. 

A murder of crows.

Yesterday evening, driving home through Gloucester, I noticed all these crows making such a racket, coming in to roost in the trees, quietening down, then becoming annoyed at something and taking off vociferously again, wheeling in the darkening sky, tumult of black screeches, loud through the dimming day.

Crows have very small brains, bird-brains, but in fact the frontal cortex is very similar to that of humans, and they are now considered one of the most intelligent animals on earth.  All that cawing and cackling, as unpretty as it is, is actually language.  Scientists believe crows even have regional dialects.  These blue-black birds are telling important information to one another, which is even passed down to new generations.  In Chatham, Ontario, crows were using the area as a rest-stop on their migration path.  As it is mostly a place of farms, and crows are considered enemies of farmland, people began to get rather upset and decided to have a crow-hunt, to try to kill off at least half the population of an estimated 500 000.  They shot one crow, and the word spread so fast that there was only that one crow that died.  The vast population of crows just vanished, winged away, never to return.  Apparently they don't stop there anymore, and fly high enough so that bird-shot cannot reach them.

This is a fascinating seven-minute video about experiments determining the intelligence of crows which use tools. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M52ZVtmPE9g

Crows are used as symbols for all kinds of things, often dark and sinister happenings, probably due to the fact that crows eat carrion, which would suggest something malevolent, especially to people long ago.  However, many nomadic cultures see the crow in a positive light.  Amongst several North American tribes the crow is the personification of the Supreme Being, organising the world and causing the winds to blow with every flap of its wings. 

The Scandinavian god Odin, the father of all the gods, and the ruler of Asgard, sat on a throne with two crows, Hugin and Munin, (Thought and Memory) and two wolves, Geri and Freki.  Odin lacked depth-perception, being one-eyed, and was also forgetful, apparently.  The two crows would fly over the whole world each day and then return to tell all their news to Odin, so that he would know and understand what was happening in the world of man.  The wild hunting wolves were providers of food and nourishment.  Some theorists believe that together, these five formed one whole, a fine amalgamation of nature and man, the ancient alliance.

Illustration from an 18th century Icelandic manuscript.

My third choice for my Desert Island Disc would be another Chopin, because Chopin is somehow part of my heart.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhnRIuGZ_dc  It is Ballad number 1, which is quite long, but beautiful just the same, and a very old recording of Horowitz, and that vast empty stage before the master enters is just such a thrill, even watched on a small laptop screen, and then the wizardry of those fingers, the muscle-memory, and the sound, even on little speakers, is huge, makes your heart beat more frantically, beautifully, in time with the magnificence.