pondering pachyderms

Something must be up with the elephants. My wife and son enjoyed seeing Tonka and the other elephants at the Knoxville Zoo on Saturday. My friend Bean sent me a photo of Batman on an elephant and Byron just sent me a link to see Abby Ham shoveling elephant manure at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. Don't worry Ham fans, she still has her regular job on the Channel 3 News.

Abby's dung-filled day reminded me of something we did one spring at WAVA. When the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus came to town, I had the opportunity to ride an elephant through the streets of D.C. Before they left, the circus would offer free bags of elephant manure to anybody who wanted some for their garden. We got several bags of the stuff and spread them in the parking lot on top of an envelope, which we had sealed in a plastic bag. We invited listeners to come and dig through the manure in search of a buried prize. When one of the listeners finally found it, he ripped open the envelope and saw nothing but the words "April Fool!"

meow mix

Susan Olsen wants your clicks. The actress who played Cindy on "The Brady Bunch" sent out an email tonight to a bunch group of her friends and family members with the news that she is in the cast of "Gimme My Reality Show," which will air on the Fox Reality Channel starting October 11. The show is filming now. As part of the competition, Susan needs as many of us as possible to click on a YouTube video she made. Whoever gets the most clicks over the weekend wins the challenge. It's a faux PSA called "Kittens In Peril" that could be analogous to the hazards faced by former child stars. Or maybe it's just about kittens.

Susan and I worked together at the defunct Comedy World Radio Network (which was way ahead of its time in online audio and video streaming). Previously she had a talk show at KLSX. Susan did a radio interview earlier this month in Colorado that made the news when she got sick. Rather than fabricate a story about having the flu or something, she knew from her past radio experience that it was best to be honest and tell the morning deejays that she was hungover from a few glasses of wine the night before. The altitude and an oncoming migraine didn't help either. The deejays were quick to get a video of the interview to CNN and other outlets, saying it was the weirdest thing that ever happened to them. Funny, it's happened to me plenty of times. Someday I should try to make a list of all the different celebrities who showed up hungover to morning radio interviews that I had booked.

spelunkadunk

Today's high temperature was 90° yet I needed my Alpaca sweater from Peru. Why? Because it was only 58° where I was, 126 feet underground in a cave. My son and I went to Cherokee Caverns for a media preview of their upcoming Cool Down in the Cave on July 12. For a (suggested) $5 donation, you can escape the summer heat that day.

There will be another media preview tomorrow. I suggested to the cavern volunteers that they may want to offer the tour to bloggers as well. It seemed to work for the Knoxville Symphony and for Gentlemen's Top Cuts. If any of you bloggers can make it on Thursday evening, contact Jennifer or Jim through the Cherokee Caverns website for an invitation.

Our tour guide was Jim Whidby, who has done a lot to preserve the cave and to make it accessible to visitors. As our tour began, we learned that this will be the final year for the Haunted Cave, a Halloween tradition that has raised money to pay for cave upkeep. Now I wish I had gone to it in the past. I'll have to make my first (and last) visit to the Haunted Cave this October.

Jim told us about the Eastern Pipistrelle Bats which he re-introduced to the cave. The previous population of bats were smoked out after vandals got in to the cave and burned some tires. Dummies. I was hoping to see some live bats, but they must have all been out feasting on mosquitoes. However, Jim had a dead one in his pocket. Near the end of the tour, my son spotted a live Cave Salamander trying to hide from us.



Jim showed us some ancient cave drawings made by prehistoric cavemen Bill Landry for an April Fool's bit.



The natural rock formations were much more interesting. My favorite was the face in the rock. Their largest stalagmite is known as the Capitol Dome, although I thought it looked more like Jabba the Hut.



There were two bullet holes visible in one of the stalactites, probably evidence of the vandalism that occurred during the 1980s. Fortunately the vandals didn't destroy the connected stalactite and stalagmite (the column on the left), which took thousands of years to meet.

animal instinct

The Body Farm turned up on my radar again last night when I caught a few minutes of "Nature" on our local hi-def PBS station. I plan to record the whole show when it is repeated on Thursday on channel 15-1.

The "Crime Scene Creatures" episode is about animals and plants that offer clues to forensic investigators. Footage shot at the Body Farm included some raccoons filmed with night vision cameras. Apparently when raccoons find a corpse or carcass, they make a hole in the skin, giving flies an inviting target to lay their eggs. Once the eggs hatch, the raccoons return to feast on the maggots.

A couple of you have graciously emailed me the link to a profile of Dr. Bill Bass on truTV.com. The first several chapters serve as a good introduction to beginners. I especially liked chapters 9, 10 and 11 in which the author takes a short forensic anthropology course and visits the Body Farm.

In other forensic "news," I watched "Bones" tonight as promised. It wasn't bad although I got a little distracted by the obvious green-screen shots when the main characters were supposed to be sitting on a bench on the National Mall.

short-term solution

A baby bird celebrated Earth Day by falling to it at our house. It wasn't exactly an Opie and Andy moment, but my son and I decided to return the little tweeter to its nest. He got his lawn mowing gloves and a step ladder while I grabbed the camera.

have a nice drey

Here's an idea for a t-shirt. My family went to the Tidal Basin and all I got was this dead squirrel picture:



On Friday, my wife and kids went to look at the cherry blossoms in Washington D.C. With camera in hand, they searched for the same group of trees where they had posed when the kids were little. One of the trees they found had a large knot hole. The kids noticed that there was a squirrel in the hole and that it was "resting." My son figured out that its rest was permanent. Then my wife decided to take a picture of it for me and for my blog. After all, I've had plenty of experience with dead critters in the pool. Or it's possible that she may have been inspired by a book. She's currently in the middle of the first Jefferson Bass novel, "Carved in Bone."

under the medium top

The Boom A Ring edition of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus is a fun night out although much smaller than the circus I remember from childhood. My parents took my sisters and me to the circus at Madison Square Garden every year. My wife and I took our kids to the circus at the DC Armory and the Long Beach Arena. Instead of a dozen or so elephants, the show visiting Knoxville this week has two. Two is a lot better than none, which partly explains why I hated Cirque du Soleil.



Ringling's one-ring version tours smaller towns while the big shows go to the major markets. Audience reaction prompted them to add a tiger act to the show we got, making it automatically better than the last circus performance I saw. There was no scrimping in the tiger department, with six of the big cats in the ring.



They gave me seats near Doug Mason, who was taking notes and recording video, perhaps for his News Sentinel blog. I was also near WBIR's LaSaundra Brown and Russell Biven. Since today was Ben Senger's last day at Channel 10, I asked Russell if he had to start working the morning shift tomorrow. If so, he was already up too late. Fortunately he gets a few days off before his alarm clock rings unbelievably early on Monday.

horse sense

Eight big celebrities are in town this week. My wife spotted them at Food City and called to suggest I drive over to see them too.



The Budweiser Clydesdales made an appearance at the grocery store and with Erin Donovan on today's "Live At Five" today. They'll be in the Gatlinburg Christmas Parade on Friday evening and in the Maryville/Alcoa Jaycees Christmas Parade on Saturday morning.

The Clydesdales are famous for their feather, which is what you call the white hair on their ankles. Their horseshoes made some marks on the parking lot asphalt that I thought might look like a night sky full of stars to my camera phone. I couldn't leave out the official Clydesdales shovel, which apparently has its own golf cart.

lunacy

Comedian Frank Caliendo was a guest on the Kevin & Bean show on Friday. I downloaded several of their podcasts from last week and have been listening to them in my car. Caliendo's impressions always make me laugh. In the interview he talked about his upcoming TBS show. It features a sketch in which he plays all four of the main characters from "Seinfeld." He set the scene in the future to justify the added weight of the characters. The sketch is available online.

There's more funny stuff on the KROQ podcasts. I enjoyed the analysis of R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet" (especially chapter 13) and the interviews with some "Superbad" cast members.

Best of all was the segment with comedian Joe Rogan. He gave a great description of a National Geographic documentary on superlions that have learned to swim and hunt powerful water buffalo. Just when everything seemed fine, Joe goes crazy defending his suspicion that NASA faked the moon landings. He seemed to doubt that astronauts could have crossed the Van Allen radiation belt. Joe said it looked like the alleged moonwalkers were supported by wires to simulate lower gravity. So basically, he thinks it must be fake because it looked fake.

top of the food chain

Feast with the Beasts is one of my favorite annual events. Attendees sampled food from some of the area's best restaurants while strolling through the Knoxville Zoo this past Saturday night. The weather was warm but not unbearably hot like two years ago. And it didn't rain like last year.

I especially liked the shrimp grits from the Green Hills Grille. I can't remember which restaurant served fried alligator meat. I felt a little guilty about tasting it mere minutes after viewing the living rare white alligator in his tank. I didn't try everything but almost everything I did try was really good. The only food I should have skipped was something they called a "boneless hot wing" from Applebee's. It was just a chicken nugget.

The darker it got, the easier it was to forget you're at a zoo. I could barely see the silhouette of an African elephant by the time we got to that end of the zoo. I wondered if the elephant was bothered by the noise and the all the cigarette smoke. I wish smoking was prohibited at the zoo. Heck, I wish smoking was prohibited in all public places. My wife and I knew it was time to leave at the point in the evening when it seemed to change from an eating event to a drinking event. The food booths had started to run out of samples. I heard one guy tell his buddy that he hadn't gotten his $60 worth yet. The friend advised him to "keep drinking."

that's what chlorine is for

Part of owning a backyard pool is sometimes finding a dead animal in the water. Two summers ago I saved a box turtle that had fallen in. This year I haven't been as lucky. At the beginning of the swim season, five (dramatic) chipmunks ended it all in my pool. I suspect that they were in search of a drink during the current Tennessee drought. Three of the chipmunks were floaters. The other two I had to retrieve from the bottom using a net on a long pole. A couple of listeners have sent emails suggesting that I purchase a product to help the critters climb out of the pool before it's too late. One wrote to tell me about the Frog Saver Lily Pad, the other about the Froglog.

My wife and I had lunch with Dr. Bill Bass and his lovely wife Carol yesterday. We talked about plenty of stuff besides the Body Farm but when the conversation did turn to forensic anthropology, I asked about floaters (no, not Ralph, Charles, Paul and Larry). Maybe the chipmunks were still on my mind (no, not Alvin, Simon and Theodore). Dr. Bass told us about a study on bodies in water done at the Body Farm that was described in the book "Death's Acre." He also told us about a failed effort to test an underwater body cage in the river. More research needs to be done in this area. I didn't get around to asking Dr. Bass about bodies in Lake Tahoe. I remember reading that the cold, deep water keeps them from ever floating to the surface. Before the conversation moved on, he jokingly suggested that I enroll at UT and do a Master's thesis on floaters.

entendre

Seriously, what were you guys thinking?

put on your pith helmets

The Knoxville Zoo is known for its success breeding tortoises. Earlier this year the zoo made news for hatching a rare spider tortoise from Madagascar.

I saw something about tortoises when I was clicking around the WBIR website the other day. It turned out to be another one of those Glitterville features that astounded me last November. Click here for the story and the video. Really. Watch it.

omega-3 fatty acid trip

The Georgia Aquarium is the world's largest and most engaging. It says so right on their website. Normally they start by engaging $10 from your wallet to pay for parking in their structure. Because we had heard that the $24 admission tickets are often sold out, we bought ours through the website the night before we went. When we arrived at 10:00 a.m. yesterday, we were able to find a parking space right across the street for only $5. The price had risen to $7 by the time we returned to our car around 1:30 p.m.



The answers to the frequently asked questions warned us not to bring the obvious things like guns, knives, lighters or fishing poles. I was immediately reminded of an episode of "The Beverly Hillbillies" in which the Clampetts went on a fishing trip to Marineland.

The Georgia Aquarium was a gift to Atlanta from Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot. They repaid his generosity by naming the aquarium's Nemo-like mascot "Deepo." The aquarium is so popular that another major tourist attraction is moving in next door. The current World of Coca-Cola is closing its doors on April 7 to re-open in the new location on May 24.



As a fan of all turtles, the aquarium's loggerhead sea turtle was an immediate favorite of mine. I liked the whale sharks not only because of their impressive size but because they are named after the characters in "The Honeymooners."



I had to look pretty hard to find some tuna in the aquarium. Turns out, they were swimming in mayonnaise. Nearby some Gummi fish were frolicking in blue Jell-O.

animal adventures

Posters around Market Square promote several upcoming shows at the spectacular Tennessee Theatre. The one that caught my eye proudly announced "Jungle Jack Hanna." As you can see, it shows the famous zookeeper with an elephant.



What kind of stage show should Jack Hanna do? Song and dance? Scholarly lecture? Magic tricks? A circus act? Wouldn't it be false advertising if the elephant doesn't take the stage with him? Until today, I had no idea that Jack is originally from Knoxville. Maybe that's why he's coming to town on Monday night.

not to be confused with White Castle or Krystal

Hong Ta Show was arrested last week. He was charged with illegal possession of wildlife after being caught selling baby turtles at a local flea market. A blog reader mentioned the story out of the blue in their comment to last Tuesday's post.

The turtles are the red-eared sliders that many of us had as pets when we were kids. They used to come with an inadequate clear plastic container that you would partially fill with water and then stick a plastic palm tree into the island in the middle.

The TWRA relocated the turtles to a tourist attraction in Sevierville called RainForest Adventures. My family and I went to see the little sliders yesterday. The facility is a lot like the reptile house at the zoo. I didn't even try to count all the species we saw. Some of my favorites were the tortoises, macaws, lemurs and a king cobra that put me in mind of Harry Potter and other parselmouths.



Two vending machines offered containers with shed skins from your choice of either venomous or non-venomous snakes. At 3pm, the keeper put on a presentation with birds, an alligator, a tarantula, a toad, a hedgehog and several other animals. Some we could not touch, like the snapping turtle, but others we could, like the snake we draped over our shoulders. The gift shop offered mostly animal related toys and souvenirs but it was a totally random t-shirt that made me laugh.