Category: Culture

A beginner’s guide to keeping pet turtles

Somebody, somewhere (I think it was a guy named Andrew, who I think, based on his email address, was a leader on the schoolies camp I went on – how random that he would be reading my blog ten years later) suggested I blog about having pet turtles more often. I think that’s a good idea. Pet turtles really are the coolest thing since pet rocks. And pet rocks were cool.

They do funny stuff. Like this:

Why you should get a turtle

  • They’re exotic, a little left field, and people (especially kids) love them. They love watching them in the water, and the love watching them run around. Turtles have a funny way of running, with in built comedic value.
  • Turtles are relatively low maintenance (eventually).
  • Turtles are amphibious. Amphibians are awesome. So are reptiles. Turtles are both.

What you should know before you buy a turtle

A hatchling

Our turtles at a very young age

  • There’s really no such thing as a penny turtle. You might remember having one as a child. What you had was a baby turtle that you probably grew out of. Our turtles started off the size of 50c pieces. Now they’re somewhere between the size of a bread plate and a dinner plate. They start small, but grow big.
  • There’s a bit of set up cost involved – you need heat lamps, UV lights, docking platforms, and eventually a big tank. If you get two (which we did) there’s a good chance they’ll fight. And you’ll need extra space. Most of our problems have been caused by turtle fights.
  • Get lots of Betadine. Betadine fixes everything. If your turtle has a wound, a fungal infection, a spot – Betadine will fix it.
  • You can’t tell if young turtles are male or female. It’s a gender lottery.
  • In some (many) Australian states you need a reptile license. You get these from the EPA in Queensland (or whatever they’re now called).
  • Turtles bite. But only really in the water.
  • If in doubt – take them out of the water – they only need to be in the water about an hour a day. They like being in the water. But sometimes their shells need time to dry out. For a long time ours slept in a box, wrapped in towels.
  • The internet is your friend. There are heaps of good turtle resources online. I even bought ours on the internet and had them flown up to Townsville from Brisbane. When I was worried about one of them I turned to the internet for help. One of our turtles, Rosie (short for Roosevelt) was a little more sickly than the other, Frankie (short for Franklin) perhaps because Frankie used to bite her around the neck and take her for a death roll.
  • Get a bucket to feed your turtle in. Turtle food stinks. And feeding them in their tank is a recipe for an incredibly stinky weekly clean up job.

Steps to getting your pet turtle

  1. Check licensing requirements where you live. Organise this first.
  2. Find a breeder – normally there’s enough time between contacting a breeder and getting the turtles to complete the next step.
  3. Set up the tank – you’ll need a dock of some sort (a rocky platform will do), a UV lamp to keep the shells healthy, and a heat lamp to keep their blood warm. A heater in the water is optional. They’ll get on their docks more if the water is cold (this is good for their shells too). You need to set up a tank a week before you put the turtle in it to get the chemical stuff happening properly. Apparently.
  4. Get some food – we use pellets and frozen turtle cubes (fish guts). We’ve tried with some cereal based pellets and they hate them. We also occasionally give them fruit and veggies. Which they seem to like. We put feeder fish in their tank, about 100 at a time. And they gradually disappear. But if you want some fun – kill one and hand feed it to the turtles and watch them go nuts trying to catch more.
  5. Get your turtles. Watch them swim. Enjoy some LOLs.
  6. Check your turtles regularly (especially when they’re young) for little blotchy spots on their shells and skin. These are bad – and should be treated pretty much straight away. Keeping them out of the water a bit will help.
  7. Take them for walks outside (but watch for birds). The sun is good for them.
  8. Wash your hands after touching them when they’re little. Turtles carry salmonella. And trust me. You don’t want that. Buy some of that reptile wash. Trust me. A week of gastro isn’t fun for anybody. They grow out of this after a while – I’m not sure at what point – but I don’t wash my hands anymore.

Some links

March 1, 2011

England is totally gay

UPDATE: Be sure to read this thorough reading of the verdict from Peter Ould.

Wow. It’s a bad time to be a Christian in England.

A couple in England. A Christian couple. Who have fostered a bunch of kids. Have lost the right to do so in the future because the believe homosexuality is wrong and will tell the children they foster that this is the case.

This is like reverse gay-adoption. Now Christians can’t adopt. Essentially. Wow.

From the BBC:

“At the High Court, they asked judges to rule that their faith should not be a bar to them becoming carers, and the law should protect their Christian values.

But Lord Justice Munby and Mr Justice Beatson ruled that laws protecting people from discrimination because of their sexual orientation “should take precedence” over the right not to be discriminated against on religious grounds.

They said that if children were placed with carers who objected to homosexuality and same-sex relationships, “there may well be a conflict with the local authority’s duty to ‘safeguard and promote the welfare’ of looked-after children”.”

Here’s the response from the Derby City Council. Bolding mine.

A spokesman said the authority “valued diversity and promoted equality” and “encouraged and supported children in a non judgmental way, regardless of their sexual orientation or preference”.

He added: “The court confirmed that the local authority is properly entitled to consider a prospective foster carer’s views on sexuality when considering their application to become a foster parent and in fact, failure to do so would potentially leave it in breach of its own guidance as well as the National Minimum Standards.”

This is why I think we need to move the goalposts on the debate surrounding homosexual marriage. Here’s a good post (and discussion) from Michael Jensen on SydAng. Here are some thoughts of mine on the homosexual debate from Venn Theology. Here’s a similar story coming out of the UK from a little while ago. And here is a post where Mark Baddeley and I thrashed out the question. This is really an issue we need to get our heads around for the sake of our freedom to proclaim the gospel and call sin “sin”…

March 1, 2011

Apple Water: What it would look like if Apple produced bottled water

I would buy it. It would make me cooler and I’m part of the Apple Cult. It would be better than Evian. Which is naive spelt backwards. Did I just blow your mind?

From here.

March 1, 2011

We all take the same photos

I’m guilty. Partially. Of taking the same iconic tourism shot as everybody else. Though I also learned this lesson back in my tourism marketing days – so I’m much more interested in taking photos of people, or odd angles, or trying to do something unique, than I am in taking the same picture that features on post cards you can buy for a dollar – though those do have a place if you’re on a study tour (hence their appearance in the albums from the Greece and Turkey trip we went on last year).

When an artist named Corinne Vionnet noticed that everybody in the world seems to take the same photos she put together this exhibition of overlayed photos of some of the wonders of the tourism world.

“Switzerland-based Corinne Vionnet is our guide to the world’s most famous landmarks, monuments millions have visited before. Her art is created not by acrylic, oil, or watercolor, each piece is made by combining hundreds of tourist photos into one. After conducting an online keyword search and sifting through photo sharing sites, this Swiss/French artist carefully layers 200 to 300 photos on top of one another until she gets her desired result.”

Including the Parthenon, on the Acropolis in Athens.

Here’s my shot from that spot.

This composite shot of New York is interesting too, just because it still has the twin towers.

February 28, 2011

Westboro v Anonymous: Round 2

Well. Time for an update. The other day I posted about this web deathmatch. Then it seemed like Anonymous had washed their hands of the initial threat. Anonymous claimed Westboro had set this up as a bit of a honey trap to harvest IP addresses from Anonymous users. I was going to post an update then, but then I thought I might ride it out a little longer. Plus, Westboro’s sites had been down for a little while.

Here’s the initial Anonymous response:

Because I figure if you hassle Anonymous for a while you’re going to wake the giant. Anonymous claim another hacker has taken down the sites. Now, Anonymous have acted – watch this…

This video is pretty funny. Anonymous hack Westboro live. During the interview. They put this message up on Westboro’s site.

Westboro think they’re “Mount Zion” and “prophets”… who can’t be shut up.

I’m sure this isn’t the end of this…

February 26, 2011

Bieber Fever: My wife is funny

My wife is pretty against things posted online that start with “my wife is” and end with a husband spamming the world about how awesome their wife is. We get it. You love your wife and she is awesome. That’s great. It’s why you’re married.

But my wife is going to see Justin Bieber’s 3D movie. She doesn’t know it yet. But that’s her punishment for signing me up to receive Justin Bieber’s ever popular twitter feed in my Google Reader. She’s funny, but this joke may have backfired.

She loves a little bit of Justin. She sings his hit song that goes “Baby, Baby, Baby Oh” when she thinks I’m not listening. She’s been looking forward to the movie for a while. I have a photo to prove it.

My wife is funny. And hot. We’re going to plant a mega church. Justin Bieber will be our “Worship Director”…

February 26, 2011

How to organise your bookshelf

We picked up a couple of new bookshelves on eBay over the holidays. So now we have space. Lots of space. For new books. Because, you know. New books are where it’s at. Although now I have Logos and the Kindle new books will be squarely in the “2nd hand purchases from garage sales” category, or the “huge donation of books to college” category.

Anyway. That’s neither here nor there. This is how to organise a bookshelf:

Via Kottke, I think. I was actually a little disappointed that this was really cool, and not at all a tutorial on how to organise your bookshelf.

February 26, 2011

Yes: Sheen finally kills 2.5 Men, No: The Biggest Loser is still alive

There are very few shows that I actively go out of my way to watch bits of just so that I can hate on them in an educated fashion. Biggest Loser and Two and a Half Men.

One is finally dead. Charlie Sheen’s self-destructing antics were finally enough to kill it. Though I doubt that will stop Channel 9 showing endless reruns in Australia. He has these odd delusions of grandeur too – this quote, from the Time magazine story:

“”Last I checked, Chaim [the Jewish writer of his series he also said some anti-Semitic stuff about], I spent close to the last decade effortlessly and magically converting your tin cans into pure gold. And the gratitude I get is this charlatan chose not to do his job, which is to write…”

That’s one down.

The Biggest Loser used to be good. It’s a reality show with real promise, and real benefit, to its contestants and its viewers. But not anymore. Now it’s a cash cow that Channel 10 is milking, Master Chef style. With scant regard to its viewers. Never has the statement that the audience is not the customer, but the commodity, rung more true than when Channel 10, seeking to wring every last dollar out of its advertisers, featured a challenge last night that gratuitously featured contestants chucking 600mL Mount Franklin water bottles onto a cart that was then pulled across a field. This exercise didn’t look like exercise at all. I am not going to go and buy a tonne of water bottles and pull them around by rope on an oval to get fit. And the contestants shouldn’t have to lose their dignity in order to shift a few more units of water. I hope Mount Franklin paid a mint for that placement.

But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is how contrived and over-produced the show has become. The producers are trying to milk every little bit of emotion from the contestants with these bisarre, clearly set-up, monologues. And these contestants are dumb. You have to be a little on the less than intelligent side to grow to 200kg. Surely. But the Red team in this series can’t string a cohesive sentence together to save themselves. So last night, when one guy won a challenge that would see his morbidly obese brother re-enter the competition after they’d tactically put him up for elimination thinking nobody would vote for the fattest guy, walked into the middle of the room and said “I dedicate this win to my brother” – and it was just an odd bit of over dramatisation with no sense of timing. I challenge you to watch every statement those guys say and find something that isn’t repeated, at the behest of a producer, with some overly dramatic affection, or just bumblingly incoherent. It’s a train wreck.

Then, we had the cancer survivor saying that she had never been happier than she was now – and that she’d never really opened up about her cancer until she had the chance to talk to her personal trainer in front of a national audience. Dumb. Really dumb. It’s like the producers said to themselves. You know what. This contestant mentioned that she had cancer in her application to come on the show, so in weeks 3, 6 and 7 we’re going to ham that up a little and get her to film a vignette about what being a cancer survivor is like. We’ll get people to cry. And then they’ll watch more and we can roll around in piles of monies. New bills only. Crisp. Like lettuce. And we will eat caviar and drink sparkling Mount Franklin while our audience gets dumber.

The worst, and most cynical move, from the producers is, I think, new this season. They now end every episode on a cliffhanger. Mid challenge. So you don’t know who wins unless you tune in the next day. This flagrant disregard to viewers, and their decision to invest time watching the ads that companies have chosen to purchase in the scheduled timeslot, is just nasty. And it’s sure to backfire. They’ve jumped the shark. The only way they could jump the shark more obviously would be to take the fat contestants to Sea World. Ostensibly because of the joke about always taking a fat person swimming. And then to, in a slow montage, get each contestant to waterski in a shark infested pool and take them over a jump to show them how far they’ve come. That they’re no longer fatties, but that they can fly. The saddest part is that these contestants are losing their beef while becoming pieces of meat for the populace to enjoy in snack sized bites.

February 26, 2011

Return to Sender: Space monkeys and transitive verbs

Long term readers will know that I surprisingly regularly receive emails that aren’t meant for me. I’m not talking Nigerian Scams either. I know plenty about them. Previously this has brought us such stories as the Washington University Essay Project and the Make Me A Mexican challenge.

It happened again today.

Good afternoon Mr Campbell

 

Thank you for your telephone call concerning your intereset in obtaining a pre-owned Ford Transit 17 seat minibus.

I have attached our latest list of pre-owned minibuses for your information.

If you require any further help or assistance then please feel free to contact me.

Kind regards

Steve Newby

This email came with an attached catalogue. Now, unless I was talking on the phone to a UK car dealer in my sleep, this wasn’t me.

Here’s my response.

Hi Steve,

Great to hear from you!

Though I don’t recall our telephone call. I’m very interested in obtaining a fleet of Ford Transits. But I’m actually after the 24 seat version because they will convert more easily into the spaceship I would like to build. I think if I weld together 18 Ford Transits with 24 seats each I’ll be able to take 431 monkeys into space with me (I’d be the driver, so that would be the 432 total passengers).

I may need to get a couple of extra transits to carry supplies. I imagine I need lots of bananas to feed that many monkeys, if they turned to cannibalism they’d doubtless get mad monkey disease and the consequences, in space, would be catastrophic. Or perhaps monkeystrophic. I don’t like cats.

So if you could draw me up a quote on 22 x 24 Ford Transits that would be much appreciated. They’d have to be the rocket fuel versions, I plan to pipe together the fuel tanks in sequence to power my trip to space. I don’t mind what year they are – so long as they are all the same.

I’m wondering if actions performed in space in a Ford Transit would be an intransitive verb? or a transitive verb? Do you know anything about the niceties of grammar?

Perhaps if you have the phone number for the guy who gave you this email address you could call him, and tell him to stop giving out the wrong address. Even if this email does get me a step closer to going into space (serendipitous, what?) it’s a little annoying having to take time out of my busy, world conquering, schedule to answer random emails from random people on the other side of the world.

I’m from Australia. Do you know what side of the road people drive on in space? I’d prefer right hand drive transits if you have them.

I really like the clip art “sold” sign graphics. Could you send me the clip art file you used? I’d love to use it on seat allocations so that when the monkeys book their historic spots on my maiden voyage there is no confusion.

If you can find me the vans I’m after, I would like to offer you a spot on my maiden voyage in lieu of payment.

Regards,

Nathan Campbell
(not whoever you thought this was)

Here’s my spaceship design. With two of the pilots.

I’ll send it to him if he replies.

February 26, 2011

Lord of the Rings as a loser’s history

The task of writing history goes to the victors – so we can be sure Lord of the Rings is full of pro-Gandalf bias and pretty much dismiss anything it says about hobbits, wizards or elves. They’re the real bad guys. The invaders and the oppressors of Middle Earth. What you’ve read is just propaganda. So here’s the alternative history – written by a Russian named Kirill Eskov, this guy named ymarkov wrote an English translation (here’s a PDF).

Ring-Wraiths
Image Credit: Flickr
Here’s an excerpt.

“Should our reader be minimally acquainted with analysis of major military campaigns and examine the map of Middle Earth, he would easily ascertain that all actions of both new coalitions (Mordor-Isengard and Gondor-Rohan) were dictated by merciless strategic logic, undergirded by Mordor’s dread of being cut off from its food sources. Through Gandalf’s efforts the center of Middle Earth turned into a highly unstable geopolitical “sandwich” with Mordor and Isengard the bread and Gondor and Rohan the bacon. Most ironic was the fact that the Mordor coalition, which wanted nothing but the preservation of the status quo, was in an ideal position for an offensive war (whereby it could immediately force its opponents to fight on two fronts), but in a highly unfavorable one for a defensive war (when the united opponents could conduct a blitzkrieg, crushing foes one by one).”

Salon.com has a review of the book.

The elves are the bad guys. Gandalf is basically Hitler. Here’s some more from the book.

“To make a long story short: the situation was highly unfavorable, but we have managed, at the cost of all those sacrifices, to shield the Mordorian civilization, and it had made it out of the crib. Another fifty, maybe seventy years, and you would have completed the industrial revolution, and then no one would’ve been able to touch you. From that point on the Elves would’ve dwelled quietly in their Enchanted Forests, not getting in anyone’s way, while the rest of Middle Earth would’ve by and large gotten onto your path. And so, realizing that they were about to lose the contest, the wizards of the White Council decided on a monstrous move: to unleash a war of total destruction against Mordor, to involve the Elves directly, and to pay them with the Mirror.”

“They paid the Elves with the Mirror?!”

“Yes. It was absolute madness; the head of the White Council himself, Saruman, a foresighted and prudent man, fought this plan to the last, and quit the Council when it was adopted after all. The Council is now headed by Gandalf, the architect of the ‘final solution to the Mordorian problem.’”

“Wait, which Saruman is that? The king of Isengard?”

“The same. He formed a temporary alliance with us, since he understood right away what those games with the denizens of the Enchanted Forests mean to Middle Earth. He used to warn the White Council for the longest time: ‘Using the Elves in our struggle against Mordor is akin to burning down the house to get rid of roaches.’ And that’s exactly how it came out. Mordor lies in ruins, and the Mirror is in Lórien, with the Elvish Queen Galadriel; soon the Elves will brush the White Council away like crumbs off the table and rule Middle Earth as they see fit.”

February 22, 2011

Happy Birthday Link

The Zelda franchise is 25 today. Did anybody else play the NES version? It was awesome. It had a gold cartridge. So many hours of my childhood were spent searching for the 8th and 9th labyrinths (I never found them. This was before internet walkthroughs).

GeekDad and the Technologizer have more.

Zelda was the first game to offer a saved game facility, thanks to that little onboard battery.

February 22, 2011

Playable Angry Birds Cake

Firstly, the concept of a playable cake, in itself, is pretty cool. But look at this….

Thanks to Amy, who sent me this video.

February 22, 2011

What do you call a segway with one wheel?*

It has been some time since my last Segway post. My name is Nathan Campbell and I’m a gyroscopaholic.

This one only has one wheel. And is slimlined.

Nice. Though I have about zero percent chance of successfully riding one.

Via Cool Hunting

* These guys called it a solowheel. Boring.

February 21, 2011

For Mitch, my brother-in-law…

My brother-in-law Mitch takes great pride in not reading this blog. He’s only interested in “real” websites by “qualified” people. Or something. I think he knows it’s awesome and addictive and he deliberately avoids it. This might be more like it.

Sadly, he’ll read this because his name is in the title.

Via Gary’s blog.

February 21, 2011

Serendipity via message in a bottle

This is an amazing story.

British man Richard Morwood discovered his girlfriend was the same girl whose message in a bottle he answered 30 years ago. Mandy English was just 13 when she hurled the note requesting a pen pal into the sea during a 1979 school visit to Scotland.

Two years later, Morwood – then just six years old – spotted the glass bottle on the beach and sent a reply by postcard. English never wrote back, but while sorting through keepsakes last week, she found the 1981 card and realised its sender had the same name as Morwood, her boyfriend since June.

This has been all over the actual news, and it’s not on snopes (after a cursory glance). So I’m going to believe that it’s true. Because skepticism is depressing.

February 21, 2011