My Messy Media Center and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom

My media center, also known as my computer room, was a terrible mess. 3 big boxes of books, the excess spilling over, were up against 1 wall, blocking a closet door. The other side of the room had all kinds of crap piled all over the place–an accumulation of over a decade’s worth of junk. I finally got tired of looking at it and decided to straighten it up. The real impetus was a book I recently read but couldn’t find. I was also looking for some tax forms. I spent hours cleaning the room and discovered a plumbing disaster. The carpet underneath the junk was wet, and I determined it was from a leaky sink drainage pipe on the other side of the wall, leading to a $1000 repair. After the repair the carpet dried and I purchased a $60 bookshelf from Amazon to get the boxes off the floor and suffered through more aggravation. It was a cheap piece of shit made in Vietnam, and I could not put it together. The top part of the bookshelf was supposed to connect with the bottom part using small plastic pegs that wouldn’t line up. Moreover, the shelves were supposed to rest on ridiculously tiny pegs, and the whole thing fell apart every time I barely touched it. I devised an alternative construction using wooden blocks and a shitload of wood glue. My concept worked, but I became really angry with my own stupidity. After installing the first shelf I went looking for the other 2 and realized I’d forgotten that I’d put them on the bottom of the case to get them out of the way. I’d glued the blocks underneath the first shelf on top of the other 2. I felt like the 3 Stooges wrapped in 1 person. I fixed the snafu by sawing extra wood from the frame of the original bookcase I didn’t use, and those served as the additional shelves. Below are before and after photos of my media center.

Boxes of overflowing books blocked my closet door.

I discovered a plumbing disaster under this mess. If I hired a maid, she would probably take one look at it, quit and cry.

Now, I can at least get into my closet without dragging hundred-pound boxes of books out of the way.

I built this bookshelf using the leftover frame of another bookcase that I could not put together with wooden blocks and a shitload of wood glue.

I did find the book I was looking for, but I never found the tax forms. I also found a box of film noir and Wild Kingdom DVDs. I’d completely forgotten about the latter and probably hadn’t watched them in over 20 years. Wild Kingdom was my favorite show when I was a little kid. I remember crying in 1968 when our family had just 1 television, and my father chose to watch The Ed Sullivan Show instead of Wild Kingdom. This long running nature series was the successor to Zoo Parade, a series that ran from 1952-1957, and it was also hosted by Marlin Perkins. He convinced the Mutual of Omaha insurance company to sponsor the next version of the show in 1962, and new episodes have been produced off and on ever since. The original Wild Kingdom aired on NBC and syndication from 1963-1988 with Marlin Perkins hosting it until shortly before his death from skin cancer in 1986. The show was revived in 2002 and again in 2011. It was a YouTube series from 2013-2018, and since 2022 it has been part of NBC’s Saturday morning line up of shows for kids.

Marlin Perkins wrestling a giant anaconda. He said, “a bite from an anaconda could be very painful.” His statements of the obvious were often fodder for late night comedians.

Wild Kingdom is 1 of the greatest nature shows of all time and was especially educational for children. Each episode often features many different species of animals interacting with each other. For example in an episode about the Okefenokee Swamp they showed alligators, alligator snapping turtles, common snapping turtles, water moccasins, egrets, mallard ducks, barred owls, red-shouldered hawks, black bears, raccoons, bobcats, gray foxes, striped skunks, and fox squirrels. A bobcat hunting the ducks and squirrels became prey for an alligator. Some episodes feature conservation projects that show game managers or scientists capturing wild animals to study them or to relocate problem individuals. (They’ve been accused of unnecessarily handling animals for the camera. I think that is true in some cases.) Other episodes follow individual animals and are narrated in story form. Below is a link to Wild Kingdom’s YouTube channel where hundreds of episodes are available.

https://www.youtube.com/@wildkingdom

John James Audubon and Henry David Thoreau: A Contrast

I can’t think of a bigger contrast between 19th century naturalists than the differences between John James Audubon and Henry David Thoreau. First, a brief biography of each.

Audubon was born in Haiti during 1785 and was the illegitimate child of a retired French naval officer who owned a plantation there. His mother was a Spanish chambermaid, and he had many mulatto brothers and sisters because his father fornicated with his slaves as well. His father sent him to the U.S. to avoid Napoleon’s draft, and he overcame his prejudice against the English when he married an American woman of English descent. He owned a farm in Kentucky, but it failed. Birds always fascinated him, and he loved painting, so he decided to make a living painting American birds. His well-known books include The Birds of America, The Quadrupeds of America, and An Ornithological Biography. Journals of his travels down the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers are also enjoyable to read. Audubon died of a stroke in 1851.

Portrait of John James Audubon.

Henry David Thoreau was born in 1818 and lived in Concord, Massachusetts for almost his entire life. Unlike Audubon, he did very little traveling, instead focusing on the nature he found locally. His most famous book is Walden–a collection of essays about the more than 2 years he spent living in a cottage next to Walden Pond, a mile from any neighbors. He went there for solitude to write his first book, Travels Down the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Walden is his most popular book, but I enjoyed Cape Cod and The Maine Woods more. Thoreau disdained the common labor most people performed then, but his books didn’t sell well, and he was forced to work as a surveyor. He never married, and he didn’t like to socialize with young ladies. He may have been gay during a time period when this was especially taboo. He died in 1862 of tuberculosis.

Portrait of a young Thoreau.

Audubon grew up speaking French. English was his second language, and it is noticeable in his earliest writings, but he did eventually master English, and his later writings reflect that improvement. His writing is straightforward with no pretention and is mostly factual with just a little embellishment. Thoreau’s writing is often deeply philosophical. Although he was a man of science, he would invite appreciation of nature’s beauty with long spiritual discussions. He had a much greater command of the English language than Audubon, but I prefer reading the latter’s writing. Thoreau could write 5000 words describing what different kinds of snow looked like, and I think that was tedious.

Audubon bought, owned, and sold slaves; and he was shockingly cruel to animals. Thoreau was adamantly opposed to slavery and was an occasional vegetarian opposed to the wonton slaughter of wild animals. (White tail deer were already extirpated from Massachusetts during his lifetime.) Thoreau was part of the Underground Railroad and helped escaped slaves get to Canada. He was the only person in his neighborhood who supported John Brown’s ill-fated attempt to spark a slave rebellion. Audubon strongly supported slavery, and his best friends were all slave-owners. He killed thousands of animals, just so he could get a better view to paint a realistic portrait. He once nailed a live bald eagle’s talons to the floor in order to take a lifelike portrait of it. He even experimented on his own hunting dog, feeding it parakeets to see if it would be poisoned by the toxic plants they ate. The worst Thoreau did was to temporarily hold some small animals captive, so he could observe them. He detained a screech owl, a flying squirrel, and turtles. He carefully returned the owl and the squirrel to the exact place he captured them. Clearly Thoreau was a much more humane person than Audubon.