I created this blog as a dumping ground for thoughts and websites that I accumulate each day, not necessarily as a place for confiding my innermost secrets. My innermost secrets are, on the whole, rather lame.<\/p>\n
But I saw a squirrel outside today and it reminded me of something stupid that I said in, oh, 1998 or so. I was in my graduate program’s shared workspace and I had gotten into a (not terribly heated) argument about gray squirrels.<\/p>\n
For some reason I argued that gray squirrels were not a destructive influence on populations of European reds. In fact, I believe I stated that gray squirrels were a European import that had run amok in the US. That was just plain stupid and I knew it even as I said it. I had conflated in my mind European red squirrels with fox squirrels, an American variant that I remembered from a zoo placard was also endangered from gray squirrel competition. But refused to apologize once I realized my error…and my opponent either conceded or gave up. I feel tremendous guilt over that incident. It was a valuable lesson in shutting up already.<\/p>\n
I never apologized to that woman — and I would now if I could remember her name.<\/p>\n
I am sorry.<\/p>\n
Also, when you think about it, “squirrel” is a weird word. That part wasn’t a confession, just an observation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I created this blog as a dumping ground for thoughts and websites that I accumulate each day, not necessarily as a place for confiding my innermost secrets. My innermost secrets are, on the whole, rather lame. But I saw a squirrel outside today and it reminded me of something stupid that I said in, oh, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-sincere-apologies","post-preview"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7V2xo-j","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lstr.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}