My understanding is it's very specialized to bowerbirds. So, unless you are bird watching in the South Pacific or Australia, you probably won't see it.
We have actually birded pretty much where ever we have traveled…just haven’t been to Australia yet. (So Europe/UK, Japan, Singapore, Central America, and all 50 states).
Stephen, I also remember watching The Beguiled (Clint Eastwood version). I loved the title because throughout the film we don’t really know who is beguiling who as it twists and turns….that Clint’s character is killed was something that I really appreciated. He was the snake in the Garden of Eden (not that the school was Eden, it just hadn’t had a snake there before)…as the Snake he brought knowledge. People write about the misogyny in the film…but I don’t totally see it that way. The women take their destiny in their own hands after all.
>> The younger generation has fallen out of love with cars.
>> It’s probably because they never had a “Knight Rider.”
WTAF? Perhaps insteadsies it might be that we have known for 35 years that cars are killing the planet but EVERY FUCKING TIME a car comes out with the potential to stop that shit, the media falls all over itself to point out how it can't possibly save the world at all, given that you have to recharge it more often than you fill a gas tank, and that takes longer than filling a gas tank, and therefore EVs are evil, incompetent fuck-ups trying to replace our real cars, like a common Single White Female.
If you let the gasoline-powered-car industry constantly trash the EV industry while ICEs are actively killing the planet, then for the last 35 years you end up with a situation in which people who believe in climate change don't actually have a hero car to covet and lionize.
And while we've known this killing-the-planet shit for 35 years, it wasn't necessarily commonly taught to/believed by kids until 2000. So... that's just every kid born after 1993 that has no super hero car (other than a transformer) to do superhero things like... take them on memorable dates or get them away from their parents after a fight.
Without a car of their own that they can love, which they have been denied by industry, not entertainment, any potential love of cars will always be abstracted and unimportant.
Me, personally, I never owned a car until the first hybrids came out. Then I both the first one sold in North America, the Honda Insight. The gas tank held 10.6 gallons for you heathens, 40 liters for the civilized world. I took great pride in getting over 700 miles on a tank on long highway trips (the number of times I drove from Portland to Boise would shock you and make a great Tabs! clickbait) and never filled the tank without travelling 500 miles. It was insane compared to what most people were driving. It still used gasoline, but it was such a huge improvement for second vehicles or vehicles for people with no kids.
But while there was always fanfare with the release, there was always just as much trashing the thing for being too expensive (20k for a fun 2-seater, which was about the same as a Miata back then, though without the convertiblisms) and not solving climate change anyway, since it only cut gasoline consumption (and thus carbon dioxide emissions) in half instead of zero-ing them out.
When they talk about having no love for cars among younger generations, let's be clear: it's because the ICE industry would rather have you hate ALL cars than ever love a single EV. It's not that people born after 1990 are critically underHasselhoffed.
They're rather like Republicans that way, preferring you to hate all government so you don't take special exception to Republicans killing everyone and stealing your money.
Of course, all those ICE-industry leaders ARE Republicans, so I suppose it's not so surprising.
The point, again, is that it's not Hasselhoff's fault. Or Hollywoods. There are actual villains in this story, and they are not it.
I wouldn’t say they had no car heroes. Little kids had the literal movie Cars and bigger ones had a seemingly endless string of Fast Furiousness and Transformers because there’s nothing new under the sun. I also think you can be super into cars and super into EVs at the same time. I’ve seen too many people fawn/fap over the World’s Ugliest Vehicle (tm) the Cybertruck to think they’re mutually exclusive.
But if you can’t afford rent, food and medicine, your adulation for EVs is going to be limited to tv and movie screens by necessity. And you’re going to be resigned to knowing that if you want to make more of a difference in emissions it’s not going to be via Cybertruck but via cyber bus or cyber subway. In the same way that if you can never afford a house you’re not going to be able to install a lot of supplemental solar panels to aid in transition to solar, because it’s literally beyond your means.
The Jug in Portland was a funny old building. Down Sandy Blvd a few miles is a place that’s been an old tavern/bar for over 100 years now called the Sandy Hut. Maybe 15 years ago our newsweekly ranked it a top pick-up spot and nicknamed it the Handy Slut. I get reminded of that each time I go by there.
This summer marks my 30th year w/o a car. I used busses in early years when I had a child, but have commuted 14 mi. round trip for more than a decade now. I do not miss having a car, though like the young woman in the story, it would be nice to drive to the coast once in a while.
Can the Alabama Democratic Party reach out to Nick Saban and get to run for Senate? I get that he's probably not exactly a liberal, but he knows how to beat Tommy Tuberhead.
Well Patti Smith was utterly fabulous yesterday afternoon. We didn't get to chat, what with all those other people going to see her perform, but... - okay, I take that back.
She chatted to the whole audience, and even read Allen Ginsburg's "Sunflower Sutra" aloud before going into a 90-minute set that included songs by Bob Dylan, Neil Young and The Electric Prunes in addition to her own. She is as fierce and compassionate as ever, with a voice that scarcely seems to have changed in 50 years. At one point she somewhat quietly announced, "I'm still here, in all my shattered glory." And when she closed with "People Have the Power," she'd got everyone to *believe* it.
I did not watch the potato video. BUT... I will never not be impressed by the National Geographic article I read as a teen that informed me there were around 13,000 - thousand! - varieties of potato on the globe, complete with a photo of a couple dozen or more displaying the incredible variety of colors of this incredibly adaptable tuber.
I couldn't find a link to the article online, but dammit, no doubt it's in my mahogany-boxed set of CDs, containing every issue since the beginning of the publication up until about the year I bought the set, 1995-ish.
Re: your pornography collection (National Geographic!), I try to score old ones from my school library when they throw them out. Besides feel-good stories about Nazi Germany from the 1930s, I love to see the old ads. It's a real shame they shut NG down.
It's the first day of cross-country practice, new for my kiddo, who rode off in the rain to go run in the rain. I am super impressed because I hate, hate getting rained on.
Some alarming details about Mitch McConnell's physical decline from a Politico longread that is otherwise a tedious hagiography about Mitch's legacy:
"Plagued by worsening hearing loss, the after-effects of his March fall at the former Trump hotel (how’s that for an accident of history?) and the lingering impact of his childhood bout with polio, the longest-ever serving Senate leader is suddenly looking and sounding every bit his age of 81.
McConnell would like it known that he’s hardly the only one putting the elder in elder statesman these days — which is why after his press conference episode he joked to President Biden, his fellow 1942 baby, about being “sandbagged.” It was vintage McConnell: invoking Biden’s frailty, namely his spill at the hands of an errant sandbag at the Air Force Academy this year, to mitigate scrutiny of his own senior moment.
However, as somebody who’s covered McConnell for years, it’s jarring to see his decline. He told me at the end of our interview that, yes, he would be at the Fancy Farm picnic this month. The gathering is Kentucky’s annual political bacchanal, a 142-year-old church barbeque fundraiser in which pigs, lambs and politicians are all roasted in their own way to please an audience that descends by the thousands the first Saturday in August to a hamlet that’s anything but fancy.
Sure enough, there was McConnell, in his first major public appearance since his freeze-up, on stage gamely getting off zingers at Biden, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and other Democrats.
Yet his voice was diminished, he mostly read his lines without looking up and his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, had to help him up from his chair each time he stood.
Always protective of McConnell, Chao has become forceful this year, keeping details of his condition private and acting as his aide-de-camp on the road. She scanned the stage floor at Fancy Farm to detect the stray sandbag, held up his speech folder to cover her lips in the fashion of an NFL coach while speaking loudly to McConnell as they sat before his remarks and rarely left his side throughout the day...
[snip]
...However, in many of my conversations, and usually not for attribution, another theme came up: how much McConnell has aged. Unlike with Biden, whose every gaffe and slip on the steps is caught on camera, McConnell’s difficulties have been largely out of view, or at least they were until late last month. In private, though, McConnell’s colleagues have grown more alarmed, with one lawmaker even talking to the leader’s staff about whether he should consider hearing implants.
“He was sitting there as the conversation went on around him,” said an attendee of a recent Senate Republican lunch, alluding to McConnell’s hearing loss."
Today’s hed gif comes by way of a BBC Earth nature documentary. More info here: https://martiniambassador.substack.com/p/flame-bowerbird-mating-display
Spousal unit and I have done a lot of birdwatching. We haven’t seen this in the wild yet.
My understanding is it's very specialized to bowerbirds. So, unless you are bird watching in the South Pacific or Australia, you probably won't see it.
We have actually birded pretty much where ever we have traveled…just haven’t been to Australia yet. (So Europe/UK, Japan, Singapore, Central America, and all 50 states).
I think I've seen this on many dance floors in my dating days.
Pretty birbs! Birby daddy like!
Very disappointed that it didn't come from that "Becky, lemme smash" youtube video series.
Cute, I needed that.
OMG first snort laugh of the day so thank you for that!
I always loved that one 😆
I love mushrooms and poking about in the woods but have never been tempted to combine those two things.
Stephen, I also remember watching The Beguiled (Clint Eastwood version). I loved the title because throughout the film we don’t really know who is beguiling who as it twists and turns….that Clint’s character is killed was something that I really appreciated. He was the snake in the Garden of Eden (not that the school was Eden, it just hadn’t had a snake there before)…as the Snake he brought knowledge. People write about the misogyny in the film…but I don’t totally see it that way. The women take their destiny in their own hands after all.
Good band recaps for rap and hiphop in LA Times also too. https://enewspaper.latimes.com/desktop/latimes/default.aspx?&edid=bb08e3ff-2cf3-46a3-ae1e-519639d5b7ea
I can’t click on the prison guard story. Way too traumatic. Nopitty nope nope.
How about that Cedric Mullins!
>> The younger generation has fallen out of love with cars.
>> It’s probably because they never had a “Knight Rider.”
WTAF? Perhaps insteadsies it might be that we have known for 35 years that cars are killing the planet but EVERY FUCKING TIME a car comes out with the potential to stop that shit, the media falls all over itself to point out how it can't possibly save the world at all, given that you have to recharge it more often than you fill a gas tank, and that takes longer than filling a gas tank, and therefore EVs are evil, incompetent fuck-ups trying to replace our real cars, like a common Single White Female.
If you let the gasoline-powered-car industry constantly trash the EV industry while ICEs are actively killing the planet, then for the last 35 years you end up with a situation in which people who believe in climate change don't actually have a hero car to covet and lionize.
And while we've known this killing-the-planet shit for 35 years, it wasn't necessarily commonly taught to/believed by kids until 2000. So... that's just every kid born after 1993 that has no super hero car (other than a transformer) to do superhero things like... take them on memorable dates or get them away from their parents after a fight.
Without a car of their own that they can love, which they have been denied by industry, not entertainment, any potential love of cars will always be abstracted and unimportant.
Me, personally, I never owned a car until the first hybrids came out. Then I both the first one sold in North America, the Honda Insight. The gas tank held 10.6 gallons for you heathens, 40 liters for the civilized world. I took great pride in getting over 700 miles on a tank on long highway trips (the number of times I drove from Portland to Boise would shock you and make a great Tabs! clickbait) and never filled the tank without travelling 500 miles. It was insane compared to what most people were driving. It still used gasoline, but it was such a huge improvement for second vehicles or vehicles for people with no kids.
But while there was always fanfare with the release, there was always just as much trashing the thing for being too expensive (20k for a fun 2-seater, which was about the same as a Miata back then, though without the convertiblisms) and not solving climate change anyway, since it only cut gasoline consumption (and thus carbon dioxide emissions) in half instead of zero-ing them out.
When they talk about having no love for cars among younger generations, let's be clear: it's because the ICE industry would rather have you hate ALL cars than ever love a single EV. It's not that people born after 1990 are critically underHasselhoffed.
They're rather like Republicans that way, preferring you to hate all government so you don't take special exception to Republicans killing everyone and stealing your money.
Of course, all those ICE-industry leaders ARE Republicans, so I suppose it's not so surprising.
The point, again, is that it's not Hasselhoff's fault. Or Hollywoods. There are actual villains in this story, and they are not it.
I wouldn’t say they had no car heroes. Little kids had the literal movie Cars and bigger ones had a seemingly endless string of Fast Furiousness and Transformers because there’s nothing new under the sun. I also think you can be super into cars and super into EVs at the same time. I’ve seen too many people fawn/fap over the World’s Ugliest Vehicle (tm) the Cybertruck to think they’re mutually exclusive.
But if you can’t afford rent, food and medicine, your adulation for EVs is going to be limited to tv and movie screens by necessity. And you’re going to be resigned to knowing that if you want to make more of a difference in emissions it’s not going to be via Cybertruck but via cyber bus or cyber subway. In the same way that if you can never afford a house you’re not going to be able to install a lot of supplemental solar panels to aid in transition to solar, because it’s literally beyond your means.
Wait a minute. They had a jug shaped strip club building but didn’t have 3 X’s on the side of it? Shameful.
The Jug in Portland was a funny old building. Down Sandy Blvd a few miles is a place that’s been an old tavern/bar for over 100 years now called the Sandy Hut. Maybe 15 years ago our newsweekly ranked it a top pick-up spot and nicknamed it the Handy Slut. I get reminded of that each time I go by there.
This summer marks my 30th year w/o a car. I used busses in early years when I had a child, but have commuted 14 mi. round trip for more than a decade now. I do not miss having a car, though like the young woman in the story, it would be nice to drive to the coast once in a while.
Can the Alabama Democratic Party reach out to Nick Saban and get to run for Senate? I get that he's probably not exactly a liberal, but he knows how to beat Tommy Tuberhead.
Well Patti Smith was utterly fabulous yesterday afternoon. We didn't get to chat, what with all those other people going to see her perform, but... - okay, I take that back.
She chatted to the whole audience, and even read Allen Ginsburg's "Sunflower Sutra" aloud before going into a 90-minute set that included songs by Bob Dylan, Neil Young and The Electric Prunes in addition to her own. She is as fierce and compassionate as ever, with a voice that scarcely seems to have changed in 50 years. At one point she somewhat quietly announced, "I'm still here, in all my shattered glory." And when she closed with "People Have the Power," she'd got everyone to *believe* it.
I did not watch the potato video. BUT... I will never not be impressed by the National Geographic article I read as a teen that informed me there were around 13,000 - thousand! - varieties of potato on the globe, complete with a photo of a couple dozen or more displaying the incredible variety of colors of this incredibly adaptable tuber.
I couldn't find a link to the article online, but dammit, no doubt it's in my mahogany-boxed set of CDs, containing every issue since the beginning of the publication up until about the year I bought the set, 1995-ish.
Re: your pornography collection (National Geographic!), I try to score old ones from my school library when they throw them out. Besides feel-good stories about Nazi Germany from the 1930s, I love to see the old ads. It's a real shame they shut NG down.
The ads in the really early ones are fascinating - and lots of ads for luxury cruises, definitely painting a picture of the magazine's audience.
Coincidentally I am just reading David Foster Wallace's old article on cruise ships. ;-)
I assume that in Texas, it's OK if it's the STATE that kills your fetus.
Procedure is that important.
It's the first day of cross-country practice, new for my kiddo, who rode off in the rain to go run in the rain. I am super impressed because I hate, hate getting rained on.
Totally gratuitous comment here, but your post reminded of a song, "Big Gorilla" by Warren Zevon, that mentions running in the rain:
He built a house on an acre of land
He called it 'Villa Gorilla'
Now I hear he's getting divorced
Laying low at L'Ermitage, of course
Then the ape grew very depressed
Went through Transactional Analysis
He plays racquetball and runs in the rain
Still he's shackled to a platinum chain
Some alarming details about Mitch McConnell's physical decline from a Politico longread that is otherwise a tedious hagiography about Mitch's legacy:
"Plagued by worsening hearing loss, the after-effects of his March fall at the former Trump hotel (how’s that for an accident of history?) and the lingering impact of his childhood bout with polio, the longest-ever serving Senate leader is suddenly looking and sounding every bit his age of 81.
McConnell would like it known that he’s hardly the only one putting the elder in elder statesman these days — which is why after his press conference episode he joked to President Biden, his fellow 1942 baby, about being “sandbagged.” It was vintage McConnell: invoking Biden’s frailty, namely his spill at the hands of an errant sandbag at the Air Force Academy this year, to mitigate scrutiny of his own senior moment.
However, as somebody who’s covered McConnell for years, it’s jarring to see his decline. He told me at the end of our interview that, yes, he would be at the Fancy Farm picnic this month. The gathering is Kentucky’s annual political bacchanal, a 142-year-old church barbeque fundraiser in which pigs, lambs and politicians are all roasted in their own way to please an audience that descends by the thousands the first Saturday in August to a hamlet that’s anything but fancy.
Sure enough, there was McConnell, in his first major public appearance since his freeze-up, on stage gamely getting off zingers at Biden, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and other Democrats.
Yet his voice was diminished, he mostly read his lines without looking up and his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, had to help him up from his chair each time he stood.
Always protective of McConnell, Chao has become forceful this year, keeping details of his condition private and acting as his aide-de-camp on the road. She scanned the stage floor at Fancy Farm to detect the stray sandbag, held up his speech folder to cover her lips in the fashion of an NFL coach while speaking loudly to McConnell as they sat before his remarks and rarely left his side throughout the day...
[snip]
...However, in many of my conversations, and usually not for attribution, another theme came up: how much McConnell has aged. Unlike with Biden, whose every gaffe and slip on the steps is caught on camera, McConnell’s difficulties have been largely out of view, or at least they were until late last month. In private, though, McConnell’s colleagues have grown more alarmed, with one lawmaker even talking to the leader’s staff about whether he should consider hearing implants.
“He was sitting there as the conversation went on around him,” said an attendee of a recent Senate Republican lunch, alluding to McConnell’s hearing loss."
Full story:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/14/mitch-mcconnell-trump-00110969?nname=playbook&nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&nrid=0000014e-f0f5-dd93-ad7f-f8f50e980000&nlid=630318
Mitch looks like he has skipped the "warmed over" stage and is now a fully-accredited zombie.
My first thought when he froze up.