The CHIRP! Of Love Is In His Face

This is a fact. Dave has a history of being dive-bombed by birds. There are many reasons this could happen, but the primary one is that birds are shitty judges of character. Dave is not a threat to birds. Any bird should be able to read it in his face, but apparently his face is too far off the ground for their comfort. I can walk right next to him and they'll go for his head every time.

But until this week, we'd never seen him get threatened by a hummingbird.

Our local Anna's hummingbirds do an awesome courtship display that involves flying up to the stratosphere and then arrowing down at warp speed, pulling up a the last second before *splat*, and then zooming back up again. Moreover, there is a tremendous CHIRP! sound right there at the bottom end of the flight, coming in fact from the bottom end of the bird. Quite recognizable. Whenever we hear it, we look straight up to locate the aerobat and watch him do it again. He pulls out of his dive right at about eye level from a prospective mate, who is observing from a twig. It's attention-getting.

This time we heard the CHIRP! just off Dave's shoulder. And--we checked--there was no female hummingbird in sight. We stood still. We waited. And sure enough, a half minute later, that hummingbird swooped down within a foot of Dave's left ear.

He was impressed, but not enough to have sex with a hummer.

So we don't know what was going on. It felt threatening.  It felt like the bird was trying to chase Dave off, not get Dave off. But who knows? Either Dave looks like another male threatening his territory, in which case we would assume it would fly straight at his hat, and not do a courtship display. Or, he finds Dave very attractive, and he would like to have three seconds of sweet hummingbird bliss on some suitable orifice, several of which come to mind.

Because as far as I know, male hummingbirds do not defend the nest. They have nothing to do with the nest. They defend their own territory of flowers and hope to entice a girl into their territory and chase off rivals and go to considerable trouble for that three-second wham-bam and then it's Sayonara, Sis, and good luck with the kids. So although other kinds of birds might try to discourage Dave from getting near their nests, the male hummer has gotten all he wants out of the relationship and is back to looking out for Number One.

That leaves attraction as the only other possibility. Something about Dave appeals to a male Anna's hummingbird. The male makes that tremendous noise during his courtship display with just his tail feathers and maybe he senses a kindred spirit in Dave.

All alone and feeling blue, and green, and yellow, and...

But the ability to make remarkable noises from your tail end isn't much to go on in a relationship. Sure, it worked for us, but we're a special case.

We should ask Anna. It's her hummingbird. Anna Masséna, the Duchess of Rivoli, was probably pretty hot. At least she was all the rage in the ornithological community. Her husband, the Duke of Rivoli, was an amateur ornithologist, which is to say he had an enormous dead bird collection. John James Audubon took a fancy to her too, but it was another ornithologist who thought to name the hummingbird after her. Audubon was probably doing this long involved courtship thing and making a gigantic bird painting for her, and then René-Primivère Lesson swoops in all CHIRP! and says "Ma chérie, I give you zees hummingbaird." No one knows what the Duke of Rivoli was doing all this time, but apparently not defending his territory.

They Shoot Out The Lip

[by DonkeyHotie]

Mike Pence is upset. "Throughout most of American history, it's been pretty easy to call yourself Christian," he said. "It didn't even occur to people that you might be mocked or ridiculed for defending the teachings of the Bible." He's right about that. Shoot, you used to be able to quote the Bible in support of slaveholding and killing the savages and nobody'd even bat an eye. That's how comfortable you can be when you're completely surrounded by people just like yourself, and you can do that by subjugating and exterminating the others.

I don't know. Maybe it takes being a non-Christian to notice how thoroughly saturated this country is in Christianity, where Jesus engineers touchdowns and is called upon to approve of war and discrimination, but if you really feel under attack, so be it. It does strike me as being over-delicate, although, as a practicing liberal, I have trained myself to take other people at their word when they feel oppressed or offended.

I understand. Being ridiculed is miserable. It's not like being kicked to death for being gay, or having a bull's-eye put on you for being a Muslim  or a refugee, or having your children kidnapped at the border, or having bombs dropped on you, but it stings. It stings.

So I'm here to assure you that I don't care what fool thing you believe. You could invent a planet to retire to, or make plans to shake Jesus's hand in the sky. In fact, you could bind up the creation myths of prehistoric goatherds and the hallucinations of schizophrenics and the edicts of tyrants, drop it a few dozen times, sweep it back up in no order and staple it together and tell me it's the word of God, and I won't mock you to your face.

I'm not a Christian, which I think is still legal. But it doesn't matter to me what you believe, unless it actually affects me, or other people, or unless I think it's evil, a word you don't own, and which I still get to use. Mr. Pence, you say that many people who espouse tolerance--you mean liberals--are often the least tolerant of Christian values. Not really, Mr. Pence. We love the Jesus values. Just not the values of intolerance.

You see, Mr. Pence, anyone can call himself a Christian.

It's possible to defy Jesus's teaching in every respect and still consider yourself a good Christian. There are good Christians who build homes for the poor. There are good Christians who murder doctors. There are good Christians who collect and control wives. There are good Christians who feed the hungry. There are good Christians who stand on street corners and hand gays the bus schedule to hell. There are even good Christians who endorse bombing the crap out of Palestinians just to hasten the End Times and catch the early flight to the Rapture. Who decides who's a good Christian? As far as I can tell, you get to decide for yourself.

Good people have some things in common, but being Christian isn't one of them. Some of them are Christians and some of them are atheists. Some of them have abortions and some of them vote for socialists. Some of them have the habit of prayer and some swear like sailors. Good people's hearts tilt toward kindness; they're not quick to judge. They can imagine circumstances different from their own. They aim for peace. They build bridges and tear down walls. They are generous. They do not demonize groups; they recognize individuals. They can imagine another's suffering as their own. To the degree possible, they live without fear.

Good people strive to not hurt others. They do this by recognizing other people as essentially like themselves, and so they can imagine what the hurt is like. It's a Golden Rule thing. Give it a shot, Mr. Pence.

I Guess The Dog Was A Laptop Model, Too

We used to have the cutest dog. When she was a puppy, we took her out to the river in case she wanted to swim. She didn't want to swim. She'd never even seen water. Her ancestry had led her to want to jam her face into holes in the ground and bother rodents with it, not swim.

But we were curious, so Dave picked her up and walked into the water with her. The most amazing thing happened. Suspended above the water but still dry as a bone, she began paddling with all fours for all she was worth. All Dave had to do was lower her into the water and she shot off like a toy boat with a rubber-band motor.

That is some freakishly specific brand of smart. I'm a little higher up the evolutionary tree, and if you'd suspended me over the water, I'd have hollered and scratched and bit and dropped to the bottom of the lake like a plumb-bob.

So the problem I have with my computer is I don't know if it's more like me or my old dog.

I do like my laptop. It replaced a massive antique Dell that looked like an old-fashioned TV set. That one started getting creaky and after a while I was afraid Everything I'd Ever Written would disappear one day and Columbo and the Murder She Wrote lady would have to climb out of the screen and go looking for it.

Remarkably, the transition went seamlessly. Everything I'd Ever Written fit on a one-inch thumb drive--I don't know how to feel about that--and showed up unscathed on my laptop. I thought I was home free.

But one thing about the new-fashioned computers: they're curious. This one wanted to know all sorts of things. It's like pudding: you have to know a lot just to get it to set up. There were keychains. Passwords. Suitcases to bring to the Cloud. Extra underwear. It wanted to see my previous computer's birth certificate and tax returns. If I answered stuff wrong, it basically rolled its little eye at me. I think I might have contributed a password full of pet names and numbers, but it kept asking more and more questions, and then I just gave up. I'm still not on the Cloud.

But regular as shit, the darn thing wants me to update stuff. Asks me every day: do you want to install this? The furthest it will put me off is "Remind me tomorrow." I already know what I'm going to say tomorrow, but apparently, as smart as it thinks it is, it can't anticipate. And sometimes it wants to change absolutely everything. It wants to upgrade me to a new operating system. The Mac operating systems were named after jungle cats for a long time, and now they're geological wonders. I don't know what OS we're up to now: Saber-Toothed Tiger On Top Of Old Smoky?

I have no wish to do any of this. If I do an update, the next day will be a slog of all the old questions before I can play. It will want me to authenticate all of the crap I never quite authenticated before. I still won't be on the Cloud. And if I upgrade my operating system?

I don't know if Everything I Ever Wrote will be dog-paddling above the machine ready to scoot along or if it will drop like a plumb-bob.

On Having A Heart

6-wk-old fetus--oh wait, this is a pepper sprout.

Aww, man. Georgia just passed a Heartbeat Bill, targeting women who pursue an abortion before six weeks' gestation. And here I just fired off my annual donation to Planned Parenthood. Unfortunately, this puts me in the crosshairs of the Georgia justice system, which might opt to prosecute me for hiring a hit man, and I can only hope they're too busy rigging elections down there to extradite me from Oregon. Odds are good Oregon wouldn't cooperate, but I can always hide in the office of our own governor, who has a uterus but (this being a blue state) is allowed to have opinions anyway.

It's not as though I court trouble, though, so I'm hoping to be able to get on the Georgia uterus registry in the "dried-up" column, because if I were to suddenly begin bleeding profusely from my central nethers, I want to be seen by a local medical professional and not hauled into court in Georgia on suspicion of aborting a potential human being at the stage in which the Legislature believes a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which is to say a few weeks before it has an actual heart, or a face, and several weeks before it develops genitalia sufficient to determine the eventual worth of the child to the State of Georgia. At the grub stage, in other words. Which means they can't yet tell if the bouncing blob of cells is going to grow up to be a Republican senator, or a host body and sperm receptacle.

6-wk-old fetus--oh wait, garbanzo bean.

The heartbeat bill is inconvenient from the standpoint of the woman who is unlikely to know she's pregnant and may not even be glowing yet, but ideal from the standpoint of the grub, who is very near the most valuable stage of its life, gram per gram, in a death-penalty state.

Georgia is to be commended for showing the most concern in the nation for African-American embryos, who are nevertheless advised to come out with picture ID in hand.

Just to be on the safe side, it is suggested that every woman of mandatory child-bearing age in Georgia take the precaution of mailing all used pads and tampons to the State Legislature so they can make sure she hasn't pulled a fast one. No need to go to the trouble of packaging them up, either. After all, you can stick a postage stamp on a coconut.

6-wk fetus--oh wait, beetle larva.

The point of all these bills--Georgia is the fourth this year to pass a "heartbeat bill"--is to send an obviously unconstitutional measure all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court, where newly instated Justice, drunk and sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh is expected to try to redeem his soul by overturning Roe v. Wade.

There may, in fact, be no recourse for women in Georgia, unless they can get some legislation passed that will allow pregnant women two votes, or outlaw anti-life activities such as fellatio. Failing that, they could hold out altogether, and if the senators get lonely they can just go fuck themselves.

Georgia legislators, for their part, insist their measure is not extreme, citing Alabama's newly passed Wet Spot Protection Act. Step away from laundry detergent, little lady.

Hanging Up Your Bird

I am always little and often hungry, but I am otherwise nothing like a Vaux's Swift, a few billion of which just showed up in town the other day. They're way up there in the sky flapping like mad and chirping and nabbing bugs out of the air. They're busy as hell.

Vaux's swifts are invariably described as cigar-shaped, even though the swifts have been around a lot longer than the stogies. And anyway it's not so much a cigar as a big poorly-rolled doobie, of the kind people used to roll when you could get an ounce for ten bucks. I am not cigar-shaped. I am Venus of Willendorf-shaped. This makes me less aerodynamic than a Vaux's swift. However it does mean if I land on the ground I will not roll very far, whereas if a Vaux's swift lands on the ground, it's totally screwed. Its feet are too little and its wings are too long to get airborne again. It would be like trying to levitate a canoe. If you ever do see a Vaux's swift on the ground you need to pick it up and heave it into the air and wish it the best of luck.

Other ways to tell me apart from a Vaux's swift: they get up first thing in the morning and work all the blessed day long. They don't rest. Most of our songbirds are plenty busy this time of year but they still park it from time to time and watch the world go by. Not those swifts. They've got nothing to park with. Their little feets can't perch, and the best they can do is sort of hang themselves up inside a tree or a chimney with their little claws, like a work shirt. They can't sit in a tree any more than a person with a conical butt can sit in a recliner. So all day long it's flappity flappity with a more or less constant chatter. I don't know what they're saying but it doesn't vary much. Probably bugs bugs bugs or yum yum yum.

That's a lot of work but it's worse than that. They have no plan for retirement. Some swifts can go ten months without landing. They sleep in the sky. If I woke up and discovered myself high in the sky I would freak out, but swifts are cool with it, and would take it in stride if they had anything to stride with. Yes, swifts eat, sleep, drink, and have sex in the air. They do make nests if they find someplace to hang themselves up in. But it's not going to be a branch or anything they can usefully weave nesting materials around--they have to hang themselves up somewhere and glue sticks to the surface with their own spit. If you have a nesting swift in your chimney and discover a baby bird in your fireplace, you should pick it up and stick it higher up your chimney, and it will keep skritcheting higher until it finds its nest again.

They've stuck little hats on birds to detect if they really sleep on the wing and discovered they even have REM sleep, during which they dream about showing up for the final exam on bug ID even when they hadn't gone to class all year, or giving a speech (yum yum yum) without any feathers on. Sometimes birds sleep with half their brains and keep the other half on the lookout, but sometimes they shut down the whole computer, usually while on a nice updraft. And maybe that works out a lot of the time, but if it doesn't, they can always make more swifts.

Keep an eye on your fireplace though.

Sacrament

Dave peered into the beer fridge with concern.

"We have to make a Costco run," he said. He was right. We were down to our last case of beer.

There are lots of people who might not consider 24 beers a panic situation, but we believe in planning and preparing and personal responsibility, and what if a couple bears showed up tonight with a bottle opener? No. It's just too close for comfort.

I did say "beer fridge." Let's call it a legacy item. Forty years ago we got a small refrigerator and drilled a hole in the door and set it up with a keg. We did pretty well with that until we realized we were attracting more friends than we really wanted or liked or, in some cases, recognized. One day we didn't replace the keg and that was that. But the little fridge had been there long enough to be a common-law appliance. We swapped it out for another small fridge and put our beer in there, with some chaperone sodas. We've had two refrigerators all this time. A full beer fridge feels like security. With a full beer fridge, we feel like we are in compliance with earthquake readiness recommendations. We're not, technically, but it feels that way. Disaster? Ha. We laugh at your disaster.

We should probably get a bucket with a toilet seat and dried food and a water filter and a first-aid kit and Handi-Wipes and peanut butter and a lantern and a space blanket and a Saint Bernard, but the lack of a lot of those things can be mitigated with beer. Oh and we're also supposed to have some firearms to protect our stash from our, uh, friends and neighbors and people in need, but we aren't planning to change party affiliation or anything, so no.

Basically, everything I've ever read about a big-ass earthquake leads me to believe the full beer fridge is a solid first step. Followed by the bucket and toilet seat. Stick with the basics and you can avoid the full-on Donner situation.

It's been suggested that being hyper-aware of the number of beers on hand is a bit of a red flag, alcoholism-wise, but who's to draw the line between a nice hobby and a debilitating disease? Also it's not supposed to be a good thing if you obsessively check the beer situation at other people's houses so you can go out for supplies, but what if you're going to be there for hours and they're Hefeweizen people? What then? Some people also think it is some kind of sign if you have to pull over when driving in a dangerous and scary situation to chug a beer before you can keep driving, which I have done twice, and both times were totally justified. Some people think being prepared to take care of your own needs is not a virtue. Suddenly people who think nothing of making sure they have life-saving heart medication on hand are all judgey about other people's needs.

The real reason it's a little nuts to panic when the beer gets low is that we are living spang in the middle of the best beer town in the whole world, and we can get any of thirty or forty different brews inside of a five-minute walk. If we actually ran out of beer, the solution is right around the corner.

But we're prepared. We're self-reliant. We're the Mormons of the beer aisle. That's not a thing, but if it were, that's what we'd be.

The View From The Driveway

It was a comment in response to a post about the urgency of forestalling climate catastrophe.

"All I know is that we have friends who have a hybrid car. They could not get up our driveway. We had to pull it up our driveway using a tow rope with our Jeep. I am not giving up my car."

Oh, sweet pea. I am sorry that is all you know. There's so much else.

All around you, people are making choices in their daily lives that must baffle you. They are paying more for items that aren't packaged in plastic. They're voting to tax themselves for greenspaces. They're checking the tags in their clothing to make sure they're not supporting slave labor. They're choosing to live where they don't need a car at all. Maybe they've found out that animal agriculture is the biggest driver of climate change and environmental devastation, and they've quit eating meat. They're doing these things because they have learned some stuff about the world, and they're unable to keep operating as they had before they learned it. It becomes a moral choice for them.

What they're not doing is changing their behavior in order to shame you. Something about your statement leads me to suspect you think your friends bought a hybrid car because they think they're better than you. But what do you do when you find out something you're doing is hurting others? Maybe it's something you didn't realize before, but once you learned better, wouldn't you change? I'm sure you would. Maybe that's what they're doing: trying to do less harm.

Of course their hybrid is still burning fossil fuel. And this is what is going to make our planet uninhabitable, in a matter of a few short lifetimes. It's a big deal. If you knew we had only ten years to get off fossil fuel altogether or risk an unlivable planet, wouldn't you embrace a solution? Maybe not--because there is so little one person can do to affect such a massive problem. It needs to be addressed on a national and world-wide level.



But here's a related massive problem: we are operating under a system of profit-driven capitalism that does not begin to account for the costs of enterprise. Shouldn't corporations be required to pay for the harms they cause? Should they be able to destroy our environment without any consequence? Should you be able to get away with poisoning your neighbor's well? We put people in prison for knocking over the corner store; why do we reward people who endanger every single life on the planet?

So nobody is going to confiscate your Jeep. You can keep your Jeep. But maybe gasoline should be $250 a gallon. Maybe that's what it would take to mitigate the harm done by the extraction and burning of buried carbon. It's not meant to be punitive--it's the cost of doing business. You might decide to make some different choices.

Seem like a lot to pay? A few decades ago someone had the idea of pegging gasoline at $5 a gallon. That was a lot at the time. People would use less, more efficient vehicles would be on the market, and the excess tax would be devoted to changing our infrastructure toward a more sustainable plan. It was a good idea. A number of things we could have done a few decades ago would have made things a lot easier now, but we didn't do them. And now we're out of time. It might even be too late.

I don't blame you or your Jeep. It's not your fault. There are real criminals involved in this scheme to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of literally everyone else. But it would be a good thing, for starters, to take a step back from your driveway and see how big the picture really is.

Being Serviced

TV was on the fritz again. This happens a lot since everything went digital. It never makes sense, which means it's probably related to hormones or some planet being in retrograde. Usually I can fix it myself with some combination of unpluggings and holdings-in-of-buttons, although the precise order is a mystery.

Sometimes, I think, it just comes back on as a sort of blessing. It's like God. You might get the dropsy or win the Irish Lottery, but it won't be because of anything you did.

Not this time. This time I scared up a screen that promised Software Is Being Updated, but I was dubious. The progress dots were just loitering. After about five minutes they gave way to an Error screen in big red letters. I unplugged more vehemently and jammed the plug back in like I meant it, Mister. It didn't budge. I unplugged the toaster and the slow sink, to no avail.

Somewhere there was a suggestion I chat with someone online, so I gave it a go. First thing I see is that I'm really important and the estimated minimum wait time is 127 minutes. I kept the window open and farted around on the internet.

Cool! The estimated wait time kept coming down fast until it was down to five minutes after only a half hour. This is a winnowing technique. They know perfectly well they lost half their complainers right off the bat. Smart! Then every two minutes they updated to say I was down to five minutes. Five minutes minimum wait time, which would include, I now realized, 127 minutes.

Then I got a new message! Hi! My name is CenturyLink and I'll be with you in a moment, as soon as I figure out who you are and whether you are packing! Followed thirty seconds later by "All our agents are busy. Try again later."

Oh, no you di'n't. I gave the chat window a wicked bitch face and then typed in "Are you there?" To my surprise, it came back with the message that someone would be right with me, and thanked me for my patience, which I believe was rather an assumption on their part.

"I'll be with you in a minute," it said. That would be Nick ("The Nickster") and his imaginary friend Nurse Skippy, who is still in the bathroom. Nick isn't allowed to chat on his own without a nurse in the room since the Incident.

Every two minutes, I got a slightly different version of this message and then--1-1/2 hours in--the "agent" terminated the chat. Would I like a transcript of our chat? Oh yasss. Yass indeedy, I would. I'll need it for the murder trial.

Used to be we had ourselves a fat monopoly called Ma Bell. Ma was all-powerful. She owned our phones and unless you had a postage stamp or a ham radio that was the only way you were going to communicate with anyone who wasn't in the room. When your phone didn't work, you went to a neighbor's house to call Ma and she sent out a nice man in a spiffy suit to fix it, no charge. He'd come in and frown at the phone and then go outside with a loop of new line and a bulge in his pocket and come back brandishing a dispatched squirrel, either a relevant one or an alternate that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then your phone worked again.

We used to complain about Ma Bell. I don't remember why.

Marge and Studley In Da House!

Studley April 2019

Marge and Studley Windowson are back again and I am so relieved.

It was no sure thing my chickadees would be back in the nesting business. At least not in the box Dave set up for them outside my window. Last year and the year before they made a go of it but didn't produce any working chickadees. And that's a heap of trouble to go through for nothing.

Last year she had a good start on the nest inside the box and then disappeared when the wasps showed up. Without much hope of success, I took down the box and removed the wasp nest that was hanging down like a chandelier from the ceiling. It was off-putting to me, and I'm certain Marge felt the same way, although she and Studley are made of stouter stuff than I am. A wasp or two came by after I absconded with their sculpture and decided the neighborhood was a little too iffy for them, and they moved on. Amazingly, Marge came back to check on things, found the chandelier gone, and resumed work on the nest. But some time before the eggs hatched, they abandoned it. I don't know why.

Studley April 2018

And yes, it is truly Marge and Studley. I will hereby admit I called them Marge and Studley for years without being utterly certain it was the same pair. Chickadees don't veer off the template much. You see one chickadee, you can kind of write the book on all the others. But last year Studley showed up with a bum foot. It was pink and swollen, and over the course of a couple months it looked like pieces of it fell off. The only thing I can think of is he narrowly escaped a cat. And I think I know which cat.

2018

This year his foot is nice and gray like it's supposed to be, but the toes aren't the right length and two of them are missing claws. When he lands on the nest box hole with his right foot, his left foot sort of slides down the side, for a lack of grabbiness. But he perches just fine, and that's mostly what he's doing now. He's keeping watch on a stubby branch while Marge works on putting the mattress together. And he's taking it seriously. His head turns every which direction and when he spots an intruder he gives it what-for. Mostly he scolds, but if there's a smaller bird, he'll chase it off. That means the Lesser Goldfinches are on the run for sure, and so are the bushtits. The bushtits don't really act scared, to be honest. He might aim at one and dislodge it and then they all fly off in a bunch, but they're all "Oh, are we going this way now? Fun! Whee whee whee!" Still, it has to puff out Studley a bit to rout fifteen birds at once.

2019

Scrub jays, whole other thing. If you could scare off a scrub jay by going dee dee dee at it, there'd be a lot of terrorized jays around here, but you can't. I don't frankly know what would scare a scrub jay. I used to like them before one made off with my nuthatch baby on its maiden flight, and now I'm a little peeved. I thought I'd help out Studley when a jay landed outside the window and I opened up the window and went all boogah boogah on its ass, and all it did was size up my eyeballs for spearing.

I worry about Marge and Studley though. I'm going to help out as much as I can this year. I'm going to buy some mealworms, which I've never done, and I'm going to put them on my windowsill for them. I'll try to rig up a parasol because the cascara tree has lost most of its leaves and I don't want the eggs to cook. I'm going to be very stern with the scrub jays. I'm going to aim a fire hose at the neighbor's cat at every opportunity. The neighbor said that was okay with her, not that I asked first. Sadly, it's considered a social blunder to fire-hose your neighbor.

Studley and Marge and the rest of us, we're all in the same boat. I despair of living with a ringside seat to the next great extinction event. I despair for the beautiful babies my friends and family are still cooking up, and I know they're due for troubles our ancestors could never have foreseen. I can scream and shout and fight with people on the internet and write post cards to my congressmen and most of the time--maybe all of the time--it's not much better than standing on my branch and going dee dee dee. But if Studley is still willing to fight the good fight with his bum foot, I can do it too.