Peregrines, Ospreys and Eagles

Seen their videocams lately? The chicks are growing. NYC Peregrine.  Maryland Osprey.  Maryland Eagles.  What's that corncob doing in the nest on the video? Looks like they had a clambake up there.

Also, the story of the removal of one of the eaglets to Vermont.

Photo courtesy of P. LaTourette - his link to the left.

Chris' Excellent Adventure

We posted a nice photo of a boat shipper earlier this week. Our friend Chris was nice enough to bring his digital camera to document his picking up his boat this week from one of those mobile boat-delivery dry-docks, in Newport harbor. After which he sailed it down to CT. Flip through the photo series to get a feel for the process. The ship sinks until the boats can be floated off and unloaded. Who knew? Photo posted: Anti-Bush sign in Rhode Island - a Blue State for sure. Nice house, though.

The Big Red Button

Seen this?  Try it. Males, youth, elderly, and females not allowed. Via Michelle via Instapundit

Reposted from 2005 - not that anyone needs a reminder of that sad tale.

From Ryan Sager at The NY Post: "March 17, 2005 -- CAMPAIGN-FINANCE reform has been an immense scam perpetrated on the American people by a cadre of left-wing foundations and disguised as a "mass movement." But don't take my word for it. One of the chief scammers, Sean Treglia, a former program officer of the Pew Charitable Trusts, confesses it all in an astonishing videotape I obtained earlier this week."

I have contended that Campaign Finance is anti-free speech, unconstitutional, and typically insidious goo goo stuff. Watch that FCC. Read entire: Click here: New York Post Online Edition: postopinion

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

Pablo Picasso

(Bird Dog comment: I get Mr. P's point, but that was in the pre-blog era.)

"Better is a dinner of herbs where love is,
than a fatted ox and hatred with it."

Proverbs 15

Columbia's ROTC

Finally, the good old old Alma Mater will be graced with an ROTC. About time, guys and gals. She will be pleased, as will be most alumni. They were hounded off campus in 1969 in a sick spasm of anti-Americanism to which a lame administration gave in, to the enduring shame of the great and ancient college of Alexander Hamilton and John Jay...and David Horowitz.

(Low Library in background, as distinguished from Butler Library - and from Butler Hall - home of the fabulous and fabulously pricey rooftop Terrace. which should be reserved only for the most important and difficult seductions, business or otherwise.) 

Theocracy Now !

Just like a person who has little to bring to the table, when a political movement finds itself without much to offer, the typical strategy is to attack and to tear down others rather than to compete. (Classic example: Dems going after Laura. No class whatsoever.)

We did a theocracy piece last week, and we continue to see this silly angle exploited as a scare and smear tactic. Truly ridiculous. I thought "church ladies" used to be a joke. Now they're dangerous? Come on! This "issue" has as much traction as a BMW in an ice-storm. Thanks, Captains Quarters.

Steely Dan and the Doobies

Dr. Bob has an interesting follow-up on these guys.

"The less you know, the smarter you think you are."

Bird Dog

The Yellow-rumped is another abundant migrant, but unique as a warbler that can winter in the north, living on bayberries which they have a unique ability to digest.

We used to call them Myrtle Warblers - some of us still do. Bright yellow at base of tail is diagnostic. Found across the US and Canada. Click here: All About Birds

Photo courtesy of Bill Horn.

The NYT Utters the G word

Too bad that it takes the power of miracles to move the souls of doubters and unbelievers. Isn't mere existence enough? But in this case, the amazing Ivory Bill:

"It's huge and beautiful. "A whacking big bird," Roger Tory Peterson wrote, nearly two feet long with a three-foot wingspan, black and white with a streak of red on the male's pterodactyl crest and a fearsome glint in its yellow eyes. To see an ivory-bill left people thunderstruck; their exclamations inspired its nickname: the Lord God bird.

It's alive. The word miracle is overused, but what else explains the survival in the 21st century of an animal considered lost to history so long ago? The ivory-bill was mourned as a mythologized victim of intense predation and habitat loss, of hunters and collectors, of the leveling of millions of acres of Southern forests into pulp and sawdust. Somehow it has endured."

Read entire.

And now, Big Master, I'm broken and bent and twisted and scarred,
But I've held my job, and Thou knowest, and Thou wilt not judge me hard.
Thou knowest my sins are many, and often I've played the fool -
Whiskey and cards and women, they made me the devil's tool.
I was like a child with money, I flung it away with a curse,
Feasting a fawning parasite, or glutting a harlot's purse,
Then back to the woods repentent, back to the mill or mine,
I, the worker of workers, everything in my line.
Everything hard but headwork (I'd no more brains than a kid).
A brute with strength to labor, doing as I was bid;
Living in camps with menfolk, a lonely and loveless life,
Never knew kiss of sweetheart, never caress of wife.
A brute with strength to labor, and they were so far above -
Yet I'd gladly have gone to the gallows for one little look of love.

from The Song of the Wage-Slave, by Robert Service. Read entire: Click here: RPO -- Robert W. Service : The Song of the Wage-slave

Video of Ivory Bill

If you aren't into God's nature, you don't understand what a big deal this is. We posted the news yesterday AM. For the video - Click here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/video/qt/woodpecker.mov

Of course, Scrapple-Man has to put in his two cents.

"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it also will make a better soup."

H.L. Mencken

Shipping Boats

Never knew how this was done. Here is Super Servant 3 entering Newport, RI with a precious cargo of sailboats as the boating season begins up here in New England. This ship is essentially a mobile dry dock - submerges to load.

Bird of the Year

For birders, a VERY BIG DEAL, and very heartening. The Ivory-bill, long believed extinct, likes the swamps of the deep south. The definite ID of one on the Arkansas border with La. is wonderful.

Story here

What's the matter with me
I don't have much to say
Daylight sneakin through the window
And I'm still in this all-night cafe
Walkin to and fro beneath the moon
Out to where the trucks are rollin slow
To sit down on this bank of sand
And watch the river flow

Dylan, from Watching the River Flow
on New Morning

"Beware of any enterprise which requires new clothes."

Thoreau

Leaves of Grass

150th Anniversary of Leaves of Grass. A good time for a Whitman-fest at the Virginia Quarterly Review. They are a subscription site, but many of the articles are free online.

From the intro by Ted Gennoway:

There's a manuscript in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia that I consider the most important single sheet of paper in American literary history. It doesn't look like anything so grandiose. In fact, it looks like little more than a scrap of paper with a few scrawled lines. There are words scratched out here and there in the penciled script, alternate words tried out, question marks inserted over uncertain choices, but the words could hardly be more significant:

The spotted hawk salutes the approaching night;
He swoops by me, and rebukes me hoarsely with his invitation;
He complains with sarcastic voice of my lagging
I feel apt to clip it and go;
I am not half tamed, yet.—

VQR's Whitman issue here. Their interesting gallery of Whitman photos here.

Theocracy?

I agree with Barone that you would think the Taliban had come to town, if you go by the headlines. It seems to me that it's all political scare tactics. When Dems like Clinton used Christian moral arguments to support a goal, no-one complained. When Repubs do the same, it's suddenly creeping theocracy.

Politicans tend to use "situational ethics". They want to win elections and keep their jobs. So if they apply religious moral principles, even if only as window-dressing, voters ought to be at least a bit pleased - not fearful. The real issue is that the Left is ticked off about the 23% evangelical voters who don't see the world their way, but they don't know how to deal with it and become shrill and hysterical and throw a tantrum. The message is that it's OK to appeal to unions, or the AARP, or the ACLU, or the NAACP, etc., but it's not OK to appeal to the views of voters who go to church. But 70% of voters go to church, believing or hoping that there is more to life than self-interest and materialism.

Barone:

"The real question is whether strong religious belief is on the rise in America and the world. Fifty years ago, secular liberals were confident that education, urbanization and science would lead people to renounce religion. That seems to have happened, if you confine your gaze to Europe, Canada and American university faculty clubs.

But this movement has not been as benign as expected: The secular faiths of fascism and communism destroyed millions of lives before they were extinguished.

America has not moved in the expected direction. In fact, just the opposite. Economist Robert Fogel's "The Fourth Great Awakening" argues that we've been in the midst of a religious revival since the 1950s, in which, as in previous revivals, "the evangelical churches represented the leading edge of an ideological and political response to accumulated technological and social changes that undermined the received culture." "  Read entire.

And an amusing piece on the subect that has been floating around the b-world by a Charlie Otto, via Borowitz Report:

"My son, do not despise the Lord's discipline or be weary of his reproof,
fot the Lord reproves him who he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights."

Proverbs 3 (Solomon)

Tennis, Anyone?

We have all heard about "Club cows," but this is ridiculous. Story here. AP photo. I like the way he is gallantly jumping over the net to congratulate the winner. But why does the other seem to be yielding the field in a fearful manner?

CT Gays

Gay Patriot is pleased to see CT dealing positively with the civil union issue. Why should gays be insulated from the trials and tribulations of legally committed relationships? Share the joy! I know that Maggie's is not of one mind on the matter, but I'm the Bird Dog in Chief. It ain't "marriage." 

Street-Fighting in Iraq

An unclassified report from the field concerning small squad operations in Iraqi urban areas, with detailed tactical advice. Fascinating.

The Essential Rolling Stones

Hey you youth out there! Enough of that Jimi Hendrix stuff, and that semi-lame Jim Morrison. If you want to get familiar with the good stuff, the Brit blues guys really got a grip on white rockin blues. Too gritty and menacing to be pop. Despite the wonderful Yardbirds, the Stones take the cake. And they usually mix it up with some sweet ballads. As good as ZZ Top is, what would they be without the Stones?

As a lad, we heard the Stones before we latched onto the Beatles. Maybe it was just chance - we were the trendy bunch that used fake ID's to hit the hot NYC clubs during vacation, and it was our baby sisters who listened to the Beatles. Not that you could hear any of these guys in NY. (Soon, I will need to post my pop music essay.) LOVE The Beatles - everything they did in their very short, brilliant career. The Beatles were highly innovative pop, but the Stones rocked it nasty, which well-bred, mannerly kids got a big kick out of. Like the college kids today liking rap. At the time, we had not heard of Dylan yet - only the wierd granola folk-guitar kids had heard his first album - and we were all in love with Joanie Baez; we heard The Kingston Trio (Charlie on the MTA) and stuff like that as an alternative to the smarmy "greaser-pop" crap of the time (which I very much enjoy hearing now...once in a while..it's a bit one-dimensional). Motown didn't exist yet in our universe - that is another huge story. Still in love with Joanie's voice.

Gotta start with Out of Our Heads. The first Stones recording I heard. As I recall, I heard this before I ever heard Dylan. Man did it sound earthy and hard and real compared to the tripe on the radio, but I had never heard Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf or Robert Johnson. I would soon, and would finally become a Delta Blues fan. But they had studied those guys, and Chuck Berry too. Satisfaction, and The Last Time, and more good stuff.

Advance to 12X5, with the immortal Time is on My Side and It's All Over Now.

Like the Beatles, the Stones began with a lot of borrowed American songs but they used all that history as a foundation for their development and growth. It's still only 1965, but December's Children represents the real beginning of Jagger and Richard's song-writing. Get off Of My Cloud and Blue Turns to Grey. I understand that the Stones weren't fond of this album, but I was/am. It's an almost sentimental collection.

In 1966 came Aftermath, as the musicians took over from the businessmen. The UK version is much better than what I heard in my prep-school dorm in 1966. Think, Flight 505, the wonderful Under My Thumb. "Under my thumb, she's a siamese cat of a girl...."

On Between The Buttons - there are two versions of this album - the Stones came into their own, and began to claim their territory of blues-influenced edgy rock-pop. Ruby Tuesday was Beatle-ish, but Let's Spend the Night Together was fairly straight-forward Jagger & Richards. And it has Complicated, now used for TV ads. Relieved to know these guys aren't starving.

1969's Let It Bleed is my final Stones recommendation. Their masterpiece, with creepy stuff, druggy stuff, country stuff including my favorite Honky Tonk Women. Brian Jones died during this recording - I have no idea how Keith Richards has kept himself alive all these decadent years. Lucky. Same for Mick, I guess.

Since then we have had Jumpin Jack Flash and lots of other stuff, but this fine early stuff is what the Stones stand on today. Not one bit of this is old-fashioned.