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Bird Corner
If birds gossip, I bet that
Cardinals are the most trash talked of all birds.
I bet that Mourning doves don’t
mind if you refer to them as Morning doves by mistake.
Some of them probably wish you’d call them Turtle doves every now and
then, although they probably won’t mention it out of politeness.
But I bet that all Mourning doves hate being called Pigeons; they've worked too hard to be denied the distinction. I also bet a Pigeon will never
correct you if you mistakenly refer to him as a Mourning dove. Posers.
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“..Or what not”, "I have to tell you.." and “that being said..” have
joined other popular and meaningless phrases including, “...and things of that nature..” that simply
fill up time during a conversation. It makes me miss “Um” and “..and like…”, which
while still distracting, are shorter.
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When I was a kid, if an old person went “off the
rails”, he or she had “hardening of the arteries”. It usually happened to “really old
people”, and back then most people usually died
in their sixties. Now the majority of us are living
to be really old by comparison to those days, and everyone I know has a relative with dementia or Alzheimer’s. Still, I hear the word awkwardly and even intentionally mispronounced
as “old-timers” or “Alltimers”. Is it
because of the fear that most of us have a fairly good chance of ending up with Alzheimer’s
or watching and helping a loved one live with it that causes this reluctance to use the correct
words and accept the challenges of the disease into our collective fluent consciousness?
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I’ve known a few people who are always starting
a project to fix something, usually because someone has pressured or nagged him
or her into it. Invariably the project,
although still worthwhile and necessary, loses its status as “the most
important thing that must be addressed right away” and stalls. At that point, the project doer gives a sigh
of relief that the spotlight is off and the
nagging has ceased, and throws a tarp
over the project. I’ve noticed that the
United States has a bunch of these urgent must do projects that have petered out
without resolution after having their focus replaced with a newer, sexier or
more dangerous scandal/emergency/tragedy fix of the moment. I wonder how these hot problems seem to cool and fall off the radar without notice. The government must go through a lot of
tarps.
Old News
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This situation seems to have fallen into the
forgotten project category, but I heard a pretty good suggestion for addressing
the recent (and apparently now stalled and tarp- shrouded) “Border Crisis”. When an illegal adult tries to come across
the border, we should send him or her back across the border immediately. When an illegal and unaccompanied child tries
to come across the border, we should provide medical care and safe living
accommodations while determining the child’s nation of origin, and then send
the kid back to that country. We should
then send the nation of origin a notification with an itemized reduction in
international aid paid to that country for all costs associated with the care
and return travel expenses of said child.
Sounds reasonable to me.
On the bright side, if things continue as
they are with loosey goosey mass and government sanctioned illegal immigration
of kiddies, there’s a good bet that in about ten years the USA will start a
winning streak in the World Cup.
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Call them lost opportunities, but there have
been a bunch of disappointing and even painful moments in my life when it just didn’t occur to me to
start looting area businesses.
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I saw Seth MacFarlane on a talk show. He did some Family Guy voices at the gushing
behest of the host. The delighted and enthusiastic
audience just went wild with crazy laughter and applause. Apparently he was able to sound just like the
animated characters he created and voices every week.
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I hear people comparing the growth of modern day terrorism to the rise of Nazism. Some argue that the comparison isn't valid, but I do wonder if any world leaders in the 1930s publically
considered “containing" Hitler, or in the 1940s described his
actions as being “extraordinarily irresponsible.”
If Twitter existed back then, I bet Hitler would have been the subject
of some very strong hashtags.
