Avian Crack Cocain

So we have a bird now. We don't actually own it, it just visits us, often. It's fairly small, and mostly black with a nice little bit of orange under the wing. It has a fun little "chirp chirp chirp tweeeeeeeeeet" call, and oh, by the way, it's a drug addict. That's the only possible explanation. I'm thinking crack cocaine because that's the only substance I know of that delivers this level of derangement combined with a nearly suicidal need for more. Definitely crack cocaine. Identifying the problem was not easy at first, because bird crack and human crack have some key differences. Both versions of crack create irresistible addictions, but human crack looks mostly like small chunks of dirty glass whereas bird crack, apparently, looks more like the side view mirror of a red Volkswagen Jetta. It can also resemble the side view mirror of a gold Nissan Maxima. We're fervently hoping that it does *not* bear any resemblance to a titanium blue Hyundai Veracruz, which happens to be in the shop right now but is due out any day, otherwise some "serious action" might have to be taken. Let me explain exactly what we are dealing with here.




This little black and orange bird simply will not leave the side view mirrors of any of our vehicles alone. Not only does he think it's OK to hop around on the mirror casing, he apparently believes that if he achieves the exact right unladen velocity, wing speed, and general agitation level he will be able to fly into the mirror itself, finding I suppose 77 vestal virgins, a pot of gold protected by a tiny black and orange leprechaun, or maybe just more bird cocaine. And here's a fun fact (yes it is) for those of you who have *not* studied avian scatology recently: birds can produce their own weight in poop approximately every 37 minutes. This speed is accelerated if there is automotive paint nearby, a substance which, for unknown reasons, was specifically designed to disintegrate if bird poop is so much as mentioned in it's presence. So no, I'm not very happy with our visitor at the moment. Not only do the review mirrors of our vehicles look like they were recently caught in an eruption from Mount Saint Birdpoo, but the windows themselves have a wonderful sort of powdered poo faux finish appliqué where the stupid things wings grind in yesterdays lunch as he tries to fly through the mirror to Neverland. And you can't keep the car clean, because humans sleep, whereas drug crazed little bird do not. So what to do, what to do...

Scare him off? Well that sounds like a good idea, but remember that drug addiction is a powerful force, even for tiny little birds. Now I'll be the first to admit that living in a residential neighborhood in a nice little town that could stand in for Mayberry (if Mayberry ever came up sick) probably lowers me down on the "potentially dangerous predators" list, but I should get *some* reaction when I approach an undersized bird. Not with this little guy. I walk out the door, talking to him in the same voice that makes the much larger family dogs go belly up and pee themselves, and he barely acknowledges me. He doesn't even flinch until I am *almost* within arm’s length, then he doesn't fly away, he just hops down to the window sill. I take another step and he hops back to the back window sill. I again close the distance and he finally leaves the car, but only to land a few feet away, raise one little bird leg as if to look at his little bird watch, cocking his head sideways, and clearly says "Aren't you late for work?" When I finally actually *run* at him he flies about 20 feet away and starts wolfing down food as fast as he can, eyeballing me the whole time. "You see that?" he says, "That was a blackberry. You didn't see it? That's OK, I'll be replaying it for your on your car in about 15 minutes. You can catch it then".

So my other option, short of a flamethrower (which would probably also damage the paint) is to park the cars in the garage. That would be a fantastic idea if not for the black hole in there. I mean an actual, physical black hole. Irritatingly enough, it’s a very tiny black hole. If it had the full working force of a real black hole it would be awesome. Some day someone will invent a trash compactor that is basically a black hole in a box and we’ll be able to crunch down a whole house to the size of a pop tart. Of course, you’re not going to want to drop a 10,000lb pop tart on your foot, but still, it would be cool. Unfortunately, our black hole only has enough power to draw everything into the garage, without actually crushing it. I would just bite the bullet and clean the garage out (again) but if I did that and parked the car in there, by the next morning it would be hopelessly jammed in by all the new junk that accumulated in there during the night. Clearly that’s not acceptable, so where does that leave us? Honestly I don’t know. I’m fairly certain my ten year old will call PETA on me if I “take drastic action”. I’m considering a plastic owl (because I’ve done such a good job of outsmarting this bird to date), hiding the mirrors each night with a bag, or re-watching some old Wile E. Coyote cartoons and trying to get the mailing address for those ACME catalogs he always seemed to have lying around. I like the last choice best. Those always seemed to work out.

Wish me luck… meep meep.

P.S. I did find this which may make me rethink the ACME plan.

This morning in the shower (no, it's not that kind of site)

Me (in shower): Hmm... I wonder if there isn't a high paying job out there somewhere who's description is "Spend time in shower"?

Wife: I only think you could get that job if you were some kind of hot Playboy type chick.

Me: You know, I think the surgery might be worth it...


Because hot showers are just that good.

To Edit or Not to Edit...

OK, I just want to take a second and apologize for my last post. I may go the rest of my life without coming across something as rich in comedic potential as that movie (Happening), but instead of thinking it through and really putting together a good post, I just put down the first things that came to my fingers (notice I said fingers, and not mind, because apparently those two operate at different speeds, and sometimes with completely different thought processes). Granted, I was bleary eyed and dumbfounded by the movie I had just seen, but c'mon, I had in front of me what could only be described as the penultimate REASON for the existance of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and I whiffed at it. My bad. So the question is, would it be bad etiquette to go back and take another stab at it, or do I have to let the corpse of my former post lie mouldering where it fell?

By way of atonement, I point you to this awesome website: RiffTrax. It's by the creator of MST3K, and you can not only watch clips online from the latest movies and shows, you can ORDER SOUNDTRACK OVERLAYS for a huge host of movies. Happiness, thy name is RiffTrax.

The worst movie... ever.

Ok, so we saw "The Happening" tonight and I just have to say that even referring to that thing as a "movie" is... well, it's just wrong. I'm not going to waste time looking up the definition of "movie" on wikipedia, but I'm almost certain it would use words like "story", "plot", "acting" and "climax", all of which were conspicuously missing from whatever it was we just saw. M. Nyght Shamwow has definitely played himself out. I would give a "spoiler" warning before I move on with this, but I am being dead honest when I tell you that nothing I say about this movie can make it any less enjoyable than it already is. It doesn't even have camp classic potential, it's just... bad. It's so bad I can't even hold it in my head. Every single part in the movie was so entirely disconnected from every other part that it's like trying to hold a bunch of oiled BBs together in a fishing net. I'm forgetting more and more of it as I type. Oops, there goes another meaningless, unrelated, silly little bit of stupidity. Bye bye wasted grey matter. I hardly knew thee... bleh. So, back to trying to decipher the point behind this tragedy. Ready? Go.

As nearly as I can tell, everyone on the left coast is now in a race to see who can get their Eagle Scout Envirowonk badge first, and M.N. Shammy is now vying for the lead with this movie. I would like to add here that I am actually an environmentalist in the original sense of the word, in that I believe we should try to take care of the planet. I have children, and I would like for them to have trees to play in and air to breathe. I am *not*, however, an environmentalist in the new sense of the word, which apparently includes the belief that humans are some sort of geo-rash on the surface of the earth, just waiting for a good creme to come along and clear us up... which is, coincidentally, the closest I can come to finding a point in Mr. Shama-lama-ding-dongs movie. Apparently, the plants are really mad at us for being here, and spontaneously evolve a neuro-toxin that causes us to kill ourselves with the closest and/or most macabre tool available (because evolving a poison that would kills us directly would have been just mean, not to mention clearly outside the realm of possibility). All these plants must have missed the reports on how much the earths biomass has increased over the last few decades, but then again, they are just plants. Plants that are capable of developing and un-developing neurotoxins in a matter of hours, communicating over long distances among varied species, and also apparently capable of summoning up a pretty darn vicious wind, ala Moses and the Red Sea. Pretty much everything but read an environmental report noting that plants are doing pretty well right now. Maybe they should have taken a Rasmussen poll before going off the deep end... You know, dangit, this movie was so pointlessly stitched together that I can't even figure out how to work in some paragraph breaks in a review about it. I'm just going to start throwing them in at random, unless my lawyer advises me that tossing in random and meaningless style elements in a story might somehow constitute a blatant plagiarism of M. Nyghts movie. Next Paragraph:

Sometimes I like to use the phrase "heavy handed" when describing a movie or book in which required plot elements are just slapped onto the metaphorical table in front of you, with no preamble or finesse. Well, that analogy doesn't cut it for this story. It was more like watching a pre-teen boy who grew three shoes size in the last month trying to walk down a broken sidewalk with one leg asleep, his shoelaces tied together, and a Wild Kingdom tranquilizer dart sticking out of his neck. It just stumbled along drunkenly, crashing into various and unrelated story elements, until it finally just gave up and sank down against a wall somewhere. Ironically, the very first person to speak in the movie can't figure out who she is, can't complete a meaningful sentence, and finally decides that the best thing to do with herself is to jab a wooden stick into her neck. Perfect analogy for the movie. I'll buy the stick.

So, the story was lame, the elements disconnected, then how about the acting you ask? Yeah... no redemption there either. I'm guessing that the story was so bad that it just sucked the life out of the actors. In fact, I'll bet that in the original script the people didn't actually commit suicide when the neurotoxin hit them. I'll bet that idea came from the actors, shortly after they read the script for the first time. I'll even go further and suppose that in the uncut version you'll find a part about actor agents being brutally murdered by plants that were angry at where they had been cast... I mean placed.

The net net on this movie is that it's just about the worst excuse for a one line environmental message that has ever been perpetrated on an unsuspecting audience. Sadly, I would have been perfectly happy to listen to this one line message if it had been even slightly dressed up with a decent story, but alas, it was not. It was just... badness. I could go on for hours on this, but seeing as I already wasted an hour and a half my life tonight I think I'll just wrap it up with this deep and meaningful message which I think could, in itself, become an hour and half long feature film:

Do. Not. Go. See. "The Happening".

Good Googlie Goo

Well, since my last topic covered the use of the word "butt" as a comedic element, I suppose I might as well go ahead and talk about breasts for just a second now and get that one out of the way too. Specifically, I'm going to talk about my wife's breasts. She's 7 months pregnant now (yes, I still have it) and I have to say, I'm becoming concerned. Let me start by saying that before her pregnancy (and in the interest of fair disclosure, yes I'm bragging here) my wife was a tall, beautiful, slender, nicely curved woman with very well shaped but more or less standard sized breasts. That (the breast part) has begun to change now, in the same way that Mt. Vesuvius underwent some slight changes around AD 79. Exactly.

By now you have a good idea of what I am talking about, and have built a little mental model in your head to visualize the degree of change I am talking about. This model is wrong. Oh, I know. You could be one of those people who is already prone to huge exaggerations in your mental modeling. If that's the case, then you're still wrong. Probably by at least a factor of three. The rest of you aren't even in the ball park. It's not your fault. Your working from preconceived notions based on past experience, when what I'm talking about here just has to be experienced to be understood. It's like the Aurora Borealis, only without the whole frozen Alaskan tundra thing. I've actually told my wife that if I detect any more growth in "the valley" I'm going to start running guided mule tours in there ala the Grand Canyon. We're going to need the money to buy new clothes for her.

Now, I don't want to sound ungrateful. I know that there are impoverished village women in Africa that would love to trade places with my wife. I've seen them on Discovery Channel, God help me, so I'm not complaining. I'm just putting this out there as an observation, without judgment. Things, they be a'changin.

Oh how the mighty have grown old...

So, this exact phrase came out of my mouth on the way back from my 7 year old's soccer tournament in Nashville (yes, we drove to Nashville for a seven year old's soccer tournament, what of it?).

Quote:

"Enough! You girls can find something funny to talk about that doesn't involve the world 'butt'!"

I have nothing further to report.

Glacial Tractors

Let me preface everything I am about to say with the admission that I do, in fact, have a rather substantial case of road rage. It's not that I'm impatient, I just have a very low tolerance for inconsiderate people, most of whom seem to have drivers licenses. I do try to remember during these stressful times that I am an example to two little girls, and should therefor not act upon this rage, despite knowing full well that both I and the other driver really need some action on whatever issue is at hand. I just ball the emotions up nicely and tuck them away inside somewhere, because otherwise I might live a long and healthy life, which would just subject me to that many more idiots before I get to rest. So, with that groundwork laid, on to today's (actually a couple of days ago's) story.

Two days ago I start the long trek to work, from Helena to Mt. Laurel (don't ask why I haven't moved closer. I don't know). I'm waiting to turn left onto Highway 11 via the shortcut which, if you don't know about, I'm not going to tell you about, when a tractor of some kind proceeds to run the light. My light. It just lumbered on through the intersection that we were waiting to turn into, without a care in the world. Now, to be clear, when I say "runs the light" here I'm using the term "run" entirely metaphorically. A more accurate description would be, perhaps, that it "inched the intersection", or maybe that it "crept the intersection at sub-glacial speed". I'm almost certain that the tractor was not actually moving at all, but had simply been put into neutral to allow the earth to turn beneath it. You may think I'm exaggerating here, but allow me to explain the actual order of events: The tractor entered the intersection just a few seconds after our light turned green. Two minutes later, when our light turned red again, the tractor was... still in the intersection. So there you have it. I'm not sure what that comes to in feet per second, but I'm guessing it's pretty darn slow. What I really don't understand is, if he was already so close to "stopped" that only the most advanced scientific equipment known to man could even register his motion, why not just stop when the light turned red? It's not like he was going to stand that thing on it's nose, trench up the concrete, and throw himself through the empty metal frame that used to hold a windshield. Was he worried about the approximately 15 feet of ground he would lose during the two minute wait at the light? Because if he was late for work, he really, really picked the wrong vehicle. So I didn't understand that part at all. Fortunately for me, despite having to sit through another light, I was granted even more time to contemplate happy-tractor-driver-guy because, of course, he was only about 20 yards beyond the intersection when the light turned green again. There was barely enough room to fit me and the two cars in front of me onto the road behind it without blocking the intersection! Luckily for me I was still in the tiny little Volkswagen something-or-other rental (the kind of car that comes as standard emergency escape equipment in a Cadillac Escalade, usually stored to the left of the spare tire). Things get a little hazy after that but I can say with certainty that 1) I was on Highway 11 for some undetermined amount of time, 2) the pain in my left eye went away by noon, and 3) my vision is pretty much back to normal now. All's well that ends well I suppose.

So that was Wednesday's driving adventure. I can't decide if I should tell you about Thursday's driving adventures next, in which I encounter a train doing it's "Tribute to Eternal Stasis" or if I should just skip on to some other topic. Maybe the incredibly insane bird that is in love with both our cars (an Eastern Towhee, apparently)? I'll just have to see how I feel.