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Year: 2007

Three Bird Lunch

My classroom has no exterior windows and if I get busy, it’s easy to go a whole day with no idea of what the weather is like outside. This time of year, however, it’s beautiful and so, I’ve taken to going for walks around the building. It’s good to get out for some exercise and even more fun to see what kinds of wildlife I can identify. Today, I brought my camera.

I’ve been especially fascinated by the killdeer around the building. Initially, it was its call that caught my attention, and so I stopped to discover these noisy shorebirds that live nowhere near shore. Apparently their natural habitats are parking lots near fields and golf courses.

When I go for my walks, I always look forward to getting around to the west side of the building where they like to congregate in the drainage ditch, which this one discovered helps make him especially photogenic.

I see mockingbirds all the time, and today, I actually managed to get a picture of this one.

I’d like to try to get one displaying the white flashes on its wings, but that will take a bit of patience.

Finally, I saw this scissor-tailed flycatcher hanging out waiting to be photographed.

I’ve seen these birds all over the place around here, but I never knew what they were until today. The tip-off, of course, was when I saw one catch a fly in midair, his scissor-like tail streaming behind him. Now that I know what he is, I get to add him to my list.

In addition to the three I photographed, I also regularly see barn swallows, turkey vultures, white-winged doves, and some kind of hawk that I haven’t been able to name yet, although, I didn’t see him today.

It’s a funny thing walking around the building. Looking outward, I see birds, wild and free, filling me up with enough of the outdoors to go back in for the rest of the day, and all of it surrounding a building full of juvenile offenders. I wonder what they think about when they see the birds outside, or if they even notice them at all.

Weekend Cat Blogging: Simon Sees Birds

Today marks the return on Weekend Cat Blogging here at Coyote Mercury. Don’t worry, my fellow lovers of the pointy-headed hounds, Weekend Hound Blogging will continue, though they’ll have to occasionally sit out a weekend.

Simon is doing great. He likes playing feather toy and he follows us around, but his favorite activity is sitting on my nightstand watching the birds and squirrels in the backyard.

Simon is fitting right in. He never had to go through that I’m-a-new-cat period of hiding under furniture for the first week. In fact, he acts as though he’s always been here and at two weeks, it already feels that way to us.

After adopting him, we realized that we’d gotten him exactly seven months to the day after losing Morrison, and while we still miss the big guy, it’s certainly fun to make a new friend.

Update: Visit Simon’s new friends at the 159th Carnival of the Cats hosted by Bad Kitty Cats.

The Lost Book Club: Carrie

Continuing my effort to read the books that appear on Lost, I’ve arrived at Stephen King’s Carrie, which makes its appearance in “A Tale of Two Cities,” the season three opener.

Prior to Carrie, the only Stephen King books I’d read were his more recent ones (except for Firestarter, which I read perhaps 100 times in eighth grade) so going back to his first novel was kind of fun.

Carrie White is the girl that gets picked on by all the mean popular girls. She has her first period at age seventeen in the shower after gym class. Her insanely religious mother never told her what this meant, and Carrie thinks she’s bleeding to death. The other girls make fun of her. Carrie is bitter, confused and angry. With the onset of her late puberty, she also develops telekinetic powers. One girl tries to make amends. Carrie goes to prom. There’s a practical joke and then Carrie turns her powers against her classmates.

My English classes just finished reading Lord of the Flies (my Lost post on that is here) and the question always comes up: what would happen if it were a bunch of girls? With Lord of the Flies in my head, I couldn’t help but think of Carrie as a kind of female version, with Carrie playing the part of poor doomed Piggy. With that thought in mind, it was hard not to think of Carrie as an examination of the effects of cliquish cruelty on the outsider, the kind of fiction that makes one think of things like Columbine.

Unlike much of King’s more recent work, Carrie is short and brisk. It’s a fast-paced novel that tells the story from a variety of viewpoints including investigatory committee hearings, police reports, letters, books written by survivors, scientific articles, and popular news pieces all interspersed with King’s no-frills narration. It’s one of those books where the form is part of the enjoyment of the text. A good read.

On to Lost. The first five minutes of season three was one of the most amazing sequences I’ve ever seen on TV. We meet Juliet hosting a book group meeting with no idea who she or any of the members are. She puts in a CD, burns some muffins and deals with book group members who complain about her book choice: Carrie. There’s a rumbling, they all run outside and there in the sky is Oceanic 815 breaking up above them. Suddenly, we realize that Juliet is one of the Others and that they live in nice houses with electricity and plumbing. They have the ability to score at least ten copies of recent editions of Carrie from the outside world. Your head spins.

Juliet says she chose Carrie because it’s her favorite book. What does this reveal about Juliet? Well, now that I’ve read Carrie and gotten to know Juliet a bit better its easy to see that Carrie White and Juliet the Other are both outsiders in their communities. Like Carrie, Juliet plots revenge (I wrote about this in my To Kill a Mockingbird post) against her own people. They are cruel to her (first sentencing her to death and then finally branding her in “Stranger in a Strange Land”) and don’t appear to think of her as one of them.

Like Carrie White, Juliet vacillates between being sweetly concerned with being liked and being an accomplished and merciless asskicker, though without Carrie’s telekinetic powers (I think). We saw this in last Wednesday’s episode (“Left Behind”) in which, Juliet cuffed herself to Kate so that she would have someone to be with after being abadoned by the Others. She appears to want to be with the Oceanic 815 survivors, but her manipulative nature and the fact that she wasn’t straight with Kate suggest to me that she may not be 100% on the side of the survivors. Perhaps, Like Carrie, Juliet is ultimately on her own side and all the while wishing desperately that she could fit in somewhere.

Next week’s episode features more Juliet flashbacks with Sayid, himself an accomplished and merciless asskicker, apparently offering to kill her if she doesn’t tell him everything. Can’t wait.

Other connections via Lostpedia:

  • Carrie White, the eponymous heroine, attends Ewen High School. The principal of that school is named Henry Grayle (similar name to Henry Gale).
  • In a Carrie TV Movie, the role of villainess Chris Hargensen was played by Emilie de Ravin, who currently portrays Claire.

This is also yet another Lost book that deals with mental/psychic/telekinetic powers.

Having nothing to do with Carrie, but interesting nonetheless, here are some links to three interesting posts about last week’s controversial Nikki & Paolo episode, “Expose” (which I really liked, by the way):

Click here to read all of my Lost book posts, or here for the index.

Next up… Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov.

Friday Random Ten

And on this Friday, made especially good by not having school today, the first ten off the ‘pod…

  1. “Houses in Motion” – Talking Heads – The Name of this Band is Talking Heads
  2. “Sorrow” – Pink Floyd – A Momentary Lapse of Reason
  3. “I’m in Great Shape/I Wanna Be Around/Workshop” – Brian Wilson – Smile
  4. “Five Room Love Story (Live)” – Cowboy Junkies – Waltz Across America
  5. “Windfall” – Son Volt – Trace
  6. “Feel So Bad” – Lightnin’ Hopkins – Blues Kingpins
  7. “Antiquity” – Chicago Underground Trio – Flamethrower
  8. “I Love Her All the Time” – Sonic Youth – Bad Moon Rising
  9. “Sing a Simple Song” – The Meters – The Meters
  10. “Open Country Joy” – Mahavishnu Orchestra – Birds of Fire

That is an eclectic set to say the least.

The Talking Heads tune at the start comes from my all time favorite live album. It covers the Heads from their post-punk minimalism through the expanded Remain in Light version of the band, which is still one of the most intriguing and thrilling musical adventures I’ve ever listened to. I had The Name of this Band… on tape for years and years. And years. Every time I went to a record store, I checked to see if it was out on CD, but no luck.

Few people I knew had heard it, and by 2004, the tape was getting pretty run down. The one day, lo, I saw it at the record store, not just on CD, but remastered and full of extra tracks from the Remain in Light days. The best parts, of course, are “Born Under Punches,” “Crosseyed and Painless,” and the ominous “Psycho Killer” that opens disc two. This was a band at the height of its powers and sometimes it seems the world is still catching up.

A Mercurial Coyote

As one might guess from the title of this blog, I like coyotes. Yes, yes, it’s true. I never rooted for the roadrunner, though I like them too.

Though I prefer old coyote stories in the Native American trickster tradition or even the Western tall-tale genre, I like a modern coyote story as well so needless to say, this story caught my eye:

Employees and customers at a downtown Chicago Quiznos sandwich shop were stunned to see a coyote walk through the propped-open front door Tuesday afternoon and lie down in a cooler stocked with fruit juice and soda.

So fruit juice and soda? I figured he’d go straight for the roasted roadrunner on rosemary parmesan (ten times as fast as you can).

Assuming he’s uninjured and healthy, he’ll be released to the wild where he will promptly order an Acme anvil, Acme Quiznos employee disguise suit, and Acme deli meat slicer in order to build a fiendishly complicated Quiznos invasion device.

More on CBS

So Long, Big Ugly Billboard

Back when this blog was only a week old (and hosted on Blogger), I took on one of the big issues of the time: big, ugly billboards.

I was inspired (or should I say provoked?) by a gigantic billboard that was erected near our neighborhood, surely making it one of the biggest erections in recent history. Well, it seems the county has won its legal battle with the apartment complex whose billboard can be seen for miles, as I realized when I first drove on the new toll roads.

I’m pretty sure you can see the thing from space.

At any rate, it sounds like it won’t be up much longer, which is good news for anyone who (like me) sees billboards for the vile eyesores that they are.

The Color of Jazz

My aunt and uncle gave me The Color of Jazz: Album Cover Photographs by Pete Turner for my birthday. I’ve been enjoying it a few pages at a time since December, and unfortunately, I’ve finally finished studying the images and reading the accompanying text.

It’s a beautiful book, LP sized to give the full effect of the album art that’s usually shrunk to CD at best or iPod screen at worst, truly made for enjoying the full-size renditions of such iconic covers as Wave and The Sound of New York.

Turner did covers mainly for albums produced by Creed Taylor for Impulse!, A&M, and CTI during the 1960s and 70s. The process was interesting to say the least. Taylor would give Turner an album title only, and Turner would create or find an image that more often than not took the title in a different direction, moving away from the artist portraits that were so in vogue at the time.

The work is amazing. Turner relies heavily on colored filters to create sublime images that are as haunting as they are vivid. His images take the music of such artists as Antonio Carlos Jobim, Freddy Hubbard, George Benson, Deodato, Joe Farrell, and Milt Jackson among others to new realms, often connecting with the music in surprising ways such as with his unsettling image from the cover of Joe Farrell’s Canned Funk: a glass eye floating in a newly opened can of peaches.

Oddly, I didn’t realize how many of the CDs in my collection are graced by Turner’s images and how many of the albums he did that I don’t have but are on my list. Reading this, I can’t help but be saddened by the way that the new download culture of music is dispensing with the notion of visual art accompanying the music. I never bought LPs, but I loved CDs for their packaging. Of course, the whole notion of the album seems to fading away as well.

To have a look at some of Turner’s jazz covers, check out this site devoted to Turner’s work.

Backyard Birds

Here’s a better shot of one of the Carolina Bewick’s Wrens who is nesting in the box on our porch. He actually came up while I was outside with my camera. Probably to demand mealworms. I checked the box and saw that the eggs hatched today. Hopefully, I’ll be home when flying lessons start.

Last weekend, we decided to see what other birds we could attract. I put up a woodpecker feeder since my wife saw one in the yard the other day. I’ve never seen one before, but the seed block had been pretty heavily pecked by the time I got home.

The only finches I’ve seen in the yard are house finches, but I put up a finch feeder in the hopes that we’ll attract some goldfinches. I think it may be the wrong time of year for them to be here, but perhaps if I plant a garden of lettuce, they’ll come as they seem to have for Amy at Esau.

So far, though, it’s mostly white-winged doves, house sparrows, and Carolina chickadees around here, although this afternoon I did hear a song I hadn’t heard before. The woodpecker, perhaps? I’m hoping to add him to my list.

And, of course, our wrens, one seen here singing “Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons.”

Visiting the Pond

Tonight was one of those perfect spring-in-Austin evenings when the air is cool, so unlike how it will be in a few months. Perfect for a trip down to the pond. I need to remember these nights when it’s 90 degrees three hours after dark. These are the days when there’s nowhere I’d rather be.

Walking along, listening to the birds stake their evening claims, I noticed this tree that seemed to be reaching towards me in a way that made me stop to make sure it was just a tree. It was, and a nice one at that.

I walked along the trail to the dam and spent a little while watching barn swallows swoop out over the water, diving along the surface to grab insects before soaring back into the sky. Swallows are probably my favorite birds; they’re such graceful flyers and when I watch them, all grace and wonder, it isn’t long before I’m with them, oblivious to the ant mound I’m sitting on.

Less arresting than the aerobatics of the swallows, some ducks American Coots paddled slowly out in the middle of the pond, too far out to get a decent shot, so this one will have to do. I’m trying to figure out what these are, but they’re too far out for my zoom. I’ll have to go back with my binoculars this weekend.

These spring nights, when the sun sets so late, the air is cool and everywhere spring green trees and wildflowers make for perfect walking, perfect evenings, perfect…