Sorta Straightened

I was about to say my problems with Blogger were cured, and then it went and ate my post.

Dammit.

Oh well.

No more ado. For lack of decent bird pictures this week, here's Friday Chordate Blogging.

OK, sorry for the delays, y'all, but Blogger is pretty much busticated for me for the forseeable future. Blogger support has been completely unresponsive. Here's the issue: I can't post anything from any browser on any Mac that I have in the house. So I know (a) it's not my machine, (b) it's not my browser, and (c) I'm not crazy.

The only way I'm posting this is by firing up VirtualPC, which I don't think I should have to do.

And not only can I not post things through Safari/Firefox/OmniWeb/IE on a Mac, I can't edit my template.

So if you want to see the .XML version of this [soon to be very rarely updated] blog, the path is http://home.comcast.net/~andyaxel/blogger/rss/atom.xml.

See you once Blogger fixes their technical difficulties.

Difficulties somewhat fixed. Still having issues, but whaddyagonnado?

(Anyone want to recommend a new blogging platform that I can access via a web browser on a Mac? Without me having to run a web server? Leave it in comments.)

When The Moon Hits Your Eye...

Aliens Raped My Eyeballs

So far as I know, this is a completely original construction from my fevered brain:

A race of aliens, strangely resembling the bounty hunter Bossk (albeit brighter green in skin tone, and brighter yellow of eye) , took over the planet after my failed mission to sail two fake battleships through an indoor lock system.

Their weapon? A pair of long, nearly invisible filaments which they could insert silently into your lachrymal ducts, and then a bioelectric current would shock you internally.

I awaken, my wife asking me what was I dreaming about -- and I recall muttering, "Aliens raped my eyeballs."

Uh, blogger?

What the hell is wrong with y'all these days?

Previews don't work... can't edit my template for days at a time...

Pull your heads out, for chrissakes.

Acronymitis

I've noticed that when I see 3-letter abbreviations on Tennessee license plates, my feverish recall of acronyms kicks in.

AEL - auto exposure lock

BSD - Berkeley Systems Development

CVB - Camper Van Beethoven

DMA - direct memory access

EDS - Electronic Data Systems

FCS - frame check sequence

GRE - generic routing encapsulation

HST - Hunter Stockton Thompson (RIP)

ISP - Internet service provider

JRE - Java Runtime Environment

KSU - Key System Unit

LVM - "left voice mail"

MSA - Metropolitan Statistical Area

NID - Network Interface Device

ORU - Oral Roberts University

POC - point of contact

QOD - quote of (the) day

REM - Michael, Peter, Mike, and Bill

SQL - "sequel"

TDS - terrestrial data service

UTM - uniform terrestrial mercator

VRF - virtual route forwarding

WTF - what the f***?

XTC - the best pop band ever

YYZ - cheezy Canadian sci-fi set to music

ZZZ - the interest quotient in this post

UPDATE: I've gotten a couple of emails regarding some of the content in my post below. According to those readers, I should not have said that Mr. Thompson should have turned the shotgun on Judith Miller or "Jeff Gannon."

And that's absolutely right.

Thompson used a .45. One Reporter's Opinion regrets that error.

I doubt that many people are unclear about the handle* on my blog, or at least I was until I started publishing this random detritus more regularly. I am not a reporter, nor, as the saying goes, do I play one on TV. I have too much respect for the profession to make much of myself as a journalist. A journalist journals. I don't have the discipline. I don't think that I couldn't have it -- it's simply not a practice that I've subscribed to much. So much of the journaling process seems to be introspective, mindless wankery, and I'd rather have something to say or a picture with which to say it.

So let me indulge in a trifle more mindless wankery:

Hunter S. Thompson, a journalist in the proud American tradition of the craft, is gone.

There are a number of zygotic thoughts running around my head, but I'm doing my best to avoid much handwringing until a bit more information is made available. That said, and in the wake of the controversy swirling around the margins of the putative world of American journalism, take note. Here was a man who asked hard questions, demanded hard answers, and lived a hard life. He embodied his profession, and goes to his grave a consummate professional.

Why he didn't turn the shotgun on Judith Miller or "Jeff Gannon" will remain, for me, one of life's cruel and eternal mysteries.

Yet we may never have the real answers behind his final moments. And so ends the life of one of America's most original contributors to essays and letters; an enigma to the last.

Selah.

* For those who don't know, the title is ganked from a song from The Minutemen:

what could be romantic to mike watt? he's only a skeleton. his body's a series of points with no height, length, or width. in his joints he feels life. his strongest connection between the yelling & the sleep. pain is the toughest riddle. he's chalk. he's a dartboard. his sex is disease. he's a stopsign.

Great Backyard Bird Count, Day 2.

Turkey vulture:



Carolina chickadee:



Cardinal:



Goldfinch:



Downy woodpecker:



Tufted titmouse:



Blue jay:



Carolina wren:



Red-breasted nuthatch:



House finch:




(Third day called on account of rain. No pictures. The final count was something like 24 distinct species in our backyard alone -- and most of those appeared within the first couple of hours of viewing on Day 1...)

Great Backyard Bird Count, Day 1

So I get home a little early from work, and I'm fussing around the kitchen when my wife starts screaming, "OH WOW! WOW! WOW!!!"

And, this is what she was seeing, although my capture of the moment is thanks to a lot of photo retouching...



Mind you, this is through a crud-covered screen and a window that's taken several long days of rain -- but that's a Cooper's Hawk with a rock dove in its talons. She saw the whole incident in living color. I was doing my best to capture the moment on digital film, with only moderate success.

Still. Pretty cool.

We filled out our GBBC form with several birds, including (1) Cooper's Hawk, and (1) rock dove [deceased].

Friday Bird Blogging

My most recent favorite subject, the mockingbird, in winter puffery:

And Now, For Something Completely Predictable

Oh, I'm conservative, and that's OK!
I pray all night and I shill all day!
(He's conservative, and that's OK!
He prays all night and he shills all day!)

Oh, I pimp the Right, for Talon News
Lifting text from the RNC
On Thursdays I do talk shows
And browbeat liberals with glee

Oh, I'm conservative, and that's OK!
I pray all night and I shill all day!
(He's conservative, and that's OK!
He prays all night and he shills all day!)

Scott calls on me in the press room
I like to toss softballs!
My journalism degree, it cost $50
Then I ran afoul of Kos

Oh, I'm conservative, and that's OK!
I pray all night and I shill all day!
(He's conservative, and that's OK!
He prays all night and he shills all day!)

Oh, I'm a closet queen, I use fake names
I'm HotMilitaryAction dot com
And after nailed for outing Plame
I may need to call my mom

(He's a closet queen! He uses... fake... names?
And hot military... UGH!!!)

Oh, I'm conservative, and that's OK!
I pray all night and I shill all day!

Because I'm Impatient

Mockingbird!



Shot with a Nikon 200-400 f/4 AF-S VR lens. Yep.

Guit With It

Friday shred blogging:



Nels Cline, fuckin' it up with Wilco, this summer in Nashville at Uptown Mix.

Not Quite Ready for Friday Bird Blogging

Pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) at Radnor Lake State Park, 1/30/05. This bird was about 30' up and about 100' from me.



I've been waiting a long time to get one of these in my lens, and I'm honestly a bit disappointed. It's not very sharp, and it's backlit, and there's a lot of foliage between it and me. Cropped & color balanced for web. Shot with a Nikon 300mm f4 ED lens, auto ISO, tripod mounted. The good news is that I finally got one in my lens. The bad news is that it may be a while before I find another. Here's hopin'.

Some yabbering idjits scared it off as they came down the trail talking about snowboarding.

Worst Possible Band Names

Some of my contributions to the agitprop-a-go-go at Peoplesforum.com.

(nods to Hayden and Bill. I am not worthy.)

: or ;
A Corpse Is A Corpse, Of Course Of Course...
A Little Daschle Do Ya
A Whiter Shade of Episcopalian
Abracadaver
Albany Jerk Reaction
Arroz Tu Di Okaychun
Ashcroft & Simpson
Ass Without Hats
Badly Drawn Curtains
Bell Biv Willem Dafoe
Boomtown Shithouse
BR6-66
Bridgestone Over Troubled Water
Burnings Pear
Buzzkill & The Wet Blankets
Camper Van Buren
Canarsie No Evil
Carlton Lutefisk & His Guitar Tuna
Churchill Downs Syndrome
Clawed Depussy
Cool Hand Puke
Crime & The Shitty Solution Provider
Crimea River
Cris Kirkwood's Valet Service
Crotchless Pansy
Da Folkeez
Das Luftwafflehaus
Dial M For Mordor
Duelin' Hambones
Düsseldork
Erie Silence
Ernest Tubb & Tile Cleanser
Everybody Loves Ramen
Flair For The Obvious
Fountains of Waco
Get Me A Toddler
Gnu Edition
Goddamn-a-Lamn-a-Ding-Dong
Godspeed You Black Betty, Bam Ba Lam!
Graham Cracker Station
Guided by Village Voice
Guillotine Spirit
Happy Happy Jihad!
Heywood Jablowme
I Pseud Your Ass Off
Ice Cream Koan
IF(IF(IF(IF(IF(IF(IF))))))) -- a.k.a. The Nested Ifs
I'll Be There Between One And Four
Jad County Fair and Livestock Auction
Jars of Klee
J'Syracuse
Leukorrhea, Dyscrasia, Scorcrasia & Thyme
Marchadigms
Mark Of The Mohel
Masalalalala Means I Love You
Maximum Fudd
Microbes & Shit
mIxEd CaSe
Mung Beans Ah Um
Mutt Bunch
Mutton Honey
My Buffer Runneth Under
My Morning Jackoff
No Use For No Use For A Name
Nom De Merde
Notorious G.O.P.
Office Of The Co-Dependent Prosecutor
Our Fans Suck
Paddy O'Shea & The Bleeding Ulsters
Parasite By The Dashboard Light
Pissedthataway
Pontiff & Lefty
Poughkeepsakes
Projectile Mamet
Quadroplegiaphenia
Quarterflush
Queef Richards
Red Hot Ashcroft on Ashcroft Action
Remember the Alamodome
Saigon Headchick Corea
Saudi Duty Time
Schadenfrög
Scraping Beatles Off The Wheel
Semisonic Youth
Shenzhenopoly
Shi'ite Hit the Fan
Shrubatrocity
Shut the Fuck Up, Portnoy
SkWrl
Sly and the Family Stallone
Sonic Yoopers
Stabbing Burtward Stabbing Adamwestward
Tabouli 'N Algebra
Teratogen & Tonic
The Blow Chunkies
The Darned
The Headcount Reductions
The Jaw Naw Say Queer
The John Denver Blues Explosion
The Real Slim Sade
The Sanctimonious Regrets
The Sneering Missouri Whitebread Folk-Nazi Choir
The Snoggin' Toboggan
The Unoriginals
The When, Where, Why, and Howe
Thin White Grope
Three Lox Box
Trying Desperately To Be Liked
Tudor Sedan
Tupperware Seals and Crofts
Twelve Angry Mandingo
Uck Bowens
Velveeta Monologues
Veni, Vidi, ROCK!chi
Vincent Bugliosi Is Dead
Vulveeta
Wang Chunder
Wang Dang Sweet Putin
We Go Royko
Whack-A-Mohel
Won'tco
Xananthrax
Xavier Breath
Zeroic Measures
ZZ Norsemen

Friday Bird Blogging

Inspired by Bubba and Fletch, here's a late Friday (Backyard Song-) Bird Blog entry...



White-throated Sparrow, Zonotrichia albicollis (taken using a Nikon D70 with 300mm f4 ED lens).

I promised more soon, and for anyone reading this, I hope you clock this as "soon." Now, whilst I fiddle with the contents of my FTP directory and the previous post, I should be able to come up with something both eye-catching and educational.

So, starting from the top...

1) Donkey by the roadside. Straddling the fine line between pest and point of national pride, these creatures inhabit all of the island. There are even donkey crossing signs in Dutch, which I'm not sure has anything to do with the text "overkstande ezels." Anyhoo, here's one of them critters (or is that kritteren?):



(proper credit/copyright to my darling wife - J.C.W.)

2) A whiptail lizard, having a little hand-feeding. I was surprised by how tame they were:



3) Detail of the lizard:



...and more detail...



4) The ever-so-cheerful tropical mockingbird at the resort. Beautiful songsters, these are:




5) This is a Venezuelan troupial, a close relative of the oriole. The picture doesn't come close to capturing how brilliantly colorful that these birds are:



6) A pair of wading flamingo. Any photographers out there have hints for shooting these? I had a devil of a time at the tippy-top of my focal range on a Nikon D70 outfitted with an 80-400VR lens. The birds are so light in tone that in direct sun, you get almost total washout. And they like to stay at a respectable distance, too. If memory serves, I was shooting in spot focus mode, A priority, somewhere between f8 and f16. (Any SKBers that hang here can feed me back on the Bubba Blab, OK?)



7) The winner of the best in show among the participants in the Splash photo contest. The judge said it was the first time he'd given this award to a non-diver. I won a Suunto dive watch! Back story to this photo: I'd been shooting these birds relentlessly for about an hour. I was frustrated by what I was seeing in the LCD on the camera, so I went back to the truck to get my f3.5 24-120VR Nikkor, and put the 80-400VR away. I set the mode to "action," and wandered back towards the birds. Sure enough, they took off when I got a bit too close. I just kept my finger on the shutter and tried to follow them as best I could through the viewfinder, BLAM BLAM BLAM. I got two useful shots out of about 20. This was the best composed, even if the other shot had better detail.



8) Now, if the contest had been later, this would have been my submission:



Taken at a distance of about 2' through a Nikkor f2.8 105mm micro with flash. The iguana was cavorting around the swimming pool deck as we were wrapping up and getting ready to have a group photo taken. I managed to shinny up pretty close, and then that unmistakeable bit of felicity appeared in the form of a dragonfly. A rather thrill-seeking dragonfly, to boot.

So that's a bit of the trip in photos. Hope you enjoy!

Bon bini!

(Almost redundant here, but all photos are (c) 2005 Andy W. Please secure permission before use.)

Pictura di vakansi ariba Boneiru!

OK, I have no idea if that's proper Papiamento -- but these are selected pictures I took during my New Year's trip to Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles. For those who've not heard of it, this is a former Dutch colony (first settled by the Dutch in the late 1600s) which is today a paradise for scuba divers. As luck would have it, the scuba club that my wife belongs to makes an annual trip down there for fun, frolic, and of course, scuba. Being a non-diver, I found plenty to hold my interest, however.

First post -- mostly cultural stuff. These were selected from about 3.1G worth of digital NEFs. (I'll get around to wildlife in the next couple of days.

1) The resort: Divi Flamingo, in Kralendijk:



2) A local dog, one of the few ever encountered upon a leash. After having been there for about five days, I was beginning to wonder if anyone on the island actually owned any dogs. Sure enough. This one was checking us out from the house adjacent to the mangrove information center on Lac Cai Bay:



3) Cactus trees on the windward side of the island. These things are HUGE, and they're omnipresent on the island. I would hazard that these are somewhere in the 20' tall range:



4) Something you don't see every day just outside your bedroom window; the Queen Mary II:



5) Boats on Lac Cai. This area was pretty nifty. It's basically a large tide pool, and it's surrounded by mountains of conch shells. Not sure if these boats belonged to conchers, but it's a safe bet:



6) Darling wife standing before a fantastic vista of cactus and coral on the top end of the island near Malmok in the Washington-Slagbaai national reserve park:



7) Red skies at night, a sailor's delight. Kralendijk is a major port of call for Caribbean cruise ships -- and leading up to New Year's Eve, there was a different one in the bay every evening, although I believe that's a tanker on the horizon. Sunsets are fantastic every night, and even if it's cloudy, the visibility extends way out to at least 20 miles:



More soon.

Posted elsewhere, but worth mentioning here at the end of the year.

The best new grooves of 2004, from my list of purchases. And here, in no particular order:

Banyan, Live At Perkins Place. Mike Watt (Minutemen) and Nels Cline (Wilco) team up with Steven Perkins (Jane's Addiction) and kick out a set of furious fusion. Funky, jazzy, driving, fun. Easily Watt's best release of the year, aside from the DVD of him playing bass for the Stooges (and if you missed that, check it out -- the outtakes of Scott Asheton banging out Raw Power songs on a paint bucket and a box at an in-store is worth the price of admission.

Guided by Voices, Half Smiles of the Decomposed. If it must be their last album, then let it be. But, wow. This is how one goes out on top.

Elvis Costello, The Delivery Man. Thank dog the man had the sense to release this following that dismal release North. Love ya, Declan, but man alive, you should stay away from the torchy-feely-croony stuff.

Steve Earle, The Revolution Starts Now. This is the album that Jerusalem could have been. This is more what I expect from Earle, which is steps up from the previous -- and in this case, I measure him against the genius of Transcendental Blues. Oh, and if you're a fan like I am, you must check out the New West DVD of his performance from Austin City Limits in 1986ish. Whoa. Especially note his behavior coming out for the first encore. When he doesn't have a guitar in his hand, it's pretty damn obvious that he was in the throes of a blow habit.

Kings of Leon, Aha Shake Heartbreak. Based on a recommendation from Earle's XM radio show -- and is it ever good. Available now as an import. I believe this ground is already trod, so the less said the better.

A.C. Newman, The Slow Wonder. The New Pornographers tunesmith cuts a solo release, and crafts a wondrous work of power pop. (Honorable mentions here -- Neko Case's The Tigers Have Spoken, featuring The Sadies, and The Sadies Favourite Colours album. If you dig the Flying Burrito Brothers, check 'em out.)

Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, Who is This America? Props to Doyle Davis for leading me to this American ensemble kicking it Fela style -- I expect a lot more from this band during the next four years of a Bush administration. "Indictment" has to be one of the angriest ... well, indictments handed out against the war criminals in DC. Supposedly they were so damned militant at their show here at the Mercy Lounge that they were driving patrons away. Those who stayed saw a burning rendition of Afrobeat not soon forgotten.

Hoodoo Gurus, Mach Schau!. Taken from a bit of Beatles trivia, the Gurus reform to "make a show" of their rock prowess. Following hard upon the dazzling outing by Faulkner and Shepherd as The Persian Rugs, this Australian import is a must-have for Hoodoo Gurus fans, and could easily be well-loved by fans of Aussie rock. "Keep Your Powder Dry" was one of the most earwormy songs of this year for me.

Mission of Burma, ONoffON. Picking up where they left off, and not losing many steps.

Wilco, A Ghost is Born. Although it would have been great to have had Nels Cline do the studio work with the gang, this CD has gotten spun so many times around my house and my car that I'm under edict not to play it again where my wife can hear it for at least six months. Now that's monomania for you!