They're coming to get you Donald.

So it is a practical question; why would I read a book about pigeons?

The answers: it was just kinda neat.

Inspired by a brief but positive review in Seed magazine, I picked up Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan ... And the World and quickly became fascinated by the subject matter. Covering everything from the human-assisted evolution, breeding, carriers, war-time experiments, shows, races, cuisine, population control, conservation, origins, and even pigeon mothers who devote parts of their lives to feeding the creatures, Superdove is a remarkable evaluation of the species and the role it casually plays in our world.

But yeah, I know, it's a book about pigeons.

To date in my life, the most exciting role a pigeon has ever played for me was at the expense of a falcon nest that rested atop the USF&G building when I worked at Bell Atlantic in Baltimore (to date myself, both Bell and the building have moved on to new names many years ago). The falcon parents would often catch pigeons as food for their young, and it wasn't uncommon to find pigeon heads littering the street on my walk to work.

But something I've learned from taking photographs of animals over the past few years: the more you watch an animal, the more you can come to appreciate them no matter what they are. And while the facts of this book are interesting and sometimes downright compelling, the evidence of the extensive research Humphries put into writing this work is more than evident in not only the amount of detail provided, but for the obvious and expressed love of creatures that people typically at best ignore. Additionally, it is a very well written and accessible work, which is important for people like me who often find themselves reading when their brain is screaming to be given a nap.

Not long after closing the book, I looked to our kitchen to find our Sashacat looking intently out the window. I walked over to her and noticed the object of her attention: a dove (almost a pigeon), looking nervously towards us. "Oooh," I told Sasha, "Isn't she pretty?"

The dove gave me a cocked-head, worrisome look, while Sasha merted and bounced away, seemingly unimpressed.

But she was pretty. I think that is what reading a book about pigeons will do for you.

So yes, I read a book about pigeons, and I'm content to admit I'm happy I did.

It took every fiber of my being to not title this post "Gone Quackers," not even caring that wouldn't have made any sense.

The first eight songs of the morning after setting the iPod to shuffle play.

Skinny Puppy - Grave Wisdom: Fitting as I have been on a Skinny Puppy kick lately. Too Dark Park preceded Last Rights and The Process which were the two darkest industrial sounding releases which is probably my favorite sound from the band, with TDP teetering on the edge of that diversion.

Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah: Hey, the first repeated song on the Random Thursday.

Mogwai - Punk Rock / Puff Daddy / Antichrist: The mellow closing to my favorite Mogwai release.

Dalek - Vague Collection: With Dalek being an apparent favorite on the random playlist, this track is an ambient-turn-noisy affair.

Deerhoof - Gore in Crown: Fewer fans exist of the early Deerhoof which was mostly noisy and disjointed. Bad might be a better term to use, but I tend to like noisy and disjointed, so I'm not complaining. This is a poor live recording off The Man, The King, The Girl which does make one wonder what they were thinking at the time, but it was a precursor to better days.

Meshuggah - Disenchantment: That wakes me up. Good ol' loud drums, mean guitar, and screaming like a bear music.

Stewart Copeland - Coco: From The Rhythmatist, influenced from African music, instruments, and rhythms, this is the album Paul Simon's Graceland could have been if Graceland wasn't poppy and awful. This is a hard to find disc (or probably easy download, I suspect), but is well worth the effort to find.

Tom Waits - Rain Dogs: The title track from the album that started my nearly two-decade old fascination of his music.

Two kitties in our family took a cruel step into adulthood this week by being spade and neutered, our little girl Coco and my mom's cat Brady, pictured above.

Coco is doing very well, although we are glad she is finally finished with her pain medicine which seems to have put her in a long-lasting state of being stoned. She has been oddly angry, growling at her big sister, biting me whenever she has the chance, and increasing her pupils to the size of dimes as she gets spun to attack whatever phantom birds she imagines flying around the house. She is always goofy, but not mean goofy, so we are glad to see her pleasant demeanor return this weekend.

Brady apparently put on a horror show at the veterinarian office, hiding in his cage and not letting anybody near him until my Mom had to be summoned into the depths of the office to coax him out. Our late Mindy Cat had a similar reaction years ago, finally having enough manhandling and completely going off on the office staff. Mindy, who might have been one of the sweetest creatures alive in the world, had injected so much angst into the office staff that folks didn't want to work with him, and towards the end of his life he even shook the calm of a 30-year seasoned specialist who had, in many ways, seen it all.

I guess a visit to the doctor can bring out the worst in all of us.

Mindy, the vicious beast.

The first eight songs of the morning after setting the iPod to shuffle play. I really do listen to new music...it is the ipod that seems to ignore most songs recorded after 2000:

Brian Tyler - Elder Hole: From the Bubba Ho-Tep soundtrack; kinda works better in the realm of the entire album, but such is the risk of shuffle play.

The Dead Milkmen - Big Lizard: A high school favorite I never outgrew.

Sonic Youth - Trilogy: The Wonder: The grand finale from Daydream Nation; I remember the day when finding DN on CD was nearly impossible as it was out of print (or perhaps just never released; it was more complicated to figure these things out back in the stone age than it is now). When it was finally issued on disc, I'm sure I listened to it fifty times in a row. I've heard a lot of criticism that it gets long and boring by the end, especially with this 15 minutes, but I think the album is a great package.

Husker Du - Something I Learned Today: This is where I start becoming fascinated with the concept of "random play" on the ipod. Here we are, third week in a row with a Husker Du song, when the likelihood of one of their songs being played in the random 8 is about .17%. I realize, of course, that a Husker Du song is no different than any other song to the random function, and that I'm more perplexed at numerology than mathematics. But still...weird.

Johnny Cash - Danny Boy: From the American IV collection, ripped most notably for Hurt and The Man Comes Around, but most of the songs are usually a nice fall back when I want to hear something calm.

Dalek - 3:46: An even louder, crazier hip hop / noise song than normal from Dalek... a nice fall back when I don't want to hear something calm.

Talking Heads - Crosseyed and Painless: From The Name of this Band is Talking Heads release, another one that I had on vinyl for a long time before it was finally released on CD. I've never been overly excited about Talking Heads in that I've never gone out of my way to listen to them, but I tend to really like their live recordings (especially the video of the Stop Making Sense tour).

Pixies - Monkey Gone to Heaven: Heh, monkey.

This is Oz Jr.

Oz Jr. is one of many strays we feed at a nearby monastery. Over time, it is easy to get familiar with the felines, and they in turn become familiar with us, coming to greet us when we arrive, knowing that food is soon to follow.

We first notice Oz Jr. not long after we had adopted our Ozzy cat. Our adopted Oz spent the first couple months in our house trying to kick a nasty congestion problem which often resulted in massive chain sneezes and the occasionally projectile sticky-booger-goo to fly across our living room. Oz Jr., with a very similar perpetual look of concern on her face the way our boy seems to have, had a similar sneezing problem and would often sniffle and wheeze while begging for food.

But, Oz. Jr. always came to greet me ahead of the other cats and would even indulge me in allowing to give her a small scratch between the ears.

And then, one day, Oz. Jr. was just gone. This happens, of course, with strays. Even the best of life spans rarely eclipses two years, and I've seen many come and go over the years that I've been feeding them.

But, Oz. Jr. came back a few weeks ago much to our delight. She had a little ear snip which leads us to believe she was captured by a group that performs spade and neuter surgeries on stray cats in the area. She looks very healthy now, gaining some weight that she always seemed at a disadvantage of compared to the others.

She still greets me, leaving out a tiny whine that is very endearing.

She still wheezes, too. I suspect that will never go away.

And, just to note, a photo book of Oz Jr. and other strays can be found at the link below to Blurb.

Stray

A photographic retr...

By Bill Murphy

Book Preview

It annoys me that I signed up for email-only monthly statements from my mortgage bank per the advertisement of "going green," yet get at least two snail mail envelopes a week full of crummy loan-rate advertisements from them (true, I'm sure I could find a way to eliminate those by phone or Web, but that isn't really the point).

Our oldest cat was so grumpy this morning that she hid under a nightstand with her head slunk down like she lost her best friend. Either she didn't know it was Friday, or she was just annoyed it was morning already...a very human thing to do for a cat, I think.

I was very happy to find the service center from where I recently bought a new car was just as friendly and professional as the salesmen were before I bought the car. This is much better than the last car purchase experience I had.

Because I'm a dork, I ran like an idiot across the living room to scare our little kitten. Said kitten defended herself by freezing and falling off the back of the couch.

There are few things more annoying in the candidate interview process than asking a person their expertise on a skill they listed on their resume, only to hear them tell me that they have never performed that task before.

Our 2 year old cat has assumed a peculiar number of habits that a previous cat of ours had, even though he had never met that cat. One habit is demanding belly rubs by lying beside me, rolling on his side, and lifting his leg to allow for easy access to have his wobble belly stroked.

If I don't start reading all the books I have in backlog faster, I'll never get through them no matter how long I live.

When I was in high school, I thought Weaveworld was just about the best book ever written.

A few years ago, Nicole bought me an corrected proof which sat on the bookshelf patiently until I finally pulled it off a few days ago and started re-reading the tale, remembering small bits and pieces, but largely wondering why I thought it was such a strong novel at the time.

First off, I found the story to be much more dark fantasy than horror (as I had remembered it). Secondly, this is the first fiction tale I have read in a long, long time that focus the entire book from the viewpoint of one main character. Third, I was oddly intrigued (for no real reason) as to how Clive Barker broke the story into very tiny chunks, almost similar to how I outline business writing instead of lengthy prose. But, for its very bite-size chunks, I was really stunned as to how characters, settings, and scenes could be presented thoroughly with very little elaboration. I probably found this much more remarkable than I did when I read it (gasp) twenty years ago, but it really helped me remember why I thought so highly of Clive Barker back then.

Of course, I still do think highly of his writing, but as a grumpier adult, which isn't really the same as being a kid.

I also remembered the debates I had as a kid as to whether or not the book was in anyway inspired by the Prog-band Genesis album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, featuring "carpet crawlers" and a "cuckoo cocoon," where cuckoos was a term used for humans in the story. I suppose now the references were mild, but at the same time fairly obvious.

I suppose there is no sense of getting into the storyline (with the exception that it revived memories in my head that every good horror / fantasy story needs a coma storyline), but I'm really glad the book held up as well as it did in my mind.

The first eight songs of the morning after setting the iPod to shuffle play:

Husker Du - You Can Live At Home: Well, after my snarky comment last week about the Warehouse: Songs and Stories album, this song puts me in my place as it is one of my favorites from the collection. A loud, fast, fun ending to the lengthy release.

Genesis - Visions of Angels: Ah, my roots are showing on this one. Although it isn't something I listen to with much regularity anymore, Trespass is probably my favorite Genesis album. This song is interestingly dismal.

Deerhoof - Giga Dance: One of those bands who I listen to a lot but never really know the name of their songs. So, now I know this one; a fun disarray of rhythm, noise, and strange vocals.

The Everly Brothers - Kiss Your Man Goodbye: I kinda got into the Everly Brothers a bit after I heard a cover of Lord of the Manor by Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey. I was surprised to learn they had a fairly diverse catalog; in addition to the pop songs that are the most familiar, there was also a root-sy type of sound that is pretty interesting.

Tom Waits - Murder in the Red Barn: After seeing his show in Columbus a few months ago, it has pretty much been a Tom Waits summer for me, playing his music practically non-stop for weeks after the show.

Material Issue - Satellite: A while back I dumped every MI album onto the iPod and promptly forgot all about them. Pretty straight pop stuff, and this song is fun in its simplicity.

Flaming Lips - Rainin' Babies: Still really like their early - mid-90's stuff.

Boredoms - GO!!!!!: Heh, an hour long collection of noise from the Super Roots 5 release. Not a bad way to close out the random eight this week.

I was wondering why the sky was so dark when the forecast was for clear skies and sunlight this morning.

As I drove to the office, I realized the McCain/Palin rally in Northern Virginia was occurring 200 yards from my office door. As I tried to drive by the GOP happy folks who were walking against the red "don't walk" signals and occupying our office parking lot, I swear I could see the clouds growing thick in anticipation.

Ten minutes later, I made my way through the masses and hid myself securely in my office.

I hope it wasn't too immature to blast the Ministry song, "Thieves" from my car speakers (twice) while I inched my way through the crowd.

While Black Squirrel (Jack) will take peanuts right out of our hand, Gray Squirrel (Ianto) tends to get a little grumpy until we leave the nuts and go back indoors.

And if you need any help deciphering why we named the two boys "Jack" and "Ianto," do a search on the names (possibly adding the BBC-show Torchwood as criteria). It shouldn't take long to realize what is going on.