January 2010
The best stories today were all outside the house.
The first was undocumented: 47 starlings swept back and forth for nearly an hour, diving onto a neighbor’s driveway to fight over – something – making of themselves an undulating rug — a scatter rug, of course, as they rose to the gutters of the same house, lined the roof with arguing and shoving, then flew high into bare trees and evergreens behind the house.
Our next door neighbor was feeding the deer – in violation Title 6, §189.3 Prohibitions (b) of the Codes, Rules and Regulations of the State of New York. (b) Feeding Wild White-tailed Deer in New York. No person shall feed wild white-tailed deer at any time in New York State It’s OK. I won’t tell. But the deer are telling each other. First 12 deer, one of which was climbing the steps to the...
Backyard Bird Count, 2010 →
“The creators of this piece would like to point out that they all work in
the...”
– Disclaimer for “Dr. Hairy and the London Hospital,” a video created by Edward Picot in collaboration with Julian Le Saux & Dr David Hindmarsh.
Generally, there is nothing amusing about the run-around we get with medical providers, especially since we usually are not attempting to contact them unless something is wrong.
Edward Picot’s video about “London Hospital” is only too true.
While very funny, it also illustrates a very troubling phenomenon that we have seen here on the opposite side of the pond from the UK: ...
Common Birds, Revisited
Reprise: &Now Conference, October 14, 2009
We went early to hear Ben Christy and David Landrey.
But they were nowhere to be found.
Attending a rescheduled poetry reading as an argument for or against the notion that You can’t go home again if home is a place where one resides before and after life on this planet then ipso facto we all leave home and then go back and the premise of this poem is a lie but if home is a “missed opportunity,” then it matters greatly whether one has returned to that everlasting home in the...
“They changed the time on us the night before. We had other obligations.”
– David Landrey to Spork, January 27, 2010
WatchBenjamin Christy, clarinet; David Landrey, poet, perform “Predictions of the End of Time” at Appletree Reading, Empire State College, Cheektowaga, New York, January 27, 2010.
Ten Deer
Housekeeping Exercise
Cleaning around the computer invariably results in malfunction. Usually, I lose the speakers, but sometimes it is the monitor that closes down in a sulk. My desktop is so accustomed to filth that it cannot think without it.
But if something else happens something outside of normal something beyond human error or the unauthorized use of a vacuum cleaner
then — ah then — the computer...
Cobweb Study
Why I am changing my antivirus protection
Malware on the loose
or whatever you want to call it.
This is what I learned last night and today:
You can have updated patches and a functioning antivirus program with an updated virus database
and still lose your operating system.
This is me speaking, the non-techie Spork, but not even the major Spork could have saved us from this disaster — an ad for a phony antivirus on an unfamiliar (but I thought,...
The New Bird
Even when your bird-watching occurs in the comfort of your home, it is possible to have problems worthy of complaint. Fortunately, in the bird-watching world, such problems are often fixable with a little elbow grease.
“The supreme irony of her art is that like the knotty grain of a piece of burr...”
– Edward Picot, “Not-so-silly Millie. An Appreciation of Millie Niss (1973 - 2009)”
Commonplace Birds
Why, you ask, oh why do we suddenly see all of these birds and common ones at that?
Because, this Spork is trying out a different camera — a 12 megapixel Canon Elph instead of the 5 megapixel Elph she is used to —
and she is comparing the results to the photograph function with 14x zoom on a Canon Optura 40. The Elphs have 3.5 optical zooms, and the question is — Is it...
Broken Furnace
Surly Man gets out of bed at 7, wraps himself in a flannel robe, resumes the sleeping position.
“Wait a minute,” she says, taking a systems approach to the cold husband.
She rumbles through the house to the basement where she encounters an unfamiliar flashing green light on a cold furnace, water on the floor.
Then come the miracles:
Service man arrives before the indoor...
Watch
