Silflay Hraka

I figger it’s time for me to bird blog. What the heck, everybody in this neighborhood is doing it.

Admittedly, my bird tales aren’t as exotic as the rest of the folks around here. The birds I see regularly aren’t returning from combat tours in Iraq. (What’s up with that? I served in GW I and all I saw were some lousy seagulls while I was picking up a truck and a conex from some Saudi port). Nor are they unidentifiable rarities or exotic species thought extinct. But I think they’re cool.

Take this fellow, the Great Blue Heron:

I was taking my little boy for a walk last Friday, and we stopped at a pond behind the house to feed the ducks and the couple of resident geese. I noticed the Heron partly around the side of the pond. He walked over to us with this very funky “trying to sneak up on you with Shaquille O’Neill’s legs” gait and stood basically between my feet, looking outward at the residual bread crumbs in the water. Seriously, he was about a foot away from me, and I could have petted him, if his beak didn’t look so lethal.

Continue reading ‘Ba ba ba ooh-mau mau, ba ba ooh mau mau…’ »

N.C. Man Finds Finger in Frozen Custard.

Here’s the kicker. I ate custard at that particular Kohl’s twice this past weekend.

I thought that Twix Bar custard was a little on the crunchy side.

Efforts to control the marburg outbreak in Angola are still running into one obstacle after another.

Control operations in Uige have experienced some recent setbacks. On two occasions earlier this week, doctors at Uige’s large provincial hospital were directly exposed to blood from Marburg patients being treated on general wards, without adequate infection control. The doctors are under observation. These high-risk exposures should not have occurred.

In another recent incident, the body of a deceased patient was left, uncleaned and uncollected, on an open ward for more than eight hours, placing hospital staff and other patients at risk. In another incident, a severely ill baby admitted to the paediatric ward was placed in a cot, without disinfection, immediately after the body of another baby, who died from the disease, had been removed. In line with cultural practices, mothers are present on the paediatric ward and share the care of severely ill children, thus also sharing the exposure risk.

“Cultural practices” are why so many Africans are dying to begin with, not just from Marburg, but from AIDS as well–but God forbid Westerners should point that out, as if dead Africans were preferable to offended ones.

There is no fiction so strange that it does not eventually become non-fiction.

This is a Sunfish sailboat. What kind of nut goes shark-fishing on one?

The teenagers had set out shark fishing on a 14-foot Sunfish during a blustery day. The National Weather Service had warned small boats to stay off the water and the pair realized they were in trouble almost immediately. They tried to swim to shore, pulling the boat along with them.

I’ve seen Sunfish out during a small craft advisory. It’s all one can do just to stay on them. The idea of using one to fish in such conditions is something only the brain of a teenage male could conceive of.

I blame the sailboat manufacturer, myself. The hole in the middle of the Sunfish tends to fill up with water, and the pair above would not have been the first to look at it and think “livewell.”

All right. A wedding is a big step. So is skipping one.

You don’t want to marry the guy who gave you the ring? Fine. Don’t marry him.

You want to cut your hair, hop on a bus to Sin City, and leave 600 people asking “Has anyone seen the bride?”? Fine. Make it so. It’s not as if you’re inventing cold feet or cowardice. Go for it.

You want to report your escape as a kidnapping, complete with perp descriptions and a blue van? Interesting. The intelligence graph of your choices is taking on a noticable downward trend. You have now graduated from “panicked moron” to “panicked moron criminal.”

If you have done these things, you should now be arrested and prosecuted for falsely reporting a crime and making false statements. You should not be coddled. You should not be cuddled. You should not be the beneficiary of the bizarre sympathy expressed by the Albequerque police, who think that criminals should be shown some sort of soft glove treatment if they are “in crisis.”

“Law enforcement is really making a major move to deal with people in crisis,” Albuquerque Police Chief Ray Schulz said Sunday. “Miss Wilbanks was definitely a person in crisis.”

I swear, every time I read that quote, I hear it in the voice of Police Chief Wiggum.

You need not go to jail, but you should be tried and convicted and forced to pay for the resources that were expended investigating your fever dream. If mommy and daddy can afford to piss away the cash for a 600 person wedding in an effort to get you successfully jettisoned, they can probably pick up your fine. Oh, and good luck on that next relationship.

El-ahrairah of The Warren joins in our ongoing carnival of Iraq fauna identification with this picture.

Since you have that Lt. Col sending you photos of birds, I thought you might want some photos of the Bugs of Iraq. I took this photo late one night at the site of an Iraqi praying mantis. At least, that what I think it is, but some people thought it was a grasshopper. Anyway, it’s different from what we see in the states. The second shot is where I found him.

That big chunk of metal in the center of the photo is a door hinge for the blast doors. I work in an Iraqi hardened aircraft shelter (HAZ). I didn’t think it was bombed during the war, but after looking around, it looks like we put a bomb thru the side of the HAZ. It has since been repaired, so that’s why it doesn’t jump out at you (re-bar hanging down thru a hole is hard to miss). Anyway, when the bomb came thru, the blast doors where closed and either the explosion caused by the bomb or the resulting secondary explosions caused by what happened to be inside blew the blast doors off their hinges. So, all that remains is the hinge, the track where they blast doors swung out and a nasty groove in the concrete where they dragged the blast doors away.

While the photo El-A sent me was cleary of a mantis, I had no idea of the exact species, so it took me a while to nail down the exact id. It turns out to be a fine example of Blepharopsis mendica, the Egyptian/Devil Flower Mantis.

The flower mantises can apparently be kept as pets, but other than that there’s not a lot of English language information about the species available on the Net, though the Arabic site AlSirhan has an entire page devoted to the species, along with a number of photos, here.