Cuckoo rescue

Yesterday while sitting on the couch in the living room and reading, I was startled by a loud thump of something hitting the picture window. Looking out the window I couldn't see anything, but if whatever it was had dropped straight down, I wouldn't have been able to. When I went outside, I saw this:

It's a yellow-billed cuckoo. I watched her (him? you can't tell with cuckoos) for a few minutes but she just sat there, completely dazed. Following Cornell Lab's instructions for birds involved in window collisions, I went inside and prepared a shoebox. When I came back out, she had pulled herself together a little, but was still clearly dazed.

I put her in the box. She didn't seem injured, but was unresponsive to being handled.

I took the box inside and left her to recover for about half an hour.

When I took her back outside (she had pecked the box a couple of times, so I figured (hoped!) she was ready to go) and took off the lid, she immediately jumped out but then just sat there.

I put my hand down and she climbed on to it. She sat there for a few minutes, gradually getting perkier and letting me take a few pics:

And then she pushed off and flew over into the bushes at the woods' edge. Another minute and she was gone.

That's some fine work there, Chief Justice

Chief Justice Roberts says in his dissent:

"Indeed, however heartened the proponents of same-sex marriage might be on this day, it is worth acknowledging what they have lost, and lost forever: the opportunity to win the true acceptance that comes from persuading their fellow citizens of the justice of their cause. And they lose this just when the winds of change were freshening at their backs."

Just like black people "lost, and lost forever: the opportunity to win the true acceptance that comes from persuading their fellow citizens of the justice of their cause" in Brown v. Board of Education, and interracial couples "lost, and lost forever: the opportunity to win the true acceptance that comes from persuading their fellow citizens of the justice of their cause" in Loving, and Republicans "lost, and lost forever: the opportunity to win the true acceptance that comes from persuading their fellow citizens of the justice of their cause" in Bush v. Gore, and rich people "lost, and lost forever: the opportunity to win the true acceptance that comes from persuading their fellow citizens of the justice of their cause" in Citizens United and .........

Some fine concern trolling indeed.

The week summed up

(from SPLC)

Scalia Burns

Snerk. Check out how Justice Scalia would burn you. Here's how he burned me:

Uh, hello?

"But no court, no law, no rule, and no words will change the simple truth that marriage is the union of one man and one woman. Nothing will change the importance of a mother and a father to the raising of a child. And nothing will change our collective resolve that all Americans should be able to exercise their faith in their daily lives without infringement and harassment." Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced his defiance.

But that paragraph must mean, if it's not pure applesauce, that Texas intends to outlaw divorce for couples with children and mandate remarriage for widows and widowers with children and single mothers.

And it must mean that any church that wants to marry gays has to be able to do it legally, because otherwise they're being infringed.

edited to add this update: Though he disapproved of the ruling, Paxton said that Texas would be following the Supreme Court ruling, and county clerks in Texas began issuing marriage licenses to gay couples on Friday.

and edited again to add this great picture from the Dallas Morning News:

APPLESAUCE it was.

One more time!

YES!

WTF NPR? Really. WTF

I'm flabbergasted.

On NPR today David Greene asked Roxanne Gay this (quote is from memory) :

The Lord's Prayer says "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive the trespasses of others."¹. You're not really living up to the spirit of that when you say you can't forgive him.

Jesus Louisus.

I can confidently say that not once did I hear someone say that people who don't forgive Dzhokar Tsarnayev or Osama bin Laden or the 9/11 terrorists or anybody else isn't being a good Christian.

Seriously?

This is racism. This is white privilege. Black people should forgive this white boy who walked into a black church and killed  nine strangers because they were black and who wanted to start a race war, so "we" can "heal" and "move on".

Fuck that.

"Forgiving, healing and moving on" are to make us white folks feel better about ourselves. We move on. Black people stay where they are.

And that needs to end.


(1: oh yeah. That's not what it says. It says "as we forgive those who trespass against us".)

Good news on Two Fronts

The ACA is Here to Stay!

Read about it here

But also important today, the Court upheld "disparate impact" in housing discrimination - the provision that criminalizes practices not just of overt unfairness, on-the-surface racial discrimination, but also policies that were unintentionally biased, such as zoning strategies that inadvertently promoted segregation, as well as more subtle tactics that make it harder for minorities to live where they want to. It's not as flashy as the Obamacare ruling, or the same-sex-marriage one that might come tomorrow or might come next week, but it's very important, particularly in the light of all the talk of institutionalized racism we've heard this past week.

Read about it here.

The Week in Entertainment

DVD: Candide with Sir Thomas Allen, Paul Groves, and Kristin Chenoweth (thanks, Kathie!) A genuinely beautiful animated film called The Song of the Sea.

TV: Cleared Perception off the DVR backlog. I'm glad they didn't go with the Daniel-loves-Kate-so-she-doesn't-marry-Donnie ending they were flirting with. That would have been such a mistake for the characters. Since the show is apparently not coming back, the ending was the ending, and for once it's reasonable. There was no way they could work out as a couple. Also caught up on Modern Family, which is as always amusing but not earth-shattering. Don't get me wrong, I like it a lot, but I did manage to go a couple of months without it.

Read: The Mathematician's Shiva, which I saw at Zeno's blog and enjoyed very much.The Replacement Child, recommended by Judy Blume at the end of In the Unlikely Event as being about a family who lived through the events of her novel. The Fateful Day, the latest in the Libertus series. Began The Edge of Nowhere, first in a trilogy set on Whidbey Island. Pretty good so far.

Father's Day

My father (left in roughly 1960; I remember well the sweet smell of his pipe; and below with some fellow shutterbugs at about the same time) turned 92 on his last birthday. He's got a few aches and pains and treatable ailments, but on the whole he's still going strong. I won't be there today - though I called - but I get home a couple of times a year for longish visits - I'll be there in just over a week for the summer one.

Sometimes I hear coworkers talk about their fathers and know: I got so lucky with mine. So lucky.

Happy Father's Day - I love you.

Happy Solstice

It's the Solstice! Summer solstice here in the northern hemisphere - nearly Midsummer Day - and winter solstice in the southern, nearly Midwinter.


Longest day or longest night: may it find - and leave - you happy.

A modest suggestion

This is the Stars and Bars. (Yes, this one, not the battle flag.) Or if we don't want to get hung up the terminology, this is the first national flag of the CSA.

You almost certainly didn't recognize it, because hardly anybody does. So here's my suggestion:

If you sincerely want to honor your Confederate ancestors for gallantry or whatever it is you say, try a different flag. Use this one.

Because whatever they may have been "originally," a black swastika in a white circle on a red field is not an innocuous Hindu symbol and the Confederate battle flag is a symbol of hateful, terrorizing racism.

And if it's really about "heritage, not hate", you don't want people to misunderstand you.

(ps: here's an historian's take)
(pps: not going to get into a discussion about whether hate isn't the "heritage", though as a child of the South I am qualified. That's not the point. If you don't want people to think it's true, stop displaying a symbol that no longer has any other real meaning.)

"I don't get it"

The Guardian looks at Jon Stewart looking at Charleston, for those who don't like video clips.

Looking back at Juneteenth

The Hidden History of Juneteenth tells a story that this week shows us we still need to hear: Juneteenth and what it really was.

Not just that white, rebel Texans hid the news of Emancipation.But that

Ending slavery was not simply a matter of issuing pronouncements. It was a matter of forcing rebels to obey the law. To a very real extent, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment amounted to promissory notes of freedom. The real on-the-ground work of ending slavery and defending the rudiments of liberty was done by the freedpeople in collaboration with and often backed by the force of the US Army.

Granger’s proclamation may not have brought news of emancipation but it did carry this crucial promise of force. Within weeks, fifty thousand U.S. troops flooded into the state in a late-arriving occupation. These soldiers were needed because planters would not give up on slavery. In October 1865, months after the June orders, white Texans in some regions “still claim and control [slaves] as property, and in two or three instances recently bought and sold them,” according to one report. To sustain slavery, some planters systematically murdered rebellious African-Americans to try to frighten the rest into submission. A report by the Texas constitutional convention claimed that between 1865 and 1868, white Texans killed almost 400 black people; black Texans, the report claimed, killed 10 whites. Other planters hoped to hold onto slavery in one form or another until they could overturn the Emancipation Proclamation in court.

Against this resistance, the Army turned to force. In a largely forgotten or misunderstood occupation, the Army spread more than 40 outposts across Texas to teach rebels “the idea of law as an irresistible power to which all must bow.” Freedpeople, as Haywood’s quote reminds us, did not need the Army to teach them about freedom; they needed the Army to teach planters the futility of trying to sustain slavery.

Juneteenth

Today is Juneteenth -

"On Juneteenth we think about that moment in time when the enslaved in Galveston, Texas received word of their freedom. We imagine the depth of their emotions, their jubilant dance and their fear of the unknown."

My heart aches for Emanuel AME and her people

Given that he had to drive 90 minutes to get there, this church, and this day, is no coincidence.

Two things: This was terrorism, by any definition that doesn't include "only Muslims" or "never whites".

And you can donate to help Emanuel AME at their page.

Yes, why isn't there?

Terrific idea from Fred at Slacktivist:

I would like to see a televised debate between Christian commentator Bill Koenig and California state Assemblywoman Shannon Grove (R-Bakersfield) regarding the precise cause of the brutal drought that has been afflicting the Golden State. Koenig attributes the drought to his god’s displeasure with California’s legalization of same-sex marriage. Grove disagrees. She says the drought is due to her god’s anger over legal abortion.

I would like to see the debate moderated by Bill Nye and/or Dr. Louis W. Uccellini. First question for both Koenig and Grove: Why isn’t there an even worse drought in Massachusetts?

The Week in Entertainment

TV: Finally I caught up on the season ender of Grimm. A lot of people died, all the right ones for a change. Next year will be interesting.

Read: Finished The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, which I like a lot. In the Unlikely Event which is probably not the best book to read on an airplane, being the story of people from Elizabeth in that two-month period when three planes crashed there. When Marnie Was There, a beautifully written YA.

Your baby was Hitler so God killed him

This is from Fred over at Slacktivist:

This is Pat Robertson’s response to the question, “Why did God allow my baby to die?”

“As far as God’s concerned, he knows the end from the beginning and He sees a little baby and that little baby could grow up to be Adolf Hitler, he could grow up to be Joseph Stalin, he could grow up to be some serial killer, or he could grow up to die of a hideous disease,” Robertson said. “God sees all of that, and for that life to be terminated while he’s a baby, he’s going to be with God forever in Heaven so it isn’t a bad thing.”

Your dead baby was probably going to become Hitler or a serial killer, but now he’s in Heaven instead. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.

And Fred's reaction is a good one, and spot on, and refreshing from a Christian.

My immediate reaction was: So why does God let some babies grow up be to Hitler or Stalin or serial killers or die of hideous diseases? Does God just plain hate some babies?

This woman needs help. Fast.

Wow. Just look at those dead eyes, that heavy-lidded expression of ennui and self-loathing. Think about those words. Considering that Cayla straightened her hair, had a nose job, got her lips thinned (is that even a real thing?) and her skin lightened all for love of Les, it's startling how in less than two years of marriage she has become this dreadfully depressed woman who can't even conceal her loathing for the man she's married to.

In fairness, it is Les. And in this storyline he's just completed arranging, scheduling, and setting up a web page for his class reunion, and announced that "everything is all set up". Except he didn't book a venue.

Yeah, that would get old real fast.

I said to ignore this, but

I know I said to ignore this, but I decided to leave this picture up because it tickles me.

This is Hennadiy Moskal', governor of the Luhansk Oblast in Ukraine, where some of the worst fighting is going on. His name is from the Polish world for "Muscovite"; it's also used to mean anyone from Russia and is a mildly negative slang word.

His t-shirt reads Головний Москаль України (Holovnyy Moskal' Ukrayiny, Ukraine's Main Moskal), which cracks me up.

Swans

I went to the Anchorage Zoo yesterday (more pics later). It's a nice zoo; the animals are in enclosures in the woods and most of them are rescues that either are being rehabilitated or can't be. Here are some exceptions: they're not actually in the zoo, they're just at it. (Given that you're not allowed off the walkways, it's a pretty safe place to nest, I imagine!

The Week in Entertainment

Live: Keb' Mo' in concert - he put on a really good show. A guy called Tom Shinness (who was playing in the band though not a regular) opened for him and he was very good too. He played "When I'm 64" on a cello - which he was playing like it was a giant ukelele or something - and "Dueling Banjos" on a mandolin/mandola hybrid. Good show, lots of fun.

TV: I was excited to see that TCM was having a Bulldog Drummond festival (I've never seen one of those movies, numerous though they are), only to discover that I was rather bored by them. It didn't help that Ray Milland was playing Drummond in the first one they showed, as I've never been able to warm up to him as a dashing and/or debonair leading man.

Read: Almost finished with The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August which is extremely good.

Babysitter

One of the livestock dogs at my sister's place, with some of her charges.

Because we all need cuddles sometimes!

Traveling

In Alaska for work. The work part means I'm too busy (and tired) to do much besides work. Plus, like an idiot I went off leaving the bag with the binder and the camera sitting beside the door - only when I realized that I didn't have it to tuck my purse into before I got on the plane did I realize I didn't have it - way too late to go back for it.

It also rained most of the week, and looks like it'll rain next week, too. But here is a photo from the phone taken yesterday... at 11 pm. Yep, June this far north.

Missing the point, in a big way

A woman wrote to Miss Manners complaining about someone selling t-shirts:

Two days after my town lost three teenagers to a tragic car accident, a community member began selling memorial T-shirts that were donated by a local family in the T-shirt business. All proceeds are to be given to the families to help with final expenses.

On the front of the T-shirt is an “inspirational” message, and the back has the names of the three children with their birth dates and the date of the accident.

I think their hearts are in the right places but, to me, it seems to trivialize and cheapen the memories of these children.

When I suggested that perhaps donations should be sought in order to provide a more lasting tribute than a T-shirt, I was accused of “starting drama.” I was trying to think of how I would feel as a mother if next year someone is washing his car with that T-shirt or dropping it off to charity.

I suggested that a tree planting with a small plaque or a small monument at the school the three children attended would be more lasting, and was surprised by the nasty responses I received for not supporting the T-shirt sale.

Miss Manners, I don’t want to further hurt an already grieving community, but am I wrong in thinking that a “T-shirt memorial” is cheap and tasteless?

This woman has completely missed the point.

The T-shirts are not a "memorial". They are a fund-raiser. People are trying to collect money to help these families out. A tree or a plaque won't put a dime - a much-needed dime, I'm certain - in the coffers. They can't bury their kids with a plaque. They can't deal with any insurance or legal expenses with a tree.

What baffles me is that she actually says "All proceeds are to be given to the families".

Plus, I really doubt any of those kids' mothers will even recognize that shirt if they walk past someone washing their car with it.