Well, so long as they don't evolve back into dinosaurs, I'm cool.
I thought the latest thinking was that they were in some technical cladistic sense still dinosaurs. In which case I'm happy so long as they don't re-evolve teeth.
My happiness with this scenario depends on whether they evolve to be more or less birdlike.
Although I'm not really sure what the "less birdlike" option would look like.
Couches. With feathers, but couches.
Or end tables, whichever.
There are several extant options for the less birdlike bird, ranging from penguins to kiwibirds to roadrunners to the ostrich to the oilbird to the kakapo. Which do you prefer, teo?
I'd feel like a real fool explaining that I got my ass bitten off my a dino-avio-sofa.
I just flew in from Vegas and boy, are my beaks tired from pecking out everyone's eyeballs.
Penguins and roadrunners sound best. Definitely not ostriches.
7: Luckily, that's the sort of thing you don't generally have to explain personally. The sofa may have some explaining to do, but that's its problem.
How about a recliner that poops on your head?
The kakapo would not be favored by any of kind environmental pressure I can think of, but I'd pick it myself.
14 was to 12, but it works to 13 as well. Giant parrots are no good, flightless or otherwise.
You are a hard one to please, teo. My recliner just pooped on my head, and I couldn't be happier.
Thing is, some forms of evolution do happen fast enough to be a visible problem. Think about antibiotic resistance. But this has no effect on the evolution deniers.
Similarly, George Will will be perfectly capable of continuing to deny global warming, even after Canada goes five years without snow. Someone will make up another explanation for the lack of snow in Canada for him to parrot. Maybe they will start insisting that there is snow in Canada that no one is reporting on. Moreover, this will have no effect on his status in the press, which is dependent political power, and not the reasonableness of anything he says. Worse yet, you will meet people all the time who cite Will as an authority on global cooling and the secret snow in Canada.
No, wait, I have more to rant about.
Reality can turn around and bite someone like George Will on the ass, but he will only acknowledge it when it begins to effect the power structure that supports him. If economic and ecological collapse force the Washington Post and every organ like it to close, Will will stop saying that global warming and Keynesian economics are hoaxes. Of course, he will also have to stop saying anything publicly.
Saddam Hussein had a spokesperson during the war whose job was to keep telling the world that that the US army would never reach Baghdad and in general, Saddam's army could not be defeated. He continued to say this after the US army was right there in Baghdad. He only stopped giving the party line when he was shot dead by an American soldier.
That guy got shot? I'd forgotten, if I ever knew.
Oh, I'm wrong. Wikipedia says he is now living the the UAE with his family.
A backup position for Will is that we have may more species than we actually need. And that climate change is just a form of creative destruction. And that we have way more people than we actually need. And that desperate poverty purges the rottenness and make the poor proberly grateful to the rich.
9: whoah, there Hoss. Ostrich tastes good, while penguin (so I am credibly informed) does not. I know in which direction I'd prefer to steer evolution.
20: That's just what they tell the kids. The spokesman really didn't go to a farm...
22: I'm down, as long as you're willing to wrangle and slaughter all the ostriches yourself.
A recliner tried to pick me up from school today, but I knew what was what.
whoah, there Hoss
Sigh. "Whoa there, Hoss".
!!
The recliner knew my name as well, but my parents warned me about that trick. Something odd about him--always lying around.
I heard that ogged and SCMTim moved in together.
22 is accurate. Ostrich tastes very good indeed. So does emu. I've been pecked by an emu but not by an ostrich. Never been pecked by a penguin. Chicken pecked me, hurt less than being pecked by an emu. Emu tastes better than chicken. You know what else tastes better than chicken? Duck. They peck harder, too. I bet a bird that could kill you with a single peck would taste delicious. To die for, even.
I've heard that swans taste rather fishy.
I would like to eat a bird that eats nothing but fish. Audubon described the kingfisher as having a very distinctive flavor. And penguins, with all those swimming muscles...good eatin'. Though Audubon was unfamiliar with them.
I bet a bird that could kill you with a single peck would taste delicious. To die for, even.
A cassowary could kill you with one kick. Scrumptious?
Ostrich can also kill you with one kick, IIRC.
The sofa may have some explaining to do, but that's its problem.
I believe you mean "'splainin'".
A bird that tastes remarkable is the pelican.
It holds more deliciousness than your belly can.
32: What the hell have you been doing to get pecked by all these birds?
A bird that tastes remarkable is the pelican.
A phrasing heebie used just to annoy me is the above.
I have heard that pelican tastes quite like human flesh, gamier than a monkey's, and somewhat salty.
It should have been "A bird who tastes remarkable is the pelican"?
I've heard that under their feathers, they wear pelican briefs.
A bird, which tastes remarkable, is the pelican.
A birdwich tastes remarkable when made of pelican.
A Report on Avian Sensory Modalities
A bird which tastes—remarkable!—is the pelican.
Remarkable bird, the pelican. Beautiful plumage.
35: My hypothesis relates to pecking, not kicking. Admittedly, a lot of things that can kill you with a single kick are also delicious. I do not think you can use kick lethality to rank them, though. Pigs can't kick for shit, but pork is way tastier than mutton, and a sheep can deliver a nasty kick indeed.
I suspect the Elephant Bird was a victim of its own deliciousness.
40: Living, man. Living.
Ein bird what tastes remarkable am das pelikan.
I have been pecked by a duck. They are hard peckers.
(It was only fair. I, a cruel child, was taunting it.)
Eine Feder, die merkwürdig schmeckt, macht Pelikan.
How will you get down from a sofa? By plucking it!
35 - the cassowary is not, in fact, a bird.
This link might work better for that last comment.
Le Capitaine Jonathan,
Etant âgé de dix-huit ans
Capture un jour un pélican
Dans une île d'Extrême-orient.
Le pélican de Jonathan
Au matin, pond un oeuf tout blanc
Et il en sort un pélican
Lui ressemblant étonnamment.
Et ce deuxième pélican
Pond, à son tour, un oeuf tout blanc
D'où sort, inévitablement
Un autre, qui en fait autant.
Cela peut durer pendant très longtemps
Si l'on ne fait pas d'omelette avant.
Living, man. Living.
If you're going to channel Wooderson, it should be livin'.
"You just gotta keep on livin' man. L-I-V-I-N."
18: He's still alive and living in the UAE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf#Post-war_life
You people are taunting me, but I'll say this anyway, I have a pelican rookery walking distance from my home. Pelicans in the air are extremely graceful and powerful, and sometimes they circle around in fair size groups.
And they routinely take on the carp in a vicious dual medium danceoff?
max
['Pelican Jackson!']
59: Stop what you are doing. Go to the pelican rookery. Taunt one of them into pecking you. Kill it. Eat it. Is it more delicious than other birds that have pecked you? Were their pecks more or less painful than the pelican peck? Do it in the name of science.
I hypothesize that pelicans are lousy peckers and lousy eating.
A peck of birds pecks one-fourth as much as a bushel.
Peter Pellecano picked a peck of pecking pelicans.
How many carp would a pelican peck if a pelican could peck carp?
Peter Piper picks a peck of pickled pelicans.
The loon is the official Canadian bird, and as the alpha Canadian, a loon will peck a presumptuous Canada goose to death.
She sells seashells down by the seashore. Until she gets pecked to death by pelicans*.
*A woman required 20 stitches to her face after a pelican crashed into her in the sea off Florida, apparently diving for fish.
Peter Pellecano's prized pelican, cackling cacaphonously, pecks petulantly carp caught quickly.
Also, I have never been able to come up with a joke with the punch line "Alimentary, my dear Watson." This saddens me.
And so Teofilo, having faced his fears, set sail with his new feathered friends in search of further adventures, only to become fascinated with his own reflection in the water.
66: Also via Wikipedia, more bird-on-bird violence.
Families and tourists in a London park were left shocked when a pelican picked up and swallowed a pigeon....
It was kicking and flapping the whole way down
lousy pecker
Getting lice on the thing is highly dispreferred.
i'm evolving to become lazy to not open the links it seems
The link isn't really about birds.
What flightless bird would you like to see more of in the future?
i recalled this
but maybe i linked this before
Speaking of birdy deliciousness, my local yuppie market is offering, on their Valentine menu "cog au vin". Or, more specifically, "chicken cog au vin". What part of teh chicken is the cog?
The socket ends of the thigh bones, maybe.
No, no, no, don't listen to ben. The cog is the part of the throat that makes French chickens say "coggle doodle du" which is what French chickens (both male and female—they're very advanced birds, so watch out) say.
There's no such thing as a male chicken, Stanley.
In France there is. Like I said, very advanced. We're talking hyper-evolution, dude. Fucking scary shit, man.
83: There are few things more embarrassing than a dragging cock.
I am making beef stock even as we type. This is driving the kittens quite mad. And say what you will about birds, they don't usually do as much damage to one's garden as a random escaped boeuf does. I speak from experience, having lived in a rural corner of CT for some years. I cannot, therefore, object to eating dead cow. Penguins, OTOH, have never eaten my corn, so I so object to eating teh happy feet.
There are few things more embarrassing impressive than a dragging cock.
I have very limited experience with birds.
I once lived in a place that had a whole lot of owls living in the trees around it and during mating season I learned - repeatedly, at all hours of the night - that owls are best termed "screamers."
When I was a child my parents were friends with an older woman who had a pet bird that sat on her shoulder while she watched TV and occasionally it repeated the dialogue it had just heard. When this happened she would make kissy noises at it and it would nip her lower lip in affection.
I can confirm that ostrich is delicious. There was a fast-fading fad of trying to encourage ostrich farming in NC in the '90s at a time when one of my fraternity brothers worked at a local Whole-Foods-alike that tried to sell it in large quantities. When this flopped he got to bring home vast quantities of ostrich so we ate a lot of ostrich burgers, ostrich loaf, etc. I can best describe it as pre-seasoned beef, as it's vaguely spicy. Years on, the only sign of NC's brief flirtation with ostrich farming is the presence of an ostrich-meat foods vendor on the midway at the state fair but last year even that was gone. I was very sad, as the ostrich quesadilla has been a standard part of my state fair experience for years and years.
Finally, my mother's sister had a bird, in the '70s, that they tried to train to say "hello" every time someone walked in the door but it got it all backwards and would instead shout, "Oh, hell!" whenever anyone walked in. My father told it to shut up once when it did this and it fell over dead.
All of which is to say that I am left with a lingering suspicion of end tables that can talk.
88: Apparently emu farming was a similar fad in parts of Georgia; a lean meat, good for you, etc. But emus are ornery, and when the emu meat fad didn't take off, there were plenty of farmers stuck with 400 bad-tempered birds.
We raised emus for a while. We got out before it got really lucrative and then dropped.
I got a very hard kick in the leg from a young emu while trying to move it from one pen to another. Ouch.
88: RMMP, I hope you & Rah have nieces and nephews, because you're going to make a damn fine uncle spinnin' yarns on the front porch. Tobacky optional.
1, 2: Are people going to just accept that the idea of birds evolving to be more like their dinosaurian ancestors/cousins would be a bad thing?
Right when I first had heard about the birds=dinosaurs idea, I was sitting and watching a dozen seagulls work their way across the lawn, and it really made sense. Seagulls are powerful, aggressive, and downright mean-looking, and a 200-lb. seagull would be damn scary.
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Okay, so the Fug Girls totally vindicate my position that bemoaning how you are so small you wear children's clothing is a form of bragging. I feel so much better.
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They too seem to be unaware that people don't brag about how short they are.
Seriously, there are a lot more fat 8-year-old girls than 5'10" 8-year-old girls.
My friend Kobe's parents had a couple of emus along with several other weird birds on the peculiarly landscaped grounds behind their house. The emus were pure evil.
90: For some reason, I find the idea of eating emu really squicky. I think this is because I am picturing some other, friendlier animal instead of an emu.
I am still kind of miffed about ostrich not taking off here but largely because the burgers were so very fine.
If industrial ostrich farming took off, would ostrich plumes become an ordinary decoration for clothing? More hats with ostrich plumes would definitely be a plus.
But only if you take them off indoors.
If chihuahuas were once wolves, surely we can develop ostriches or emus big and docile enough to ride (or at least to use as pack animals). Chop-chop, breeders!
Ostriches are already big enough to ride, no? Didn't you ever play Joust?
105: Before my time, sadly. And Wikipedia says only light people can ride them.
Before my time, sadly.
Get offa my lawn before I hit you with my cane.
108: Shouldn't you be at the gym?
Chop-chop, breeders!
Happy as I'd be to reduce the heterosexuals to slave labor, I resent the implication that the queer community is incapable of developing a docile, rider-friendly strain of emu.
Well, then, step up. Be the docile-emu-developers you want to see in the queer community. (Actually, I see some important synergies here in terms of developing a market for ostrich plumes.)
If industrial ostrich farming took off, would ostrich plumes become an ordinary decoration for clothing? More hats with ostrich plumes would definitely be a plus.
The town of Oudtshoorn, South Africa grew to prominence and then crashed on the fashion for ostrich feathers as adornments to hats. They still produce a lot of ostrich meat.
Durham is one of the local municipalities getting into what seems to me to be an out-of-nowhere debate over urban/suburban chicken-keeping. If I can hitch my wagon to that with some questionable arguments I have got it made.
Indulging in some link/comment whoring, as well as revealing myself as a speciesist (a beak full of herring or carp, no problem), but the picture linked in my #72 of the doomed pigeon in the pelican's bill has been giving me the heebie-geebie's ever since I found it. I think is because it looks like the pigeon is merely about to start pecking at leftover food tidbits in the pouch. Pigeon in a pelican's beak, alas.
116: There are videos online. At your own risk.
116 - I have to imagine the pelican regretted its decision, since pigeons have claws and a beak with which to tear up one's innards during their death throes.
A friend of my sister was nearly killed by a pelican. Actually it was more of a case of he nearly got his stupid ass killed and the pelican was an innocent bystander. He was riding his motorbike at a high speed and there were pelicans on the road just sort of chilling in a pelican way. He hit his horn and they took flight but the combination of his excessive speed and the poor takeoff characteristics of pelicans meant the flock was at about chest height when he drove into it, taking an adult pelican in the chest. Knocked him off the bike onto his stupid sorry ass. But for a helmet and some decent leathers he'd have died. This was part of a pattern of stupid behavior for him. I took him to hospital three times over the course of the time I knew him.
I took him to hospital three times over the course of the time I knew him.
I had a friend like this once, and it became tiresome: a call at 11:30 pm, him on the street, me saying "What, you did what? WTF? And now you have a deep puncture wound and can't ride your bike, okay, and you're where?? Right, I'll be there in half an hour. Maybe you should hide from those guys who punctured you." (Dumbass.)
Many of the pics in 106.2 look extremely fake.
Just sayin'.
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The Cloud Factory is switching over to natural gas.
It's really a picturesque industrial throwback watching the little yard engine pulling coal cars into the building across a wood railroad trestle. Used to be part of my commute.
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121, 122: Somewhere I encountered the claim that way back in the day, one of the required duties of students at Carnegie Tech was to help shovel coal. If true, I assume it would have been at this facility.
123: Never, ever heard that.
Heard the story that Baker Hall has a sloping floor to facilitate conversion to assembly line should Carnegie Tech fail, but consensus seems to be that that's tour guide nonsense.
Also heard someone claim that they polish Clemente's pinkie to make it look more worn, but I've seen enough kids dangle from it to disbelieve the skeptics.
121, 122: What?!? I like the plumes! (OK, my lungs probably don't like the plumes.) Will we still have them with a mere gas plant? They really make the Cathedral of Learning look much more like Isengard from our side of Panther Hollow.
123: This is a new one on me, but I think I might start using it on my students when they complain about the workload.
124.2: It is indeed tour-guide nonsense.
123: If true, I assume it would have been at this facility.
Here is one reference (article in the PG on a 1914 painting of the hollow), but it looks like it took place on the other side of the Hollow. But Machinery Hall's lofty classicism was a guise; the building housed the school's power plant and for many years it was a rite of passage for freshmen to shovel the coal.
Cathedral of Learning look much more like Isengard
Heh. When I was in Pittsburgh last fall I found myself referring to the Cathedral of Learning (assuming it's the thing I think it is) as Orthanc. Good to know my grasp of the obvious joke has remained firm.
127: Awesome - that painting depicts the aforementioned wood RR trestle. Indeed, that hollow was part of my semi-daily bike commute for 4 years. The foreground buildings are, for the most part, still there (including the barn-looking ones, which I'm surprised to see were already ramshackled 95 years ago). I would try to pace myself against the trains - it was a relatively tight turn into the Hollow, so they were slowed down, giving me half a chance.
Huh. The linked article says the barn is gone, but I swear there's ancient, wooden, barn-like buildings in pretty much that location. I'd bike over to check, but it's snowing and my mt. bike has no chain.
