rassilon%EDDIE.MIT.EDU@bu-it.BU.EDU (Brian Preble) (09/04/88)
The following has been brought to you by Karl Heuer. However, there appears to be a missing section. If anyone has a complete copy of article in their archives I'd appreciate getting a copy of it. Enjoy. -- Rassilon -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- CUT HERE -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- This Column is for "The Birds" by Dave Barry Everybody should know something about birds, because birds are everywhere. Zoologists tell us there are over 23,985,409,723,098,050,744,885,143 birds in the city of Lincoln, Nebraska alone, which is one of the many reasons not to go there. Now, perhaps you get a bit nervous when you think about all those birds out there. Perhaps you remember Alfred Hitchcock's famous movie "The Birds", in which several million birds got together one afternoon and decided to peck a number of Californians to death. Well, you needn't worry. First, any animal that attacks Californians is a friend of man. And second, "The Birds" was just a movie; in real life, your chances of being pecked to death by birds are no greater than your chances of finding a polite clerk at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. There is an incredible range of birds, from the ostrich, which weighs up to 600 pounds and stands up to nine feet tall and can run two hundred miles in an hour and crush a man's head as if it were a Ping-Pong ball; to the tiny bee humming- bird, which is a mere 6.17 decahedrons long and can fly right into your ear and hum its tiny wings so hard you think your brain is going to vibrate into jelly and you will eventually go insane. Birds, like most mammals, especially lawyers, evolved from reptiles. The first bird appeared millions of years ago, during the Jurassic Period (which gets its name from the fact that it was a fairly jurassic period). What happened was [Editor's note: there appears to be a section missing] this reptile, inspired by the same urge as the first reptile, but even stupider, climbed up and began leaping from the branch. Soon the ground trembled with the thud of many reptile bodies, raining down on the Jurassic plain like some kind of scaly hailstorm. This went on for a few thousand years, until one of the reptiles evolved some feathers and discovered it could fly. As it soared skyward, the other species, who had grown very tired of being pelted by reptile bodies, let out a mighty cheer, which stopped a few seconds later when they were pelted by the first bird droppings. Soon birds had spread to the four corners of the earth, which is where they are today. And wherever there are birds, there are also bird watchers, in case the birds decide to try something. Bird watchers are known technically as Bird Watchers, which comes from the Latin word for ornithologist. Birdwatchers divided birds into four main groups: * Boring Little Brownish Birds That Are All Over The Place: Wrens, chickadees, sparrows, nutcrackers, spanners, catcalls, dogbirds, hamsterbirds, flinches. * Birds That Can Lift Really Heavy Things, Such As Your Car: Albatrosses, winches, pterodactyls, unusually large chickadees, elephant birds, emus. * Birds With Names That You Are Going to Think I Made Up But I Didn't: Boobies, frigate birds, nightjars, frogmouths, oilbirds. * Birds That Make Those Jungle Noises You Always Hear During Night Scenes in Jungle Movies: Parrots, cockatoos, pomegranates, macadams, cashews, bats. Your avid birdwatchers spend lots of time creeping around with binoculars, trying to identify new and unusual birds. The trouble is that most birds are of the little-and-brownish variety, all of which look exactly alike, and all of which are boring. So what birdwatchers do is make things up. If you've ever spent any time at all with birdwatchers, you've probably noticed that every now and then they'll whirl around for no apparent reason and claim they've just seen some obscure, tiny bird roughly 6,500 feet away. They'll even claim they can tell whether it was male or female, which in fact you can't tell about birds even when they're very close, what with all the feathers and everything. I advise you to do what most people do when confronted with birdwatchers, which is just humor them. If their lives are so dull and drab that they want to fill them with imaginary birds, why stand in the way? Here's how you should handle it: BIRDWATCHER: Did you see that? YOU: What? BIRDWATCHER: Over there, by that mountain (he gestures to a mountain in the next state). It's a male Malaysian sand-dredging coronet. Very, very rare in these parts. YOU: Ah, yes. I see it. BIRDWATCHER: You do? YOU: Certainly. It's just to the left of that female European furloughed pumpkinbird. See it? BIRDWATCHER: Uh, yes, of course I see it. YOU: Look, they're playing backgammon. BIRDWATCHER: Hmmmm. So they are. If you have a good imagination, you may come to really enjoy the birdwatching game, in which case you should join a birdwatching group. These groups meet fairly regularly, and usually after a few minutes they're detecting obscure birds on the surface of Saturn. It's a peck of fun.
malpass@vlsi.ll.mit.edu (Don Malpass) (09/08/88)
In article <8809040327.AA17947@EDDIE.MIT.EDU> rassilon%EDDIE.MIT.EDU@bu-it.BU.EDU (Brian Preble) writes: >.....If anyone has a complete copy of article in their >archives I'd appreciate getting a copy of it. Enjoy. > If you get an answer, I, for one, would also like one, and maybe there are others similarly inclined (or at least warped). -- Don Malpass [malpass@LL-vlsi.arpa], [malpass@spenser.ll.mit.edu] My opinions are seldom shared by MIT Lincoln Lab, my actual employer RCA (known recently as GE), or my wife.
gpasq@picuxa.UUCP (Greg Pasquariello X1190) (09/09/88)
In article <158@vlsi.ll.mit.edu> malpass@ll-vlsi.arpa.UUCP (Don Malpass) writes: >>.....If anyone has a complete copy of article in their >>archives I'd appreciate getting a copy of it. Enjoy. >> >If you get an answer, I, for one, would also like one, and maybe >there are others similarly inclined (or at least warped). >-- >Don Malpass Me too please! -- ========================================================================= Greg Pasquariello AT&T Product Integration Center att!picuxa!gpasq 299 Jefferson Rd, Parsippany, NJ 07054 =========================================================================