I heard this on NPR this morning. It's especially for you, Milo, because I know you're a bird lover and I expect you don't listen to NPR:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14081591



(red-footed boobie)

Cool.
I've heard of Easter Island but never Eastern Island.

Thank you AnnaStrophic, but even after having carefully perused your post above I am somewhat afraid that somehow someway you have called me a Red Necked Boobie.
No matter, thank you. I do so very much love to know stuff about birds. And ants.

Your Communist Pinko NPR report about the good ole Tennesse boy attempting to goad natural species diversity on the Midway Islands has inspired me to report in full to AWAD my conversation during Earthweek this past April with the Father of Diversity, the winner of two Pulitzer prizes, Professor E.O. Wilson of Harvard.

I'll write it up this weekend and post it here in ANIMAL SAFARI or in INFORMATION.

> Communist Pinko NPR report

lol

Milo, you're so funny.

Your Communist Pinko NPR report ...

This is probably the best noun phrase I've come across in the wild in quite some time. At first, I took it to mean:

a. Your communist report on [that] Pinko NPR [station] ...

But, I see that is probably not what was meant. (Not that any text means anything in the absence of falling diocesans in a vacuum.) How about:

b. Your report, which is both [sic] Communist, Pinko, and NPR ...

I like it, but not yet. Maybe it's more along the lines of a NP like:

c. Your huge big large book ...

But, lo! then, I realized that a rupture in the time-space continuum had occurred and this utterance had leaked out from a parallel Hubble sphere. In this dimension, not only are there Communist Pinkos, but also Communist bluestockings, Communist dowager empresses, and Communist Neo-Conservatives. And, they all own a piece of those radio stations which narrowcast Peorgie Tirebiter's Adventures in Shluburbia. At least, the next time I see a penduline tit, I'll know whether it's Chinese or African.

heh.

He's a spy and a girl-delighter.

actually®, the original George Tirebiter was a stray dog.

-joe (curb your facts) friday

Nothing compared to Able Seaman Just Nuisance.

Trust Nuncle zmjezhd to turn this into a (gasp!) word thread.

And Milo, while Red Necked Boobie has a certain ring to it, I didn't say it. I'm just sayin' ...

Well AnnaS, I appreciated the birdman story. Here is a poem of sorts that I wrote for my sister (Her name is Ana) Her and a bunch of her bird counting friends were responsible for the survival of the 'Rarotongan flycatcher' or 'Kakerori' endemic to our home island of Rarotonga. They raised the population from 29 in 1990 to several hundred today and have managed to successfully transplant another 10 to a neighbouring island.


Te Akamaramaanga
(The renewal)

Pursued by the perils that lie beneath the canopy of life,
Is my struggle in vain?
Kept alive by the memory of things once lost,
Almost a memory, is my name.

Soaring higher,
Replenished by the memory renewed.
Full of life from the memories to come
My name is Kakerori.

Fine poem, olly, and a deep bow to your splendid sister Ana too.

Butasforyou, AnnaStrophic, let me tell you a story...

I love wordwebs as I love spiderwebs; both can be works of art.
But sometimes a weave of words like a weave of spiderwebs can have an ulterior design that ultimately bites, so as a lover of the two artforms I have learned to be careful.

But asforme, I hate "nonce" art and have come to use a certain technique that freezes the beauty of spiderwebs beyond their season, as follows...

Armed with a can of spray paint and a 12" square of ceramic floor tile I creep through brush and wood until I find a perfect spiderweb glistening glossily in the weak morning sun. Then carefully. slowly, I sneak up on the web and, in a sudden, I spray the web with spray paint. This usually makes the bitch spider mad (like female dogs female spiders are called bitches) and so she usuallly drops down on an excape line to avoid being sprayed.

Now I must hurry. Quickly, but gently, I press the ceramic tile against the paint-wet web and nip the guide lines that support the web face in space. Then quickly I snip the excape line to keep the bitch from climbing back up to the web. This is important because she will maliciously rip up her own labourously constructed web just for spite if she can. After all, the only reason she built her beautiful web was to bite somebody or something (some beautifully crafted wordwebs are set in the same manner).

Then, with luck, I will end up with a one-of-kind spacial painting in three dimension and in fix forever on a ceramic tile that I can display and impress my crafty, artsy, slow witted friends.

Ah, yes. The love of eating is the root of all evil.

check here, Milo:

Spider Web Farm

hey there's two of'em

Better make that three, Zed. My pal Tim King (the bug king) is the master.
He began by handbrush painting spiderwebs which he stuck on the backs
of NO TRESSPASSING signs back in 1973.

What a guy! Tim owns a pest extermination company and is well respected in bug circles. He lives in a log cabin without electricity and is a part time nudist.

Tim has discovered several new species of cave beetles and has one of the largest private collections in the south.

Interesting fact: In beetles differentiation of species is determined by the shape of the male penis. In copulation the male drills directly through the female's tough outer shell (shells vary from species to species in construction and thickness) and so in response to this added difficulty the male penis has become intricately specialized to the point of being species specific.

Some folks think Tim strange because they say he wears a gun when he hunts beetles in caves. He doesn't. He always leaves it at the entrance.

tap... tap... tap...

Ok AnnaStrophic, you can stop tapping now, my story is getting long and I'm tired of writing about me and EO Wilson so I'm gonna stop now and have two tall dixie cups of bourbon and bitters and chocolate milk and then go nighty-night.

If I come home sober tomorrow night after a fossil gathering trip with pal Andy I'll write the ending then.

You don't want a sloppy, drunken, slurred, ending do you?

Bourbon, bitters and chocolate milk?

Yes Zed, bitters tone down the sweeetness of the choclate milk. Normally I don't add bitters, I just use a cheap gut-rot whiskey with a harsh bite. but unfortunatly Monday night I found myself out of good whiskey and had to use the expensive stuff instead, so I mixed in a dash of bitters for bite.

Pretty good, pretty good.

Merriam-Webster ready for the word bourbitchoc?
Southern beverage with the above ingredients?

Call it Southern Cumquat.

Yeah, Faldage, real south. Like Australia.
------------------------------------------


Rum Cumquat

2 litre Bottle (empty)
1.5 Litres White Rum
1 kg Ripe and Fresh Cumquats
2 kilos Palm Sugar

Wash the cumquats of all dirt and other impurities. Drain. Remove stems from the cumquats. Place cumquats in bottle. Layer with the palm sugar. Fill bottle with white rum. Place bottle on shelf and allow to mature for three months or longer. Watch carefully so that the bottle doesn't explode. Enjoy in small doses. You can also offer the rum soaked cumquats to your friends. These will just explode in their mouths. A good joke.
.

But you can only drink it in May

Channeling TEd

From the first of May till the first of June? Why's that?

Cumquat May.

Thats a goodie!

May be.

To his red footed cousin:
Just looking at a tv documentary about the Blue Footed Booby, where I hear the commentator say that Booby comes from Spanish bobo.(so far so good) But that this means clown. Not 'stupid fellow' as Wikipedia sold me. That the word refers to the way the bird lifts its feet and I have indeed seen that the Blue Footed Booby walks like a clown. Very funny, not stupid.
Wicked wiki.

but.. but.. some might think that clowns *are stupid.

and some actually find them frightening.

-joe (coulrophobia) friday

That's very very true. Dislike them.Clowns.Scary.But the birds' 'mimicries' of the walk were so perfect.Very funny.

Not 'stupid fellow' as Wikipedia sold me.

Might want to check out what the Real Academia has to say 'bout that. (Spanish bobo > Latin balbus 'stammering'.) A word can mean more than one thing ...

> A word can mean more than one thing ...

oh god, say it ain't so?

Yes, I see, complicated.There's a lot of bobo's around, only I have erased stupid fellow from my list and thanks for the spanish dictionary.The chain of favorites keeps growing.

Even we use the word bobos. Stands for the presidents and board people of mainly sports' organisations. Any branch of sport.

I'm also not sure what kind of clown a "personaje cuya simpleza provocaba efectos cómicos" was in the primitive Spanish theater. Did they look like Emmett Kelly, Pierrot, or Harlequin?

"personaje cuya simpleza provocaba efectos cómicos" was in the primitive Spanish theater. Did they look like Emmett Kelly, Pierrot, or Harlequin?

Cuya among others a guinea pig?

Bobo, boba.
Seems like it's a small bird, a fried egg over easy,a fool,some other food.The Spanish road ends here for me.

asiento de los bobos,carrillos de monja boba, huevos bobos, manga boba, pájaro bobo, sayo bobo, sopa boba.

Cuya among others a guinea pig?

I thought cuya meant whose. "A person whose simplicity caused comic situations".

cuya.
1. f. El Salv. y Méx. conejillo de Indias (‖ mamífero roedor).

This is what I get from that spanish dictionary as a first.

Here the images from spanish google:
Conejillo de Indias

Did you ever have a pair of guinea pigs? I had a pair and before I looked twice I had six. Pretty comic situation.

And, not only do individual words have different and multiple meanings (i.e., polysemy), but sometimes two different words have the same pronunciation (i.e., homonymy). I was pointing out that cuya in the quotation above means 'whose', not 'guinea pig'.

more to the point, here: two different words with the same pronunciation or spelling (or both).

-joe (not jo) friday

damn, language is cool.

"personaje cuya simpleza provocaba efectos cómicos"
Yes I do understand and that it means ; a person whose simpleness provokes comic effects.(litterally)

It goes a bit far to dig out Spanish history of theater.
I brought up the guinea pig because they also are pretty comic pets besides being champion reproducers and sharing the word.

As this all came from: bobo. When I look up bobo it still seems to go with modern theatrical items.

booby

The OED offers: 1. 'A dull, heavy, stupid fellow: a lubber' (J[ohnson]); a clown, a nincompoop. b. The last boy in a school class, the dunce. 2. A name for different species of Gannet.

The primary meaning has a first citation of 1599-1603 and the secondary of 1634. Close. Ultimate etymology is unknown. Cf. German Bube in the sense of 'fool, lubber'. Kluge connects Bube with English boy and Dutch boef 'crook, rogue, cheat'.

As for clown, the OED has: 1. A countryman, rustic, or peasant. 2. A man without refinement or culture; an ignorant, rude, uncouth, ill-bred man. 3. A fool or jester, as a stage-character (? orig. representing a rustic buffoon), or (in Shakespeare) a retainer of a court or a great house. The etymology connects it with the word clod and various words in Low German languages.

Damn...this thread has come full circle.