The American Pigeon Museum Is Real

Here’s evidence:

The marigolds look nice.

Pigeons.

War heroes.

Autosomal mutants.

After looking at enough paintings of pigeons, you start thinking that, yeah, maybe you *should* have a pigeon painting hanging up somewhere in your house.

The museum plays it all pretty straight.

Things I learned:

1. Pigeon racing is a thing and requires specialized time-keeping equipment.
2. Pigeons basically won the Franco-Prussian war for France (well — except that Prussia won that war).
3. The pigeons that are good at their jobs get names (such as Paddy, Gustav, and the one that won the Purple Heart). The others just get numbers.
4. There are breeds of pigeon that are categorized as “fancy”. Many of them look kind of weird.
5. Pigeons aren’t very good at making nests.
6. If you’re kind of a marginal visual artist, you could probably get your work hung in a museum if you focus on a very narrow subject matter.

Admission’s free, allow 90 minutes if you want to see everything. It’s located in OKC’s museum district (near the Cowboy Museum, Softball Museum, zoo, etc.). It *does* end up feeling a little like a skit from Portlandia.

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Worst Birds Ever

I made a pledge to myself two years ago that I’d one day post something on my blog about the birds that used to crap all over my deck when I lived on the lake in Mission Viejo. Was transferring photos off the laptop today and came across the cretins:

So infuriatingly not dead.

• They were always relieving themselves on my deck — the railing and floor.
• Sometimes they would vomit carcasses onto my deck. I found an entire dead crab there once.
• My brilliant neighbors fed them. At first they didn’t know what to feed them, so they called an ornithologist to get advice. He advised raw meat. Sometimes I found raw meat on my deck.
• I taped nails on top of my deck railing to keep them from standing there, but they just sort of stood around the nails.
• They have orange eyes and their feathers are greasy.

Coincidentally, I had this conversation with some random woman while on Kauai and visiting the arboretum:

Woman: Did you see those birds?

Me: Yes. I got a bunch of them at my house at home and I hate them.

Woman: Well I think it would be neat to live somewhere that has herons. Where do you live?

Me: California — Mission Viejo. You?

Woman: Uh — Lake Forest.

True story. (Lake Forest and Mission Viejo border each other icydk.)

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(They’re “black-crowned night herons”. May they soon go extinct.)

A Day in the Life

Woke up, fell out of bed, comb+head, found my way downstairs and drank a Coke, etc., etc. Opened my garage door and there, between the door and the grill of my truck (parked in the driveway) was a dead bird. A sign, no doubt, an omen of things to come, namely:

• There was a cop blocking the onramp for Mifflin Road, so I had to veer off onto Carson Street and was half-way to South Side flats before there was a turnoff I could use to turn around again.
• Found out it was going to cost me $5,000 to get my roof fixed.
• Ken Griffey, Jr. retired.
• Big ol’ electrical storm.
• Power went out (and stayed out for 18 hours).

Took a shower by flashlight, then I went back to bed. Today I got a revised estimate on the roof: $3,900. And it seems like I should have taken a photo of the bird.

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PS, My hair’s too short to comb, but the rhythm would’ve been way off without it. Also considered using the Easy Star All-Stars variation (fingers+dreads), but figured the original would be confusing enough.

PPS, I’m sad about Griffey retiring.His bat was too slow and he should have retired at the end of last year, but he was a big part of the reason I ended up liking baseball as much as I do; he was the guy that made my team relevant. With him out of the game it feels like a part of me is, now, officially and irrevocably, washed up.