January 19, 2004

• My kingdom for a picture of Winston Churchill's 104 year old parrot. That's my new wallpaper, f'shizzle.
• Reminds me of the parrot in Scary Movie 2 who calls the lead "sweet cheeks." Saucy!
• Here she is. According to this site (halfway down page) Charile isn't looking so great because: "...he has started to pull the feathers out of his chest and under his arms, but he still whistles away", says current owner Leonard Small. "He looks like a turkey, but he's a lovely old chap". This quote and the original article do seem to call into question Charlie's sex though.
• Berry Nice. Thankee.
• great work, treeboy! and, i might add, hurray for charlie, whatever sex he/she may be.
• This is the best bit - "when Charlie gives her opinion of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, it is rendered with a Churchillian inflection," They really ought to record her for posterity.
• One assumes, therefore, that Winston was fond of saying "Fuck", too. As an aside, this is the problem with parrots as pets: many of them live as long as a human.
• This parrot needs to meet the Nazi monkey from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).
• It seems he/she can take on both Thatcher and Blair together.
• Is it just me, or does this widely-reported story strike anybody else as just a little improbable? According to the equally improbably-named website Estate Planning For Pets, the maximum average lifespan of a parrot is 80 years. I realize that Winston's parrot could be an outlier, but it all just smells just a little bit hoaxy to me.
• I was wondering about the 104 year old thing as well- if, as the article said, Churchill bought the parrot in 1937, the parrot would already have been about 37 years old. That struck me as a bit odd. But if the parrot was, say, five years old in 1937, (picking a number out of my head) then it would now be 72, which is much more believable. I guess we'd have to know more about the story of Churchill acquiring the parrot. On the other hand, leave it to Churchill to get a parrot that lives to a crusty old age, muttering obscentities...somehow, that works for me.
• Nah, it's true. Parrots live for feckin' ages. There is a flock of giant black ones who go by my window every couple of days whose average lifespan is 80
• Oh, and my very favourite parrot lives here.
• Looks like I may have been right: Churchill's daughter says it's not her father's parrot.
• /me kicks hyperlink Am I on camera here? *click* *click* . . . dang! . . *click*
• Maybe this isn't jacobw link but talks about the same.
• Sorry, I meant it's true that parrots live for ages, not that it's true that's Churchill's parrot, which of course I have no way of knowing. But hundred-year-old parrots are not at all uncommon.
• Oops... Sorry about that broken link. Very odd. But thanks, Zemat, for posting the fixified version.
• Parrot May Have Been Churchill's, but She's Not Saying
• Wow. Now THAT'S a followup.
• Surprisingly moving too. The ravages of time...
• Well, whether it's Churchill's parrot or not, f*** the nazis!
• There's Just No Telling For an abandoned parrot Gobi (not your real name), where were you before whoever left you here? What color was the room around your cage? In a sunny spot or cold gray corner? What sounds? TV? Radio? An old hi-fi booming Brahms or Baker? Or nothing— off to work they went, leaving you with lawnmowers buzzing outside plush Connecticut digs? Or car honks below your high rise? You hate being misted, insisted on in all the books. Vegetables, ideally 75% of your diet, remain uneaten and get yelled at. You still whisper "I love you" to whoever taught you how, the whoever who is never coming back. --Jennifer L. Knox
• That's absolutely heartbreaking, bees. Here's something a bit happier. Robert Kinsella essay: Parrotology: On the Necessity of Parrots in Poetry
• Er ... um ... in the first paragraph: ...We eventually handed the injured bird over to the local ‘bird lady’, who later let me know that it had died due to massive brain damage. No need for heartbreak, BlueHorse, for in Knox's poem, Gobi doesn't die, (although whoever's never coming back may have). However, it seems Gobi's still rejecting its vegetables, etc.
• Truly, I wasn't "pissed as a parrot" when I wrote that, but it certainly didn't get expressed the way I wanted. (Teach me to be in a hurry to get outside to shovel manure.) Kinsella says parrots are ...an addictively necessary part of a poetics.--To which sentiment I do agree. And I certainly laughed at the idea of Gobi yelling at his vegetables.
• to a grey parrot whenever I'm in earshot of your vocal mimicry your low growling and fizzing to say nothing of the shrieking sounds halfpast gimmicky an almost mechanical creaking sometimes in fact as you maintain that not-so-secret balancing act between parrotty and parody o bird of raucous melody and fuss I think you've learned too much from overhearing us
• Deceitful birds steal meerkats' food. This is not uncommon; often I have witnessed North America blue jays doing the same thing to induce other birds and critters such as squirrels to leave a food source alone. Then the jays move in and feast.
• Pretty clever, for a bunch of drongos.
• Yup. That link is laden with serious bird-slander, by the way. *notices that islander and slander are almost identical in spelling*
• A true islander would never stoop to slander a bird but drongo is a funny word. *apologizes unreservedly to all birdkind, even the smallest*
• A lot of Australian words tickle the ear of the hearer.
• The Kookaburra laughs at that.
• Kookaburra Douglas Alexander Stewart I see we have undervalued the kookaburra; they think they are waking the world, and I think so too. They gobble the night in their throats like purple berries, they plunge their beaks in the tide of darkness and dew and fish up long rays of light; no wonder now they howl In such triumph of trumpets, leaves fall from the trees, small birds fly backwards, snakes disappear into a hole. All day long they will rule the bush as they please. Perched on high branches, one eye cocked for the snake, from treetop to treetop they watch the sun and follow it; far in the west they take it in that great beak and bang it against a bluegum branch and swallow it; then nothing is left in the world but the kookaburras like waterfalls exulting down from the gullies.
• Over the west side of the mountain, that’s lyrebird country. I could go down there, they say, in the early morning, and I’d see them, I’d hear them. Ten years, and I have never gone. I’ll never go. I’ll never see the lyrebirds - the few, the shy, the fabulous, the dying poets. I should see them, if I lay there in the dew: first a single movement like a waterdrop falling, then stillness, then a brown head, brown eyes, a splendid bird, bearing like a crest the symbol of his art, the high symmetrical shape of the perfect lyre. I should hear that master practising his art. No, I have never gone. Some things ought to be left secret, alone; some things – birds like walking fables – ought to inhabit nowhere but the reverence of the heart. --Judith Wright, "Lyrebirds"
• Between Neighbors The complainant is a big man in his own goddamn front yard in a wheelchair, his voice as high and highly offended (but only half as loud) as the dogs barking on his porch. His goddamn neighbors (a young male couple standing their own ground deadpanned, on the other side of the chain-link fence) went and aimed their hose at his expensive bird and hosed it. It was innocently catching a little healthy goddamn sun in its cage. The cop bends close to listen. Then he walks off to consult the complainees who say the barking, the barking goes on and on till they can't, just can't stand it. If they pass on the sidewalk, the dogs bark. If they decide to swing on their porch swing, the dogs bark, so, yes, they hosed his parrot and would do it again. The big man says between barks he needs, listen, he needs the dogs as a signal to tell him strangers are nearby. The cop explains loudly the definition of nuisance, issues a warning, turns his palms like a double stop sign up and against the opposing sides, then demonstrates keeping the peace by bending forward and saying, “Polly, want a cracker?” and offering through the cage bars, one healing finger, and the wet-backed, green-backed, red-white-and-blue para- military macaw gives a counterdemonstration to all of them of what can happen if you give somebody, anybody, a finger. --David Wagoner
• Foul-mouthed parrot in need of new home