"Still, we’d recommend steering clear of Safari -- and perhaps not being so smug."

This from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (via the A.P.):

"If the votes of the superdelegates overturn what’s happened in the elections, it would be harmful to the Democratic party,"

The only thing I can think of is that she isn’t clear on why the DNC has superdelegates, because if their job is to simply echo the pledged delegates, then the status of superdelegate is purely ceremonial. I suppose that could be the case, but I assumed that their purpose was more, um, checks-n-balances oriented. If that is the case then I’d further assume that the Speaker of the House would understand that role, being the head of a bicameral branch of somewhat powerful government and all.

Maybe I should go look at the above quote in the context of the full interview, but I’m afraid it’d just make me more grumpy, and I’m afraid of being more grumpy.

Every year or two I rename my dogs. Nobody I know goes along with this practice, and so most of them call my orange dog orange even though that was only her name for a short time, and only in a particular context.

Well, I think the dogs are due for another update. I'd like them to be called a boy named sue and a man called horse (which completes a cycle that began in the 80s when I named my cat mcgruff the crime dog for a short time).

If I had a third dog, though, she'd surely be called Brian.

via ars technica:

"The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules."

-Quote popularly attributed to Gary Gygax

Oh, and while I'm on the subject of youtube and Salt Lake City, sorta, I'd like to direct the third of my readership who follows such thing to this post.

While I didn't know her at the time, one of my neighbors lived in Utah at the same time that I did, and was at a lot of the same shows. She even remembers Ska Bob! I think she'd have liked BYU more if she'd played D&D with us on the weekends.

Remember the LDS "who broke my window?" commercial from the early eighties? Why am I even asking? Of course you do.

Well, Mr. Danks just sent me the relevant YouTube link, and I now see that I'd missed the real truth behind "telling the truth".

The window was broken from the inside.

shot
stabbed
burnt

Well, I'm pretty excited about tomorrow night. See you at 6:59?

Hmm. Maybe "excited" isn't the right word.

(see weather.com for more info)

(As opposed to "breaking news", since I forgot to post an update earlier.)

David from Ohlone Wildlife Rehabilitation Center decided that Lou wouldn't be able to live in the wild. It* has a broken pelvic bone that will never heal right, so it'll be unable to walk or perch.

Refusing to give up, Lila from YUWR, who'd been helping me all along (even while sick, even while juggling homeless ferrets), who is very well connected, cut a deal with somebody from the Oakland Humane Society, and off it (Lou) went to live with a bunch of other gimpy birds in an aviary that I've taken to calling The Island of Broken Pigeons.

I kinda miss having  bird hanging around outside my door, so I went and bought a hummingbird feeder, and next spring I'll plant something big and red and trumpetty.

* Nobody ever got around to determining Lou's sex.

I have a small pile of half-though-out entries in the queue. Alysoun wants me to finish "in defense of prescriptivism". Other coming-soons include

• my long overdue review of Tipper Gore's Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society
• in defense of hypocrisy
• my "if I had an account on yelp" gripes about things that beep
• my "if I had a an account on yelp" gripes about things that probably don't beep with any great frequency

Any requests?

Totally unrelated: I just noticed that gmail saves my outgoing messages even though I sent them through the SMTP servers and not through the web-interface. Clever kids.

Breath comes out white clouds…
i'll be damned; the call's coming
from inside the house.

I parked a block away from the vet and carried Lou in a cat-sized plastic carrier. While everybody in the waiting room winced when I said that the bird had two broken legs, they still seemed to think I was nuts for fussing over one pigeon in a world full of lame pigeons. In the time it took me to write down my name and address, somebody came in with a sick squirrel. Everybody seemed to like him more than they liked me.

Halfway back to my truck, a security guard outside the bank stopped me and asked whether Lou was a pet. How'd he see into my cat-carrier in the split second it took to walk past him? Anyway, we talked for a few minutes, and it turns out he's been feeding a pigeon outside the bank, that it has an injured leg, and he's been trying to catch it for three days to take it to the vet.

I told him about my failure with the towel, and my surprising success with the box/rod/string method. He laughed and asked, "Really? It walked right in?" So maybe tomorrow he'll get his bird.

Good news. The bird is as dumb as it needed to be. We got it on the first try w/ plan b, and tomorrow morning it'll visit Dr. Richter at MVH.

So if all goes well, it'll get a splint for a while, I'll take one or two more pictures when we release it, and that'll be that.

If you were thinking of capturing a pigeon with a towel, I urge you to reconsider. Tomorrow morning, if Lou is dumb enough to come back, I'll try plan b, which would have been plan a except that it makes me feel like the Warner Bros. character that's forever on the wrong side of the falling anvil.