This is the most personal and detailed story I’ve seen so far from a hurricane survivor.

“Missing Person: Sarah’s tale” was written by Sarah Donley, the daughter of the editor of NOLA.com. She tells her whole experience from the time she evacuated the 9th ward on Friday night before Sunday’s storm. It’s almost 5000 words, but I’m sure much-abridged. Here’s an excerpt where she describes the moment she heard news about the fate of her neighbourhood:

The only information we received at all those few days was a woman in line at Saia’s, a small grocery store that opened on Tuesday with no power and two inches of water on the floor. The owner was only letting a few people in at a time, and as a result we waited in line for nearly an hour. At some point I heard a woman behind me in line mention the Bywater. I went up to her and asked her if she had mentioned the Bywater. Yes she had, she told me. Desperate for any sort of information, I begged her to tell me anything she had heard. She looked me square in the eye, and said softly “All I’ve heard is that they are pushing floatin’ bodies out of the way to find survivors.”

Somehow I’ve got material for yet another bird post. Upstate NY is bird-crazy and there’s an abundance of birds here, so there you go. To prove my case I could now link to a bunch of birding sites and mail lists (which I actually subscribed to for a short time until the infighting got out of hand) but just trust me on this.

Some recurring themes are taking shape when it comes to my personal relationship with birds: Again this particular story involves an impending birdy death (like here); and uncanny coincidence (like here).

Very early yesterday morning I carried the laundry down the block, started three loads, then headed toward Gimme! for a coffee. A few feet ahead on the sidewalk I saw what I first thought was a large, pinkish flower petal, and for whatever reason made a point not to step on it. Hmm, that was strange-looking, so I glanced back at it and thought that actually looks something like a funny-shaped slug. I closely studied it for a few more seconds, realized it was a breathing, living thing, and what looked like a little distended tummy took shape. Suddenly I had an idea what this curious thing was…. a freshly-hatched bird left to die on the sidewalk! YUCKY.

I bee-lined home to grab my camera so I could now share what I saw. Back on my way down the block I also mentioned this little phenomenon to a woman walking her dog (a well-mannered Jack (FYI now Parson) Russell). I invited her to come take a look because I didn’t know if anything could possibly be done to save it, and I thought it only right to share the burden of my discovery with someone else. She said her hardcore vegan friend would just kill it. The alternative, which she did, was to take a couple of twigs and move it off the sidewalk.

Now for the kind-of-gross but fascinating part - PICTURES!
Click only if you really really want to:

About an hour later I walked by and the bird was gone! What became of it?

Moving on to the bizarre coincidence. When I returned home I transferred the pics, then browsed me some internet. Awhile back, like 6 weeks ago, I entered a draw for some art at Art Prostitute so I decided to check in to see if a winner has been announced and as luck would have it no, not yet.

But this image on their site looked freakishly familiar to me:

And when I visited this Site of the Month, I saw more than a few images of dead baby birdies, like this one which is more developed than the above.

Weird coincidence, no?

While Tiff was away in Montreal, various household duties fell to me. One was checking the mail. I came wandering home one day, and noticed that each mailbox for our building had a yellow sheet of paper with “urgent” written on it. Naturally, I thought it was some message from the landlord. Perhaps a pipe had burst, or something. But no, when I unfolded the paper, I saw this

Anybody care to take a stab as to what this means?

Okay, this is the strangest looking insect I have seen (I haven’t traveled enough). I came across it in the door jamb, thought it was a super-dusty dead spider and attempted to pick it up (with a paper towel, that is). Then it started moving. Here’s the picture (roughly actual size).

Anyone know what this is? If you’re brave, click for the macro version!

These “mad geniuses of cuisine” in Chicago, led by chef Homaru Cantu, are inventing some interesting stuff including new cutlery-type mechanisms for eating, futuristic cooking methods, and yes - paper food!
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Have a little fun with Google’s word algorithms! Inspired by Boing Boing’s Adwords (Sponsored Links) results from the search word ‘dead’ I wanted to see what I would come up with. The results were nothing short of miraculous considering you can, apparently, pick up a new set of bowels on ebay - at a discount!

Say you aren’t in the mood for physical improvement and instead have a desire to take a turn for the worse… perhaps then you might be interested in purchasing a disease!

More fun ‘Sponsored Links’ screenshots (and my tasteless humour) follow:
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