Parrots Again

Scattered throughout this blog are stories and pictures of Les Perruches de Paris.

Perruche is French for parakeet.

I saw them first in Parc Montsourris.

Then also in Jardin de Luxembourg.

Then also Jardin des Plantes, Bois de Vincennes Quai Bernard, Avenue Henri Quatre, and, occasionally flitting across the Seine by le Palais Royale.

I have never seen them in Bois de Boulogne.

The best pictures I ever got of them was in 2016.

When a pair flew out of le Jardin des Plantes and into one of the sweetgum-like trees that line an access ramp to the Paris Cops’ Boat Dock ( an unofficial name).

I was at the cop dock taking pictures of the cormorants that hang out there.

I heard a screech at my back and when I turned around I saw the best parrot picture opportunity I had ever had.

The birds were inspecting a hole in the tree trunk – guess for nesting in the – then – coming spring.

A few days ago I was in Rome.

We were walking back to our apartment along the Tiber at sundown of our first day there.

The Tiber is lined with trees like the one in the image of the cop dock parrot.

So I wasn’t completely surprised when I thought that I kept hearing that familiar screech from the limbs above my head.

The next day I began seeing them as they catapulted across the sky in that acrobatic way that parrots seem to love.

There must be thousands, maybe tens of thousands of them.

I was on a quest: get a decent picture of some Rome Parrots.

I finally succeeded on my almost last day.

I pursued them to a roost in a garden at the end of Via Corsini.

They live, and I think probably, nest in the palm trees of the garden.

The surprise was, and is, they are a different kind of parakeet.

It Has Already Been Done

This is a picture a Facebook friend posted a few minutes ago.

I looked at it.

(By the way, I admire this young woman and her family; she is the daughter of a guy i used to sing with in the RF Trio.  We almost went somewhere – the Trio.)

The first thing I noticed was what the rest of this post is about.

Anyway, here is the picture and the follow on observation that screams out to me – at least to me; at least to me:

And here is what I said to Stacey on Facebook:

Odd: They are eating what looks to be food that we are imminently going to be keeping out of this white, god fearing country with the wall of trump; Stacey: aren't you worried that your family will be on the deport list? Or, to say what I really mean, why is that idiot and his idiot followers railing against a fait accomplis?

Some Images Of Venice

I didn’t take my computer so I couldn’t do a daily select/edit/ponder/enhance, so I am left with a lot of images – almost 1600 – to work with, so this is pretty much a random selection of a number of images that I can email in one gulp.

But they do indicate why we loved Venice.

President Pig

This almost poem leapt to mind in the face of a posting of donnie's utter contempt for women; I decided to move it up front: 

"I am old and male and he makes my skin crawl; it must be really awful to be his concubine; and to be the spawn of something so genuinely evil would be a fatal birth defect in any rational world".

Presidents

It is really difficult to make sense out of the number of Americans who think trump is doing a great job. 

If more Americans read at all, and maybe an occasional book about past Presidents - Conrad Black's FDR, David McCullough's Truman, John Adams and 1776, Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s Age of Jackson for example, they would see that donnie not only misses the mark, he doesn't even know that a mark exists. Wild and crazy makes great entertainment ; watching one's country lose its way, its place and its soul is not particularly entertaining.

Yep!

"It's not guns that kill people, it's hotel rooms that kill people" has become the new republican slogan against gun control. 

"After all" said Paul Ryan recently, "where else can demented killers accumulate vast caches of innocent little guns, preparatory to raining down terror on the ground below."

He is working on legislation to outlaw hotel rooms. 

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