David, I miss you so!

David, my closest friend, to whom I had to say goodbye many months ago. I do not closely know anyone who knew him, and it looks as if there will be no memorial service, which baffles and wounds me. It seems unfair that such a rich life should go uncelebrated and unmarked, and it has made my grief infinitely harder to deal with. It ambushes me at certain vulnerable times, like right now when my husband has been hospitalized and the outlook is uncertain. And I don't want to let him go, for it means the end of a huge chapter of my life. Maybe a whole book. The story is too large to tell right now, thirty years' worth of memories, and I don't know where to begin. I found this bit of him on his Facebook page, in which he sings in his inimitable fashion, and some pictures from my album.

A fluffy white mystery: the Korean crow-tit

Blogger's note. What baffles and pleases me about this blog with its modest-but-loyal following is how I get comments, sometimes quite a few, on posts that are several years old. Though I've continued to post here, I sometimes think, "oh, nobody's reading this," and even try to avoid looking at stats, because it's too easy to get caught up in it (and that's not why I do this anyway). Unfortunately, the internet has become one big competition for views, likes and subscriptions in recent years. 

Strangely enough, the biggest reaction in recent times was to a small, satiric piece about a fluffy little bird called the Korean Crow Tit. It started out life on the internet as a  cute 'n fluffy meme which was soon posted and reposted everywhere:

I had my misgivings. The name  "Korean crow-tit" did not seem to match this creature, if in fact it existed at all. It looked more like those fake baby chicks you used to get at Easter, usually stuck onto cardboard. Could this in fact be Fake Bird News? I tried to find out more. 

Here's a sampling of comments and responses I received, some of which are fairly heated for this fluffy little topic. I've removed most identifying remarks, but alternated font colours for (I hope!) clarity.

Hi, Margaret! I love a good internet-"meme" mystery!

So, as near as I can figure, the bird that is colloquially referred to as a crow-tit in Korea is the Parrotbill - the Vinous-throated Parrotbill Sinosuthora webbiana.

The picture that comes up if you google "Korean Crow-tit" appears to be some kind of actual tit-but possibile leucistic. Not the parrotbill, though I see some superficial resemblance.

I will have to investigate further to see if I can figure out what that mostly white bird is that is coming up in the search.

Marc Devokaitis
Public Information Specialist
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology

The bird appears to be a Long-tailed Tit (Aegithalos caudatus).

As a korean its really uncomfortable to see googles first result on korean crow tit is your page. U have never seen birds in korea yet when im so happy that our crow tit is getting some attention and love from people all over the world u say its fake??? What evidence do u have to say its fake??? U have none... because they r true...i grew up with them. This page is offensive

I was very curious myself if this bird actually existed... That should not be taken offensively.. it's such a beautiful little bird it almost does look fake due to its sweet and perfect appearance....

I know this is probably not relevant anymore, but I wanted to try giving insight even if it's late. As far as I can tell from asking my friends and relatives who grew up in Korea, the word "baepsae" (뱁새) is typically used in conversation to refer to both the Vinous-Throated Parrotbill and the Japanese Long-Tailed Tit (which is colloquially called the Korean Crow-Tit). I think the Parrotbill is the more official/proper translation, but the reason the Long-Tail appears so often when you search "Korean Crow-Tit" seems to be because most Koreans think it's the cuter of the two and the word is used to refer to the Long-Tail far more often than the Parrotbill as a result. (But that's just what I've learned from people around me. I can't confirm anything for 100% certain.)

This is the Japanese Longtailed tit! :) Probably the cutest bird to ever exist imo

This is Aegithalos caudatus

Absolutely true....This is the right name. ..checked everywhere ...On YouTube too..Thanks so much .

Hello! I came across this post by accident but wanted to add that here in Europe we have a variant which is called Codibugnolo (meaning long tailed) - it's a tiny white bird with black stripes (pretty similar to the 'Korean Crow Tit'). Also about the cotton-like appeareance, like someone already said, it could just be the bird fluffing up its feathers from the cold.. my budgies sometimes look like that when they clean themselves, other times they completely puff out and look like starving pinschers haha! Hope I didn't intrude with this comment

It is a species of long tailed tit that mostly resides in Hokkaido, Japan known as Shima Enaga and the white floofy balls are only native to japan. Other variants have different colours

Adding onto the information above, the bird is not a Japan-limited bird. it's habitat extends from Asia to Mediterranean. One reason why the photo shows white colouring is because it is a migratory bird that changes its colour depending on the season. I just wanted to correct the misinformatin about the bird being Japanese.

For everyone saying this is a Japan-only bird, it's actually widespread all across Central/East Asia and Europe and (gasp) even Korea! They're a migratory species and change the color of their plumage from pinkish-gray to the winter black/white. Yes, the adorable white cotton ball can also be found in places like Germany. As for the 'fake' Korean crow-tit, Aka the Baepsae - Vinous-Throated parrotbill. It looks very similar to the long-tailed tit and also lives in places like Korea, Vietnam and Japan.

Yes finally, we have them here in Sweden too! Here they're called stjärtmes in Swedish. Lovely small bird. All this 'controversy' about this bird just shows how easy people trust what they read online, kindly source check please. :)

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PLEASE NOTE! This is a link to the original article, entitled FAKE BIRD NEWS: The Korean Crow-Tit, from 2017. I'm STILL getting comments on it. COOL!

FAKE BIRD NEWS: The Korean Crow-Tit

Moose in the sprinkler

 A cooling moose!

P. S. I feel suddenly compelled to say something about my lack of longer written pieces on this blog. To be honest, at this moment we're going through a family health crisis involving several people - none of us is getting any younger - and this involves multiple trips to the ER and the hospital that I find more than disconcerting, given the fact that the chaos in the ER triggers every bad memory/nerve cell in my body. This on top of not knowing exactly what is going on medically. The wheels grind very slowly, and information is scarce and has to be squeezed out of medical staff at 1:00 in the morning.

I find it's not a very good idea to share  deeply on a blog like this, as people feel uncomfortable with it, and I always wonder if I should have  done that and usually delete it anyway. I don't like those many attention-getting videos that dramatize battles with serious disease, some of which turn out to be total  fraud. My world view is just not very positive now, so I can't share that either. So I try to pass along fun stuff, mostly, because that's what I can do right now while I wait out  some pretty worrying  things. 

Meantime, here's that moose! 

An amazing transformation

Some wonderful Harold Lloyd gifs!

Grumpy Cat and Lumpy Cat

La vie en rose (a lot of large pink birds)

 


(Please unmute - the music is lovely!)

"Can it be done?". . . Well, why the hell not?

 

When I was a kid, everything I was ever taught about the future was prefaced with, "By the year 2000. . . "   The Year 2000 was some sort of magical threshhold, a massive divide between our primitive way of life (nasty, brutish and short), and a brilliant new vision that seemed almost like the Third Reich in its monolithic, blinding purity. One day in Grade 5, the grade that was to change my life forever because we gave the teacher a nervous breakdown, we were even asked, one by one, to forecast what that astonishingly momentous year was going to bring to revolutionize the human condition. I have no idea what I said, and in fact nobody had much to say that was memorable, except for Michael de Haan (who is still on my Facebook page!), who said, "Twentieth Century Fox will become Twenty-First Century Fox."

That turned out to be about as significant as anything else I read and heard about the year 2000. Domed cities were a universal vision, perhaps inspired by the Jetsons and a certainty that the planet would soon become too polluted to inhabit. There would be no more food: we'd all take our nourishment by taking various pills. (I was secretly terribly worried about this one, convinced no one would ever be able to eat again. What would happen to all the restaurants?) All those zeroes just stood there in the future, and although they seemed to me like some nightmare from a bankrupt slot machine, to everyone else they shone like iridescent bubbles ready to lift the earth out of its squalid dilemmas once and for all - and mostly through the unmixed blessing of technology.

When the actual time came, if you can remember this, everyone began to run around in tiny little circles because of the Millennium Bug. The world was going to come to an end, supposedly, because of all those zeroes. Computers everywhere would malfunction, all at once, triggering global havoc. Time and Newsweek had the zeroes on their covers. There were whole books written about this, with the kind of bunkered-down hysteria that is still alive among the survivalists, happily awaiting the collapse of civilization with their stores of canned milk and dried beans.

You know what happened? Do you remember?  NOTHING. Diddlysquat happened when 1999 rolled over to 2000, except that the world had a hell of a party. It was comical to see the sale bin in the book store on January 1, heaped with untouched copies of those alarmist books. But in spite of what everyone was proclaiming, it wasn't even the 21st century yet - that didn't come until the next year. But by 2001, the world had other, more pressing dilemmas to face.

It interests me to see "futuristic" things like these magazine pages from the 1930s. Like reading Ray Bradbury, the flavor of it is almost right, then goes off-course somehow because no one really knows how to think about the future. Bradbury was more of a 19th-century poet with a manual mind, and could never get the hang of technology. Even a visionary work like Fahrenheit 451 didn't get beyond a clunky sort of radio in its communications systems. Thus his writings had a sort of stay-on-the-ground quality even as they reached beyond the stars.

I never futurize because it scares the hell out of me, what with the unprecedented power we now have to destroy the earth and everything that is in it (including all those groaning billions of people).  I am guilty of the worst kind of denial and suppression, because I want to have a nice day, thank you very much, and not sink into a depression from which I am not likely to emerge (unless I am blown to bits first).

No, I want to have a nice day, and for the most part I do, because I know how little control I have over anything at all. Those who say you rule and govern your life by the decisions you make don't take into account how utterly irrational most of our decisions are. We decide with our genes, our gonads, our superstitions, and our worst childhood fears. I have far more life behind me now than ahead, and believe me when I say, I don't want to waste one second of it in doomsaying. Besides, I might be wrong! The Soviet Union fell. The Berlin Wall came down. A Catholic Pope is making sense, at least some of the time. That's the list, folks, and it's short, but it might just be enough to sustain me for the rest of the day.

Full moon party (aurora borealis)

CARTOON TIME! The Story of Elizabeth Holmes

 

 

A strange guy turns into a horse

 

Funny egg guy, doing things

 

 

 

Jello Jiggle

A little lion in the back yard

Cat in the bathroom: can this turn out well?

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen

Where my grandchildren frolic in the Danish sun.

"Has THIS ever happened to YOU?"

AT LAST! Someone has made a truly impressive montage of all the "before" moments from infomercials. I have already watched it a dozen or so times. 
Wah-wah-wah-waaaaahhhhh!