9/10/23

 Sunday, September 10, 2023

In bed at 9:40, move to brr at 3:30 unable to sleep, and back to bed at 4:20, up at 4:40, with CPP and bait bucket thoughts.  55°, high of 71°, cloudy day ahead, AQI=59, wind  W at 5 mph, 1-9/14.  Sunrise at 6:25, sunset at 7:11, 12+45.

Rosey-fingered dawn 

Who rang the breakfast bell?  There has been no action at all on the bird feeders until 7:15 when, all of a sudden, WHAM - finches, nuthatches, chickadees arrive in droves.  By 8:30, I see the first clustering of goldfinches on our long niger seed tube.  Last winter I would see up to 12 or 13 of the inches on the tube at one time and then they seemed to disappear.  The Wild Birds Unlimited manager said it was probably because the seeds had gotten soft and unpalatable to the birds during a period of much rainfall and that I should throw away the remaining seeds, and clean the tube feeder.  I did neither since the chickadees seemed to enjoy the remaining seeds as they were but a few days ago, I put fresh niger in the tube and I note the goldfinches seem to cluster near the top of the tube where the fresh seeds are.  I'll get some more fresh niger and keep filling the tube so the chickadees can feed lower and the finches higher.

    Also, I've made a dietary switch in my sunflower tube.  For years I've used songbird blends, usually from Walmart.  The problem with those blends is that they include some nuts and large sunflower seeds that are too large for the mesh used in my tube feeder; the birds can't get the victuals through the mesh.  I bought some black oil sunflower seeds and some safflower seeds at Meijer's and mix the two in my seed bucket.  It looks to me like the birds prefer the safflower seeds since, as the seeds in the tube are eaten, the safflower seeds seem to disappear, leaving only the black sunflower seeds, seemingly the birds second choice.  Hmm....

Not so random thought.  Cheri's post on FB this morning is about her Dad's 95th birthday and her warm, loving thoughts about him.  When I read it, I thought of Johnny Mathis' beautiful song Wonderful, Wonderful which reminded me of Geri, especially the last verse.

Some quiet evening I sit by your side / And we're lost in a world of our own
I feel the glow of your unspoken love / I'm aware of the treasure that I own
And I say to myself "It's wonderful, wonderful / Oh, so wonderful, my love."

I am reminded of a USO show I attended on Okinoawaa in 1966 starring Johnny Mathis.  The audience was packed with Marines and other servicemen.  At the time, Mathis had not  yet publicly acknowledged his homosexuality but few doubted that he was gay, a fact he much later did acknowledge.  His nickname was "Johnny Mattress" because of his soft, smooth, seductive delivery of love songs, including of course, Wonderful, Wonderful,  I thought at the time how curious it seemed that all these Marines and others, most on their way to Vietnam or, like me,, freshly out of Vietnam, to be gathered together to enjoy a gay man singing love songs to us.  So it goes.  Mathis will be 88 at the end of this month.

The RBG Stamp.  Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals has an op-ed in this morning's WaPo about the new Ruth Bader Ginsburg forever stamp.  He is a Ronald Reagan appointee to the bench, a conservative serving on what is perhaps the most conservative federal appeals court, but to his credit, he claims RBG as a friend.  Although his essay praises Justice Ginsberg he acknowledges that he was initially reluctant to use her honorary stamp on his personal correspondence because of their political/judicial/philosophical differences.  He says he has overcome that initial resistance to using her stamp but it seems to me some evidence of how much American conservatives are loathe to be identified with anything or anyone that smacks of liberalism or progressivism, almost as if adhering an RBG stamp on his letter would contaminate him or the contents of his letter.  I suppose I am reading way too much into his little confession since after all he clearly went to some effort to write the op-ed and praise the many great qualities of Justice Ginsburg so it's petty of me to focus on his short-term resistance to using the stamp which he overcame.  But a thought is just a thought and that was my initial thought. (Call me pisher.😔)  On the other hand, I also took note of a real complaint he lodged against RBG's jurisprudence, to wit: "That she would too easily displace representative government and the votes and voices of millions with the superior wisdom of just five justices of the court."  One wonders how this conservative jurist feels about what the newly-constituted Roberts/Trump court has been doing since RBG's death and her replacement by Amy Coney Barrett.  Now we have the supposed or putative "superior wisdom of just six justices" rather than five.  The only difference is that, with 6 reactionary votes rather than 5, the conservatives have considerably more power to do just what Judge Wilkinson abjures, i.e., ignore the votes and voices of millions on issues like abortion, guns, and voting rights.   Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander.