The following cardinal looks like a little angry red bird.  I photographed it in the Gardens, earlier this month.  He reminds me of an iPhone game that I played on the drive back home from Rochester.  It is called Angry Birds.

Angry Birds is an arcade style video game and it best enjoyed on a very long road trip, like as in too long.  The birds are angry because the pigs have stolen all of their eggs.  Either to just get back at the pigs or maybe to rescue their eggs (I don’t know which), the player launches his angry birds at these intricate, but poorly constructed structures and attempts to knock them over and kill the pigs.  Like I said. on a too long car trip this mind waster is golden.

I have only downloaded the lite, as in free version of the game.  Even so, with my meager talents, I was not able to defeat all of its levels.  It did infuriate me that when I showed it to Bob, he was able to breeze through the first half-dozen levels way faster than I did.  He eventually hit a wall and gave up, but then he didn’t have 500 miles to drive that day.  Maybe all of his victories in the Pacific weren’t just luck.

Anne knitted the above gloves for my brother Chris.  They are the first full fingered gloves that she has ever made.  I’ll be delivering them this weekend.

Dogfight!  Bird fight?  Whatever it is, this clip imparts three important lessons:

1. Respect birds’ space.
2. Always put a camera on your RC plane.
3. Our pale blue dot planet is just waiting for more exploration.

I found the preceding video online and when I saw it I knew that I had to post it.  Pretty amazing photography!  Don’t you think?

OBTW, I got a solicitation email from a British birder who was looking for a job.  My ISP had marked it as spam and after some thought I took their advice.  On second thought, with the diminutive size of some military UAVs (unmanned air vehicles), maybe falconry is about to become a born again military science?  Maybe I should have read his resume after all?