Here is a guest paragraph from the so-called muse. Today Joanie and I drove out to the World Bird Sanctuary (WBS), while Mark rode in the park (18 miles). There just aren’t enough hours in the weekend to do everything, now that we are in the season of fall festivals and autumn adventures. The WBS was hosting their annual open house and had many animals on display. WBS tries to rehabilitate and release as many of the birds as possible, such as the red tailed hawk released at Shaw Nature Reserve’s Flying Wild program last weekend. Today, animals that could not live in the wild due to their injuries or other conditions were fulfilling an educational niche. Most of the animals were birds, naturally, but they also had snakes and mammals.

There was a white necked raven, native to Africa that had been trained to grab a soda can from an audience volunteer and deposit it in a recycling bin, as well as take dollar bills and put them in a donation box, in exchange for a treat. There was a pelican which had been clicker-trained to follow its trainer for crappy bits. (Crappy as in fish, not as an adjective) There was an albino python, who would not have survived in the wild because of it yellow and white coloring. It is now 14 feet long and weighs 67 pounds, but was clearly all muscle as it frequently required a third volunteer to step in and help. There was also Kubie, the announcer’s cat, who had a cameo role.

While it was interesting to see the birds up close, especially the raptors, after a while it made me sad to see so many birds in cages. I did see some wild life outside of the cages, including a black snake that was 5 or 6 feet long, climbing a ladder. I also saw a pair of downy woodpeckers playing around in a tree, and nuthatches and a chickadee at the bird feeders.

It looks like we will have a full house for Thanksgiving. Rey will drive over from Tennessee, Dave will drive from Purdue and Dan will fly in from LA. Both Rey and Dave have expressed interest in seeing a Blues hockey game, so I guess; we’ll have to see what’s up with that. Dan was curator for the CalArts 2011 Mid-Residency show. It was a lot of works, something like herding 34 very opinionated cats, but then aren’t all cats very opinionated?

“Mad Men”, the TV series that has been raking in the Emmys for several years has come to Netflix online. I tried watching the first episode, but didn’t make it very far. All TV series first episodes are full of exposition, as they layout the series and introduce the characters. This can be a somewhat tiresome chore to have to wade through. I did watch enough of the show to get a feel for the flavor of this series. It is set in a time period that is not so distant that nostalgia, like smoke from a burning cigarette, can’t wrap itself around us all again. Set in 1960s New York City, it revolves about an advertising executive and the people in his life. It doesn’t flinch while it portrays the social mores of that time. At first glance, we used to smoke a lot then, and also treat women and minorities like crap. After writing this paragraph, I think that I’ll give “Mad Men” another chance.