I’ve been checking the bird cam on the porch and for the last several days I haven’t gotten an oriole photo.
Neither of us has spotted any in the yard.
I’ll keep the camera out for a while longer just to be sure; but if my diary is to be believed the orioles have departed. They’re winging their way south already for their wintering grounds in Mexico, Central and South America.
One of the last photos was July 23
They arrived May 7 and left, on or about, July 25.
Last to arrive - first to depart.
Anecdotally, 2026 has been a bumper year for house finches and Monarch butterflies….
The names associated with our full moons are frequently
derived from the names given by the indigenous peoples that inhabited North
America. The tribes used a calendar to
track the seasons by means of the names given to the return of a full
moon.
In
the northern hemisphere the full moon that greets
us today is called the Buck Moon in recognition of the rapidly-growing,
velvet-covered, antlers of the whitetail deer. It will appear at its fullest tonight and tomorrow night. Look for it to rise
in the east after sunset; highest at midnight and setting in the west at dawn.
With the arrival of European settlers two
additional monikers come to mind:the
Meade Moon which coincides the harvest of honey used to ferment this drink and
the Hay Moon as the first cuttings of cattle fodder occur.
This is an interesting bit of breakfast cereal lore that dates back to the mid 1960s. Post Sugar Sparkled Rice Krinkles and their animated mascot, an Asian boy named So-Hi (because he was ''so high"). I missed-out on this opportunity as this cereal wasn't part of our household line-up; nevertheless, each box included the So-Hi Rickshaw Racer.
For the time it was rather nifty; including easy-to-assemble parts featuring a tiny figure of So-Hi pulling a two-wheeled rickshaw. The kit included some string and a small plastic bucket which functioned as a counterweight. Tie the string to the rickshaw, put a coin in the bucket, hook it over the edge of the kitchen table and let the weight drop. The falling weight would cause So-Hi and his rickshaw to zip across the table at high speed. Fun stuff and you were always one box away from a replacement once it broke.
At the time Madison Avenue didn't have any of today's qualms about cultural tropes like gongs, a broken-English accent, conical hats or rickshaws. So-Hi was intended to be a fun and lighthearted replacement for an unsettling clown mascot dating back to the 1950s; he even had a role as a regular character on Linus the Lionhearted, a Saturday morning cartoon show funded entirely by General Foods (Post) where the characters were literally cereal mascots.
Naturally, this era used cultural characters to foster instant identity. Frito Lay had the Frito Bandito, Pillsbury used Funny Face drink mixes with flavors like Injun Orange and Chinese Cherry. Post had So-Hi.
Post eventually retired So-Hi realizing that Rice Krinkles didn't need the baggage of a clown that creeped-out children or a mascot becoming a textbook example of racial stereotyping. In 1971 they repurposed their puffed-rice operation and launched a licensed and inoffensive mascot; Fruity Pebbles. Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble became pitchmen for sugary children's breakfast cereal.
This was a popular advertising slogan from the 1970s for cassette recording tapes that Millennials are unlikely to identify-with as they're not going to recognize the marketing campaign. Nevertheless, if you are a baby boomer you already know that the Memorex brand audio recording tapes claimed to offer such an authentic playback experience that the listener would not be able to differentiate a live performance from an audio recording.
I still have a soft-sided case of Memorex mix tapes in my pick-up truck that are the industry's contribution to bootleg music recordings. But I digress.
I'm sharing this anecdote as further evidence that nowadays you cannot expect that everything you see on the interweb or social media is real. It may very well be an AI fake.
For instance this advertisement for the Spacematic Food Spinner 2000, boldly marketed by the Spacematic Corporation as The Futuristic Food Preparation Center for Today's Space Age Family! According to the ad it is an all-in-one tabletop unit that can spin, mix, blend, heat and serve an entire meal visualized thru a See-Through Dome. It comes equipped with a One-Touch Control Panel and a Revolutionary Gyro-Mix Feature that cooks food evenly in individual wedges. All of this George Jetson Family space-age technology is yours for only $19.95 (plus tax).
Pretty cool, eh?
Nope. It's all made-up. It never existed.
This is a clever piece of AI-generated art that perfectly captures the atomic-age aesthetic of the late 1950s or early 1960s.
How to tell?
The text lacks any specific details ordinarily included in a vintage Sears or Montgomery Ward advertisement. The capsule structure behind the tidy nuclear family looks like a spaceship instead of a suburban kitchen. The food in the spinner is indistinct and doesn't include any jello. Finally there's the RetroFuture Vault watermark in the bottom right corner.
It's certainly entertaining; but you won't find one on EBay....
The dollar figures are sketchy as the administration has left out the replacement cost of lost aircraft and the rebuilding of damaged bases; but here's a start. Casualties on our side; 18 dead, 482 wounded and counting. Deaths among the Gulf States, including Iran, and merchant seamen are estimated to number into the thousands.
Excluding aircraft and base losses the war in Iran has officially cost the United States $37.5 billion so far, according to recent testimony by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. However, intelligence officials and independent analysts estimate the total cost exceeds $100 billion.
Supporting the higher estimate consider that earlier this week Defense
Secretary Hegseth and General Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, appeared before the Senate appropriation Committee seeking $70 billion more to cover costs of the conflict and replenish
depleted weapons stocks.
Sounds like the tip of an iceberg.
Nevertheless, insofar as nobody can put the toothpaste back in the tube and hardly anybody wants to cut the troops off at the knees during wartime I think we're stuck with paying for a conflict of choice begun by one guy. An impulsive choice, likely made against the advice of the Vice President, Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; but that's a discussion for another day.
What do we have to show for our expenditure of lives and treasure?
The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. The Red Sea's Bab el-Mandeb (Gateway of Tears) is now threatened by the Houthis. U.S. bases throughout the Gulf States remain vulnerable to attack. And oil is trading close to $100 a barrel. Mr. Trump has set in motion a cascade of destabilizing events that have dangerous consequences for global stability, security and the world's economy.
By all outward appearances this has all the elements of an open-ended cluster. Some have suggested this could develop into another costly and grinding conflict that might persist into the next administration. Iran is near certain to obtain a nuke. This is Mr. Trump's Jimmy Carter moment - on steroids. Time will tell how this plays-out.
And not a single MAGA supporter I'm acquainted-with will admit that their guy might have fallen under the thrall of Bibi Netanyahu.
Jiminy Glick is one of comedian Martin Short's most brilliant and chaotic alter egos. He has been described as a satirical masterpiece weaponized against the usual standard of softball celebrity interviews.
Buried in a massive fat suit and outrageous facial prosthetics and sporting signature thick-rimmed glasses, Glick is fictional celebrity journalist from Akron, Ohio. The character is completely uninformed, deeply self-absorbed and utterly unbothered by his own total lack of preparation. All of which is a near-perfect set-up for Short's improvisational comedy skills as he interviews. real-life celebrity guests.
A typical interview is marked by near zero attention span, bizarrely insulting questions, high-pitched outbursts ranging from a breathy lisp to maniacal giggles and constant snacking.
In 2001 Short brought the character to Comedy Central for Primetime Glick interviewing Bill Maher and Steve Martin as his first guests. Over two years and 30 episodes Glick hosted a long list of Saturday Night Live alumni including Dennis Miller, Bill Crystal, Janeane Garofalo, Molly Shannon, Chevy Chase, Jon Lovitz, Chris Elliott and Rob Schneider. In 2003 Glick earned Short an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program.
Primetime Glick wrapped up after three seasons, yet the character kept going. In 2004, MGM released Jiminy Glick in Lalawood, a feature film co-starring Jan Hooks that was mash-up of Glick interviews and murder mystery.
From a recent trip along the trail camera trapline fawns and their mama have been showing-up regularly. Some days you'd think we were running a deer farm or ranch operation.
Little-known factoid. The white spots on a fawn's coat do not show when a trail camera is operating on infrared (IR) mode.
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